National Walkout: An Act of Disobedience

The ENOUGH: National School Walkout, planned for March 14, at 10:00 a.m., is intended to be an act of civil disobedience in which students demand safety in their schools through gun control legislation.

In response, Chancellor Fariña released a letter saying the Department of Education supports the walkout, so long as students operate within certain guidelines. Yet her warning for students to be “respectable,” and that while the brief walkout “will be considered cutting class,” schools will be so generous as to not enforce any “consequences beyond a notation,” is difficult to read as anything other than patronizing.

The DOE and school administration are complicit with the very state legislatures the walkout is protesting, by relegating students to the status of second-class citizens. We cannot vote because we have not crossed a threshold of maturity and intellect. Yet similar standards were used to disenfranchise black folk, and today, no adult without a high school diploma, or senior citizen, would ever be subjected to a test of their mental competence.

Our lack of political agency has resulted in decades of disregarding the victims of school shootings because we are not part of a voting constituency (nor do we hold the sway of the NRA); in government entitlement spending being disproportionately allocated toward the elderly, a large voting population, in state and national legislatures; in arbitrary dress codes and curricula stemming from a web of legislation, bureaucracy, and special interests that the affected students are shut out from.

We are similarly powerless within schools. Academic achievement benchmarks, along with curricula, change every year without student input; the Supreme Court consistently rules that students don’t receive full protection under the Bill of Rights (e.g. Hazelwood and Bethel School District limiting student speech and TLO ruling students aren’t protected against unreasonable searches and seizures).

Perhaps, then, we need administrators and faculty because they are the only ones with political voices. But in the words of Audre Lorde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” To follow the government and school administration from the outset is to confine our agency and aspirations to concessions granted by the very authorities we are resisting.

The National School Walkout website preaches that we must “protest Congress’ inaction to do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to the gun violence plaguing our schools and neighborhoods. We need action.” Yet a brief, school-sanctioned walkout, despite the symbolism of lasting 17 minutes, is at best a touching gesture and at worst a more grandiose tweet. Either way, it does not carry political pressure.

That is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. However, our protest cannot be limited to what is respectable. Finding victories in student activism requires looking to the Sit-In Movement and Third World Liberation Front in the 1960s, or filling the streets of Ferguson like students did in 2014. Though these movements ultimately worked toward material change in government and school policy, they were not limited by administrative guidelines. To do so risks turning protest into a call for piecemeal reforms preordained by authority, rather than viewing small changes as victories in a larger battle for gun control and student agency. The DOE can, and should, join protests—but they should do so by following students’ lead.

Civil disobedience requires us to disobey, and a movement for student safety must be defined by student voices. Instead of accepting Fariña’s patronage, Stuyvesant students should walk out on March 14 and, rather than returning, march a few blocks to City Hall. Hundreds of students protesting in defiance of not only gun lobbies, but of our status as second-class citizens, would be impossible to ignore.