Falling for Fascism

 Year 3

Dedicated to MJG

 

            In the wake of Trump’s second election and subsequent inauguration, students asked if they and their families were going to get deported. We felt scared and powerless. However, in our United States history class we had recently finished a unit on the Bill of Rights. Students knew that the 4th Amendment protects them and their families from unlawful searches and seizures, and that law enforcement needs a warrant before entering their private residences. We learned that the 5th Amendment gives us the right to remain silent, so that no person is compelled to be a witness against themselves. To connect these lessons to our current context, a practice continually encouraged in professional development, I printed out “Know Your Rights” flyers for students to take home to their families. I made sure that these documents came from a credible city agency, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, which made it clear that these flyers were general information, not legal advice. That didn’t stop a school administrator from interrupting my morning classes to tell me to cease and desist the distribution of flyers, threatening me with disciplinary action if I gave students political materials again. 

 

            In accordance with Chancellor’s Regulations D-130, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union members are allowed to put union election fliers in staff mailboxes if the member is not disrupting teachers, staff, or school activities. Concerned members saw this as an opportunity to bring to light the fact that $135 million of our pension funds are invested in Israeli weapons manufacturers, which are responsible for the slaughter of over 18,000 children, as well as the destruction of nearly 90% of school buildings, in Gaza. This amounts to a classroom full of children murdered every single day since October 7th, 2023. Flyers placed by UFT members in mailboxes encouraged voters to “vote for candidates who support divesting our pensions from genocide,” actions consistent with the Chancellor’s Regulations. To adhere to protocol even further, I asked for and received permission from my union representative to distribute flyers in mailboxes quietly, during my period off. However, the next day a member of the school administration, who is not a UFT member and was therefore interfering with election activities, removed the flyers because they viewed them as “disruptive.” I was called into their office for a meeting without UFT representation and given a counseling memo for violating the chancellor’s regulations. When I appealed to school leadership I was told that these orders came from district managers with the tacit endorsement of UFT leadership. The memo will be placed in my file for three years.

 

About a month before graduation, a ninth-grade student at my school was shot and killed. She was the victim of a stray bullet fired by young teenagers in a schoolyard a few blocks away. After hearing the news, I expected our world to come to a halt. Instead, classes continued and teachers were left largely to deal with the traumatic fallout in our classrooms without much guidance. There were counseling services offered for staff and students and a small ceremony held for the student by her friends, but a larger school assembly was postponed after students in my school got into a grief-induced altercation. We never had it. In my classes we had discussions on the causes and prevention of gun violence, with students taking aim at war and police as the biggest contributors to gun violence, alongside poverty, social media, and the proliferation of military-grade firearms in the United States. We made cards for the student’s family and grandmother, who continues to endure an irreplaceable and inexplicable loss. Two teenagers, 13 and 14 years old, were arrested in connection to the shooting, more lives and families ripped apart by violence. The school reeled from the stunning truth that in our own neighborhood, children were killing each other. Yet in the following weeks, it quickly became clear that the Department of Education was ready to move on, as they remained focused on attendance initiatives and Regents scores.

 

            The faces of fascism that I witnessed this year were not the same ones my father’s grandparents saw on their way to the gas chambers. Mid-level bureaucrats today are not dropping bombs or tightening handcuffs, but they are just as culpable in the perpetration and normalization of tremendous state violence. We cannot stand for this. If we accept the destruction and starvation of two million people in Gaza, and the kidnapping without due process of tens of thousands of immigrants from our streets, then this violence against a vaguely defined “other” will inevitably be turned inward. Soon the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be guaranteed to no one. Already our children are taking up arms and killing each other in a brutal manifestation of the system they grow up in. As a public-school teacher in service to the students and families of New York City, the place I was born and raised and love with all my heart, I am blowing the whistle on the fascism that is enabling the naked violence exposed this year. The time to speak out is now, before there is no one left to speak out for us.  

~ ~ ~

In 1938, the leaders of Great Britain and France agreed to let Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany take over part of Czechoslovakia, in the hopes that this would prevent a larger conflict. This policy of appeasement failed when Hitler invaded Poland the following year, starting World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history. History has taught us that pandering to tyranny is a losing strategy. Fortunately, we don’t have to look far for a winning one. Students are bearing witness to the negligence and crumbling disrepair of our society, and they demand better. In their re-imagined school system, they “would be able to choose their own classes.” Alongside traditional classes like Algebra and English, which teaches students important skills like “how to read and comprehend things,” there would be pottery, finance, technology, environmental health, swimming, games, group projects to promote social skills, and study hall “to either catch up on missing work or just have some time to relax and clear their minds of the crazy school schedule.” Students call for internships based on interest, which “allow experience and money for underprivileged people.” There would be school-wide social events inviting the whole neighborhood, and “a day in which we have a massive water balloon fight.” 

Teachers agree. Amidst the monotony of Regents testing and grading at the end of the school year, I saw faces light up with the thrill of possibility of integrating chorus, theater, and garden clubs in the flow of the school day. They faded under the specters of mandated curriculum, an uncompromising focus on academic literacy, and delayed and denied district and administrative approval. No one is coming to save us. To stand up for ourselves we must take back the power that has been stolen from us. It belongs not with false leaders who duplicitously assure our protection while leeching our labor and hard-earned resources, but with those at the heart of the education world - students, their families, and in-service teachers and school staff. The night is darkest before the dawn, and rising out of the seemingly endless night of violence and exploitation burns the bright candle of our collective liberation, if only we have the courage to claim it. 

Zander Bullock teaches in the Bronx, where he was born and raised.