“Fighting for Community”

Young People Organizing for Freedom Now

Abstract

Centering a dialogue among young people who are movement builders, this article considers one example of freedom work: school walkouts. The authors narrate how mobilizing in Brooklyn and Chicago illustrates possibilities for futures beyond the euro-modern human project. Specifically, the article is a dialogic set of stories about organizing against the codification of adult superordination, with people across difference, and through collective praxes. We situate this movement building in the long tradition of Black radical work and share stories that shed new light on the locus of school-based counterinsurgent forces and young people’s self-determination. Young organizers incisively interrogate systems of power, delegitimizing these systems’ logics and practices, and move us radically beyond the current social organization by modeling sustained learning.