 | "Students made a right on Telegraph and began to fill the streets, attracting crowds from office buildings." |
Around second period the message began to spread: "Walkout at 12:00 pm, meet on the 18th street side entrance." At 12:00, it seemed as though the entire high school was streaming down the staircase, each student surprised that their peers had shown up. As we made our way down 18th street towards Telegraph, a woman ran up, unaffiliated with OSA. Her arms were full of posters which she began handing out.
Students made a right on Telegraph and began to shout, ”Not our President, Not our President”. The high schoolers filled the streets, shouting, cheering, attracting crowds from office buildings, people hanging out windows to participate in the first hope since the electoral vote count reached 270 the night before.
After the protest, teachers and students alike admitted that before school on Wednesday, they had lost hope. In school, teachers and students hugged, few teachers continued with their lesson plans, open discussions were at once feverish and dispassionate. On BART, people were either glued to their screens or to the floor, it seemed the Bay Area, known for its resilience and passion, had settled into despair.
I interviewed Ms. Charity, a tenth grade world history teacher who dedicated November 9th to debriefing the election results with students. She described the worry she had expressed to fellow teachers earlier before teaching on Wednesday.
“What’s hard about being an educator is having to go to work and have to face the grief of the youth because what do you say? What can you say?” Charity said other teachers were at a loss but were never forced to convey it because the students had taken a different view of the situation. It was our time to act as leaders and OSA rose to the challenge. A common thread throughout the interviews was one of hope, and how it had manifested in the twenty four hours surrounding the election.
There was a common narrative in the 48 hours around the election: loss and regain of hope throughout the election, the desolate aloneness as the results came in, the wild surge as students staged a walkout at City Hall. After the protest, the hope remained intact but was rechanneled into mobilizing and retaining hope throughout the next four years.
Barbara Griffin, an OSA junior in the vocal arts department, told the crowd at City Hall that we will not give Donald Trump so much power, that he is only as powerful as we allow him to be. This rung true as notes of encouragement appeared around the school and teachers went back to regular schedules, refusing to give Trump the power to disrupt their lessons for more than a day. Mayor Libby Schaaf complimented the audacity and talent of the students and encouraged everyone to keep resisting through protest and art.
Students made a right on Telegraph and began to shout, ”Not our President, Not our President”. The high schoolers filled the streets, shouting, cheering, attracting crowds from office buildings, people hanging out windows to participate in the first hope since the electoral vote count reached 270 the night before.
After the protest, teachers and students alike admitted that before school on Wednesday, they had lost hope. In school, teachers and students hugged, few teachers continued with their lesson plans, open discussions were at once feverish and dispassionate. On BART, people were either glued to their screens or to the floor, it seemed the Bay Area, known for its resilience and passion, had settled into despair.
I interviewed Ms. Charity, a tenth grade world history teacher who dedicated November 9th to debriefing the election results with students. She described the worry she had expressed to fellow teachers earlier before teaching on Wednesday.
“What’s hard about being an educator is having to go to work and have to face the grief of the youth because what do you say? What can you say?” Charity said other teachers were at a loss but were never forced to convey it because the students had taken a different view of the situation. It was our time to act as leaders and OSA rose to the challenge. A common thread throughout the interviews was one of hope, and how it had manifested in the twenty four hours surrounding the election.
There was a common narrative in the 48 hours around the election: loss and regain of hope throughout the election, the desolate aloneness as the results came in, the wild surge as students staged a walkout at City Hall. After the protest, the hope remained intact but was rechanneled into mobilizing and retaining hope throughout the next four years.
Barbara Griffin, an OSA junior in the vocal arts department, told the crowd at City Hall that we will not give Donald Trump so much power, that he is only as powerful as we allow him to be. This rung true as notes of encouragement appeared around the school and teachers went back to regular schedules, refusing to give Trump the power to disrupt their lessons for more than a day. Mayor Libby Schaaf complimented the audacity and talent of the students and encouraged everyone to keep resisting through protest and art.
The protest had no official organiser, just the messages posted on social media but Naia Rodarte-Young, a junior at OSA took the lead and spoke passionately, recognising each group that Trump poses a threat to and speaking on behalf of OSA in solidarity. Her speech was followed by an open mic where various students spoke, sang, and read poetry and essays. Students showed immense respect for their peers, and listened to the provocative, often upsetting issues students spoke about. One student spoke about his entire family being deported, another of what it meant to be a black girl before Trump, and how she thought it would change now that Trump was president.
The entire protest was peaceful and advocated for the need for peace, understanding, and solidarity in a time where we are at our most vulnerable to hatred both from within and outside our communities. A few hecklers, both pro Trump and anti Schaff began to call out but were immediately shut down by community members who asked them to leave. In addition, A’naya Johnson, a 10th grader in the vocal department, made a strong case against them, shouting that this was a peaceful protest of students and was not the time or place for negativity.
Faculty who have been working at the school since its founding said they had never seen the student population so united, a drastic change from the beginning of the year when Mr. Oz spoke to the high school about regaining a sense of community that had been lost. The protest generated a sense of radical hope, in that the community began to hope based in a source. In the words of Junot Diaz, “Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility….Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future.”
All photographs by imani Jones, digital media student, Oakland School for the Arts