By Toussaint Louverture

November 6, 2019

EDWARDSVILLE: New Afrikan and settler students at Edwardsville High School in Edwardsville, Illinois fought on Monday and Tuesday of this week after the exposure of several racist social media posts by settler students using the n-word on the Snapchat app. There were also unverified threats on the part of some students to bring a firearm to school for unknown purposes. Principal Dennis Cramsey made an announcement via email stating, in part: “We will not tolerate any comments or actions that are disrespectful or offensive to others within our school. Students who make inappropriate or offensive social media posts that cause a disruption in the school day will face disciplinary consequences. Additionally, students who react inappropriately to social media posts they see or are shown by other students will face discipline. I am asking for you to talk to your student about proper use of social media and to refrain from engaging in negative or offensive posts on social media.”

This conciliatory line is divorced from the material reality of New Afrikan students in majority settler schools such as EHS. Demographic data show that EHS was 80.7% White during the 2017-2018 school year, with the remaining 19.3% being nonwhite. Black students make up only 7.8% of the student body. Low income students are only 16.2% of the student body. Rockwood School District, which covers West Saint Louis County and has similar demographics, has been torn by similar contradictions which have often turned violent in the past. Most of the New Afrikan students in this wealthy settler district are proletarian/lumpen/proletarian in class background and bussed in by the VICC corporation, commonly known as “Deseg”, short for “Desegregation”.

Under this court-ordered program, working class students from North Saint Louis are bussed to West and South County districts, and in exchange, students from these districts who are white are bussed to the city to attend so-called “Magnet” schools. The forced intermingling of students from the ruling class and oppressor nation with the working class and oppressed nation inevitably leads to conflict and contradictions that oftentimes turn vicious and violent.

Racial/class conflicts in Saint Louis area schools are more often than not initiated by rich colonizer students bullying, harassing and threatening nonwhite/poor students. The administration promotes class and national conciliation because schools are agents of colonial supremacy, ruling class propaganda, and class warfare. They are trenches of combat, and nationally oppressed working class/lumpen/proletarian students should treat them as such. Mass fighting organizations capable of beating back ruling class terrorism with revolutionary violence should be established and put under the leadership of the most advanced and capable revolutionary students. Only under socialism can truly revolutionary schools that serve the people exist, as socialism is the order of things under which the class that commits these heinous acts is suppressed and pulled out root, stem and branch.