California Youth Unite to Upset the Setup

With one hand caressing the mic, and the other shaped into a fist, "raptivist" and emcee Rashidi Omari, of the Oakland-based hip hop group Company of Prophets, sounds loud beats over political spoken word and conscious lyrics into a heated high school auditorium.

Glance around to his audience: a motley crew of high schoolers, b-boys, breakers, feminists and lyricists, sporting dreadlocks, afros, baggy jeans, Mumia shirts and Che buttons. They are Asian, African American, Pacific Islander, Arab and Latino.

In other words, they represent California's newest – and youngest – generation of organizers.

"When I say upset," Omari spits out, arms raised in the air as he beat-boxes rhythms in between a flow of words. "You say the setup!" The crowded auditorium pumps fists with hyped energy in response.

"Upset!"

"The setup!"

"Upset!"

"The setup!"

Now freeze.

This month around 300 youth gathered for the fourth annual "Upset the Setup" conference in Oakland, Ca., which yearly has brought together high school age youth from across the state of California to discuss ways to organize and to stop the war on youth in their local communities.

In the tradition of – a protest concert that drew thousands of youth in the last two years against a proposed SuperJail in Alameda county – the "Upset the Setup" conference uses cultural protest and resistance through music, art, politics and hip hop to educate and empower youth in the methods of effective organizing strategies and protest.

Khadine Bennett, project director with the Youth Force Coalition, the group that hosted the conference, explained that the conference was founded to bridge youth organizations that work on different issues and with different identities and to illustrate how the prison industrial complex intersects with all their issues.

"If you are a young queer woman of color working on environmental issues in Oakland or a Latino youth organizing against incarceration in LA, here is a place you meet and connect," Bennett said. "This conference is a space for youth organizations from all of California to realize that they are not fighting this system alone."

The conference was attended by around 50 different organizations representing a wide spectrum of the growing movement against the criminalization of youth. Many groups hosted interactive workshops educating and linking issues from the local to the global, ranging from the fight for ethnic studies in California highs school to methods of guerrilla art organizing against Bush's war on Iraq.

		"If you are a young queer woman of color working on environmental issues in Oakland or a Latino youth organizing against incarceration in LA, here is a place you meet and connect," Bennett said. "This conference is a space for youth organizations from all of California to realize that they are not fighting this system alone."

Youth organizations like PUEBLO (People United for a Better Oakland) gave workshops on organizing against measure FF in the local November elections. FF is a ballot initiative that would put 100 new cops on the streets in Oakland with a hefty price tag of $67.5 million.

Californians for Justice gave a workshop on campaigning against the High School Exit Exam, a new requirement that will be applied to California's graduating class of 2004. They argue that the exam is already proven to be racist, and in schools where it has been administered, the dropout rate has increased.

Youth from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee connected the struggles in Palestine to the indigenous battles in the Unites States and in South Africa. Most students left the workshop shocked by the amount of information they never knew about Middle East politics.

The Birth of a Coalition

When California began passing measures in the late 90s aimed at controlling its youth, such as zero tolerance laws, three strike laws and adult transfers, a new generation of urban high school organizers was born.

The Youth Force Coalition, a coalition of 30 social justice groups in the Bay Area, also originated in this struggle. It formed in 1998 at the Critical Resistance conference, an event that connected thousands of youth organizations from across the country working to address America's ballooning prison industrial complex.