Community, Education, and the Power of Young People

As event pros and programmers, we’re often working with speakers months ahead of time, but when they take the stage and share their own powerful perspective and experience, even those of us behind the scenes are moved and inspired right alongside participants. 

Meet Artemisio Romero y Carver, ELE speaker, founding member of YUCCA (Youth United for Climate Crisis Action), Chicano anti-racist organizer, and rising high school senior.

At NCSC virtual, Artemisio opened the general session on 7/23, “Black Lives Matter: The Defining Movement of Our Time” by connecting the concepts of community and education. Arte illustrated his own experience, and that of his community, about how community and education are intrinsically linked. 

Now factor in the fact that you’re hearing a speech by a 17-year-old, and this feat becomes all the more impressive. Even our keynote DeRay McKesson was blown away by Arte’s story. All this and more is part of why student voice matters. Below are a few excerpts from his speech: 

My community is what people usually call marginalized, low-income, impacted, or colloquially called ghetto.

That’s an interesting term to me. The word ghetto. It has so many meanings. It can mean trashy or bad. Maybe even haphazard. A friend used duct tape to fix the bumper of their car instead of going to a mechanic. We laughed and called that ghetto.

But for me, ghetto also means gunshots in the morning before middle school. My mother throwing her body over mine like some kind of ineffective bulletproof vest. Ghetto can mean sidewalks with cracks in them, and heroin needles sticking up out of the front lawn. The feeling of knowing our food stamps were running low for the week.

See ghetto is what you call that concentration of violence and trauma. Some of you might call it a barrio. And the specific place I’m from, we call the Southside. 

I got out of the Southside earlier than most. The Family Courts removed me from my mother’s custody when I was 12. But that environment will always shape me. 

At 14, I was diagnosed with CPTSD. That’s what I inherited from ghettoization. CPTSD is like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But PTSD is the product of a single traumatic incident that alters your brain chemistry, while CPTSD is caused by a sustained traumatic environment.  

What that means for me, specifically, is I get pretty jumpy.  You could set off a firecracker or a car alarm and I'll run in the opposite direction. My adrenaline just doesn’t process properly. I remember the first date I ever went on. I and the girl I had asked out were talking, and getting banter going. I thought it was going pretty well. But then we went to get coffee. And she saw that even just stepping into a Starbucks with what must have only been 20 other people affected me. I visibly tensed up. I got scared. Like some kind of instinct. 

And then when I started organizing protests, that felt like just an instinct too. It wasn’t an intellectual thing, it just had to be done.

Last September, I and many other people started organizing a mass demonstration at our state capital, as part of the international climate strike. It is what we needed to do to build buy-in. We needed a lot of people, in a politically charged location. And even though at that point I really wasn’t comfortable in crowds, I had to recognize what was necessary.

So it’s a few nights before the protests and we are trying to find people to lead chants on megaphones, on top of ladders. And I said I’d do it. The same way you say you’ll throw out the trash or wash the dishes next time. It was abstract. 

And then it wasn’t abstract. I was holding a megaphone and standing at the base of a ladder.

Looking out the crowd. I wasn’t sure if I was going to take that next step up the ladder. I mean, if I was scared of getting coffee at a Starbucks, I’m sure you can guess I wasn’t feeling comfortable in the center of a mass demonstration.

But then I looked out in the crowd and saw people who looked a little like me. Students my age and younger. Friend and allies. So I took the next step. And I spoke louder than I ever had before.

I yelled so much that the next day I sounded like an ex-smoker. That was the moment I think I truly started healing. It had to start there, in a community. Because the realization you have to have when you go through a racially premised trauma like ghettoization is that your trauma isn’t unique. I know mine isn’t. In fact, I even know it's ongoing. Kids like myself are still being born poor in neighborhoods, on the losing side of gentrification.

We talk often about education as the way out of poverty. I respect that. I’ve honestly been a model of that. But I also think that many people like myself, we don’t want a way out. We don’t want a way out from our community, or neighborhoods, or families. We don’t want an escape from our homes. 

What we want is a way in. A way to bring resources into our communities and to our people. I do believe as a charter school student that there is a role for charter schools to play in that. A role many charter schools already play.

You see, I was only able to attend that first protest because a month before then I had gone to my Government teacher and asked to leave class. I told her I had to be on the streets that day and she understood. She understood that my education happens both in and outside of the classroom. She gave me her support and trust, and in doing that she gave support and trust to my community.

When I started this off I said I’d be talking about the link between education and community. That was a little bit facetious. I don’t even know if I can tell the two apart sometimes. I believe that if an educator is going to support and care for a student, you must also support and care for that student’s community. 

This is why we do the work that we do.

To lift up voices like Arte, and to share this connection between community and education. Arte, like so many other young people, inspires us to action each and every day through his lived experience, his personal story, and his hope for a better future. To have Arte speak at your next event, contact us!