When a group of young student activists asked California senator Dianne Feinstein to support the Green New Deal in February 2019, a video of the exchange, with her condescending reply, went viral. “I’ve gotten elected. I just ran. I was elected by almost a million vote plurality, and I know what I’m doing,” the senator told the climate activists, defending a decision to propose her own alternative legislation to the Green New Deal.
“You’re supposed to listen to us,” student organizer Isha Clarke insisted. “That’s your job.”
Feinstein cut her off: “How old are you?”
“I’m 16, so I can’t vote,” Isha replied.
“Well, you didn’t vote for me,” Feinstein told the activists from the Sunrise Movement, Earth Guardians, and Youth Vs. Apocalypse. The message was clear, and it is omnipresent in the attitude of politicians toward underage constituents: You don't vote, so your voice doesn't matter.
In Oakland, conversations about expanding voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds started at a September 2019 retreat for the school district’s All City Council, a union of student leaders across Oakland's public schools. They took note of the cities that had already implemented such measures, like Takoma Park, Maryland, which in 2013 became the first city in the United States to lower its voting age to 16 for local elections. Maryland cities Hyattsville, Greenbelt, and Riverdale Park followed suit a few years later; and in 2016, Berkeley, CA, Oakland's neighbor, voted to lower the voting age to 16 for school board elections. Frustrated because their main avenue for influencing elected officials was limited to making public comments at school board meetings, the Oakland students wanted a way to directly hold their representatives accountable after years of budget cuts, slashed student support programs and services, and school closures.
Stay up-to-date with the Teen Vogue politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take!
During and immediately before the 2019 Oakland teacher strike, I helped organize and participated in student demonstrations to protest our school board’s cuts to student programs and services. I watched hours of public comments at school board meetings as students, some in tears, begged board members to save the programs that they said saved their lives, including foster youth support services, Asian American Pacific Islander Achievement programs, and more. I watched those board members lean back in their chairs, eyes on their smartphones, behind a police barricade that separated them from the same constituents whose voices they had tuned out. The message they gave was a nonverbal echo of Feinstein’s: We don't have to listen to you. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the Oakland Unified School District for comment.)
In response, Oakland student organizers testified, wrote letters, drafted legislation, and secured 300 endorsements before putting a successful resolution before the Oakland City Council to put the youth vote on the ballot. This month, Oakland voters passed Measure QQ by wide margins to join the handful of cities across the nation that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in school board elections, the culmination of years of work by a coalition of Oakland student organizations.
But young people in Oakland and beyond have been politically and civically engaged since long before they gained the franchise. In the 1980s, Oakland Technical High School students lobbied the California State Legislature to establish a holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helping to lay the foundation for the first national holiday to honor a Black man. That same school is the alma mater of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton, who notably said he didn’t know how to read or write when he graduated in 1959. Newton’s story demonstrates that even after our schools have failed us, and well before we had an electoral stake in the political process, Oakland youth have always taken the well-being of our communities into our own hands.
Earlier this year, that same Oakland school board was the body that voted to approve the George Floyd Resolution proposed by the grassroots Black Organizing Project (BOP), eliminating the Oakland School Police Department (OSPD) and pledging to use its $6 million budget to hire social workers, psychologists, and restorative justice practitioners. This came after nine years of organizing by the BOP, sparked by the 2011 killing of 20-year-old Raheim Brown by OSPD officers. The board had previously voted against even minor cuts to the department, as recently as March, despite accusations of racism and excessive force, including the resignation of OSPD's then chief Peter Sarna after he allegedly remarked that “the only good n- is a dead n-” while intoxicated at a 2011 golfing event, and a 2016 lawsuit by a then 15-year-old special needs student who was choked and dragged by OSPD officers. (An Oakland Unified School District police summary determined that officers used appropriate force, according to KQED.)
But four of the seven board members were not running for reelection this November, and, as I see it, their shifting attitudes had nothing to do with electoral pressure and everything to do with community-led efforts. The Black Organizing Project was fighting to remove police from schools long before policing and systemic racism captured the national stage. Oakland students played an active role in organizing protests and rallied outside of district headquarters in the days leading up to the vote to eliminate the department.
Expanding the franchise is not the beginning of youth engagement; it's the unlocking of a new tool for a population that has shown time and again that the most impactful work happens at the grassroots level. This summer, some of the largest protests against police brutality in the Bay Area were organized and led by Oakland students. The most consistent opposition to student program cuts and school closures came from Oakland student leaders on bodies such as the All City Council. Even the presence of Measure QQ on the ballot was the product of youth leadership and organizing.
On a national scale, young organizers have been on the front lines of everything from the Black Lives Matter movement to youth climate strikes to the movement for stricter gun control. The same Sunrise Movement that was dismissed by Feinstein went on to help Senator Ed Markey win his primary campaign against the Nancy Pelosi-endorsed challenger Joe Kennedy this year, and to elect progressive congressional newcomers Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman; all three have now won their general elections. Many volunteers in the Sunrise network are underage, but this hasn’t prevented them from working to oust out-of-touch incumbents in ways that can be far more impactful than casting a vote. As is the case across the country, systemically disenfranchised Black and Indigenous youth have constantly mobilized for change by doing the most effective non-electoral work, even though they didn't have the option to vote to begin with.
The Democratic Party’s inability to usher in a true-blue wave in 2020 demonstrates deep flaws within the establishment. This election cycle saw two presidential nominees who failed to represent the future that this country needs. Under a Joe Biden presidency, it seems “nothing will fundamentally change,” by his own admission. In a country with rising income inequality, amid a pandemic that has devastated the livelihoods of millions, in a world that is rapidly accelerating toward an irreversible climate crisis, a return to the neoliberal definition of normalcy is not an option.
The Oakland student organizers have shown us how to move toward the future we want, and how to influence the powerful from inside and outside the electoral system.
Editor's note: This piece was updated to note that organizers from Earth Guardians and Youth Vs. Apocalypse also met with Senator Feinstein in February 2019.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Youth Voter Turnout Was High in 2020, But Youth Organizing Is the Big Story