The following are three exercises you can do to acquaint yourself with a youth liberationist line of thinking. They call upon you to practice youth liberationism by reorienting the ways you have come to think about youth and by starting a conversation with youth liberation in mind. I hope readers of all ages find these to be useful exercises in youth liberation, as I have.
In Ashanti Alston’s seminal 1983 essay on Black youth liberation, Childhood & The Psychological Dimension of Revolution(1), he calls on the reader to think back.
“Go on, think back.
Open up that ole hidden chest where those ancient memories are stored. The ones you never had cause to ever think about again. The ones you never knew had such significance or influence on you at present. They aren't all nice memories either. You know that. Many of them evoke anger, hatred, ill-feelings towards those significant persons in your earlier life. But never-the-less, you have got to face them. Think about how those early traumatic experiences conditioned your development into the kind of person you are today.”
For Ashanti Alston, thinking back is an exercise to remember not just how you were unjustly oppressed as a young person, but also to remember how your true self was lost as a result of this oppression.
[O]nce you've learned to shut your mouth and not express your self in natural manners, the emotions come out in soundless physical gestures that HIDE your true thoughts and feelings. But even the Physics of it is an apt indication to "experienced" parents that you are STILL rebellious. That you have learned to HIDE the truth within you at an early age shows that you are learning the more "advanced" and subtle ways to , personally and socially, control yourself. This is a shame because it means you are learning to be other than, OTHER THAN your true self! Think back…
What kind of upbringing is this? What are its consequences for the child, in its childhood AND its adulthood?...
Influenced by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon(2), Alston considers childhood to be the process in which a person acquires a “mask.” According to Alston, this mask is what enables one to perform the roles required to maintain all forms of oppression. In order to stop oppression, he demands the reader to look inward, to think through how they’ve been raised and why they act in oppressive manners. He doesn't call on people with privileged positionalities to feel guilt, but instead anger at the adultist violence that broke our true selves and replaced it with this system.
I do not adhere to the concept that there is an infant “true self,” which is my primary departure from Alston as well as other youth liberationists including Emma Goldman(3) and Andrew Sage(4). In fact, one could argue that this concept itself is adultist, following claims made in Aiyana Goodfellow’s Innocence and Corruption(5). Despite this, I find a deep utility in looking back, as it unveils what we have forgotten, intentionally or not.
Akilah Richards displays how looking back informs her unschooling practice in her 2020 book Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work(6). In chapter five, Richards writes about her experience being assaulted by a police officer at age 14 while walking home, and her family’s cold response while she processed that trauma. She connects this to acculturation used to justify Black americans hitting their children, which is termed elsewhere in the book as “slave master behavior.” Richards thinks back on this and realizes that she needs to break the cycle of adultist violence by refusing to ever hit her children again. This results in her apologizing to her children for hitting them in the past and going through a reconciliation process with them, an admirable act.
I want to expand the notion of thinking back beyond Alston’s usage of the term, which explicitly focuses on suppressed childhood traumas. Although it is important to think back to suppressed childhood traumas, and doing so can lead to the disruption of internalized adultism and by extension adultist behaviors, it seems an unwarranted limitation to stop there.
I invite you to once again THINK BACK!
Think back to the ways you would resist the adults and build your own worlds. Think back to those who helped you. Follow their examples and be the adult accomplice you loved in your youth. Learn with yourself learning with them. Thank yourself for your resiliency in the face of adults who hurt you.
In her speech Youth Liberation and Radical Imagination(7) delivered at the 2022 Youth Liberation General Assembly, Genevieve Shade (also known as Lark) identified a lack of possible conceptions of a real future of youth liberation as one of the key stumbling blocks in our movement. At the end of the speech, she assigns everyone in the audience a task: “…ask someone younger than you, preferably under 10, what they imagine the future will be like. Turn it into play. Fun, joyful play. Create a new world in collaboration with this young person.”
Here I want to flip this assignment on its head. I ask you one last time to THINK BACK!
Think back to your dreams for futures, utopias, and peace that were dismissed as idealistic, childish, and naive. Think back to the worries you had about the future. Think back to the wonder of that unknown. Sit and simmer with all those queer utopian longings(8) and worries and wonder and allow them to allow you to reimagine the future once again. THINK BACK, TO THINK FORWARD!
It seems to me that there are a million terms out there to describe the oppression of young people. Every few months I feel like I find a new term too; the most recent term I found was misopedy in Toby Rollo’s article Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child(1). A non-exhaustive list of these terms would include ageism, childism, pedophobia, youth oppression, gerontocracy, adult chauvinism, adult supremacy, adult saviorism, anti-child ageism, adultism, patriarchy, youthism, anti-youth ageism, age segregation, and age apartheid. There also are a million terms for young people too: children, kids, youths, teens, toddlers, babies, infants, adolescents, girls, boys, whippersnappers, tykes, scamps, rascals, knaves, young adults, etc.
Language is a finicky symbolic technology(2). It demands to represent the world yet it cannot. For the purposes of this essay, I am going to take seriously the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and reject universal grammar(3). This basically means that the essay will take for granted that the language we use influences the ways we think and act. Through this, we will see that language is power laden, and that the ways in which we (re)name concepts can shift epistemologies and ontologies(4).
The language of youth liberation (itself a contested term) is not well defined. Unlike feminism, socialism, and anti-racism, a unified vocabulary for the movement doesn’t exist, nor a consistent epistemology or register for inquiry. This results in both casual miscommunication as well as more fundamental disagreements about the nature of youth oppression(5). In response to this I ask you, the reader, to do the following: be intentional with your language. Think and theorize deeply about why you are speaking or writing about young people in the way that you are, change your language if you need to, and explain your linguistic choices if they are counter-hegemonic.
For this paper, I will focus only on the semantics of the terms kid and child to exemplify how youth liberationists are theorizing language. I do not allot these terms ontological stability, instead focusing on the ways they are perniciously discursively constructed through their relationships with animality and reproduction.
In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone connects childhood and womanhood to reproduction, claiming that this connection is what makes them both the target of western patriarchy(6). Child has two meanings. One refers to an aged classification, and the other to a classification of direct descendance. Whenever the word child is used, both meanings are invoked, tying the age category intimately to the ontology of being spawned by a parent. Children of the aged category are seen as incomplete without their parents, and children of the descendance category are subject to adultist violence at the hands of their parents well into adulthood. Whenever you call a young person a child, you are also defining them as someone’s descendent, and by extension as their property(7). Be intentional. When you say child, is this what you mean?
Kid maintains this same dual meaning as child. When you are young, you are at once a kid and someone’s kid. In a discord call with a 14 year old youth liberationist last winter(8), she explained to me that she views the word kid as fundamentally dehumanizing and animalizing, due to its origin as a word referring to animals, specifically baby goats. Indeed, she told me that it was so dehumanizing, in fact, that she and her friends viewed it as akin to a slur against young people. Be intentional. When you say kid, is this what you mean?
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other languages construct their semantics of childhood and youth differently than English. In toki pona, for example, there are no distinct words for children or youth; all people are referred to either as jan (person), mije (male), or meli (female). Reformed contemporary Esperanto(9) does have a word that maintains the dual meaning of childhood, infano, but it is almost exclusively used only for what we would term in English as infants and toddlers, and is never used to refer to adult direct descendents. For slightly older young people, Esperantists use the word knaboj, which has no direct connection to reproduction. To refer to direct descendents at this age or older, they use either filoj, idoj, or homidoj, none of which are directly tied to age.
I am not saying we have to destroy the words child or kid from the dictionary or cancel anyone who uses them. Instead, I am begging you as a reader to be intentional with your language. Almost all of the youth liberation theory I have read thus far has used the word child withintention. Childhood is a powerful discourse and talking about it without naming it would prove impossible. The same goes for the term kid, as well as all other terms we use to describe age and aged power dynamics. Introspect about what you want to be communicating about youth and childhood, and how it relates to language. Understand that language underpins not just social movements, but also culture and how we navigate and interact with the material world. Be intentional with your language: use it for liberation, not oppression(10).
Call your dad, or if you don’t like your dad then call some other older person you trust and have known for a while(1). If you don’t need to call, just sit down together and talk. Ask about your younger self. Be open to hearing things that might upset you and also be open to hearing things that might bring you joy. Ask for stories. Ask what you were like. Ask who they thought you would be. Ask who they think you will be. If they are your parent or were around your parents, ask what they were thinking before you were born. Ask whatever will be helpful to you. If you need an excuse to ask such things, you have my permission to lie and say it was for school.
Youth liberation asks us to subvert adultist notions of defining ourselves and our relationships. Many in the movement call for family abolition(2), which creates space for new kinship relationships to exist between those young and old. Others call on us to rethink family(3) - to redefine our relationships with family based on non-coercion. For me, reorienting my relationship with my family has been the hardest thing about youth liberation.
What has been most helpful for me in redefining my relationship with my parents and other adults that I grew up with has actually been humanizing them. Instead of thinking of them either as quasi-gods or simply the arbiters of adultist institutions, I remind myself that we are actually very similar. Talking to my parents about how they parented me affords me the opportunity to both reflect and decide how I want to go forward in my relationship with them. Maybe for you, such a conversation could lead to similar healing, regardless of whether it results in restored relationships or severed ones.
This can also be an opportunity to journal, or to think back to think forward.
1) Alston, A. (1983). Childhood and The Psychological Dimension of Revolution. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ashanti-alston-childhood-the-psychological-dimension-of-revolution
2) See: Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Book.
3) See: Goldman, E. (1906). The Child and Its Enemies. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-child-and-its-enemies
4) See: Sage, A. (2021). Why It Sucks To Be Young. https://youtu.be/nuBDcpW9S_I
5) Goodfellow, A. (2023). Innocence and Corruption. Book. The Anima Print.
6) Richards, A. (2020). Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. Book. PM Press.
See: Eterna, K. (In Press). Using Personal Experience to Develop Unschooling Theory: A Book Review of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education.
7) Lark. (2022). Youth Liberation and Radical Imagination. https://medium.com/@youthlibnow/youth-liberation-and-radical-imagination-fb7afeb5191c or https://youtu.be/DBv8UYNHQis
8) See: Muñoz, J. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Book. NYU Press.
1) Rollo, T. (2018). Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies, 8:1, 60-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1199826
2) Here I am thinking through the work of Felix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, especially the books Gender Trouble, Braiding Sweetgrass, and A Thousand Plateaus.
3) I debated at length whether or not to include this sentence. Ultimately, I decided to include it because of my use of toki pona and Esperanto later in the essay to demonstrate other ways of knowing age. I want readers with a background in linguistics to know that I am considering linguistic relativity, and that I am not drawing from toki pona and Esperanto uncritically.
4) See: Eterna, K. (2022). Renaming Power: Indigenous and Trans* Perspectives. https://komencanto.neocities.org/renaming-power
5) This is exemplified by disagreements over the existence of a primordial self, which is discussed in Think Back.
6) Firestone, S. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Book. William Morrow and Company.
I am very critical of this text and am trying to use it less as a site to theorize through. Nonetheless it holds a specific weight in discussing childhood as it relates to reproduction and western patriarchy that I think is valuable.
7) See: Goodfellow, A. (2023). Innocence and Corruption. Book. The Anima Print.
8) I include this because it was this conversation that caused me to deeply reevaluate my own language regarding youth and childhood. It is important to note that in addition to the texts on youth liberation which I draw on in my writing, I am also drawing on an oral tradition of youth liberation which often ends up difficult to include via citation.
9) In traditional Esperanto, children were assigned a genderless pronoun which translates to “it” rather than the pronouns “he” or “she.” The ideological reasons for this are unclear to me, and are a site of continued research. Reformed contemporary Esperanto does not adhere to this pronoun scheme. See: Brosch, C. (2021). Ĝi-Parentismo. https://www.cyrilbrosch.net/bd/ghi-parentismo
10) See: Richards, A. (2020). Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. Book. PM Press. & Eterna, K. (In Press). Using Personal Experience to Develop Unschooling Theory: A Book Review of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education.
1) See: Vice, Myles. (2018). 1999. Song. https://open.spotify.com/track/04MQ2PsvSRkwWAbVJ89ZdE
2) See: Shivak, Lee. (2022). Towards the Abolition of The Family. https://butchanarchy.medium.com/towards-the-abolition-of-the-family-d3f8f008cf6
3) See: Sage, Andrew. (2021). Rethinking Family. https://youtu.be/hmqNSCe0w2w