To Be Human

Speech delivered on September 18, 2021 in Hartford, Connecticut for the Community First Coalition’s launch of their Care Not Cops campaign.

Good afternoon, my name is Dave John Cruz-Bustamante. I use they/he pronouns. I am an operations apprentice at Citywide Youth Coalition, a community organizer in New Haven Connecticut, and a high school student. I am queer, working class, and a child of immigrants. I am the “black and brown” youth that governments, liberals, and politicians love to pretend to care about. Today, I am here to talk about what it means to be human.

Now . . . I need not to repeat the metaphors, conventions, or emotional stories that have been told over and over again throughout the last 200+ years to tell the existence of an oppressive system that brutalizes black and brown people today, and why that system needs to be dismantled.

To be human is to care for others, to value justice and peace, to embody love and compassion.

We currently live under a system that does not value humanity. Black and brown youth, especially queer and disabled youth, fear for their lives everyday in New Haven, in Connecticut, in the U.S., and throughout the entire world. How could we not? For our innocence was robbed decades too soon, as we watch people that look like us get snuffed out on national news by the people that are supposedly here to protect us, we live in neighborhoods that are underfunded, underserved, and unstable.

How are we supposed to carry on while the world around us collapses, how are we supposed to carry on and pretend like all is normal while mass death and trauma follow us around?

Young people are vulnerable, they are precious, and they are worthy of protection, but we do not have the privilege to get that at the time of our birth, black and brown youth are, instead, looked at as nuisances, trouble, and undesirable. As criminals. We are forced to be resilient, we are forced to fight for what we deserve. To struggle.

But we don’t want anyone else to struggle, for it is a terrible, distressing, and intensely sorrowful feeling to be robbed of something we all need and yearn for: protection . . . childhood . . . carelessness . . . and warmth . . . love.

Through resilience and community, the people have already started building a vision for a future that values love, care, and humanity, and we will get there through concrete wins that benefit the people today. We do not have our heads in the clouds, there are organizations and people fighting for our liberation, domestic and abroad, today.

Liberation will not come at the moral consciousness of our oppressor, for they have no morality to begin with. Our liberation from police, prisons, and punishment, to start, will be achieved through the blood, sweat, and tears of our own. At the hands of mass movements, communities, and collective struggle, for we are our own liberators.

No victories for the working class have been accomplished by one person, leader, or group. Only through the collective’s anger, joy, and mass action has there been change, only through the people- have revolutions taken place.

The systems that oppress the people work together in harmony. If we want to dismantle those systems, we must do the same. The work is being done by so many like the Community First’s Care Not Cops campaign, like Citywide Youth Coalition’s cops out of school and defund the police campaign, like the Water Protectors resisting Line 3.

To the apathetic, the undecided, the “moderate:” The Revolution is here, now it’s up to you to join it- for the love of God get your goddamn tails out from between your legs, for everyone deserves housing, food, clean water and climate, access to union jobs, safe communities, public transportation, and care.

To fight for it is not radical, but human. Black and brown youth do not need your sympathy or tears on the shining house up the hill. What black and brown youth need is liberation, we need solidarity. Black and brown youth need to be able to walk down the street, black and brown youth and their families need to be able to go to the hospital without being buried in debt, black and brown youth need to be able to live their lives freely. We need access to greenspaces. We need care, not cops.