Dear Students, Dear Mr. Lopez,

I read today in LAist about your activism and teaching, alongside your comrades at Maya Angelou Community High School. The student walkouts last week in Los Angeles are a continuation of a proud and important tradition in L.A., where students stand up for themselves and their communities. The action you took was important, including Mr. Lopez’s efforts to ensure that you walked out safely, without getting injured. It is disappointing to hear that Mr. Lopez has been fired for doing his job, and I signed a petition demanding that this decision be reversed. I think it’s fantastic that as I write, you are preparing to walk out again. What you are doing is very brave and very important.

I am so sorry to hear that your school is failing to recognize that your participation in these protests is a sign of how well-educated you are: you’re reading the news, interpreting events, and becoming part of history. The actions you are taking now are also ones that will make you an important part of future AP U.S. History courses like the one Mr. Lopez teaches.

I am writing to you, as a theoretical physicist who was born and raised in El Sereno in East L.A. I too grew up fearing that immigration would kidnap my neighbors. I too am a product of an academically-focused high school — LAUSD’s Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (aka LACES, home of the mighty Unicorns). I was also very concerned with social justice when I was in high school, where I organized for students to join protests protecting the rainforest and opposing U.S. colonialism in Latin America.

Today, I am a professor of theoretical physics with a focus on particle physics and cosmology at the University of New Hampshire. So like Mr. Lopez, I am an educator who regularly has to grapple with what it means to educate in these political conditions, including keeping my students safe. Unlike Mr. Lopez, I am in a workplace that allows union organizing, and my rights are protected by a chapter of an American Federation of Teachers affiliate union, AAUP. Synergy’s firing of Mr. Lopez represents exactly the dangers of charter schools that lock students in and collective bargaining rights out — at the expense of student safety and well-being.

I see your efforts to oppose the terrible actions of la migra, which has terrorized our Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles for generations, as part of a proud tradition of STEM students and practitioners who refuse to shut up and calculate. In firing Mr. Lopez, this is the message Synergy Quantum Academy hopes to send you: just keep your head down, don’t break the rules.

But what if the rules are unjust? What if the adults have failed you? The fact that we are being terrorized by DHS’s kidnappers is a sign that the adults — the responsible people in charge — have failed you miserably. You have a right to be angry and sad about that. And you have a right to protest that. Latine students in Los Angeles in particular have been doing this for generations.

Now, I’m not saying you’re not responsible for doing your homework and studying. I want you all to do well — to learn the lessons of history, to learn some physics too. At its best, physics is a beautiful subject, showing us a universe that is, as my mom Margaret Prescod has said, bigger than the bad things that are happening to us. I also know that the people who ask you to go to school every day are responsible for creating the conditions where you can focus on studying things like Newton’s third law, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I am glad that you are determined to be part of the opposite reaction to ICE’s actions. I know that your efforts are not charitable; I know that in many cases you are defending yourselves, your friends, and your family members, as generations have had to do before you.

Education doesn’t just happen in classrooms. It happens wherever community gathers to demand a world that sanctifies life and the rights of all people to live in dignity, with enough food to eat, with secure and safe housing, with accessible universal healthcare, with support for our multilingual and multiracial communities, and importantly without fear of kidnapping by government authorities.

I hope your school understands that students learn better when they are not terrified, from people that they trust. I hope the leadership of Synergy Quantum Academy will reverse their firing of Mr. Lopez and do everything they can to earn your trust.

Whatever they ultimately do, don’t let them define the world of knowledge for you. I loved my AP U.S. History class, and my activism continued into graduate school. It’s one of the reasons I am the scientist and writer that I am today. Being successful academically doesn’t mean we forget where we came from or our community responsibilities. Read Einstein on Race and Racism, study the legacy of mathematician Chandler Davis, spend time on the website of the particle physicist-organized Strike for Black Lives. Know you are not alone in the world of STEM and that, for generations, scientists have refused complicity in state violence and protested it.

Keep your head up and know that the spirit of the ancestors runs through you. Don’t let what your school has done sour any budding interest in STEM that you might have. I especially hope that you’ll take an interest in quantum physics because it is a stunningly beautiful subject. If you get far enough to study it at an advanced level, I hope you’ll look me up too.

In solidarity,
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Theoretical Physicist, Black feminist theorist, and author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie