Mass strikes don’t happen very often in the US. But when they do, such strikes can reveal important truths about society. By walking out for the schools students deserve, Los Angeles teachers exposed the deepening contradiction between a privatizing billionaire class and the preservation of public education in the city and around the country.

But the victorious strike also demonstrated the existence of two competing, and contradictory, proposals to fight racial injustice in Los Angeles and across the United States. The conflict in LA was a story of two antiracisms.

On the one hand, privatizers and their political lackeys like LA school board president Monica Garcia pushed charter schools as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Ending racial inequality in American schools and throughout American society, in their view, is impossible through regular public schools. Those schools have to be dismantled.