Resist. Rogue. Hands off. Deplorable. Bloodstained. In mourning. What next? Now what? Who are we?

These incendiary words and questions have been printed in red, white, and big, bold letters on the Laney Tower’s front pages over the last year. It’s time for a big and bold response.

It’s been, as it always is, months of turmoil and tumult worldwide. But it’s also been — for our country, our district, and our small student newspaper — a game-changing era.

While our president has pushed far beyond the limits of what a country can tolerate, we’ve pushed far beyond the limits of what we thought a community college paper could be.

We’ve chased big stories, from the Oakland Police Department sexual assault scandal last summer, to the increasingly questionable decisions of Peralta district officials, to the escalating number of fires across the East Bay, to the potential displacement of Laney College itself by a possible deal with the Oakland A’s that would change our campus irreparably.

While our president has pushed far beyond the limits of what a country can tolerate, we’ve pushed far beyond the limits of what we thought a community college paper could be.
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But the work we do as journalists is only a tiny piece of the collective force we need to resist the injustices that escalate with every deportation, displacement, and death as results of the destructive policies that were in place long before Trump, and the awful new ones he’s forcing into place as we speak.

The work you do is the far more important and crucial piece of that force. (Keep it up!) And it’s the work we want to here acknowledge and celebrate.

That work is why we’ve put proud women of color — always the mothers of our social movements — on our two most recent front pages. It’s why we cover the socially conscious work of our students. It’s why we run our Privacy Protector feature (see top-center), to keep you safe.

We hope all this inspires new readers to act, and encourages those already resisting to keep on fighting the good fight.

We need you now more than ever, and the Tower pledges to be right there beside you.