Jeffrey Caplan
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A middle school teacher accused of punching a white nationalist during a demonstration last year says her punch was thrown in self-defense.
Yvette Felarca, who teaches humanities at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Calif., was arrested last month for allegedly punching a man during a far-right rally in Sacramento in June 2016.
Felarca, 47, was charged with felony assault by means of force likely to inflict great bodily injury and two misdemeanor counts of inciting and participating in a riot.
Video footage of the incident shows Felarca bumping against two men, and she appears to punch one of them in the abdomen and yell, “Get the f**k out of our streets,” according to Berkleyside. The man was identified as a member of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group that is “intimately allied with neo-Nazi and other hardline racist organizations,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As the video footage continues, a group of people comes to Felarca’s aid, dragging the man to the ground and kicking him.
The rally and associated events prompted an eight-month investigation, which led to Felarca’s arrest. She called for the charges to be dropped in July at her arraignment. She doesn’t believe that standing up to fascism should be a crime.
“Standing up against fascism and the rise of Nazism and fascism in this country is not a crime,” Felarca said. “We have the right to defend ourselves.”
Felarca is well-known at California demonstrations. She is a member of the of the activist group By Any Means Necessary.
Felarca continues to teach, as she has not been convicted of a felony. She was suspended by the school district for six weeks before being reinstated, and several petitions have called for her dismissal.
