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June 26 - August 30, 2020
Abolitionist teaching is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.
How do you matter to a country that measures your knowledge against a “gap” it created?
When teachers shy away from intersectionality, they shy away from ever fully knowing their students’ humanity and the richness of their identities. Mattering cannot happen if identities are isolated and students cannot be their full selves.
To want freedom is to welcome struggle. This idea is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. We are not asking for struggle; we just understand that justice will not happen without it.
This endless, and habitually thankless, job of radical collective freedom-building is an act of survival, but we who are dark want to do more than survive: we want to thrive. A life of survival is not really living.
Creating the narrative that dark people are criminals to justify locking them up for profit is no different from continuously reminding the American public that there is an educational achievement gap while conveniently never mentioning America’s role in creating the gap. Both prisons and schools create a narrative of public outrage and fear that dark bodies need saving from themselves. The two industries play off each other, and America believes that criminality and low achievement go hand in hand.
The barriers of racism, discrimination, concentrated poverty, and access to college—persistent, structural barriers—cannot be eradicated by tweaking the system or making adjustments. We must struggle together not only to reimagine schools but to build new schools that we are taught to believe are impossible: schools based on intersectional justice, antiracism, love, healing, and joy.
thriving, not simply surviving.
Abolitionist teaching is choosing to engage in the struggle for educational justice knowing that you have the ability and human right to refuse oppression and refuse to oppress others, mainly your students.
Abolitionist teaching is refusing to take part in zero-tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
Each fix falls short precisely because it fails to acknowledge how these struggles are direct consequences of injustice.
a future educator can engage the language of justice and culturally relevant teaching, while webbed to a disposition that is harmful to all students.
Simply said, a teacher cannot support hateful rhetoric about dark children and their families and still teach them with kindness, love, and care and see the beauty in that child’s culture.
I was watching, living, and teaching education for survival, at best, without an understanding of why I could not get out of survival mode.
Black teachers and principals lost their jobs due to the closing of all-Black schools and the fact that White parents did not want their children taught by Black teachers.26
In what ways is BP similar? Different?
Her statement is a perfect example of how racist educators believe their actions outside the class in no way impact their classroom or school.
As educators, we must accept that schools are spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and disempowerment.
“As a nation, we have been counting on education to solve the problems of unemployment, joblessness, and poverty for many years. But education did not cause these problems, and education cannot solve them.”61 Education is not the antecedent of failing schools, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, and/or crime. Racism is; racism that is built on centuries of ideas that seek to confuse and manipulate we who are dark into never mattering to one another or this country.
My parents wholeheartedly trusted my teachers with my education; they had no choice.
A politics of refusal is one of the necessary components of activism vital to dark folx’ survival and is fundamental to abolitionist teaching.
What are we called to refuse?
“Don’t be an educated fool.” That was it, but I knew exactly what she meant: earning a PhD would mean nothing to my mother if I forgot where I came from and how to relate to the people who protected my dreams and my education. What good is an education if you must shed who you are? Authenticity was a fundamental component to “giving them hell.”
The teachers were kind, tolerant, and compassionate but focused mainly on academic rigor. I liked going there, but I did not understand why school was so important. There was no connection to my history or my community, nor any discussion to explain why drugs, guns, and violence were becoming everyday problems in my city.
13th
For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.
In what ways is this true for students at BP?
School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-Black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle… . When we entered racist, desegregated, White school we left a world where teachers believed that to educate Black children rightly would require a political commitment.8
I have taught so many future educators and worked with hundreds of in-service teachers who profess to love all kids and have good intentions to be fair and just in their classrooms, yet they write, say, and partake in racist actions and posts online about dark children loosely masked in the language of low expectations, of judging low-income parents and dark children’s behavior. Furthermore, there are so many White liberal teachers who think racism is something singular to the far right. Racism is not exclusive to one political party or a particular type of White person. White, well-meaning,
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Today we hardly ever teach that dark people fought to matter,
Dark children need teachers who not only look like them but who are engaged in an active, antiracist orientation. The conversation around the need for Black teachers must expand to having Black teachers—having all teachers, really—who teach from an abolitionist agenda.
How do we as a school have/not have an abolitionist agenda? As individuals? Do these conflict?
their nationality made them Haitian while their skin color made them Black; thus, they were forced to adapt to address bigotry in both of those worlds. It is important for educators to know how deeply unjust systems affect people and their communities in unique ways, but it is also imperative to understand the intersections of injustice.
For dark folx, thriving cannot happen without a community that is deeply invested in racial uplift, human and workers’ rights, affordable housing, food and environmental justice, land rights, free or affordable healthcare, healing, joy, cooperative economic strategies, and high political participation that is free of heteropatriarchy, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, sexism, ageism, and the politics of respectability.
We all thrive when everyday people resist, when everyday people find their voice, when everyday people demand schools that are students’ homeplaces, and when everyday people understand that loving darkness is our path to humanity.
There is a civic empowerment gap because the rich have all the political influence and civics education is no longer a space that teaches youth how to petition, protest, speak in public, solve social issues with groups of people from diverse backgrounds, and commit to acts of civil disobedience.7 Our students are now taught with the world crumbling around them to pay their taxes, vote, volunteer, and have good character, which is code for comply, comply, comply.
Is Boston Prep a comply, comply, comply school? Yes, I think so. What can we do about it?
How do I as an individual teacher perpetuate this?
Measuring dark students’ grit while removing no institutional barriers is education’s version of The Hunger Games. It is adults overseeing which dark children can beat the odds, odds put in place and maintained by an oppressive system.
Dark children, especially those who are experiencing or have experienced toxic stress, do not need their grit measured or their character examined by researchers or school officials. They need culturally relevant therapy that teaches age-appropriate stress-reduction practices and they need mentors who understand what being a critical mentor means
inserting restorative justice and mindful practices in schools and communities alike.
lastly, teachers need to mobilize to fight systemic inequities and the educational survival complex.
research shows that people who live through high levels of toxic stress alter the genes of their children and, therefore, the lives they will lead.
telling dark children that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve on their own merit is not a new approach; it is short-sighted and, in actuality, racist thinking.
White enough to be less threatening, less outspoken, and more task-driven (gritty), so that nothing could supersede White economic demands for labor.
Redirecting power and resources is a primary focus of abolitionist teaching and the goal of educators and individuals concerned about educational justice, rather than measuring grit or appraising dark children’s characters in toxic environments or while they’re living with the stress of being young and dark. Our focus must shift instead to protecting our students’ potential.
Yes!!
protected me, protected my grit, protected my zest, and protected my potential.
I share these details of my life not to echo a cheesy movie like The Blind Side with a White savior, because there are no saviors. There is only a village, a community, and a goal: protecting children’s potential. My homeplace.
There is no amount of grit that can fight off the intersections of living in poverty, being pushed out of school, facing a world full of patriarchy and racism, and suffering toxic stress.
Children of color attending schools that do not help them interpret the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic world in which they live is not only maintaining the status quo but also ensuring that Whiteness, patriarchy, and hate are never disrupted and challenged.
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. . . . To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible—and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people—must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in
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End with this quote
Abolitionist teaching is not a teaching approach: It is a way of life, a way of seeing the world, and a way of taking action against injustice. It seeks to resist, agitate, and tear down the educational survival complex through teachers who work in solidarity with their schools’ community to achieve incremental changes in their classrooms and schools for students in the present day, while simultaneously freedom dreaming and vigorously creating a vision for what schools will be when the educational survival complex is destroyed.
Freedom to create your reality, where uplifting humanity is at the center of all decisions. And, yes, concessions will be made along the way, battles will be lost, and sometimes teachers, parents, and community members will feel like they are not doing enough, but the fight is fought with the indomitable spirit of an abolitionist who engages in taking small and sometimes big risks in the fight for equal rights, liberties, and citizenship for dark children, their families, and their communities—this is fighting for freedom.
Use for discussion!
There is no one way to be an abolitionist teacher. Some teachers will create a homeplace for their students while teaching them with the highest expectations; some will protest in the streets; some will fight standardized testing; some will restore justice in their classrooms; some will create justice-centered curriculums and teaching approaches; some will stand with their students to end gun violence in schools; some will fight to end the prison-industrial complex in and outside of schools; some will fight in the effort so communities can peacefully govern themselves to control their
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