More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 2 - January 12, 2023
Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”
To want freedom is to welcome struggle.
Education reform is big business, just like prisons. 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.
Reimagining and rewriting curriculums with local and national activists to provide students with not only examples of resistance but also strategies of resistance.
Antidarkness is the social disregard for dark bodies and the denial of dark people’s existence and humanity.19 When White students attend nearly all-White schools, intentionally removed from America’s darkness to reinforce White dominance, that is antidarkness.
The idea that dark people have had no impact on history or the progress of mankind is one of the foundational ideas of White supremacy.
No type of pedagogy, however effective, can single-handedly remove the barriers of racism, discrimination, homophobia, segregation, Islamophobia, homelessness, access to college, and concentrated poverty, but antiracist pedagogy combined with grassroots organizing can prepare students and their families to demand the impossible in the fight for eradicating these persistent and structural barriers.
their darkness and language were not valued in a country that may require the completion of a Spanish-language class to graduate from high school but condemns you for speaking Spanish as your first language. This paradox is what it means for your culture to be invisible and visible at the same time.
In 2016, a group of education researchers sounded the alarm comparing charter schools to subprime mortgages.38
I dont undeestand this comparison
Her statement is a perfect example of how racist educators believe their actions outside the class in no way impact their classroom or school.
After the election of 2016, Mother Jones published an article titled “Bullying in Schools Is Out of Control Since Election Day.”47
A thirty-two-year-old White woman, Heather Heyer, who was there to counterprotest White nationalists, was killed at the protest when James Alex Fields, a White supremacist, drove his car into the group of protesters who were standing up for justice. Trump refused to condemn these White supremacists and their action, and days following Heyer’s death, Trump called the White supremacists who invaded Charlottesville “some very fine people.”
Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to be educated.56
Beacon Hill is an example of what people can do when the ideas of abolitionism turn into a way of life; a way of seeing the world that does not normalize hate, White rage, and the inferior conditions for dark people; a way of life that relentlessly pursues and protects Blacks thriving.
Some abolitionists promoted militant action, such as Black abolitionist Nat Turner and White abolitionist John Brown. Some advocated for nonviolence, some wrote books and gave speeches that railed against slavery and injustice, some raised funds, some gave money, some taught, some fought in the war, some sued the government for equal rights under the law, some were healers, some community-organized, but all believed in
Art helps people remember their dreams, hopes, and desires for a new world.
Writer and activist adrienne maree brown says, “All social justice work is science fiction. We are imagining a world free of injustice, a world that doesn’t yet exist.”
Art is freedom dreams turned into action because “politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary world.”
We cannot have conversations about racism without talking about Whiteness.
It also presents time to challenge what you think about your own educational experiences and resources in relation to the issues your students and their communities face.
Molly Tansey, coauthor of Teaching While White
Abolitionist teaching is not just about tearing down and building up but also about the joy necessary to be in solidarity with others,
Abolitionist teachers have to hold themselves and their colleagues to a level of accountability that focuses on justice, love, healing, and restoring humanity.
Our schools and our teaching practices do not need to be reimagined; they need to be torn down and replaced with our freedom dreams rooted in participatory democracy and intersectional justice.
Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma
Therefore, my hope is that my students’ personal social justice journey of making Whiteness visible starts in my class, but it cannot end there.
When 88 percent of all teachers in schools are White women, conversations that unpack and challenge their ideas about race, class, privilege, meritocracy, religion, sexuality, sexism, and power are critical to the everyday lives of dark children. If the system is just, then who is to blame for poverty, failing schools, crime, and high unemployment? I use the word “blame” intentionally because blame assigns responsibility, and as a former teacher and current teacher educator, I have experienced teachers blaming students—blaming eight-year-olds for falling behind—and not the educational survival
...more
Too often, future educators and those teaching in the field conclude that dark children and their families are solely responsible for their life conditions. There is no interrogation or indictment of the system; it is all about personal responsibility and merit.
These premeditated moves—and many more—to push Indians out of their native lands are masked by fake holidays like Thanksgiving Day and Columbus Day, which depict Indian Nations willfully giving their food, cattle, and land to White men.
That plan was rejected because of the pipeline’s close proximity to the town’s municipal water sources. The pipeline was then rerouted to run beneath Standing Rock’s water supply and ancient burial grounds. Why was it acceptable to run fractured crude oil beneath Standing Rock’s water supply but not Bismarck’s?
Settler colonialism is a lens that helps us understand how Native Americans experience systemic oppression in the United States in a different way than any other dark group.
Black feminism provides an analysis of misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy—along with the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender—to disrupt and challenge racialized gender oppression while creating strategies for resistance and community thriving.
Critical White Studies (CWS) is a body of scholarship that aims to underscore how White supremacy and privilege are often invisible in society yet are still reproduced.
White emotionality goes a step further than White fragility by arguing that when race and racism raise up emotions of guilt, shame, anger, denial, sadness, dissonance, and disconcert, those feelings need to be deeply investigated to understand how racialized emotions perpetuate racism.36
Studying Whiteness, White rage, and violence is a fundamental step to moving from ally to coconspirator.
It is not by chance or good fortune that top-level staff at nonprofits and charter schools are overwhelmingly White people serving dark populations, who deserve more than a five-year strategic plan and dreams of saving all the less fortunate.
To be a Black mother is to be America’s punching bag, as you morph into a shield and take every blow for your family, especially your Black children, that will be thrown by America’s White rage.
Wilson’s racist views of Brown’s strength is no different from White doctors refusing to give Black people pain medication because they believe Black folx have a higher tolerance for pain,
caught on a dashboard camera telling a White woman, “We only kill Black people.”
Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters opens
“As an identity, Blackness is always supposed to tell us something about race or racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The determination to see Blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist—it
And you understand that your White privilege allows you to take risks that dark people cannot take in the fight for educational justice.
I know White administrators and principals who feel uncomfortable speaking about issues of race and racism, but somehow feel comfortable being in charge of a majority-dark teaching staff and student population.
If students are not well, test scores do not matter. It breaks my heart to talk to a principal who thinks that because test scores are low the school cannot focus on students’ emotional well-being.
This country kills our babies and we mourn with grace and compassion and use each death as a teaching moment for this country to find its North Star.
