We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

by Bettina L. Love

Teachers need to be taught how to question Whiteness and White supremacy, how to check and deal with their White emotions of guilt and anger, and how these all impact their classrooms. Only after unpacking and interrogating Whiteness, White teachers—and, really, all teachers—must unpack how Whiteness functions in their lives; then they can stand in solidarity with

better controlled and better workers if their character is tracked throughout their lives.

Never fully White, of course, but White enough to be less threatening, less outspoken, and more task-driven (gritty), so that nothing could supersede White economic demands for labor.

Not just their culture, language, sexuality, or current circumstances but their entire selves, past, present, and future. Their ancestors, their family members, their friends, their religion, their music, their dress, their language, the ways they express their gender and sexuality, and their communities must all be embraced and loved.

“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 comes from the language of racial superiority and is a practice intended to dehumanize Black people.”

More than just attending antiracist workshops and culturally relevant pedagogy professional developments, they need to come to terms with what Whiteness is, how violence is needed to maintain it, and how their successes in life are by-products of Whiteness.

White folx’ approach to antiracism work in schools is checking it off their to-do list.

I take issue with White school staff members who shy away from speaking out against racism but have no problem controlling dark minds and bodies.

I have spoken to leaders of schools who understand how racism, Whiteness, and sexism function in schools and want to do something about it, but addressing these issues would mean letting go of their control of Black bodies, losing power, and admitting that they are part of the problem infecting the school.