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

by Bettina L. Love

In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks walks the reader through how her schooling experiences changed after desegregation. Before her school was integrated—I would say colonized—teachers understood that their job of teaching Black children was a political act rooted in antiracist struggle. She writes that she experienced her all-Black grade school as a space of “learning as revolution.”7 After her school was colonized, she writes, 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