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

by Bettina L. Love

How do you matter to a country that measures your knowledge against a “gap” it created?

but that uplift cannot come at the expense of trans folx, folx with disabilities, or women.

In education, it is not well publicized that Black girls are suspended at a rate that is six times higher than that of their White female peers.

Mattering cannot happen if identities are isolated and students cannot be their full selves.

Demanding the impossible means we understand that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, mass incarceration, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are protected systems that will not be dismantled because we ask; they will be dismantled because we fight, demanding what they said was impossible, remembering through the words of Angela Y. Davis that “freedom is a constant struggle.”

When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no shortcuts and no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination.

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.