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

by Bettina L. Love

What do we want? What is the thing we are after? … We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals? —W. E. B. DU BOIS1

there is one thing that I know with everything I am: we who are dark want to matter and live, not just to survive but to thrive. Matter not for recognition or acknowledgment but to create new systems and structures for educational, political, economic, and community freedom. It would mean we matter enough that our citizenship, and the rights that come with it, are never questioned, reduced, or taken away regardless of our birthplace or the amount of melanin in our skin. Mattering, citizenship, community sovereignty, and humanity go hand in hand with the ideas of democracy, liberty, and justice for all, which are the unalienable rights needed to thrive.

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?

We who are dark are complex—we are more than our skin hues of Blacks and Browns. We intersect our moonlit darkness with our culture(s), language(s), race(s), gender(s), sexuality(ies), ability(ies), religion(s), and spirituality(ies). Our complicated identities cannot be discussed or examined in isolation from one another. These identity complexities, which create our multifaceted range of beings, must matter too.

Kimberlé Crenshaw refers to these multiple markers of identity as “intersectionality.” Intersectionality is not just about listing and naming your identities—it is a necessary analytic tool to explain the complexities and the realities of discrimination and of power or the lack thereof, and how they intersect with identities.

Combahee River Collective,

“multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”

“Intersectionality” is more than counting representation in a room or within a group; it is understanding community power, or its lack, and ensuring inclusivity in social

justice movements. It is a way to build alliances in organizing for social change.

The racial uplift of dark people is crucial, 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.

I knew about the higher rates of biys being suspended but not girls...disturbing

In Monique W. Morris’s book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School,

Morris argues that Black girls never get to be girls, a phenomenon she describes as “age compression,” in which Black girls are seen as Black women, with all the stereotypes that go along with Black womanhood (e.g., hypersexual, loud, rude, and aggressive).

Importantly, intersectionality does not ignore Black and Brown boys, who endure many similar issues; it merely adds complexity to our understandings of how institutions such as public schools are oppressive in different ways to different people.

The American Civil Liberties Union reported that “students of color, students with disabilities, and students of color with disabilities are more likely to be funneled into the criminal justice system for behavior that may warrant supportive interventions or a trip to the principal’s office, not a criminal record.”

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.

Our impact on this country, whether it is recognized or not, is where mattering rests; it is where thriving rests. Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity.

Angela Y. Davis that “freedom is a constant struggle.”11

Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the “human hierarchy” was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological racial inferiority to “those Americans who believe that they are White.”12 Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to his son, “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”13 America’s legacy of oppression and dispossession of dark people is in large part met with the ethos of “We Shall Overcome,” “Si Se Puede,” and “We Gon’ Be Alright.”

It is these acts that have allowed us to produce beautiful, visceral, and eloquent literature, photography, visual art, and films that explain and endure our suffering, soundscapes for all to enjoy (but which only those in the struggle can feel and heal from), body movements that express pain and joy simultaneously, food that can only be made from love, and a joy that cannot be replicated outside of the dark body. We have created in the void, defiant of the country’s persistent efforts to kill and commodify us. Finding ways to matter.

For those of us who are dark, our lives are entrenched, whether we like it or not, in creating what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a “beloved community,” a community that strives for economic, housing, racial, health, and queer justice and citizenship for all. This is the work of mattering to one another. It is the work of pursuing freedom. It is the work of our survival, and how we will one day thrive together. It is how dark folx in this country have always mattered to each other, by attempting to carve out, on the edges of total degradation, common goals for justice, liberation, liberty, and freedom that inspire and make this country better for all.

Michael Hames-García: “The very fact of freedom’s incompleteness (no one is free so long as others remain unfree) necessitates action directed at changing society. Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”14 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.

Toni Morrison once said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”15 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.

Education reform is big business, just like prisons.

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.

Abolitionist teaching is built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are 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 calling out your

fellow teachers who degrade and diminish dark children and do not think dark children matter—we must demand that they leave the profession; we have to call them out.

Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist, discriminatory, and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving. To learn the sociopolitical landscape of their students’ communities through a historical, intersectional justice lens.

These dreams are spaces of love, solidarity, and resiliency, as we demand what seems impossible from a place of love and joy. While we do not forget injustice, we are focused instead on love, well-being, and joy and refuse to be oppressed any longer. Lastly, teachers must embrace theories such as critical race theory, settler colonialism, Black feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies, and other critical theories that have the ability to interrogate anti-Blackness and frame experiences with injustice, focusing the moral compass toward a North Star that is ready for a long and dissenting fight for educational justice.

Each fix falls short precisely because it fails to acknowledge how these struggles are direct consequences of injustice.

Education research is crowded with studies that acknowledge dark children’s pain but never the source of their pain, the legacy that pain has left, or how that pain can be healed.

Teaching strategies and education reform models must offer more than educational survival tactics to dark children—test-taking skills, acronyms, character education, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, charter schools, school choice. They need to be rooted in an abolitionist praxis that, with urgency, embraces what seems impossible: education for collective dignity and human power for justice.

Teachers who say they are deeply concerned about social justice or that they “love all children” but cannot say the words “Black Lives Matter” have no real understanding of what social justice is and what it truly means to love, find joy, and appreciate their students and their students’ culture.

In reality, many of these teachers who “love all children” are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia. These teachers do not belong in classrooms with dark children or even White children because antidarkness can happen without dark children in the room. Antidarkness is the social disregard for dark bodies and the denial of dark people’s existence and humanity.

Denying dark people’s existence and contributions to human progress relegates dark folx to being takers and not cocreators of history or their lives.

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.

What is astonishing is that through all the suffering the dark body endures, there is joy, Black joy. I do not mean the type of fabricated and forced joy found in a Pepsi commercial; I am talking about joy that originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life’s greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering.

This book is about struggle and the possibilities of committing ourselves to an abolitionist approach to educational freedom, not reform, built on criticality civics, joy, theory, love, refusal, creativity, community, and, ultimately, mattering.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. —JAMES BALDWIN1

The reality is that “our political economy is structured to create poverty and inequality.”2 Schools reflect our political economy. The fact that schools are funded by local property taxes ensures that students who live in poor communities receive an education that will maintain, and, in fact, widen the gap between the über-rich, the rich, the rapidly shrinking middle class, the working poor, and the poor. This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility. Schools in higher-income districts or rich enclaves are well-resourced, have high-quality teachers, and have low teacher turnover. In addition, the Parent Teacher Associations of affluent schools work to ensure that extracurricular activities, community initiatives, and field trips are offered to the already privileged.

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. Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice.

Failing a test because your language is deemed inferior communicates a message about your identity and ideas of who is and what is smart.

As I relate my experiences, and put the pieces together after all these years, the words of James Baldwin seem appropriate and clairvoyant in regard to the lives of my students and me: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish… . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”10 These dark families were “casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable.”11

lips. I shared with them what it feels like on a hot summer day to watch your skin made darker by the kiss of the sun, but I also know that our beautiful skin functions as a biological, ebony-colored tattoo that labels our bodies and our spirits as disposable to those who produce and consume racist ideas.

I personally witnessed educators lower their expectations for students of color while insisting they were doing what was best for their students.

The conditions that preserve dark suffering are the result of hundreds of years and multiple continents’ commitment to creating and maintaining destructive, insidious, racist ideals that uphold White supremacy and anti-Blackness. The field of education is anchored in White rage, especially public education. We like to think that education is untouched by White supremacy, White rage, and anti-Blackness, that educators are somehow immune to perpetuating dark suffering. But education from the outset was built on White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and sexism.