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

by Bettina L. Love

The racist ideas that condition all of us and take hold of so many, according to Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, are not the work of ignorant and hateful people: “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.” Kendi’s words are an introduction to understanding that America’s deep entrenchment in racist ideas that produce discriminatory policies, which engineered “mass incarceration, beatings, and the killings of Black people by law enforcement,” is the same reality that functions as a site of dispensability for dark people in America’s schools.59 Living under the surveillance of a superpredator is a slow death of the body, mind, and spirit—if the system does not speed up your expiration date. Schools are mirrors of our society; educational justice cannot and will not happen in a vacuum or with pedagogies that undergird the educational survival complex.