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

by Bettina L. Love

Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate. Teachers entering the field of education must know this history, acknowledge this history, and understand why it matters in the present-day context of education, White rage, and dark suffering.

Historian Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

These horrific practices—lynchings, shootings, separating families, and beatings—were all protected by the US (in)justice superpredator system.

Most dark suffering does not make the nightly news or our social media posts. If we are honest, most dark suffering goes unnoticed by too many Americans, but America’s educational history is overrun with dark suffering. Native American boarding schools, school segregation, English-only instruction, Brown v. Board of Education, No Child Left Behind, school choice, charter schools, character education, Race to the Top … all have been components of an educational system built on the suffering of students of color. I call this the educational survival complex, in which students are left learning to merely survive, learning how schools mimic the world they live in, thus making schools a training site for a life of exhaustion.

Legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that Black folx would have been better served if the court had ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education and enforced the “equal” part of “separate but equal.” W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument in 1935; he proclaimed, “Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.”

The latest iteration of the educational survival complex is the charter school movement. Like most liberal egalitarian efforts, charter schools perpetuate inequalities, pulling high-achieving students from traditional public schools. Many charter schools are operated by education management organizations (EMOs) that work to privatize public education, indirectly and directly. Moreover, successful charter schools push low-income dark families out of their own neighborhoods.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the “no excuses” teaching approach of many charter schools around the country. Charter school networks such as Success Academy and KIPP popularized aggressive, paternalistic, and racist ideological teaching practices on dark bodies. The boards of directors operating these charter schools are typically composed of wealthy philanthropists, corporate foundations, and Wall Street hedge fund managers who believe dark children need discipline, character education, rudimentary academic skills, and full submission to White economic demands.33 In his book Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching, Jim Horn documents in great detail the unrelenting pressure on students to meet education benchmarks—what some KIPP school officials called the “plan of attack”—and the resulting suffering that dark families experience at charter schools.

Dark children at KIPP cannot fail, cannot express their stress, cannot feel pain from a world that rejects them, and cannot make mistakes, one of the critical and necessary experiences of childhood. The “no excuses” model is just another form of zero tolerance. These schools function to feed the school-to-prison pipeline that targets dark children. In March 2016, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA released data from one of the largest studies ever to research school discipline records, involving more than 5,250 charter schools.35 The study found that charter schools suspend Black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared with White and nondisabled students. For example, the study reported that five hundred charter schools suspended Black students at a rate of 10 percentage points higher than their White peers. This has a direct impact on children’s futures, as extensive research demonstrates that high suspension rates are part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Again, it’s another way in which the educational survival complex and the prison-industrial complex are tied together to profit from dark suffering.

After all the dark suffering in and outside of school, students of charter schools who are not pushed out—particularly at those schools that serve dark, low-income communities—do not graduate from college at dramatically higher rates than the same demographic of students who attend traditional public schools. According to the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard University, the American dream, if there ever was one for dark people, is fading fast. Children have a 50 percent chance of earning more or the same as their parents. A half century ago, that possibility was 90 percent. Even a person’s life expectancy is tied to his or her education, income, and location. Data suggest that “for the poorest Americans, life expectancies are 6 years higher in New York than in Detroit.”

Similarly, researchers point out that there is a charter school bubble growing too.

The push to open so many charter schools, when only 17 percent of them academically outperform public schools, is tied to profiting from dark suffering. Corporate school reformers prey on the suffering and hopes of dark communities, and just like the subprime-mortgages practice of predatory lending, they lack regulation and oversight. Once the charter school bubble bursts, dark communities will be left with what education researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings calls “education debt.”42 According to Ladson-Billings, education debt has accumulated over time, composed of the US’ historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debts.43 Corporate school reformers profit from the history of oppression of dark people. Their earnings rely on the stability of dark children and their families surviving while preying on their desire to do more than just survive. They make money on dark families’ dreams of thriving through education.

Corporate school reformers are superpredators too.

merely saying the words does not make you a freedom fighter—your actions do.

To be clear, all of these racist, antidark, emotionally and physically violent school incidents happened before the election of Donald Trump. After the election of 2016, Mother Jones published an article titled “Bullying in Schools Is Out of Control Since Election Day.”47 The article documented cases of anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic incidents that were normalizing everyday racial aggression in classrooms and on college campuses across the country.

These school attacks are more than just racist acts by misguided school officials, youth, and community members; put into a historical context, these attacks “draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of Whiteness and non-Whiteness.”54 These school attacks also spirit-murder dark children. Legal scholar Patricia Williams argued that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs dark people of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries.55 Racism literally murders your spirit. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to be educated.56 The White rage in our schools murders dark students’ spirits. Physical survival is not enough. Spirit-murder is not only about race and racism; dark people’s other identity categories, such as gender, citizenship, religion, language, class, ethnicity, nationality, and queerness, are additional, distinct factors driving discrimination, bigotry, and violence.57 This state of affairs underlines the importance of intersectionality: “Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with complex discrimination that they face.”58 We must use all the analytic tools available to understand how our children are spirit-murdered and educated in a state of perpetual survival mode for the benefit of the educational survival complex.

Survival is existing and being educated in an antidark world, which is not living or learning at all. It is trying to survive in, and at the same time understand and make sense of, a world and its schools that are reliant on dark disposability and the narratives necessary to bring about that disposability. This existence is not truly living nor is it a life of mattering. As dark people, we are trying to survive the conditions that make the dark body, mind, and spirit breakable and disposable.

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.

Nehisi Coates writes, The streets were not my only problem. If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. Suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more… . The world had no time for the childhoods of Black boys and girls… . When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing… . Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.

Education is not the antecedent of failing schools, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, and/or crime. Racism is; racism that is built on centuries of ideas that seek to confuse and manipulate we who are dark into never mattering to one another or this country.

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do. —TONI MORRISON1

It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten… . We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful. —EDUARDO GALEANO2

My parents wholeheartedly trusted my teachers with my education; they had no choice. My father had an eighth-grade education, and my mother earned her GED. They believed education was the great equalizer, but there was a caveat: education was not to be confused with common sense in the Love house. Education was what you learned in school and common sense was what you learned to survive, and they taught us that upward mobility done with your dignity intact depended on a combination of the two. Common sense meant trusting your gut, reading between the lines, listening before speaking, and never, I mean never, telling your family’s business, especially to White folx. We never explicitly discussed racism because it needed no exploration; racism was simply an ever-present part of our lives, like oxygen—but unlike racism, oxygen is necessary to survive. It was implicitly understood in our house that you had to be twice as smart as White folx, had to never let down your guard, never lower your head in defeat, and had to possess a confidence that should never be mistaken for arrogance. To my parents, if you were going to be something in this world, being an A student was just the tip of the iceberg.

A politics of refusal is one of the necessary components of activism vital to dark folx’ survival and is fundamental to abolitionist teaching.

Therefore, I learned above all else to protect my dignity. My dignity was never to be compromised, which meant never compromising my voice and my connection to how I mattered in this world. When you compromise your voice, you compromise your dignity. No dignity, no power. Knowing I had a voice backed by common sense, which I understood was supposed to be used to protect myself, was one of the most powerful things I have ever been taught. To my mother, common sense was everything; that’s where you speak from and then education follows. When I called my mother to inform her that I wanted to go back to school to pursue a PhD, she simply told me, “Don’t be an educated fool.” That was it, but I knew exactly what she meant: earning a PhD would mean nothing to my mother if I forgot where I came from and how to relate to the people who protected my dreams and my education. What good is an education if you must shed who you are? Authenticity was a fundamental component to “giving them hell.” My mother desperately wanted her children to be themselves. I never once had a conversation with my mother about my sexuality. We both knew I was a lesbian, so there was really nothing else to discuss. To be honest, Patty knew before me.

Our humanity rested in White America’s racist imagination, which always turns to antidark policy.

To be clear, conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute still celebrate the report and used aspects of it to explain the uprisings after the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.5

Nixon named himself the law and order president; he believed that Blacks and Puerto Ricans, especially those with their fists in the air shouting Black and Brown Power, were the reason the country lacked law and order. Nixon’s racist, combative, state-sanctioned, violent tactics killed and criminalized dark folx in order to appeal to White voters.

School did not come easily to me; it never has. I needed more time; I needed school to slow down. From the outset, I remember wishing my teachers and my classmates would just come to a screeching halt so I could catch up. My voice, the voice needed for survival, could not be heard from so far behind. My most important tools—my opinions, my ideas of right and wrong—were in a holding cell. I could not find a space where I mattered. I

Mrs. Johnson did not just love her students, she fundamentally believed that we mattered. She made us believe that our lives were entangled with hers and that caring for us meant caring for herself.

Mrs. Johnson had beautiful penmanship; she wore colorful dresses to school and demanded excellence. She was also keenly aware that school had to matter to us beyond our grades; we needed a survival plan. Mrs. Johnson taught as if the fate of her and her children was tied to ours. She shared stories with her students of her childhood in New Orleans. She was vulnerable in front of the class. She called home to speak to your parents about you as a person, not just a student. She had a sense of responsibility for her students, and we were a family. You did not want to disappoint Mrs. Johnson because then you disappointed the class and your family. It was a collective spirit of accountability, love, and purpose. She genuinely listened to us, took up our concerns in her teaching, and made sure each voice in the classroom was heard. After I had been in her class for a few weeks she knew I was behind and that my home life was unraveling. At the time, my mother and father were hooked on drugs and my siblings were off living their adult lives. I am not sure how Mrs. Johnson knew, but she did. She never looked down on me or lowered her expectations of me. If anything, she demanded more, with a keen understanding of my life and what was in front of me.

Those of us who make it through

school leave with skills and scars that are necessary for survival in this racist, sexist, and capitalistic world. The scars of systemic oppression are real and traumatic. Sadly, in that way, school is a battlefield. For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.

The writer bell hooks argues that loving Blackness is an act of political resistance because we all have internalized racism, regardless of the color of our skin, which operates to devalue Blackness, but she argues that Black people need to love themselves not in spite of their Blackness but because of their Blackness.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,

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.

yet they write, say, and partake in racist actions and posts online about dark children loosely masked in the language of low expectations, of judging low-income parents and dark children’s behavior. Furthermore, there are so many White liberal teachers who think racism is something singular to the far right. Racism is not exclusive to one political party or a particular type of White person. White, well-meaning, liberal teachers can be racist too. Therefore, understanding how racism works and understanding how White privilege functions within our society does not bring us any closer to justice, and it certainly does not undo the educational survival complex. Knowing these truths is the first step to justice, but it’s only a start. Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal. It is explicit, with a deep and intense understanding that loving Blackness is an act of political resistance, and therefore it is the fundamental aspect to teaching dark kids.

we were being politicized through antiracist struggle with a global perspective, specifically emphasizing our own communities.

I had to learn despite school, not because of it. School mattered because it provided the testing ground in which I learned ways to resist and navigate racism, the low expectations, the stereotypes, the spirit-murdering, all the forms of dark suffering, gender suffering, queer suffering, religious suffering, and class suffering. I learned that to succeed at school—by “succeed” I do not mean getting good grades but leaving every day with my darkness intact or only slightly bruised—I had to practice a politics of refusal, love my Blackness as an act of political resistance, and give them hell.

I required a village to survive and understand how I mattered in this world. My parents could not do it all. Dark children cannot thrive without a community of love, refusal, protection, knowledge, and resource-sharing. Mrs.

The conversation around the need for Black teachers must expand to having Black teachers—having all teachers, really—who teach from an abolitionist agenda. A teacher working from such an approach understands what Bernice Johnson Reagon calls “the sweetness of the struggle.”11 An antiracist approach elicits the understanding that the work of living and learning is about the solidarity created through shared

struggle. Antiracist teaching is not just about acknowledging that racism exists but about consciously committing to the struggle of fighting for racial justice, and it is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. Antiracist educators seek to understand the everyday experiences of dark people living, enduring, and resisting White supremacy and White rage.

All teachers, regardless of race or ethnicity, need to know that racism is not separate from economic class and that resistance, in its various forms, is always an option. We also need to recognize the specific nuances of different types of dark...

It is important for educators to know how deeply unjust systems affect people and their communities in unique ways, but it is also imperative to understand the intersections of injustice. Pedagogies must call out and teach students how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and inequality are structural, not people behaving poorly. They must criticize the systems that perpetuate injustice, such as the educational survival complex, while pushing for equitable communities, schools, and classrooms. Antiracist education also works to undo these systems while working to create new ones built upon the collective vision and knowledge of dark folx. For educators, this work starts in the classroom, school, and school community.

Before the War on Drugs slogan took hold, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” However, it is the administration of President Ronald Reagan that is responsible for the mass imprisonment of dark people.

Thus, while this colored system of punishment for profit is not new, in the twentieth century, the fall of manufacturing giants, an increase in language that justifies a carceral state, and the sociopolitical power structure that keeps Whites at the top, left dark people in my hometown without a survival kit or a way to matter. The racial disparities of the incarceration rate demonstrate another example of the human hierarchy that was codified by slavery, denies dark Americans citizenship, fails to make good on America’s promises of democracy, and continually reinscribes itself as legitimate, natural, and even moral.

The vulnerability of being young and dark alongside the multiple intersections of being human intensifies the unjust nature of the justice system. For example, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are more likely to be deported. Undocumented youth experience high levels of criminalization, poverty, and profiling by law enforcement at schools. The educational survival complex adopts the school-to-prison pipeline because we all live in a carceral state, increasing deportation for queer undocumented youth. In general, gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming dark youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. Our most vulnerable youth are walking targets for White rage inside and outside the walls of schools.

Described by bell hooks, “homeplace” is a space where Blacks folx truly matter to each other, where souls are nurtured, comforted, and fed. Homeplace is a community, typically led by women, where White power and the damages done by it are healed by loving Blackness and restoring dignity. She argues that “homeplace” is a site of resistance. Understanding the gutting of dark communities’ homeplaces is critical to a teacher’s analysis of the community in which he or she teaches.

Rochester is not an anomaly; many US cities mirror these statistics. And just as Rochester did not become riddled by crime, high unemployment, drugs, and low-performing schools overnight, neither did Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Atlanta. White rage methodically destroyed these cities for their dark residents in the form of Jim Crow, school desegregation, urban development or gentrification (which is code for removing and displacing dark bodies), the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, police brutality, school rezoning and closings, redlining (from 1934 to 1968 the Federal Housing Administration denied dark people home loans),

globalization of the US manufacturing industry, vanishing public sector jobs, and the educational survival complex.