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

by Bettina L. Love

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?

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 refusing to take part in zero-tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline.

Not sure I understand doing away with a zero tolerance policy

Abolitionist teaching ensures that students feel safe in schools and that schools are not perpetrators of violence toward the very students they are supposed to protect.

How are we to do this without a zero tolerance policy?

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.

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.

in 2017, 95 percent of wealth created went directly into the pockets of the top 1 percent of society.3 Meanwhile, the median income for a family of four was $54,000, with $16,000 in credit card debt, more than $172,806 in home mortgages, $28,535 in car loans, and just under $50,000 in student loans.4 This economic state is what our country calls the middle class—folx in debt, barely hanging on, living paycheck to paycheck. This perpetual state of financial precariousness is only exacerbated when you are dark, poor, and living in isolation.

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.

The FCAT did not measure their intelligence; it just served as another reminder that their darkness and language were not valued in a country that may require the completion of a Spanish-language class to graduate from high school but condemns you for speaking Spanish as your first language.

Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate.

Many White teachers are by-products of White flight and White rage. They have grown up living and learning in communities created by their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ hate and fear of darkness.

Moreover, successful charter schools push low-income dark families out of their own neighborhoods.

This may be true for some charter schools but not all. Many charter schools do not require students to be zoned in order to attend.

Gentrification is displacing millions of such families.

There are many long walks and cups of coffee to be had on this topic.

rising home prices pushing dark folx to the edges of the city and society.

A high-performing school, whether charter or traditional, will expedite the displacement of dark families.

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.

This is very true for the most part, sadly, especially in regards to the board.

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.

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.

We cannot fall into narratives of racial progress that romanticize “how far we’ve come” or suggest that success comes from darks being more like Whites.

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

my siblings and I would be in deep trouble if we tried to pretend to be something we were not. My mother did not like people who changed their voices around White folx to sound more proper or Black folx who put other Black folx down in front of Whites folx.

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.

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,

It certainly is perceived as resistance by some, but politics aside, it is what is RIGHT and good. It is about the person before it is about the knowledge instilled.

I do not mean just to teach dark children their ABCs and 123s; I mean to teach them to demand what Anna Julia Cooper called “undisputed dignity.” To call for “recognition of one’s inherent humanity” with the courage, persistence, vigilance, and the visionary imagination of an abolitionist.9

Wow...powerful

I had to practice a politics of refusal, love my Blackness as an act of political resistance, and give them hell.

This is an unbelievable responsibility for a student - having to stand tall - not in spite of skin color - but because of it.

Students no longer learn how to be informed and active citizens, which is key to democracy; instead, they learn now how to comply and recite affirmations about their grit.

Interesting

Dark children, especially those who are experiencing or have experienced toxic stress, do not need their grit measured or their character examined by researchers or school officials. They need culturally relevant therapy that teaches age-appropriate stress-reduction practices and they need mentors who understand what being a critical mentor means

They need health services in the schools that service their community. Students need paid internships and career planning courses. Schools need healthy foods programs and urban gardens.

Teachers must demand the end of high-stakes testing and the yelling of slogans at dark children, such as “knowledge is power,” “work hard,” “be nice,” and “no excuses” because all you need is grit.

According to reports, approximately 62 percent of all children come to school every day experiencing some type of trauma.

For dark people, being gritty means being solution-oriented, it means finding a way out of no way because you understand what is needed to solve the issues you are facing but lack the power and resources.

Our focus must shift instead to protecting our students’ potential.

My mother and father who taught me early on in life, so that when they were not there, I was still giving this world hell.

Saddening

Protecting children’s potential is not an easy lift, and it cannot be done episodically. My protectors were not just people who volunteered once a year with children from low-income neighborhoods or donated canned goods to the local food bank for a community service project; they were committed to building a relationship with me, my family, and my community in ways that were authentic and honored my knowledge of growing up Black and a woman in America.

Ella Baker’s model of grassroots organizing rooted in creativity, imagination, healing, ingenuity, joy, and freedom dreaming is vital to the undoing of the educational survival complex and to all justice work.

History tells them, and us, that if we just change, adjust, or even eradicate one piece of the oppressive hydra, such as the prison-industrial complex or educational survival complex, another piece will grow in its place.

An ahistorical understanding of oppression leads folx to believe that quick fixes to the system, such as more surveillance, more testing, and more punishment, will solve the issues of injustice and inequality. This way of thinking is a fallacy of justice like the achievement gap is a fallacy of educational improvement.

Wow. This is revolutionary thinking.

It is one of the fallacies of justice to know that the achievement gap is due to race and class and yet never proclaim racism and White rage as the source of the achievement gap.

Dark students and their families are sharecroppers, never able to make up the cost or close the gap because they are learning in a state of perpetual debt with no relief in sight.

Brown wrote in his book Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, “If you have never been deprived of your liberty, as I was, you cannot realize the power of that hope of freedom, which was to me indeed, an anchor to the soul both sure and steadfast.”10

Art helps people remember their dreams, hopes, and desires for a new world.

Art education in schools is so important because, for many dark children, art is more than classes or a mode of expression; it is how dark children make sense of this unjust world and a way to sustain who they are, as they recall and (re)member in the mist of chaos what it means to thrive.

Writer and activist adrienne maree brown says, “All social justice work is science fiction. We are imagining a world free of injustice, a world that doesn’t yet exist.” Art first lets us see what is possible.