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

by Bettina L. Love

Although no one person is equipped or has the right to speak for millions, particularly on the issues of race and racism, 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.

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 poisoned your child’s drinking water?

How do you matter to a country that would rather arm teachers with rocks than have courageous conversations with itself about gun control, eliminating guns, and White male rage?

How do you matter to a country where the idea of “consent” seems alien to its conquering culture?

Kimberlé Crenshaw

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.

Audre Lorde,

“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.

The racial uplift of dark people is crucial, but that uplift cannot come at the expense of trans folx, folx with disabilities, or women.

Another useful example of the need for intersectionality can be seen in the pay discrepancies in the medical field. Male doctors make about $20,000 more per year than female doctors.3 White male doctors make about $65,000 more than Black male doctors. Black female doctors make $25,000 less than White female doctors.4 White male, Black male, and White female doctors all make more than Black female doctors. Black female doctors are paid less because of their race and their gender. Their pay is not an indication of skill level or education; it is an example of the intersections of discrimination.

In education, it is not well publicized that Black girls are suspended at a rate that is six times higher than t...

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

Educational justice is going to take people power, driven by the spirit and ideas of the folx who have done the work of antiracism before: abolitionists.

The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism.

Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive.

Education reform is big business, just like prisons. Creating the narrative that dark people are criminals to justify locking them up for profit is no different from continuously reminding the American public that there is an educational achievement gap while conveniently never mentioning America’s role in creating the gap.

The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments.

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 refusing to take part in zero-tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline. Demanding restorative justice in our schools as the only schoolwide or districtwide approach to improving school culture. Refusing the idea that children do not need recess and insisting that all children need to play.

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. To abandon teaching gimmicks like “grit” that present the experiences of dark youth as ahistorical and further pathologize them and evoke collective freedom dreaming.

These theories additionally help in understanding that educational justice can happen only through a simultaneous fight for economic justice, racial justice, housing justice, environmental justice, religious justice, queer justice, trans justice, citizenship justice, and disability justice.

They must move beyond feel-good language and gimmicks to help educators understand and recognize America and its schools as spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and White supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color.

For example, too much of the field of education is filled with quick fixes or slogans (e.g., No Excuses), gimmicks (e.g., grit), best practices (e.g., benchmarking), and professional developments (e.g., Understanding Poverty) that focus on dark students through the lenses of daily struggles with trauma, gaps in learning, poverty, hunger, and language barriers. Each fix falls short precisely because it fails to acknowledge how these struggles are direct consequences of injustice.

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.

My point here is not to endorse Hillary Clinton—especially since many of her policies were anti-Black—but to highlight how a future educator can engage the language of justice and culturally relevant teaching, while webbed to a disposition that is harmful to all students.

When White students attend nearly all-White schools, intentionally removed from America’s darkness to reinforce White dominance, that is antidarkness.

When dark people are presented in school curriculums as unfortunate circumstances of history, that is antidarkness. When schools are filled with White faces in positions of authority and dark faces in the school’s help staff, that is antidarkness.

If we are being truly honest, if a teacher believes Mexicans are “animals,” that teacher cannot teach Mexican children.

To put some real numbers to the lives of average families, 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.

In terms of race, a 2014 study found that the wealth gap between White and Black families had widened to its highest levels since 1989.5 The children of Black families that do reach the middle class have a more difficult time maintaining that status, much less achieving more than their parents. For example, Black college graduates are twice as likely to experience unemployment as their White counterparts.

Today the poverty line is roughly $24,250, with racism and sexism still at the core of poverty, woven into the fabric of the US. According to 2016 US Census data, women were 35 percent more likely to live in poverty than men.7 Of the 16.9 million women living in poverty, 45.7 percent live in extreme poverty, with an income at or below 50 percent of the federal poverty level.8 It is no coincidence that women of color and their children make up a vast majority of women living in poverty.

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.

As a parent, I cannot imagine the frustration, anger, and hopelessness of waking up your child every morning to attend a failing school. But what about the students? What does it mean to walk into a building every day thinking the school is failing not because of teachers or administrators, nor a sociopolitical history of dark communities being intentionally destabilized, terrorized, and put into a carceral state, but because of your dark skin? A good number of my students in Homestead, especially those whose second language was English—language being a critical component of a person’s identity—had failed the FCAT multiple times because it was administered in English.

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

The stand your ground law moved “home-defense principles into the streets.”18 In short, stand your ground gave immunity to White rage, the same White rage that has repeatedly and systematically kidnapped and killed dark children.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 killed thousands of Native Americans by forcefully removing them from their land in the Deep South to make room for White settlers who would become slaveholders.

According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, between 1877 and 1950, nearly four thousand Black men, women, and children were lynched.

During World War II, Japanese Americans were forcibly taken to internment camps. The federal government apologized and disbursed over $36 million in ...

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

That night, Trayvon was simply walking with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea in a gated community, which he had visited several times before, when the superpredator, White rage, took his life.

Before the landmark decision of Brown in 1954, Black schools were proud institutions that “provided Black communities with cohesion and leadership.”25 Though Black schools’ facilities and books were inferior to their White counterparts, the education they provided was not.

“Black schools were places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded respect, and where parents supported teachers.” Educating Black children was viewed as the collective responsibility of the community. Schools were the anchors for the Black community, and teachers were leaders inside and outside school walls.

As schools desegregated, more than thirty-eight thousand Black teachers and principals lost their jobs due to the closing of all-Black schools and the fact that White parents did not want their children taught by Black teachers.26

Currently, less than 2 percent of teachers are Black men; White men and women make up more than 80 percent of the teaching force.27 Teacher retention is also at an all-time low.28 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. Many of these teachers are unaware of how their lily-White communities were established in and have upheld Whiteness. This lack of awareness, of course, often leads them to measure their communities against the urban school communities they teach in, which makes subscribing to stereotypes easier.

Given the hypersegregation of today’s schools and the lack of economic and social mobility for dark students, it is safe to say that Brown‘s mission has failed.

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. Gentrification is displacing millions of such families.

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.