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

by Bettina L. Love

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. —MAYA ANGELOU

on a day-to-day basis, arming teachers with guns would threaten the lives of dark students and dark students with disabilities more than a mass school shooter, particularly because data tell us that mass shootings are rare in urban schools.

Policy agendas devoid of intersectionality do not allow questions and dialogues that reflect the lives of the people who will be impacted by policy.

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.”

When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no shortcuts and no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination.

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.

Education researchers know that without a long-term strategy to eradicate the causes of racial and economic isolation—such as discrimination, predatory lending, housing displacement, the gender wage gap, rising healthcare costs, and unemployment (which leads to the 99 percent being no better than indentured servants to the 1 percent)—“heroic attempts to restructure schools or to introduce new pedagogical techniques in the classroom will be difficult to sustain.”

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 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.

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