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

by Bettina L. Love

Thus, while diversity was present in the proceedings involving a Black man and a Black woman, both of them extremely accomplished, Thomas’s male privilege, along with America’s ignorance and outright disregard of Black women’s own history of lynchings and sexual trauma due to assault, harassment, and rape, made it easy for America to ignore Hill’s accusations. And even today, we see the “high-tech lynching” claim used to excuse Bill Cosby’s numerous sexual assaults. Intersectionality would have allowed both race and Black women’s history of sexual trauma to enter the conversation. Sadly, in addition to Bill Cosby being a rapist, he is also a great example of someone who stood for racial uplift but not intersectional social justice; the two terms are often conflated. Cosby generously gave to historically Black colleges and universities and initiatives that supported the racial uplift of Black people, but his justice stopped there. The racial uplift of dark people is crucial, but that uplift cannot come at the expense of trans folx, folx with disabilities, or women.

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.16 Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.17 Education reformers take up space in urban schools offering nothing more than survival tactics to children of color in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education.

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. This book is about that struggle and the possibilities of committing ourselves to an abolitionist pursuit to educational freedom—freedom, not reform. 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.

The conditions that preserve dark suffering are the result of hundreds of years and multiple continents’ commitment to creating and maintaining destructive, insidious, racist ideals that uphold White supremacy and anti-Blackness. The field of education is anchored in White rage, especially public education. We like to think that education is untouched by White supremacy, White rage, and anti-Blackness, that educators are somehow immune to perpetuating dark suffering. But education from the outset was built on White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and sexism.

You cannot discuss White supremacy without considering White rage. Historian Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, argues, “The trigger of White rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”14 A devastating example of White rage, which is always present, festering, and plotting, occurred in the town of Ocoee, Florida, on November 2, 1920. The region was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. According to reports, until at least 1959, a sign hung at the town’s line that read “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcomed.”15 Ocoee was also considered a sundown town,

White rage erupted when John Moses Cheney, a white judge who supported efforts to register Black voters to win his campaign, and two Black businessmen, Mose Norman and Julius “July” Perry, publicly encouraged Black folx to vote. Perry “encouraged young blacks to be educated and stand up for themselves as first-class citizens.”17 As Black folx arrived at the polls on Election Day, they were met by a growing White mob. When the dust settled, sixty Black citizens had been killed and their property destroyed for having ambition, drive, and purpose: for mattering. Perry was lynched for daring to matter.

One investment strategy used by corporate school reformers (akin to disaster capitalists) is the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000, which provides tax incentives for seven years to businesses that reside and hire residents in economically depressed communities. To increase profits, investors lobby federal and local governments to ease regulations and restrictions that limit the number of charter schools in a particular state or school district. Deregulating charter school growth allows corporate school reformers to open up public schools to the highest bidder. This scheme motivates investors such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to donate half a million dollars of stock to organizations that distribute charter school funding.39 Zuckerberg also opened his own foundation, Startup:Education, to build more charter schools.40 The real estate industry receives massive tax cuts for buying inner-city schools, homes, and buildings. Many of the most über-rich hedge fund operators have close ties to charter schools. David Tepper ($3.5 billion in earnings in 2013) founded Appaloosa Management and Better Education for Kids; Steven A. Cohen ($2.4 billion in 2013) of SAC Capital Advisors donated $10 million to the Achievement First charter school network.41

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.

In June 2016, Kim Stidham, a charter school principal in Duval County, Florida, posted on Facebook a song with the lyrics, “Take all of the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree, round up all them bad boys, hang them high in the street for all the people to see.”45 Stidham released a statement after she came under fire for her post: I am absolutely devastated that my personal political views were perceived to be racist in any way. I am a firm believer in equality, justice and respect for all individuals and I recognize now that some of my posts could have been misunderstood. I appreciate the fact that those who were offended brought this to my attention so that I could rectify the situation. I encourage anyone who has any concerns about this to come to me directly so that we can discuss it further.46 Her statement is a perfect example of how racist educators believe their actions outside the class in no way impact their classroom or school. She is “devastated” that her personal views could be seen as racist, but history confirms her racism. Black women, men, and children were rounded up and killed by White mobs; there is no other way to “perceive” her words. Also, people who are “firm believer[s] in equality, justice and respect” can be racist; merely saying the words does not make you a freedom fighter—your actions do. Lastly, Stidham did not apologize because in her mind she did nothing wrong. Racist educators seldom take responsibility for their racist actions and believe...

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.

In sum, Baker’s philosophy of community is how dark folx move from surviving to thriving, so that we matter to one another and the world. We cannot pursue educational freedom or any type of justice without a model of democracy that empowers all. We all thrive when everyday people resist, when everyday people find their voice, when everyday people demand schools that are students’ homeplaces, and when everyday people understand that loving darkness is our path to humanity.

Taking the lead from Baker, abolitionist teaching is built on the cultural wealth of students’ communities and creating classrooms in parallel with those communities aimed at facilitating interactions where people matter to each other, fight together in the pursuit of creating a homeplace that represents their hopes and dreams, and resist oppression all while building a new future. Growing up, I had multiple homeplaces that valued me, all of me, all the time. Looking back, I see that these spaces were abolitionist spaces in that they protected my humanity, my dignity, and not only told me I was powerful but taught me how to be powerful. These abolitionist spaces loved Blackness and understood that, to be dark, you must give this world hell to survive.

Dark students being gritty, full of excitement and energy, reciting self-improvement statements, and displaying social and emotional intelligence does not stop them from being killed in the streets or spirit-murdered in the classroom; these are their odds. It does nothing for kids growing up poor, who experience the stresses and traumas of poverty. Research has shown that the stress of poverty and adversity alters brain functions. It is called “toxic stress.” Children who experience prolonged adversities—poverty, chronic neglect, the US government separating children from their parents, violence, physical or emotional abuse—suffer great impact on their ability to learn. Specifically, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, research has shown that children who experience high levels of toxic stress display impaired social and emotional understanding, along with learning disabilities and potential early death.13 Researchers believe that, because toxic stress creates neurobiological transformation in children, it should be seen and treated as a national health crisis.

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 (see the work of Torie Weiston-Serdan). Students need youth-centered programs like FIST; Young, Gifted, and Black (Oakland, California); and Kuumba Lynx (Chicago). 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. Every community needs a Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School. These schools have been models for teaching social change for more than fifty years, built in response to the educational survival complex after Black schools closed around the country in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. Dark children need an end to the school-to-prison pipeline through the decriminalization of schools by removing security guards, metal detectors, and police and with deliberate speed, inserting restorative justice and mindful practices in schools and communities alike.

If education is going to deal with trauma, we must recognize the trauma of our teachers. Educators need trauma sensitive training and free or affordable therapy for themselves. Schools of educational psychology should create degrees that help school counselors understand the human development needed to be a teacher. Teachers need to be taught how to question Whiteness and White supremacy, how to check and deal with their White emotions of guilt and anger, and how these all impact their classrooms. Only after unpacking and interrogating Whiteness, White teachers—and, really, all teachers—must unpack how Whiteness functions in their lives; then they can stand in solidarity with their students’ communities for social change. 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. And, lastly, teachers need to mobilize to fight systemic inequities and the educational survival complex.

telling dark children that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve on their own merit is not a new approach; it is short-sighted and, in actuality, racist thinking. It should come as no surprise that the KIPP charter school network and the inventor of the character growth card—all aspects of the educational survival complex—allowed Duckworth to test her grit theory on children. Dave Levin, the cofounder of KIPP, clings to the field of positive psychology, which declares that success in college and life can be predicted by testing for positive character strengths such as grit, zest, gratitude, and social intelligence. He introduced the field of education to the character growth card and character performance assessments (CPAs). According to a 2014 article by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder in the New Republic: When Levin first hit on the idea of a character report card in 2007, he envisioned that students would eventually graduate with both a GPA and a CPA, or character point average. In Levin’s conception, the CPA would be a valuable tool for admissions officers and corporate human resources managers who would be delighted to know which applicants had scored highest on items such as grit, optimism, and zest.17

What Levin makes clear in his obsession with positive psychology and measuring the character of dark and poor children—KIPP’s primary student population—is his belief that dark children can be better controlled and better workers if their character is tracked throughout their lives. Levin’s thinking can be traced back hundreds of years to “good” White folx who thought that, given the “proper” education and learning environment, dark children (Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans) could be taught how to be less barbaric and more White. Never fully White, of course, but White enough to be less threatening, less outspoken, and more task-driven (gritty), so that nothing could supersede White economic demands for labor.

In the world of grit, the ideas of love, kindness, thoughtfulness, courage, honesty, integrity, and justice are rarely discussed, nor is the idea of epigenetic inheritance. In her book Grit, Angela Duckworth reconciles the points that someone can be a “gritty villain” and that “altruistic purpose is not an absolute requirement of grit.”22 Therefore, she concludes that interest, purpose, and hope are needed for gritty people to do good in the world. She argues that grit depends largely on hope: Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.23 This statement does not reflect and is out of touch with the real world and what it means to be dark, poor, and surviving.

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. Redirecting power and resources is a primary focus of abolitionist teaching and the goal of educators and individuals concerned about educational justice, rather than measuring grit or appraising dark children’s characters in toxic environments or while they’re living with the stress of being young and dark. Our focus must shift instead to protecting our students’ potential.

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. They respected my family; they also respected my community and saw the value in both. Even though my home and community were broken, they saw me beyond my trauma.

These individuals were not only benevolent, but they also recognized the intersections of our relationships. These men knew they had to protect me. Fat-Daddy would tell all the boys that if they messed with me or picked on me, they would have to deal with him. White folx in my life used their position, power, and privilege to negotiate space and opportunities for me.

I share these details of my life not to echo a cheesy movie like The Blind Side with a White savior, because there are no saviors. There is only a village, a community, and a goal: protecting children’s potential. My homeplace. This work is hard, frustrating, and sometimes seemingly depressing. One person cannot do all the heavy lifting. I needed critical mentors, math tutors, SAT tutors, coaches, bodyguards, rides home, a job, financial literacy, college prep, therapy, and folx to make calls, schedule meetings, run interference, and leverage their power and privilege on my behalf. These folx knew I was a good kid in a mad city. I was not just a kid who could play basketball; my multiple identities made me vulnerable and I needed to be protected, mentored, and employed.

INTERSECTIONS OF PROTECTION

Dark communities are ill-equipped to protect girls of color. I was fortunate because I had a community and basketball. Black girls, as I stated in chapter 2, are also expelled and suspended from school at high rates because teachers do not understand Black girls’ struggles to live with dignity and stand up for themselves despite mental health issues, learning disabilities, and sexual and physical abuse. There is no amount of grit that can fight off the intersections of living in poverty, being pushed out of school, facing a world full of patriarchy and racism, and suffering toxic stress. It is not that dark children do not have grit and zest, but they need educators and their communities to protect it, not measure it. Sadly, this is easier said than done in an environment of injustice, profit from oppression, and quick fixes.

SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION

The study is grounded in the social-psychological theory of “system justification,” which explains how humans believe, defend, and rationalize the status quo because they see social, economic, and political systems as fair and legitimate. Among the low-income youth of color in the study, 91 percent believed in the “American dream.” While holding system-justifying beliefs, these young people lacked the skills to interpret their world, which, sadly, is filled with intersectional, systemic oppression.

Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author, remarked on her team’s findings in an article in the Atlantic: “We cannot equivocate when it comes to preparing our children to face injustices.”33 Godfrey’s study confirms what Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have always known: “You cannot continue to oppress a consciously historical people.”34 Children of color attending schools that do not help them interpret the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic world in which they live is not only maintaining the status quo but also ensuring that Whiteness, patriarchy, and hate are never disrupted and challenged.

Abolitionist teaching is not a teaching approach: It is a way of life, a way of seeing the world, and a way of taking action against injustice. It seeks to resist, agitate, and tear down the educational survival complex through teachers who work in solidarity with their schools’ community to achieve incremental changes in their classrooms and schools for students in the present day, while simultaneously freedom dreaming and vigorously creating a vision for what schools will be when the educational survival complex is destroyed. No one teacher or parent can abolish the educational survival complex but if we work together, we can.

Abolitionist teaching is welcoming struggles, setbacks, and disagreements, because one understands the complexity of uprooting injustice but finds beauty in the struggle. Abolitionist teachers fight for children they will never meet or see, because they are visionaries. They fight for a world that has yet to be created and for children’s dreams that have yet to be crushed by anti-Blackness.

Black Youth Project 100’s “Agenda to Build Black Futures” calls for “shifts in economic policy in order to acquire the resources needed to build healthy lives, strong families, and communities.”29 Black Youth Project 100 has chapters throughout the US. Dream Defenders is a Florida-based organization, established in 2012, that declared, “In 2018, we were killed in our classrooms and on street corners. We were locked inside Florida’s prisons and the keys were thrown away. We live in a state with more billionaires than almost anywhere in the country, yet, our parents and our teachers didn’t have the basic resources they needed to keep us safe.”30

The intentionality of these words demonstrates these educators’ deep sense of understanding how structural inequality is reproduced and how education that does not hide the truth from students is one of the first steps of freedom dreaming and fighting for freedom. The thirteen guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement highlighted in the resolution speak to the intersectional justice of Black Lives Matter: Black families, Black villages, Black women, collective value, diversity, empathy, globalism, intergenerationalism, love engagement, queer affirmation, restorative justice, transgender affirmation, and being unapologetically Black.32 These principles affirm inclusiveness but center those at the margins of society. The push for justice by students, parents, and community members cannot be done without solidarity and a reflectiveness of self.

Teachers from around the country are forming organizations to freedom-dream new teaching methods, classrooms, community partnerships, and school systems built with intersectional social justice at the roots of their foundations. Badass Teachers Association, New York Collective of Radical Teachers, Caucus of Working Educators, Teacher Action Group in Philadelphia and Boston, Teachers of Social Justice in Chicago, Teachers 4 Social Justice in San Francisco, Black Teacher Project, Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice, Educators’ Network of Social Justice in Milwaukee, Education for Liberation Network, Association of Raza Educators in San Diego and Oakland, and Free Minds, Free People are all teacher-activist organizations that will move us forward in tearing down the educational survival complex and creating an education system thought by some to be impossible.33

These steps are the internal work that needs to happen before the outside work can start. One cannot enter freedom-dreaming spaces holding on to dark people’s nightmares. We cannot have conversations about racism without talking about Whiteness. The time-consuming and serious critique and reflection of one’s sociocultural heritage—which includes identities related to race, ethnicity, family structure, sexuality, class, abilities, and religion—taken side by side with a critical analysis of racism, sexism, White supremacy, and Whiteness is the groundwork of coconspirators. It also presents time to challenge what you think about your own educational experiences and resources in relation to the issues your students and their communities face. It is time to reflect on your educational history that either enabled or prevented you from achieving. How do resources such as your family, school structure, curriculum, materials, school funding, and community support help you thrive in education? This type of deep personal reflection is a must before taking up space in spaces that are trying to build, heal, and tear down all at the same time while never forgetting that joy is central to the work of freedom.

Whitney Dow, creator of the Whiteness Project, captured the work best when he said, “Until you can recognize that you are living a racialized life and you’re having racialized experiences every moment of every day, you can’t actually engage people of other races around the idea of justice.”44 When speaking about White guilt, Dow adds, “I could do something inside and that would change things. It kind of eliminated guilt for me. It made me feel incredibly empowered and really enriched my world.” Dow is describing the inner work that is needed when you are White and fighting for justice in solidarity with dark folx.

White folx can also embrace Black joy by helping, advocating for, and wanting Black folx to win. Recognizing and acknowledging White privilege is cute, but what does it mean without action?

goal as an educator, teaching overwhelmingly White students, is to get White students to question how they are going to teach children of color with a limited understanding of who these children are, where these children come from, their history, why and how they matter to the world, who loves them, why they should love Blackness, why they should want to see dark children win, how to support their quest to thrive, and how it is intentional that future teachers know so little about dark students. And, most important, how did my White students come to know what they know about dark students. Students knowing so little about dark people is not an accident; racism erases dark bodies from historical records of importance and distorts their everyday reality.

Culture is not as biological as we think. It is a group’s knowledge production process that occurs as they understand and respond to their reality and create ways of being to survive or thrive in their everyday lives. Whiteness is also a culture; it was created by the educational, social, economic, spiritual, and political conditions that intentionally and methodically give power to racism. This is why Whiteness is so hard to remove from society. To abolish Whiteness means dismantling the structures that maintain its power and influence. If we, teacher educators, are going to ask teachers to be culturally relevant and culturally competent—which I wholeheartedly believe are fundamental to challenging inequities and develop critical perspectives—then teachers should be required to study culture.

How can you love something you know so little about? When 88 percent of all teachers in schools are White women, conversations that unpack and challenge their ideas about race, class, privilege, meritocracy, religion, sexuality, sexism, and power are critical to the everyday lives of dark children. If the system is just, then who is to blame for poverty, failing schools, crime, and high unemployment? I use the word “blame” intentionally because blame assigns responsibility, and as a former teacher and current teacher educator, I have experienced teachers blaming students—blaming eight-year-olds for falling behind—and not the educational survival complex. If we do not know who or what is responsible, then how do we abolish it—how and where do we fight?

Theory does not solve issues—only action and solidarity can do that—but theory gives you language to fight, knowledge to stand on, and a humbling reality of what intersectional social justice is up against. Theory lets us size up our opponent, systemic injustice. Theory is a practical guide to understanding injustice historically, the needs of people, and where collective power lives within groups of people. There are many useful theories that explain the world in a way that helps me break down injustice in small, digestible pieces. Without theory, the moveable mountain of injustice and oppression seems too big and immobile, but theory helps us understand that our job is not to move mountains but to outmaneuver them. For all those reasons, I will use space in this chapter to introduce some theories and highlight how they provide an understanding of injustice concerning particular groups inside and outside an educational context.

CRT argues that racial remedies for equality can happen only if these remedies benefit White people and their interests. Derrick Bell called this proposition “interest convergence.” A good example of interest convergence is school desegregation: a disproportionate amount of money that went to desegregating schools in the South during the late 1950s and 1960s was directed toward White schools that enrolled Black children. Thus, White schools profited from receiving Black students, while Black teachers were replaced by White teachers.

Another manifestation of “interest convergence” is the fact that White women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group. For example, “a 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that White women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector.”17 More current data show that, in 2015, “a disproportionate representation of White women business owners set off concerns that New York state would not be able to bridge a racial gap among public contractors.”18 Simply put, “interest convergence” argues that White people will support civil rights legislation only when it’s in their interest to do so.

Tara Yosso calls “community cultural wealth.”20 Yosso stresses that there are six types of cultural capital that educators should understand and use to empower students beyond White narratives of what cultural capital is and is not. 1. Aspirational—that dark folx continue to have “hopes and dreams” despite persistent, structural barriers in education, employment, housing, and healthcare 2. Linguistic—the beautiful and rich storytelling and communication skills of linguistically diverse students 3. Familial—how family members’ wisdom, stories, and traditions can be a positive resource 4. Social capital—using your network for accessing college and other social institutions 5. Navigational—how dark people have to maneuver hostile spaces to be successful despite being unsupported 6. Resistance—recognizes that dark folx are committed in the fight for justice and abolitionist work21

CRT combined with community cultural wealth not only provides an intellectual space to critique racism and understand how it operates in a world with laws that seem just, but also how to empower communities to recognize and affirm the wealth they already have to fight racism.

“women who theorize the experiences and ideas shared by ordinary Black women provide a unique angle of vision on self, community, and society.”22 Black feminism provides an analysis of misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy—along with the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender—to disrupt and challenge racialized gender oppression while creating strategies for resistance and community thriving. Black feminism is a theory that mandates practice. Black feminism is not just theoretical, it is an everyday practice of engaging with individuals and of communities centering the lives of dark girls and women. Black feminists deeply care about their communities.

Black feminism centers Black women and girls, and girls of color, because there is an understanding that “racism alone as a phenomenon in the lives of Black women was politically insufficient as an analysis or as a plan of action.”24 Intersectionality grew out of Black feminism because it is “crucial to understand the particular experiences of Black women as compared to White women and Black men, but it also created entry points for Black women to engage in politics.”25 Black feminism is concerned about the lives of those deemed most disposable by society: dark children, dark queer and trans folx, and women all along the gender spectrum. Black feminism organizes and creates community from a space of Black joy. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by three Black queer women, demonstrates the power, influence, and real-life outcomes of Black feminism.

Black queer studies is an important field for understanding sexuality in relationship to other identities. The need for Black queer studies came about because queer studies and queer theory ignored the concerns of queer Black people. Political scientist and Black feminist Cathy Cohen suggests that “queer theorizing that calls for the elimination of fixed categories of sexual identity seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival.”30 Queer theory must address how dark people and queer dark people build community together to survive homophobia, racism, classism, and possibilities for intersectional social justice.

Make no mistake, I did not learn as quickly as I would have liked that the ability of education to be a mechanism for freedom, particularly for dark students, is suspended in midair by Whiteness, racism, sexism, and neoliberalism. When you understand how these theories function, when they become your North Star, you understand why progress is so hard and why survival is a constant struggle. Theories are more than just academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how structures uphold oppression. It is not by chance or good fortune that top-level staff at nonprofits and charter schools are overwhelmingly White people serving dark populations, who deserve more than a five-year strategic plan and dreams of saving all the less fortunate. Dark families deserve and have a right to the power of the organization that seeks to determine what is the right course of action for their lives. Meaning the decision-making, the budget, the staff, and the overall goals should be made in conjunction with the community and with an analysis of Whiteness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and neoliberalism.

All the decisions we make must be guided by our moral compass of intersectional social justice. Where we choose to live, teach, send our kids to school, work, go to the movies, dine, and attend college, as well as the TV shows we watch, the clothes we buy, and even where we buy goods can all be traced back to race, racism, Whiteness, classism, sexuality, gender, and whose land we are living on. If our everyday repetitive, mundane life decisions are made by racism, Whiteness, and sexism, then so are our curriculums, discipline policies, teacher hiring practices, school-closing decisions, testing, teacher pay, teacher turnover, and school leaders. The struggle for educational freedom does not somehow vanish when you apply theory, but your barriers are no longer hiding in plain sight; now you have the language, understanding, and, hopefully, coconspirators not only to fight but also to demand what is needed to thrive.

The Salt Eaters is a book about healing but healing that centers race, racism, culture, history, gender, community, justice, environmental concerns, and humanity. As abolitionists we must be well; we cannot settle for just being alright. Wellness is a part of social justice work. There must be an inner life that refuses to be treated less than human. I had to choose to be well; I had to choose to have an inner life; I had to choose to be vulnerable, to find my own sovereignty rooted in Black joy, Black love, and humanity regardless of America’s hate for me and mine. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture by Kevin Quashie reminds me, “As an identity, Blackness is always supposed to tell us something about race or racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The determination to see Blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist—it comes from the language of racial superiority and is a practice intended to dehumanize Black people.”11 Dark folx have to choose to see ourselves beyond our protest, beyond our fight for justice; we are more than just resistance. Fighting for justice shows how human and how loving we are. But to be fully human is to know yourself beyond the fight, to have an inner self that can be quiet and enjoy life.

INTERGENERATIONAL HEALING