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

by Bettina L. Love

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.