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.

Thus, 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.

of these approaches is new or removed from the long history of abolitionist envisioning, mobilizing, and revolting against racial oppression. Indeed, these multiple methods remind us of the profound words of Michael Hames-García: “The very fact of freedom’s incompleteness (no one is free so long as others remain unfree) necessitates action directed at changing society. Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”14 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.

Toni Morrison once said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

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. Individuals with little to no experience are tasked with working in struggling schools that were designed to fail (e.g., they are underfunded, with high teacher burnout, tests that punish students, and low-quality teachers) and given only two years—if they can make it that long—to “make a difference,” when hundreds more qualified have tried and failed before them. These educational parasites need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative and the financial reason for their existence.

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. Both prisons and schools create a narrative of public outrage and fear that dark bodies need saving from themselves.

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.

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 ensures that students feel safe in schools and that schools are not perpetrators of violence toward the very students they are supposed to protect. Abolitionist teaching is calling out your fellow teachers who degrade and diminish dark children and do not think dark children matter—we must demand that they leave the profession; we have to call them out. Abolitionist teaching stands in solidarity with parents and fellow teachers opposing standardized testing, English-only education, racist teachers, arming teachers with guns, and turning schools into prisons. Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.

for most students—not all, but most—one course focused on social justice cannot undo a lifetime of racist thinking and of learning in racial isolation.

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.

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.

America’s first public schools, often called grammar schools, were only for White, wealthy males. And over time, when any group outside of the established norm fought for the right to educate their children, particularly by way of their culture and/or language, they were met with White rage.

Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate. Teachers entering the field of education must know this history, acknowledge this history, and understand why it matters in the present-day context of education, White rage, and dark suffering.

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.”

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

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.

Like most liberal egalitarian efforts, charter schools perpetuate inequalities, pulling high-achieving students from traditional public schools.

The study found that charter schools suspend Black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared with White and nondisabled students.

Charter school networks like Success Academy are notorious for “coaching” students and their families out of school.

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.

In short, Moynihan branded and blamed the Black family structure for Black folx’ inability and unwillingness to assimilate into White American culture.

Those of us who make it through school leave with skills and scars that are necessary for survival in this racist, sexist, and capitalistic world.

Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. 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, and therefore it is the fundamental aspect to teaching dark kids. 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.

Antiracist educators seek to understand the everyday experiences of dark people living, enduring, and resisting White supremacy and White rage.

Pedagogies must call out and teach students how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and inequality are structural, not people behaving poorly. They must criticize the systems that perpetuate injustice, such as the educational survival complex, while pushing for equitable communities, schools, and classrooms. Antiracist education also works to undo these systems while working to create new ones built upon the collective vision and knowledge of dark folx. For educators, this work starts in the classroom, school, and school community.

Before the War on Drugs slogan took hold, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” However, it is the administration of President Ronald Reagan that is responsible for the mass imprisonment of dark people. In 1980, there were less than half a million people in prison in the US. Twenty years later that number had reached close to 2.2 million.15 President Reagan’s policies emphasized imprisoning drug offenders while cutting funding for addiction treatment, privatizing prisons, and disenfranchising millions of dark Americans from their right to vote.

For example, in 2016, Blacks and Hispanics made up 71 percent of the US prison population, even though these groups made up just one-quarter of the population.

Between 2014 and 2015, six counties in the state of California spent $37.5 million to jail people whose cases were dismissed or never filed.

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.

At face value, character education seems harmless, and I am sure we can all agree that children need good qualities to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success, but character education is anti-Black and it has replaced civics education in our schools. 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.

civics education is no longer a space that teaches youth how to petition, protest, speak in public, solve social issues with groups of people from diverse backgrounds, and commit to acts of civil disobedience.

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. Every child needs a counselor or therapist. In order to make mental health as important as education, the two must and should work in tandem.

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.

particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people—must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.

But Congo Square is more than music; it’s where personal and communal healing happened, where Black joy was found, and where resistance could be expressed in art. Social change cannot happen without art for joy and resistance.

Abolitionist teaching is dependent on spaces like Congo Square to create art for resistance, art for (re)membering, art for joy, art for love, art for healing, and art for humanity.

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.

The educational survival complex has become so rationalized and normalized that we are forced to believe, against our common sense, that inadequate school funding is normal, that there is nothing that can be done about school shootings, that racist teachers in the classrooms are better than no teachers in the classrooms. We have come to believe that police officers in our schools physically assaulting students is standard practice, and that the only way to measure a child’s knowledge is through prepackaged high-stakes state tests, the results of which undermine teachers’ autotomy, de-professionalize the teaching field, and leave dark children in the crosshairs of projected inferiority. After all the billions spent in test materials and meaningful teaching hours lost to test prep, dark children are held accountable for the failures of the public school system.

Freedom dreaming gives teachers a collective space to methodically tear down the educational survival complex and collectively rebuild a school system that truly loves all children and sees schools as children’s homeplaces, where students are encouraged to give this world hell. This is why deep study and personal reflection on the history of the US is so important to abolitionist teaching. When an educator deeply understands why meaningful, long-term, and sustainable change is so hard to achieve in education because of all the forces antithetical to justice, love, and equity—such as racism, sexism, housing discrimination, state-sanctioned violence toward dark people, police brutality, segregation, hate-filled immigration policies, Islamophobia, school closings, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the prison-industrial complex—that is when freedom dreaming begins.

teaching practices that center Whiteness, but never address racism.

however, we need to be critical of strikes that are not centered around issues of equity and race, because history tells us that dark people will always get the short end of the deal.

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

Allies do not have to love dark people, question their privilege, decenter their voice, build meaningful relationships with folx working in the struggle, take risks, or be in solidarity with others. They just have to show up and mark the box present; thus, ally-ship is performative or self-glorifying. This type of ally-ship still centers Whiteness in dark spaces. Too often, though not always, our allies are eager White folx who have not questioned their Whiteness, White supremacy, White emotions of guilt and shame, the craving for admiration, or the structures that maintain White power.

The backbone of abolitionist teaching is solidarity with courageous coconspirators.

Coconspirators work toward and understand the following, according to Allies for Change, a network of educators and activists committed to sustained “life-giving ally relationship”: ■ Understanding where we stand in relation to systems of privilege and oppression, and unlearning the habits and practices that protect those systems, which is lifelong work for all of us, without exception ■ Authentic relationships of solidarity and mutuality, which are not possible when we try to avoid or transcend power imbalances ■ Honestly acknowledging and confronting those imbalances to create authentic relationships ■ Social change work is always rooted in collaboration, humility, and accountability ■ The interior journey into silence, mediation, inner wisdom, and deep joy is inextricably linked to the outer work of social change43

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.

Teacher education programs ask students to speak openly and honestly about race and racism without the students having any understanding about where they stand in relation to systems of privilege and oppression and how these systems function in their everyday lives.

Theory consistently explains patterns of injustice when sound bites, flamboyant yet hollow teaching practices, and myths about dark people block ideas of humanity, justice, and dignity. Theory is a “location for healing,” like the North Star. 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.

settler colonialism “is a structure, not an event,” meaning that settler colonialism is a theory that helps to frame how destroying, then taking, Indigenous land is a ceaseless, ongoing project.