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June 22 - July 1, 2020
How do you matter to a country that measures your knowledge against a “gap” it created?
Research shows that these higher rates of suspension are not because of misbehavior (a determination that is incredibly subjective, especially when race is a part of the equation) but because of racist and sexist stereotypes that teachers and school officials hold against Black girls. For too many, suspension is a birthright of being young and Black.
Morris argues that Black girls never get to be girls, a phenomenon she describes as “age compression,” in which Black girls are seen as Black women, with all the stereotypes that go along with Black womanhood (e.g., hypersexual, loud, rude, and aggressive).
Not only is this a terrible idea for obvious reasons (e.g., the armed sheriff assigned to protect Stoneman Douglas High School did not enter the school while the gunman was inside), but the conversation about arming teachers was silent on race and disability.
When teachers shy away from intersectionality, they shy away from ever fully knowing their students’ humanity and the richness of their identities. Mattering cannot happen if identities are isolated and students cannot be their full selves.
Our impact on this country, whether it is recognized or not, is where mattering rests; it is where thriving rests. Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity.
the practice of abolitionist teaching rooted in the internal desire we all have for freedom, joy, restorative justice (restoring humanity, not just rules), and to matter to ourselves, our community, our family, and our country with the profound understanding that we must “demand the impossible”10 by refusing injustice and the disposability of dark children.
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.
A life of survival is not really living.
Both prisons and schools create a narrative of public outrage and fear that dark bodies need saving from themselves. The two industries play off each other, and America believes that criminality and low achievement go hand in hand.
The barriers of racism, discrimination, concentrated poverty, and access to college—persistent, structural barriers—cannot be eradicated by tweaking the system or making adjustments.
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.
Knowing that freedom is impossible without women and queer leaders being the thinkers and doers of abolitionist movements. Engaging in civics education that teaches direct action and civil disobedience while incorporating the techniques of the millennial freedom-fighting generation, such as social media, impactful hashtags, and online petitions.
Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
These dreams are spaces of love, solidarity, and resiliency, as we demand what seems impossible from a place of love and joy. While we do not forget injustice, we are focused instead on love, well-being, and joy and refuse to be oppressed any longer.
To achieve the goals of abolitionist teaching, we must demand the impossible and employ a radical imagination focused on intersectional justice through community building and grassroots organizing.
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.
In actuality, 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.
In reality, many of these teachers who “love all children” are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia. These teachers do not belong in classrooms with dark children or even White children because antidarkness can happen without dark children in the room.
The idea that dark people have had no impact on history or the progress of mankind is one of the foundational ideas of White supremacy.
Simply said, a teacher cannot support hateful rhetoric about dark children and their families and still teach them with kindness, love, and care and see the beauty in that child’s culture.
Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice.
Failing a test because your language is deemed inferior communicates a message about your identity and ideas of who is and what is smart.
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.
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.
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.
The United States has a long history of passing laws that protect Whites when they kill, torture, and displace dark people.
Trayvon and Jordan, like all dark children, had dreams. Their dreams were destroyed by White rage, rage that is endorsed, celebrated, and profited from in our schools because dark children are educated only to survive.
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.
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.
To be clear, all of these racist, antidark, emotionally and physically violent school incidents happened before the election of Donald Trump.
racism robs dark people of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries.55 Racism literally murders your spirit. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to be educated.
Schools are mirrors of our society; educational justice cannot and will not happen in a vacuum or with pedagogies that undergird the educational survival complex. We need pedagogies that support social movements.
As educators, we must accept that schools are spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and disempowerment. We cannot fall into narratives of racial progress that romanticize “how far we’ve come” or suggest that success comes from darks being more like Whites.
Education is not the antecedent of failing schools, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, and/or crime. Racism is; racism that is built on centuries of ideas that seek to confuse and manipulate we who are dark into never mattering to one another or this country.
I needed more than love and compassion; I needed to know what folx who looked like me meant to the world beyond what Officer Friendly thought of my friends and me.
My voice, the voice needed for survival, could not be heard from so far behind. My most important tools—my opinions, my ideas of right and wrong—were in a holding cell. I could not find a space where I mattered. I was an average student—sometimes below average. I do not remember winning any awards or thinking deeply about anything. I entered school every day because I had to.
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. The scars of systemic oppression are real and traumatic. Sadly, in that way, school is a battlefield. For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.
The writer bell hooks argues that loving Blackness is an act of political resistance because we all have internalized racism, regardless of the color of our skin, which operates to devalue Blackness, but she argues that Black people need to love themselves not in spite of their Blackness but because of their Blackness.
When we entered racist, desegregated, White school we left a world where teachers believed that to educate Black children rightly would require a political commitment.
teachers who profess to love all kids and have good intentions to be fair and just in their classrooms, yet they write, say, and partake in racist actions and posts online about dark children loosely masked in the language of low expectations, of judging low-income parents and dark children’s behavior.
Racism is not exclusive to one political party or a particular type of White person. White, well-meaning, liberal teachers can be racist too. Therefore, understanding how racism works and understanding how White privilege functions within our society does not bring us any closer to justice, and it certainly does not undo the educational survival complex. Knowing these truths is the first step to justice, but it’s only a start.
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
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class. I had to learn despite school, not because of it. School mattered because it provided the testing ground in which I learned ways to resist and navigate racism, the low expectations, the stereotypes, the spirit-murdering, all the forms of dark suffering, gender suffering, queer suffering, religious suffering, and class suffering.
Too often in schools we learn and teach about oppression and injustice, but rarely are we taught or do we teach how ordinary people fought for justice. In schools, we occasionally learn that injustice is met with resistance; we do not learn that dark folx have always practiced a politics of refusal that looks different depending on the person or the community. Today we hardly ever teach that dark people fought to matter, wishing one day to thrive and taking calculated steps to benefit the next generation.
I required a village to survive and understand how I mattered in this world. My parents could not do it all. Dark children cannot thrive without a community of love, refusal, protection, knowledge, and resource-sharing.
Antiracist teaching is not just about acknowledging that racism exists but about consciously committing to the struggle of fighting for racial justice, and it is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. Antiracist educators seek to understand the everyday experiences of dark people living, enduring, and resisting White supremacy and White rage.
One major reason why my friends and I needed so much support outside of our homes is because our parents were at work.
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.
