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

by Bettina L. Love

a Black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a White woman with less than an eighth-grade education.

Simply put, White doctors believe that Blacks do not feel pain. So, either Black folx are superhuman or not human at all. This is how Black folx are seen and treated as disposable. This is how unarmed Black people get shot or strangled to death by the police or other White men, because White people believe we feel no pain and we have strength beyond the average human.

Whiteness is addicted to centering itself, addicted to attention, and making everyone feel guilty for working toward its elimination.

More than just attending antiracist workshops and culturally relevant pedagogy professional developments, they need to come to terms with what Whiteness is, how violence is needed to maintain it, and how their successes in life are by-products of Whiteness.

Being well and White is rejecting Whiteness for the good of humanity. The same goes for patriarchy, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, ableism, and xenophobia.

I take issue with White school staff members who shy away from speaking out against racism but have no problem controlling dark minds and bodies.

For schools to be well, and, therefore, the children in them, schools must place more importance on students’ mental, physical, and spiritual health than on any test. If students are not well, test scores do not matter.

School officials will put everything before students’ actual mental health, not understanding that test scores cannot and will not increase until students are healing from trauma and/or mattering to themselves and their community.

Schools cannot be doing just alright; they have to be well by putting everyone’s mental health as the first priority and understanding how systems of oppression spirit-murder children.