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.

for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize when your country finds you disposable.

How do you matter to a country that would rather arm teachers with rocks than have courageous conversations with itself about gun control, eliminating guns, and White male rage?

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 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.

The fact that schools are funded by local property taxes ensures that students who live in poor communities receive an education that will maintain, and, in fact, widen the gap between the über-rich, the rich, the rapidly shrinking middle class, the working poor, and the poor.

This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility. Schools in higher-income districts or rich enclaves are well-resourced, have high-quality teachers, and have low teacher turnover. In addition, the Parent Teacher Associations of affluent schools work to ensure that extracurricular activities, community initiatives, and field trips are offered to the already privileged.

OES described here at the end

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.26

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.

teachers either did not know the conditions of “human hierarchy” or saw themselves as liberators with their anti-Black, color-blind rhetoric. As a result, I was a lost kid. 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.

Mrs. Johnson taught as if the fate of her and her children was tied to ours. She shared stories with her students of her childhood in New Orleans. She was vulnerable in front of the class. She called home to speak to your parents about you as a person, not just a student. She had a sense of responsibility for her students, and we were a family. You did not want to disappoint Mrs. Johnson because then you disappointed the class and your family. It was a collective spirit of accountability, love, and purpose. She genuinely listened to us, took up our concerns in her teaching, and made sure each voice in the classroom was heard.

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.

It Gets Better, with all the bells and whistles of social media and celebrity star power, revamped the old message of: pull yourself up by your bootstraps and live the heteronormative (that is, the idea that the traditions of heterosexuals are the norms for all members of society) dream of children and marriage.26

This need is why E. Patrick Johnson coined the term “quare” studies.31 Johnson defines quare in part as —adj. 2. a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered person of color who loves other men or women, sexually or nonsexually, and appreciates black culture and community. —n. 3. one who thinks and feels and acts (and, sometimes, “acts up”); committed to struggle against all forms of oppression—racial, sexual, gender, class, religious, etc. —n. 4. one for whom sexual and gender identities always already intersect with racial subjectivity. —n. 5. quare is to queer as “reading” is to “throwing shade.”32

We all need quare studies as a lens for liberation, freedom, and abolitionism.