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July 21, 2020
we who are dark want to matter and live, not just to survive but to thrive.
abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.
But for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize when your country finds you disposable.
Intersectionality is not just about listing and naming your identities—it is a necessary analytic tool to explain the complexities and the realities of discrimination and
of power or the lack thereof, and how they intersect with identities.
“Intersectionality” is more than counting representation in a room or within a group; it is understanding community power, or its lack, and ensuring inclusivity in social justice movements.
The racial uplift of dark people is crucial, but that uplift cannot come at the expense of trans folx, folx with disabilities, or women.
schools because schools are inherently violent to dark children and children with disabilities.
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.
Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity.
Tied to GC.
instead, I am referring to something much deeper: the practice of abolitionist teaching rooted in the internal desire we all have for freedom,
Demanding the impossible means we understand that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism,
mass incarceration,
Political activist and scholar Angela Davis’s mandate for fighting injustice is systemic change by way of mass movements for community sovereignty.
Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”
want freedom is to welcome struggle.
An ongoing process.
we just understand that justice will not happen without it.
The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism.
Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive.
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.
Education reform is big business, just like prisons.
Need students to fail to stay in business. What policies do they support to keep up their cash flow?
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.
Playing up white savior complexes.
The two industries play off each other, and America believes that criminality and low achievement go hand in hand. The
School to prison pipeline.
lobbying for more mandated student assessments.
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 pursuit to educational freedom—freedom, not reform.
not only examples of resistance but also strategies of resistance.
Knowing that freedom is impossible without women and queer leaders being the thinkers and doers of abolitionist movements.
Abolitionist teaching is refusing to take part in zero-tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline.
we must demand that they leave the profession; we have to call them out.
Need to find the conviction for that. Do not make assumptions. Really get to know a person before marking them as racist. Maybe can change minds with love and examples.
ahistorical
focused instead on love, well-being, and joy and refuse to be oppressed any longer.
pedagogies that promote social justice must have teeth.
educators understand and recognize America and its schools as spaces of Whiteness,
Each fix falls short precisely because it fails to acknowledge how these struggles are direct consequences of injustice.
Has this been an unseen barrier in my teaching?
redlining, housing discrimination, White
flight, gentrification, police brutality, racial health disparities, and high unemployment, problems that are not due to low levels of education but to the racism discussed.
Issues that many white people don’t believe exist.
education for collective dignity and human power for justice.
What does this look like?
community building was a vital part of education.
When dark people are presented in school curriculums as unfortunate circumstances of history, that is antidarkness.
Make sure to include positive stories in class.
Denying dark people’s existence and contributions to human progress relegates dark folx to being takers and not cocreators of history or their lives.
Need to go beyond black history month.
dark suffering is to understand how antidarkness works in the day-to-day lives of both dark and White children.
Because through flashes of clairvoyance, present goals and ideals reveal that what we who are dark want is to matter to this country and thrive as full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of White American citizens.
intersectionality in the field of education, of how race, ethnicity, nationality, and class intersect and leave students living and learning in enclaves of racial (dark) and economic isolation.
The reality is that “our political economy is structured to create poverty and
inequality.”
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.
