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

by Bettina L. Love

Survival is existing and being educated in an antidark world, which is not living or learning at all.

Kendi’s words are an introduction to understanding that America’s deep entrenchment in racist ideas that produce discriminatory policies, which engineered “mass incarceration, beatings, and the

but it does not change the field or the context in which youth are being disposed of;

come” or suggest that success comes from darks being more like Whites.

But education did not cause these problems, and education cannot solve them.”

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.

Education was what you learned in school and common sense was what you learned to survive,

A politics of refusal is one of the necessary components of activism vital to dark folx’ survival and is fundamental to abolitionist teaching.

Refusal Activism

Authenticity was a fundamental component to “giving them hell.”

Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.5

Remember this too.

For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.

We also learned that Black power meant grassroots organizing, human rights, and cooperative economic strategies.

The basis of our work was self-determination.

Pedagogies must call out and teach students how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and inequality are structural, not people behaving poorly.

Kalief Browder, who committed suicide at his parents’ home after spending three years in custody in one of the most notorious jail complexes in the US—New York’s Rikers Island—for

I remember this. And seeing him jumped in jail.

Poor Black folx ages eighteen to twenty-nine typically receive higher bail amounts

Only 4 percent of convictions result from trials.

“homeplace” had collapsed. Described by bell hooks,

“homeplace” is a space where Blacks folx truly matter to each other, where souls are nurtured, comforted, and fed.

Homeplace

homeplaces is critical to a teacher’s analysis of the community in which he or she teaches.

Despite the fact that almost all the sites of resistance created by early abolitionists, teachers, community organizers, civil rights leaders, and, ultimately, dark women, have been gradually and methodically destroyed by White rage.

For dark folx, thriving cannot happen

without a community

Community- thrive.

Ella Baker,

She believed in the power of oppressed people and communities to create pathways to leadership that were decentralized and not hierarchical.

Baker was driven by the idea of a radical democratic practice in which the oppressed, excluded, and powerless became active in positions of power with decision-making opportunities.

According to Ransby, Baker believed “that education and the exchange and dissemination of ideas could make a difference in people’s lives.”

powerhouse was her relentless development of new and young activists.

those who were politically engaged were at the center of deliberations, not the so-called experts.

SNCC members would go on to lead the Freedom Riders, organize voter registration drives, and shape the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Baker’s philosophy of community is how dark folx move from surviving to thriving, so that we matter to one another and the world.

model of democracy that empowers all.

Character education has been around since the development of education in America; the founding fathers of public education (Horace Mann, William McGuffey, and Benjamin Franklin)

but character education is anti-Black and it has replaced civics education in our schools.

TRAYVON MARTIN

“to understand your own and others’ feelings and emotions and then to use this understanding to inform your decisions and actions.”

grit is not enough to fight these systems.

Yes, it is needed, but to insist that dark children need, do not have, and can function on those characteristics alone is misleading, naïve, and dangerous.

Measuring dark students’ grit while removing no institutional barriers is education’s ve...

“Beating the Odds.”

This type of educational Hunger Games propaganda leads educators to believe that the key to “success” for dark children lies in improving their grit and zest “levels.”

They need culturally relevant therapy that teaches age-appropriate stress-reduction practices and they need mentors who understand what being a critical mentor means

education is going to deal with trauma, we must recognize the trauma of our teachers.

but telling dark children that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve on their own merit is not a new approach; it is short-sighted and, in actuality, racist thinking.

character growth card

KIPP-character growth report card.

“good” White folx who thought that, given the “proper” education and learning environment, dark children (Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans) could be taught

how to be less barbaric and more White.

Never fully White, of course, but White enough to be less threatening, less outspoken, and more task-driven (gritty), so that nothing could sup...

According to historian Robert G. Lee, Asian Americans were stereotyped into different categories by the level of

Level of Asian character report, track Asian groups to assess “threat.”

“yellow peril,”