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June 17 - June 21, 2020
Du Bois’s indictment of America is plain and simple, yet at the same time shattering, because we as dark people see—which White Americans cannot—a country with enough promise to capture and hold four hundred years of freedom dreams while systematically attacking, reducing, and/or destroying each and every aspiration.
Although no one person is equipped or has the right to speak for millions, particularly on the issues of race and racism, there is one thing that I know with everything I am: we who are dark want to matter and live, not just to survive but to thrive. Matter not for recognition or acknowledgment but to create new systems and structures for educational, political, economic, and community freedom.
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.
How do you matter to a country that is at once obsessed with and dismissive about how it kills you? How do you matter to a country that would rather incarcerate you than educate you? How do you matter to a country that poisoned your child’s drinking water? How do you matter to a country that sees your skin as a weapon? How do you matter to a country that steals your land, breaks treaty after treaty, and then calls you a savage? How do you matter to a country that tears families apart because of arbitrary lines that instill terror, violence, and geographical separation rather than a compassion
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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.
The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism. Toni Morrison once said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
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 four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments.16 Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.
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.
Abolitionist teaching stands in solidarity with parents and fellow teachers opposing standardized testing, English-only education, racist teachers, arming teachers with guns, and turning schools into prisons. Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist, discriminatory, and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving.
educational justice can happen only through a simultaneous fight for economic justice, racial justice, housing justice, environmental justice, religious justice, queer justice, trans justice, citizenship justice, and disability justice.
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.
Education research is crowded with studies that acknowledge dark children’s pain but never the source of their pain, the legacy that pain has left, or how that pain can be healed.
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 reality, many of these teachers who “love all children” are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia.
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.
Telling them they could be whatever they wanted to be was simply a lie, and they knew it. The barriers of race, language, and class predetermined their place in the world.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
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.
Education is not the antecedent of failing schools, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, and/or crime. Racism is;
When I called my mother to inform her that I wanted to go back to school to pursue a PhD, she simply told me, “Don’t be an educated fool.” That was it, but I knew exactly what she meant: earning a PhD would mean nothing to my mother if I forgot where I came from and how to relate to the people who protected my dreams and my education.
Nixon named himself the law and order president; he believed that Blacks and Puerto Ricans, especially those with their fists in the air shouting Black and Brown Power, were the reason the country lacked law and order.
no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle… . 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.8
To me, they were both more than teachers or role models; they were necessary parental figures. Of course, I needed my own parents, too, but 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.
They must criticize the systems that perpetuate injustice, such as the educational survival complex, while pushing for equitable communities, schools, and classrooms. Antiracist education also works to undo these systems while working to create new ones built upon the collective vision and knowledge of dark folx. For educators, this work starts in the classroom, school, and school community.
There is a civic empowerment gap because the rich have all the political influence and civics education is no longer a space that teaches youth how to petition, protest, speak in public, solve social issues with groups of people from diverse backgrounds, and commit to acts of civil disobedience.
Our students are now taught with the world crumbling around them to pay their taxes, vote, volunteer, and have good character, which is code for comply, comply, comply.
Dark children are told that their good character is dependent on how much they obey. However, history tells us that dark folx’ humanity is dependent on how much they disobey and fight for justice, which can sometimes...
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But Trayvon fought for his life; all the grit, self-control, critical thinking, problem solving, and self-advocacy were not enough.
“system justification,” which explains how humans believe, defend, and rationalize the status quo because they see social, economic, and political systems as fair and legitimate. Among the low-income youth of color in the study, 91 percent believed in the “American dream.” While holding system-justifying beliefs, these young people lacked the skills to interpret their world, which, sadly, is filled with intersectional, systemic oppression.
There is no one way to be an abolitionist teacher. Some teachers will create a homeplace for their students while teaching them with the highest expectations; some will protest in the streets; some will fight standardized testing; some will restore justice in their classrooms; some will create justice-centered curriculums and teaching approaches; some will stand with their students to end gun violence in schools; some will fight to end the prison-industrial complex in and outside of schools; some will fight in the effort so communities can peacefully govern themselves to control their
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The achievement gap is not about White students outperforming dark students; it is about a history of injustice and oppression. It is about the “education debt” that has accumulated over time due to the educational survival complex. It is one of the fallacies of justice to know that the achievement gap is due to race and class and yet never proclaim racism and White rage as the source of the achievement gap.
Abolitionist teaching starts with freedom dreaming, dreams grounded in a critique of injustice. These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance.
Understanding the mechanisms that reproduce structural inequality is an essential component of freedom dreaming. We cannot create a new educational system for all with a lack of understanding of what cripples our current system.
In 2018, when Manning arrived at the White House to officially be awarded National Teacher of the Year, she handed President Donald Trump a stack of letters from her students, who are refugee and immigrant children. She also staged a silent protest by wearing political pins that were highly visible to the president. One of her pins read “Trans Equality Now” and another was a rainbow-colored apple to support LGBTQ rights in education. In her application for Teacher of the Year, Manning wrote: In the current political climate, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric is rampant. . . . As soon as
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A coconspirator functions as a verb, not a noun.
But the real work for Molly began when she started having conversations acknowledging her White privilege with other White people; when she began to name Whiteness and its privileges with her White friends, family members, and colleagues. This is the work of challenging Whiteness in your community so you can challenge it at school. The work is not a onetime conversation; it is who you must become in and outside the classroom.
Abolitionist teaching asks us to be accountable for the pain we have caused others, to restore justice, and call into question our liberal politics.
Abolitionist teaching asks us to question the piece of the oppressor that lives in all of us.
Abolitionist teachers have to hold themselves and their colleagues to a level of accountability that focuses on justice, love, healing, and restoring humanity. Educators, and especially those with privilege, must be responsible for making sure dark children and their families win.
Any pedagogy that does not interrogate and challenge Whiteness is inadequate, especially since more than 80 percent of the teaching force is White. Any pedagogy that does not help teachers contextualize students’ realities is inadequate because no student is solely responsible for their reality. And any pedagogy that does not challenge injustice is useless because survival is not the goal.
Our schools and our teaching practices do not need to be reimagined; they need to be torn down and replaced with our freedom dreams rooted in participatory democracy and intersectional justice.
But how do we understand what we are experiencing all around us with our own biases, inundated with political sound bites that never truly explain anything regardless of political party, and centuries-old myths about children of color, their families, and their communities that get remixed for present-day forms of suffering? How do we make sense of it all without losing our minds, retreating from reality, giving up, and/or spirit-murdering children?
Whiteness “is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied.”7 The invisibility of Whiteness and its extensive history of violence make Whiteness a hard concept to grasp.
Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. This means that settler colonialism is not something that happened in history. It is an ongoing and ever-changing structure that defines everything in settler states. . . . In this moment, the project of settler colonialism is defined by resource extraction and development on Indigenous lands in the name of progress.
Settler colonialism is a lens that helps us understand how Native Americans experience systemic oppression in the United States in a different way than any other dark group. The constant theft of Indigenous land, the extraction of resources, and the cultural genocide of Indigenous people has led to “negative health, cultural, and economic consequences for Indigenous people and lands.”12
Settler-colonialism theory helps us understand oppression beyond race or class and adds the constant invasion of land to the conversation and ideas of intersectional social justice.
