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

by Bettina L. Love

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.

This book is about mattering, surviving, resisting, thriving, healing, imagining, freedom, love, and joy: all elements of abolitionist work and teaching. 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.

Kimberlé Crenshaw refers to these multiple markers of identity as “intersectionality.” 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.

“Diversity” is a catchall term that includes different types of people in terms of race, gender, sexuality, or religion within an organization, community, company, or school.

“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. It is a way to build alliances in organizing for social change.

painted Hill as a bitter Black woman trying to bring a Black man down like so many White people had done before. Thus, while diversity was present in the proceedings involving a Black man and a Black woman, both of them extremely accomplished, Thomas’s male privilege, along with America’s ignorance and outright disregard of Black women’s own history of lynchings and sexual trauma due to assault, harassment, and rape, made it easy for America to ignore Hill’s accusations.

folx,

In education, it is not well publicized that Black girls are suspended at a rate that is six times higher than that of their White female peers.

Another timely example that highlights the need for intersectionality is the ridiculous proposal to arm teachers with guns. After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed seventeen people, President Donald Trump, other Republicans, and, of course, the National Rifle Association suggested that giving teachers guns would prevent school shootings. Not only is this a terrible idea for obvious reasons (e.g., the armed sheriff assigned to protect Stoneman Douglas High School did not enter the school while the gunman was inside), but the conversation about arming teachers was silent on race and disability.

Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity.

Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive.

America’s legacy of oppression and dispossession of dark people is in large part met with the ethos of “We Shall Overcome,” “Si Se Puede,” and “We Gon’ Be Alright.”

We have not always agreed on the methods of liberation, but the work has never ceased. The approach of Dr. King, often guided by civil rights activist and strategist Bayard Rustin, was one of nonviolence, coalition building, and courageous acts of resistance for social change. Ella Baker joined King and Rustin in their nonviolent approach but insisted that the more sustainable method was robust grassroots organizing, which cultivated civic and community leaders from within. The Black Panther Party fought for liberation by policing the police, preaching self-determination, and serving their communities through social and educational programming such as health clinics and food-justice programs. Political activist and scholar Angela Davis’s mandate for fighting injustice is systemic change by way of mass movements for community sovereignty.

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.

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.

Abolitionist teaching is built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving.

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.

While we do not forget injustice, we are focused instead on love, well-being, and joy and refuse to be oppressed any longer.

Lastly, teachers must embrace theories such as critical race theory, settler colonialism, Black feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies, and other critical theories that have the ability to interrogate anti-Blackness and frame experiences with injustice, focusing the moral compass toward a North Star that is ready for a long and dissenting fight for educational justice.

In reality, many of these teachers who “love all children” are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia.

When White students attend nearly all-White schools, intentionally removed from America’s darkness to reinforce White dominance, that is antidarkness.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. —JAMES BALDWIN1

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.

Schools in higher-income districts or rich enclaves are well-resourced, have high-quality teachers, and have low teacher turnover.

in 2017, 95 percent of wealth created went directly into the pockets of the top 1 percent of society.

Black college graduates are twice as likely to experience unemployment as their White counterparts.

College-educated Hispanics were hit hard by the collapse of the housing market: their net worth crashed 72 percent between 2007 and 2013.6

Today the poverty line is roughly $24,250, with racism and sexism still at the core of poverty, woven into the fabric of the US.

No type of pedagogy, however effective, can single-handedly remove the barriers of racism, discrimination, homophobia, segregation, Islamophobia, homelessness, access to college, and concentrated poverty, 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.

Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades.

The conditions that preserve dark suffering are the result of hundreds of years and multiple continents’ commitment to creating and maintaining destructive, insidious, racist ideals that uphold White supremacy and anti-Blackness. The field of education is anchored in White rage, especially public education. We like to think that education is untouched by White supremacy, White rage, and anti-Blackness, that educators are

And over time, when any group outside of the established norm fought for the right to educate their children, particularly by way of their culture and/or language, they were met with White rage.

Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate.

It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”

Ocoee was also considered a sundown town,

December 17, 1979, and 250 miles south down Florida’s turnpike in Miami, Arthur McDuffie, a Black former Marine, ran a red light on his motorcycle and led four White police officers on an eight-minute high-speed chase.

the police officers responsible for McDuffie’s death were reinstated

The United States has a long history of passing laws that protect Whites when they kill, torture, and displace dark people.

The slave codes of the 1700s and 1800s

The Indian Removal Ac...

Japanese Americans were forcibly taken to internment camps.

Native American boarding schools, school segregation, English-only instruction, Brown v. Board of Education, No Child Left Behind, school choice, charter schools, character education, Race to the Top … all have been components of an educational system built on the suffering of students of color.

Legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that Black folx would have been better served if the court had ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education and enforced the “equal” part of “separate but equal.”

Though Black schools’ facilities and books were inferior to their White counterparts, the education they provided was not.

Black schools before Brown constantly made remarks like, “Black schools were places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded respect, and where parents supported teachers.” Educating Black children was viewed as the collective responsibility of the community.

The school’s official policy stated, “Hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros, mohawks, and other faddish styles are unacceptable.” This policy is not just about hair; the policy is informed by racist ideas of Black peoples’ unfitness, unattractiveness, and inferiority.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, two high school students Photoshopped a picture showing two Black students surrounded by White students wearing KKK hoods.

These school attacks are more than just racist acts by misguided school officials, youth, and community members; put into a historical context, these attacks “draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of Whiteness and non-Whiteness.”

Racism literally murders your spirit. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to be educated.