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June 11 - July 30, 2020
What I am describing is a life of exhaustion, a life of doubt, a life of state-sanctioned violence, and a life consumed with the objective of surviving.
We cannot fall into narratives of racial progress that romanticize “how far we’ve come” or suggest that success comes from darks being more like Whites.
Education was what you learned in school and common sense was what you learned to survive, and they taught us that upward mobility done with your dignity intact depended on a combination of the two.
learned above all else to protect my dignity. My dignity was never to be compromised, which meant never compromising my voice and my connection to how I mattered in this world. When you compromise your voice, you compromise your dignity. No dignity, no power.
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. What good is an education if you must shed who you are?
Mrs. Johnson did not just love her students, she fundamentally believed that we mattered.
She genuinely listened to us, took up our concerns in her teaching, and made sure each voice in the classroom was heard.
FIST (Fighting Ignorance and Spending Truth),
For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.
being Black was beautiful, to love our skin, that our darkness had a history of resistance, pride, community, joy, love, and understanding, and that we mattered to our community, to the world, and to ourselves. We also learned that Black power meant grassroots organizing, human rights, and cooperative economic strategies. The basis of our work was self-determination.
Before her school was integrated—I would say colonized—teachers
Too often in schools we learn and teach about oppression and injustice, but rarely are we taught or do we teach how ordinary people fought for justice.
Today we hardly ever teach that dark people fought to matter, wishing one day to thrive and taking calculated steps to benefit the next generation.
The conversation around the need for Black teachers must expand to having Black teachers—having all teachers, really—who teach from an abolitionist agenda.
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.
recognize the specific nuances of different types of dark oppression, recognizing that not all injustices are the same. For example, Indigenous rights are defined more by land than race, meaning that the US consistently and violently takes Indigenous land.
Mount Hope Cemetery, where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony are buried.
Rochester is considered the birthplace of the women’s movement that is famously associated with Seneca Falls. Rochester was one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad before enslaved Black folx crossed the Niagara River into Canada for freedom.
There were so many safe places for us to go after school, but more than that these organizations were critical to our sense of community and survival. The folx who ran them lived in the community, graduated from the same schools we attended as kids, knew our families, raised their kids in the centers, and loved our community and city.
The economic downturn that led to an employment crisis was happening in my city at the same time America rebooted slavery through a war on drugs, which is code for a “War on Dark People,” or what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow.”
President Reagan’s policies emphasized imprisoning drug offenders while cutting funding for addiction treatment, privatizing prisons, and disenfranchising millions of dark Americans from their right to vote.
“War on Dark People” with the 1994 crime bill, which required federal prisoners to serve 85 percent of their sentence before they could be eligible for parole.
37 percent of female and 28 percent of male prisoners have monthly incomes of less than $600 before their arrest.
while 80 percent of all women in jails are mothers.
90 percent of women in prison for killing a man were abused by the man they killed.
Dark youth are still more likely than White youth to be committed to a juvenile facility. Hispanic youth are 61 percent more likely than White youth to be committed, Black youth are four times more likely, and Native Americans are three times more likely.
One of the most prolific, courageous, intellectual thinkers and acute political organizers for social change of all time is Ella Baker, though her work is rarely discussed. She worked from the premise that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Baker helped organize one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
She wanted the students to get organized, and she wanted adults and young people to work together from a vision for participatory democracy.
A true measure of SNCC’s participatory democracy is how many Black women held prominent positions in the civil rights movement and government because of their training and participation in SNCC, including Bernice Reagon, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
In sum, Baker’s philosophy of community is how dark folx move from surviving to thriving, so that we matter to one another and the world.
Taking the lead from Baker, abolitionist teaching is built on the cultural wealth of students’ communities and creating classrooms in parallel with those communities aimed at facilitating interactions where people matter to each other, fight together in the pursuit of creating a homeplace that represents their hopes and dreams, and resist oppression all while building a new future.
the founding fathers of public education (Horace Mann, William McGuffey, and Benjamin Franklin) wanted to teach morality in schools.
At face value, character education seems harmless, and I am sure we can all agree that children need good qualities to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success, but character education is anti-Black and it has replaced civics education in our schools. Students no longer learn how to be informed and active citizens, which is key to democracy; instead, they learn now how to comply and recite affirmations about their grit.
A robust civics education should include discussions focused on current events, opportunities for students to participate in school governance, media literacy, and classroom instruction on government, history, law, economics, and geography.
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.
The Character Lab defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”
Revising an essay repeatedly or not quitting a sport in the middle of the season are examples of gritty behavior, according to the Character Lab.
The Character Lab defines zest as “an approach to life that is filled with excitement and energy.”
Every child needs a counselor or therapist. In order to make mental health as important as education, the two must and should work in tandem. However, we have to address that school counselor shortage.
Teachers must demand the end of high-stakes testing and the yelling of slogans at dark children, such as “knowledge is power,” “work hard,” “be nice,” and “no excuses” because all you need is grit.
Measuring students’ grit and zest, and reminding them that there are “no excuses,” sounds like an easy fix for oppression, 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.
Donald Trump unsuccessfully ran for president for over fifteen years before taking office in 2017. By definition, Donald Trump is gritty, hard-working, and demonstrates perseverance. His tenacity in his quest to become president should be celebrated by grit enthusiasts. How Trump became president—through ruthless power, White privilege, Russian interference, misogyny, and racism—does not matter to such believers because he has “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”
In the world of grit, the ideas of love, kindness, thoughtfulness, courage, honesty, integrity, and justice are rarely discussed,
For dark people, being gritty means being solution-oriented, it means finding a way out of no way because you understand what is needed to solve the issues you are facing but lack the power and resources.
because there are no saviors. There is only a village, a community, and a goal: protecting children’s potential. My homeplace.
Abolitionist teaching is as much about tearing down old structures and ways of thinking as it is about forming new ideas, new forms of social interactions, new ways to be inclusive, new ways to discuss inequality and distribute wealth and resources, new ways to resist, new ways to agitate, new ways to maintain order and safety
Abolitionist teaching is not a teaching approach: It is a way of life, a way of seeing the world, and a way of taking action against injustice.
For example, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Texas slaveholders forced enslaved Black folx to remain in bondage for two and a half additional years.
This is a very irrational statement, for people who don’t know History they would not know that the other 10 confederate states ignored this proclamation too.
