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July 7 - July 18, 2022
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.
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.
But for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize when your country finds you disposable. 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
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“multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”
“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.
Thomas’s lynching comment caused people to view the case through the lens of race and racism, but only from a male perspective.
Research shows that these higher rates of suspension are not because of misbehavior (a determination that is incredibly subjective, especially when race is a part of the equation) but because of racist and sexist stereotypes that teachers and school officials hold against Black girls.
Morris argues that Black girls never get to be girls, a phenomenon she describes as “age compression,” in which Black girls are seen as Black women, with all the stereotypes that go along with Black womanhood (e.g., hypersexual, loud, rude, and aggressive).
I am certain that dark people have never truly mattered in this country except as property and labor. However, we have mattered to our communities, to our families, and to ourselves.
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 s...
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Political activist and scholar Angela Davis’s mandate for fighting injustice is systemic change by way of mass mov...
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“The very fact of freedom’s incompleteness (no one is free so long as others remain unfree) necessitates action directed at changing society. Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”
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 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.”15
Education reform is big business, just like prisons.
Creating the narrative that dark people are criminals to justify locking them up for profit is no different from continuously reminding the 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 n...
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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.
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.
My point here is not to endorse Hillary Clinton—especially since many of her policies were anti-Black—but to highlight how a future educator can engage the language of justice and culturally relevant teaching, while webbed to a disposition that is harmful to all students.
Education researcher Michael Dumas argues that schools operate as spaces of “racial suffering” because “educational access and opportunity seems increasingly (and even intentionally) elusive” to dark children.
I am talking about joy that originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life’s greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering.
As diverse as the school was, and still is, its diversity was held together by poverty.
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.
This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility.
This economic state is what our country calls the middle class—folx in debt, barely hanging on, living paycheck to paycheck.
Education researchers know that without a long-term strategy to eradicate the causes of racial and economic isolation—such as discrimination, predatory lending, housing displacement, the gender wage gap, rising healthcare costs, and unemployment (which leads to the 99 percent being no better than indentured servants to the 1 percent)—“heroic attempts to restructure schools or to introduce new pedagogical techniques in the classroom will be difficult to sustain.”
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.
Telling them they could be whatever they wanted to be was simply a lie, and they knew it.
The field of education is anchored in White rage, especially public education.
Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate.
White rage erupted when John Moses Cheney, a white judge who supported efforts to register Black voters to win his campaign, and two Black businessmen, Mose Norman and Julius “July” Perry, publicly encouraged Black folx to vote. Perry “encouraged young blacks to be educated and stand up for themselves as first-class citizens.”17 As Black folx arrived at the polls on Election Day, they were met by a growing White mob. When the dust settled, sixty Black citizens had been killed and their property destroyed for having ambition, drive, and purpose: for mattering. Perry was lynched for daring to
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“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 killed thousands of Native Americans by forcefully removing them from their land in the Deep South to make room for White settlers who would become slaveholders.
between 1877 and 1950, nearly four thousand Black men, women, and children were lynched.
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.” W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument in 1935; he proclaimed, “Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.”
Before the landmark decision of Brown in 1954, Black schools were proud institutions that “provided Black communities with cohesion and leadership.”
The educational survival complex ensured that after Brown, Black folx would remain unable to thrive.
White rage and White flight after Brown left Blacks in the inner cities in racial and economic isolation as Whites moved to the suburbs, thereby excluding dark people from employment, housing, higher property values (which help create generational wealth), and educational opportunities, while manufacturing imaginary school zone lines, which ensured that dark children could never attend schools with their White children.
As schools desegregated, more than thirty-eight thousand Black teachers and principals lost their jobs due to the closing of all-Black schools and the fact that White parents did no...
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most White students attend a school where three-quarters of their peers are White too.
Many of these teachers are unaware of how their lily-White communities were established in and have upheld Whiteness.
This lack of awareness, of course, often leads them to measure their communities against the urban school communities they teach in, which makes subscribing to stereotypes easier.