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

by Bettina L. Love

Overall, only 9 percent of low-income students graduate from college.

The boards of directors operating these charter schools are typically composed of wealthy philanthropists, corporate foundations, and Wall Street hedge fund managers who believe dark children need discipline, character education, rudimentary academic skills, and full submission to White economic demands.

Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching,

Children have a 50 percent chance of earning more or the same as their parents. A half century ago, that possibility was 90 percent.

The real estate industry receives massive tax cuts for buying inner-city schools, homes, and buildings.

Corporate school reformers prey on the suffering and hopes of dark communities, and just like the subprime-mortgages practice of predatory lending, they lack regulation and oversight.

Stidham did not apologize because in her mind she did nothing wrong. Racist educators seldom take responsibility for their racist actions and believe the resulting situation is just a misunderstanding or a lack of cultural awareness; again, this denies dark people’s knowledge of how racism works, and we should know.

Mainstream society uses the “few bad apples” argument, which misdiagnoses the “systemic and ideological production of race itself which is squarely centered in White supremacy.”

Legal scholar Patricia Williams argued that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs dark people of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries.55 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.

Schools are mirrors of our society;

We need pedagogies that support social movements.

If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left.

My parents wholeheartedly trusted my teachers with my education; they had no choice. My father had an eighth-grade education, and my mother earned her GED. They believed education was the great equalizer, but there was a caveat: education was not to be confused with common sense in the Love house. 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. Common sense meant trusting your gut, reading between the lines, listening before speaking, and never, I mean never, telling your family’s business, especially to White folx.

“Don’t be an educated fool.”

I was not scared of Mrs. Johnson; I wanted her to think I was smart, funny, and kind, characteristics I knew she valued.

It was a collective spirit of accountability, love, and purpose.

I used to daydream as a teenager that Harriet Tubman walked down the very neighborhood streets

“the leadership for the South had to be a southern leadership.”

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.

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.

This perfectly captures my vision of an ideal school

Critical thinking, problem solving, social and emotional intelligence, zest, self-advocacy, grit, optimism, self-control, curiosity, and gratitude are the characteristics school officials, politicians, policymakers, educational consulting firms, curriculum writers, education researchers, and corporate school reformers prepackage and sell to educators and parents of dark children.

For most schools in the US, especially schools with a large majority of low-income and dark students, their mission statements, weekly blogs, and fundraising materials are plastered with these racially coded feel-good, work-hard, and take-responsibility-for-my-actions buzzwords that make up character education.

These programs, with no formal evaluation of their success rates, were bought by public schools everywhere on the belief that their growing student bodies of dark and poor students lacked good character. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each tripled funding for character education during their administrations.

Is this how we will look back at SEL?

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.

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.

It is adults overseeing which dark children can beat the odds, odds put in place and maintained by an oppressive system.

How do you measure zest when forces you cannot stop with a pep talk and a colorful graph systemically suck the life out of you?

Specifically, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, research has shown that children who experience high levels of toxic stress display impaired social and emotional understanding, along with learning disabilities and potential early death.13 Researchers believe that, because toxic stress creates neurobiological transformation in children, it should be seen and treated as a national health crisis.

And yet we evaluate city schools as if these barriers do not exist

Torie Weiston-Serdan).

Levin’s thinking can be traced back hundreds of years to “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 supersede White economic demands for labor.

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.”21

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.

Redirecting power and resources is a primary focus of abolitionist teaching and the goal of educators and individuals concerned about educational justice,

All the guys on the corners—yes, some were drug dealers—who made sure I got home safely at night from the courts.

My mother and father who taught me early on in life, so that when they were not there, I was still giving this world hell.

I had a talent that was valued by society, and women’s basketball was presented to me as my only option for successes

there are no saviors. There is only a village, a community, and a goal: protecting children’s potential.

My story is the kind that makes people feel good, the story people use to claim that the system works.

All these unflattering statistics about a city, which have everything to do with race and racism, leave dark folx criminalized, dehumanized, and disposable. They also leave communities without the resources and socioeconomic power to protect their children.

youth of color from working-class families who grow up believing in America’s narrative of hard work, perseverance, and grit—all components of character education—are more likely to participate in risky behavior and have lower self-esteem. The study is grounded in the social-psychological theory of “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.

EDUCATION CAN’T SAVE US. WE HAVE TO SAVE EDUCATION.

!!!!

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 that abolishes prisons, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and mass incarceration, new ways to reach children trying to recover from the educational survival complex, new ways to show dark children they are loved in this world, and new ways to establish an educational system that works for everyone, especially those who are put at the edges of the classroom and society.

Abolitionist teachers fight for children they will never meet or see, because they are visionaries. They fight for a world that has yet to be created and for children’s dreams that have yet to be crushed by anti-Blackness.

instead the system of slavery was able to be tweaked because its roots were still intact.

The bones of this unfair prisoner payment system are still in place centuries later. In 2016, over half a million people were in jail because they could not afford bail.3 In the same year, eight hundred people died awaiting trial or serving short stints in jail for minor offenses.

Media always shares stories of crimes being committed while on bail or parole but rarely highlight these statistics

The debt peonage system, or debt slavery, which was created from the centuries-old, established system of slavery, forced a person with no money, such as a newly freed slave, to agree to work on a plantation as a sharecropper. The landowner provided a portion of his land to use and the materials needed to farm; in return, the sharecropper gave a percentage of his earnings from the crops to the owner. The catch was that the prices of the supplies and land usage fees were so high that the sharecropper would never be able to pay off his debt. As a result, sharecroppers were in debt year after year, and the landowners remained their masters, even with slavery abolished on the books.

History tells them, and us, that if we just change, adjust, or even eradicate one piece of the oppressive hydra, such as the prison-industrial complex or educational survival complex, another piece will grow in its place.

“Prison abolitionist strategies reflect an understanding of the connections between institutions that we usually think about as disparate and disconnected. They reflect an understanding of the extent to which the overuse of imprisonment is a consequence of eroding educational opportunities, which are further diminished by using imprisonment as a false solution for poor public education.”

An ahistorical understanding of oppression leads folx to believe that quick fixes to the system, such as more surveillance, more testing, and more punishment, will solve the issues of injustice and inequality.

It is about the “education debt” that has accumulated over time due to the educational survival complex.