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

by Bettina L. Love

Dark students and their families are sharecroppers, never able to make up the cost or close the gap because they are learning in a state of perpetual debt with no relief in sight.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the first Black soldiers allowed to fight in the Civil War, consisted of residents from Beacon Hill and throughout the US; fathers and sons enlisted together. Black men from all corners of the country came to Boston and Beacon Hill to serve in the Fifty-Fourth, including Charles and Lewis Douglass, sons of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Again, never taught to us

Vigilance Committee

“A few White victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation.”

Beacon Hill is an example of what people can do when the ideas of abolitionism turn into a way of life; a way of seeing the world that does not normalize hate, White rage, and the inferior conditions for dark people; a way of life that relentlessly pursues and protects Blacks thriving. Beacon Hill also demonstrates that you do not have to be Black to be an abolitionist. Some abolitionists promoted militant action, such as Black abolitionist Nat Turner and White abolitionist John Brown. Some advocated for nonviolence, some wrote books and gave speeches that railed against slavery and injustice, some raised funds, some gave money, some taught, some fought in the war, some sued the government for equal rights under the law, some were healers, some community-organized, but all believed in the equality of Blacks and Whites and the tearing down of slavery, and believed in taking risks for those beliefs. Beacon Hill is a model for what is possible and for what abolitionist work is and can be in today’s world of racism, sexism, hate, and rage.

“All social justice work is science fiction. We are imagining a world free of injustice, a world that doesn’t yet exist.”

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.

“any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and unfolding a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality.”

Freedom dreaming gives teachers a collective space to methodically tear down the educational survival complex and collectively rebuild a school system that truly loves all children and sees schools as children’s homeplaces, where students are encouraged to give this world hell.

Understanding the mechanisms that reproduce structural inequality is an essential component of freedom dreaming.

The marketplace will attack and attempt to co-opt these freedom dreams.

Dreams will not be met because we ask, and they will be masked by corporate America’s obsession with greed and attaching products to dark bodies and the justice work of dark bodies.

I highlight this commercial to illustrate how seductive corporate America can be in its attempts to water down social justice and center Whiteness.

in 1998, the Tucson (Arizona) Unified School District began offering Mexican American history, literature, and art classes after community activists demanded that the school district reduce the number of students being pushed out of school. Not surprisingly, the ethnic studies classes drastically increased attendance, and students who took them reported higher graduation rates and college enrollment than students who were not enrolled in ethnic studies classes. In 2010, the state of Arizona banned ethnic studies classes focused on Mexican American history because state officials and school board members argued that the classes advocated resentment toward White people, even though the classes were open to all students and simply created “ethnic solidarity,” as if ethnic solidarity were a bad thing.

In 2015, Seattle teachers went on strike to demand pay increases, which they deserved, but they also demanded and won thirty minutes of daily recess in all elementary schools; committees to examine equity issues across thirty schools, including investigating disciplinary measures that disproportionately affected dark children; a yearlong ban on out-of-school suspensions for elementary students; an end to using student standardized testing scores to evaluate teachers; the inclusion of teachers in decisions on the amount of standardized testing to be used; fewer students per special education teacher; and caseload limits for psychologists, occupational therapists, and other school-site specialists.

but things like recess and reasonable testing and workloads and special education and equity—that’s them fighting for us.

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.

“We did have some support from deep-pocketed allies who bought the climbing gear and promised to cover bail.”

Newsome and Tyson made history that day and showed the world what is possible. These two strangers put their lives on the line for each other; they were willing to risk it all to symbolically remove racism. Beyond the symbolism of their efforts is an example of solidarity, trust, and the deliberate centering of a Black woman to be the face of justice. Tyson was more than her ally; he was her coconspirator.

COCONSPIRATORS, NOT ALLIES

thus, ally-ship is performative or self-glorifying.

He was willing to use his intersections of privilege, leverage his power, and support Newsome to stand in solidarity and confront anti-Blackness.

Understanding where we stand in relation to systems of privilege and oppression, and unlearning the habits and practices that protect those systems, which is lifelong work for all of us, without exception

Joy makes the quest for justice sustainable.

White folx can also embrace Black joy by helping, advocating for, and wanting Black folx to win. Recognizing and acknowledging White privilege is cute, but what does it mean without action?

Dismantling White privilege is giving something up so Black folx can win.

YES there needs to be some give

Accountability is a word used in the field of education to scare educators into spirit-murdering dark children.

Monitoring students’ achievement on a federal level opened up the floodgates for corporate money to enter education.

These momentous events were all just blips in one twenty-four-hour news cycle of our humanity screaming for help.

While it is almost too much for any one person to take, educators must digest these realities and more. By more, I mean that abolitionist teachers must process and respond in some meaningful way to the lives of our students and their own lives as well.

Students knowing so little about dark people is not an accident; racism erases dark bodies from historical records of importance and distorts their everyday reality.

Research has shown that teacher preparation programs have been largely ineffective in preparing White teachers to teach diverse student populations.

Theory does not solve issues—only action and solidarity can do that—but theory gives you language to fight, knowledge to stand on, and a humbling reality of what intersectional social justice is up against.

Initial blueprints planned for the pipeline to cross under the predominantly White town of Bismarck, North Dakota. That plan was rejected because of the pipeline’s close proximity to the town’s municipal water sources. The pipeline was then rerouted to run beneath Standing Rock’s water supply and ancient burial grounds. Why was it acceptable to run fractured crude oil beneath Standing Rock’s water supply but not Bismarck’s?

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.

So, what explains how racism is reproduced, generation after generation, in the midst of the country becoming more technologically advanced, with some of the most elite colleges in the world, and a prideful reputation for diversity (when it makes the country look good for a model of democracy)?

They found that despite legal solutions intended to address racism and move the US toward equality, racism and discrimination persisted in all the fundamental institutions that make this country run, such as education, housing, banking, employment, and healthcare.13

White people will support civil rights legislation only when it’s in their interest to do so.

It Gets Better’s simplistic and disingenuous metanarrative argued that once high school ends, miraculously all bullying stops and homophobia is somehow subdued in urban America.

42 percent of homeless youth are queer; however, 65 percent of queer homeless youth are racial minorities.

CWS questions how some European-based groups (such as Italians, the Irish, and Jews) became White in America.

The main thrust of this idea is that competition is good for the economy, that the free market will solve all of our financial and social problems, and that deregulation is best, regardless of how it impacts the environment or job safety.

We no longer care about the common good for everyone; we leave everything up to the free market and people’s so-called merit/hard work. Neoliberalism ensures that the rich get richer and the poor get disposed of.

“Contemporary forms of oppression do not routinely force people to submit. Instead, they manufacture consent for domination so that we lose our ability to question and thus collude in our own subordination.”

Wow

Where we choose to live, teach, send our kids to school, work, go to the movies, dine, and attend college, as well as the TV shows we watch, the clothes we buy, and even where we buy goods can all be traced back to race, racism, Whiteness, classism, sexuality, gender, and whose land we are living on.

However, what you are learning about are people’s real lives. You theorize it, while some people live it.

“Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as White infants—a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most Black women were considered chattel.”

For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions—including hypertension and pre-eclampsia—that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care—including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms—that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.

Research shows that White medical students believe that Black people’s blood coagulates quicker than Whites, that Black skin is thicker, and that Blacks have less-sensitive nerve endings.

Wut

(As a side note, we do not just need more dark teachers but more mental health professionals too.)