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

Blame Game

Love writes that educators should be attentive to their students’ lived experiences. Students need guidance navigating their realities, which include poverty, police brutality, sexual violence, and foreign wars. Assigning blame for societal ills is normal. However, the conclusions teachers draw impact students and their families. According to Love, teachers must strive to understand the root of students’ problems—namely, systemic racism.

Teacher Education Gap

Abolitionist teachers must love and understand Black children and their history. Love writes that most of her students at the University of Georgia are white women who know little about Blackness and the realities of being Black in America. Like other education students, these women have preconceived notions about children of color. Teaching programs must address the teacher education gap comprehensively. Future teachers need more than a single diversity course to understand poverty, failing schools, unemployment, racism, and racial trauma. They must understand the systemic underpinnings of racial injustice and suffering, both inside and outside schools. Moreover, they should be taught positive aspects of Black culture, such as resistance, art, humanity, and joy. Courses about African, African American, Latinx, and Caribbean culture may be helpful in this regard. Emphasizing beauty and joy, alongside hardship, humanizes communities of color and helps combat racial stereotypes.

Starbucks

In 2018, police arrested two Black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks for no reason. In response, the company closed its US stores for half a day to provide employees with mandatory racial bias training. Starbucks urged its workers to be “color brave”—that is, to speak honestly and openly about race. As Love points out, however, a half day of training cannot undo centuries of racial bias. It is not possible to be open and honest about race without first addressing where individuals stand in relation to racism. According to Love, white people must understand how systems of oppression and privilege function and their place within these systems. Making whiteness and its long history of violence visible is a critical first step. White people must also interact with communities of color. Many people—including teachers— assume that Black Americans are entirely responsible for their life circumstances. They do not understand the systems that perpetuate poverty, crime, unemployment, and other problems affecting Black children and their families. Theory can fill the teacher education gap.

The North Star

Solaris, or the North Star, marked the path to freedom for slaves fleeing bondage. Theory is Love’s North Star. Although theory does not solve problems, it offers a framework for understanding racism and patterns of injustice. It also provides a language to make sense of the obstacles hindering intersectional social justice.

Who Was Here First and Why It Matters

Settler colonialism is a theory that describes the colonization of the Americas as a structure, rather than an event. This structure at times focused on land development and resource extraction, and at other times on ethnic cleansing and displacement. Settler colonialism destroyed Indigenous communities in the Americas over the course of centuries. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced Indigenous people off their land to make room for white settlers, who then became slave owners. School children are taught about ethnic cleansing and the Trail of Tears, but not about other assaults on Indigenous communities, such as the 1862 Homestead Act that gave millions of acres of land to white settlers, the 1949 Hoover Commission’s recommendation to terminate native reservations and turn them into cities, and the 1952 House Joint Resolution that sought to terminate the trustee status of native tribes and reservations. Columbus Day and Thanksgiving gloss over the violence that characterizes the relationship between Indigenous people and white colonizers.

Settler colonial theory helps individuals understand the past and contextualizes current events, like the 2016-2017 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The pipeline runs for over a thousand miles from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois. Energy Transfer Partners originally planned to run the pipeline under Bismarck, North Dakota, a majority white town. Locals objected because the blueprint showed the pipeline running under Bismarck’s water supply. Thus, Energy Transfer Partners rerouted it under Standing Rock’s water sources and ancient burial grounds. Love succinctly articulates the problem: “Why was it acceptable to run fractured crude oil beneath Standing Rock’s water supply but not Bismarck’s?” (134). In addition to the racism of Energy Transfer Partner’s actions, the move violated environmental regulations and two important treaties: the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Indigenous elders led a protest against the pipeline. Activists from around the world traveled to Standing Rock to support them. Their non-violent protest was met with violence. Police in riot gear, armed soldiers, bulldozers, attack dogs, and water cannons were used to disperse them. The pipeline was eventually installed. It has leaked five times since 2017. Settler colonialism theory presents the events at Standing Rock as continuations of the systemic oppression of Indigenous people, which goes back to the era of the first European colonists

Vampires and Racism

Like a vampire, racism is hard to kill. It is reproduced over the course of generations. Critical race theory (CRT) provides a framework for studying the role of racism and capitalism in maintaining power. Laws promise equality, yet inequities persist in employment, healthcare, housing, education, banking, and other sectors. The educational field engaged with CRT starting in the 1990s as a means of combating racism in schools, positing that racism is central to understanding oppression. Critical race theorists amplify the voices of Black people. They also hold that the interests of Black people and white people must converge for racial equality to occur, a position known as interest convergence. CRT helps explain how racism operates in schools and communities. Offshoots of CRT focus on specific groups, such as Asians and people with disabilities. The theory of community cultural wealth, which is part of CRT, aims to abolish racism using the resources of people of color, such as their communication skills, aspirations, social networks, and long history of resistance. The community of cultural wealth model was devised in relation to college admissions, but it is broadly applicable to the everyday lives of Black people. Alongside CRT, it provides a space to critique and understand how racism operates in various aspects of American society.

Feminism Is for Black Women and All Men Too (It Always Has Been)

The Women’s March of January, 21 2017 was the largest single-day demonstration in US history. It drew hundreds of thousands of protesters, mostly white women. However, Love argues that white women have not supported the causes of Black women with the same commitment. Black feminists analyze misogyny, patriarchy, and sexism alongside race, gender, class, and sexuality to challenge the oppression of Black women. Black feminism is not just theoretical; it also comprises everyday practices, such as centering Black women and girls. Intersectionality grew out of Black feminism because Black women realized that their experiences were distinct from those of white women and Black men. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged from Black feminism, demonstrating the movement’s generative power and influence.

It’s More Than Who Likes Who

According to Love, queer theory has historically been white-centric. Black queer youths are ostracized because of who they love, have sex with, and marry, and also because of their race. Black queer studies bring the intersection of various social categories into sharper focus, while also focusing on how Black queer people create community and fight anti-gay prejudice, racism, and other forms of discrimination.

Love uses a 2010 international campaign called It Gets Better to make this point. Two gay white men spearheaded the campaign to inspire resilience in queer youths facing discrimination. Using the catchphrase “It Gets Better,” their YouTube video garnered support from activists, politicians, and celebrities. The campaign was problematic for a number of reasons. First, it falsely implied that bullying and anti-gay prejudice ended after high school by urging queer youths to “stay strong and imagine going off to college, leaving bullies behind, or moving away from their small, homophobic town to the diverse, gay-friendly big city” (134). Equally problematic is the way the campaign whitewashed queerness by focusing on young, middle- and upper-class gay white men. Love writes that the campaign ignored “dark queer youth, poor queer youth, dark poor queer youth, queer youth who are undocumented, dark queer youth with dis/abilities, and Muslim queer youth. The campaign centered whiteness, exclusively” (141). Love cites studies that underscore the vulnerability of those excluded by It Gets Better. A report by Advocates for Youth, for example, revealed that 42% of homeless youths are queer and that 65% of queer homeless youths are racial minorities. The same report showed that queer youths of color are frequently victimized in school because of their race and sexuality. It also found that over 30% of queer youths experience physical violence (142). This report, alongside It Gets Better, explains the need for intersectional social justice.

Studying White Folx and Racism

Critical White Studies (CWS) seeks to understand how white supremacy and privilege are invisibly reproduced. It also examines how race is constructed, describing beliefs and actions that justify racism and white privilege. According to Love, people who claim not to see color deny the experiences of people of color and are thus profoundly racist. White fragility describes the reactions white people have when confronted with racial stress, such as anger, fear, and guilt. White emotionality addresses more intense emotions, including shame, denial, sadness, and dissonance. Conversations about racism often end prematurely or in frustration because of white emotionality. To become coconspirators, white people must first deal with their feelings of guilt and shame. CWS provides tools to address whiteness.

What Lies Beneath

Neoliberalism has exacerbated social problems. Neoliberalists hold that the free market can solve economic and social problems. They also promote competition and deregulation. According to Love, the neoliberalist agenda has imperiled American institutions, including schools, hospitals, banks, and infrastructure. The common good no longer matters to neoliberalists, she writes. The free market enriches the wealthy and disposes of the poor. Neoliberalism also pits oppressed groups against each other, leaving them to fight over scraps.

What I Have Learned

Love has extensive knowledge of the American educational system. She has been a student, a public-school teacher, a parent, and a board member of a charter school. Her experiences taught her that change requires collective effort. Teachers, students, families, and communities must come together to determine budgets and goals. Whiteness, racism, other forms of discrimination, and neoliberalism must be addressed head-on. Intersectional social justice must serve as the moral compass. Theory provides a language for interrogating and understanding inequality. Without theory, whiteness, racism, patriarchy, classism, and anti-gay prejudice are normalized.