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

Allyship implies working toward goals that are mutually beneficial to all parties. According to Love, it does not require white people to love or have meaningful relationships with people of color, question White privilege, or de-center whiteness. By contrast, coconspirators understand how whiteness functions in society. They use their privilege and leverage their power to support people of color and confront racism. In social justice circles, the term coconspirator functions as a verb and a noun.

CRT provides a framework for understanding how power is concentrated in the hands of affluent white men through capitalism and institutional racism, despite the existence of laws promising equality. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as statistics, the social sciences, and personal experiences, it provides tools to expose systemic racism and they ways it operates in society. The field of education began engaging with CRT in the late-1990s as a means of combating racism in education. Critical race theorists hold that the interests of people of color and white people must converge for racial equality to occur, a position called interest convergence. Offshoots of CRT focus on marginalized social groups besides Black people, such as Asians and people with disabilities. The theory of community cultural wealth, which is part of CRT, aims to abolish racism with the resources of people of color, notably their communication skills, aspirations, social networks, and history of resistance.

CWS interrogates the ways in which white supremacy and privilege are invisibly reproduced by examining how race is constructed and how racism is justified. It also provides white people with tools to confront whiteness, which includes white privilege, white rage, white fragility, and white emotionality. CWS helps white people do the work to become coconspirators in the fight for social justice.

Love uses the term “dark folx” to refer to people of color. She borrows the term “dark” from W. E. B. Du Bois to remind readers that skin color is the root of systemic discrimination and state-sanctioned racial abuse. The term folx, an alternative to folks, signals the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups.

A homeplace is a space where Black people matter to each other. It is a community that nurtures, comforts, and feeds the souls of Black people. A homeplace undoes the damage done by white supremacy by loving Blackness and restoring the dignity of Black people. It is also a place of resistance.

Intersectionality posits that different social markers, such as race, sex, and class, create overlapping and interconnected systems of disadvantage or discrimination. In the field of education, intersectionality allows teachers to have constructive conversations around different facets of students’ identities, providing a better understanding of the challenges students face, while also highlighting the ways schools perpetuate injustice.

The term mattering pertains to the relationship between people of color and the country. People of color have always mattered to their communities and families, but according to Love they do not yet matter to their country. Mattering humanizes people of color. It can only occur after systemic discrimination comes to an end.

Settler colonial theory describes the colonization of the Americas and the destruction of Indigenous communities as a structure, not an event. This structure changed over time, focusing on land development, resource extraction, ethnic cleansing, and displacement at various points in time. Settler colonial theory sees current events, such as the 2016-2017 protests at Standing Rock, as part of a destructive process that began with the arrival of the first European colonizers.

System justification is a social-psychological theory that explains how people justify the status quo, which they view as legitimate and fair. Poor people of color believing in the American Dream exemplifies system justification. Structural barriers in education, employment, housing, and other areas hinder people of color from achieving the American Dream, yet many believe that hard work will lead to success because they believe in the legitimacy and fairness of the system.