The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”1
This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists.2 The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man.
The Marxists in the West, such as Paulo Freire, held the same philosophy. Freire and his disciples believed that the critical pedagogies could reengineer the human soul and inspire a revolution from the bottom up. But in contradiction to their counterparts in the East, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed in the West was not social class, but racial identity.
“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”3
Echoing Marcuse’s redefinition of the proletariat—the white intellectuals united with the black underclass—Freire’s American disciples developed an elaborate framework for categorization and subversion of the ruling order. Their primary pedagogical strategy was to pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently oppressive, and radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed. In the academic literature, this technique is sometimes referred to as “revolutionary pedagogy,” “critical multiculturalism,” or “decolonization,” which entails ridding the education system of the repressive influence of “whiteness” and infusing it with the liberating influence of “blackness.”
Peter McLaren, another Freire disciple who worked in tandem with Henry Giroux, laid out the mechanics of how this new pedagogy of revolution would work in practice. American teachers and students, McLaren argued, must “[break] the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism” and “construct sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines of forces can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice.”4
Appealing directly to figures such as Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin, McLaren contended that the ultimate end of critical pedagogy was to use the power of identity politics in order to “gain control of the production of meaning”5 and to usher in a “democratic socialist society” that combined the identity-based “struggle over cultural meanings” with the traditional Marxist “redistribution of material resources.”6 For McLaren and the critical pedagogists, this movement of decolonization was already gathering at the margins in the 1990s as the influence of Freire’s theories began to expand in academia and school administration. “Decolonized spaces are forming in the borderlands,” McLaren predicted a quarter century ago. “And these will affect the classrooms of the future.”7
That future has already arrived. Public school districts across the country have begun to apply the principles of critical pedagogy in the classroom. The practice follows a recurring pattern: teachers set an emotional anchor by framing the United States as an oppressive society, separate individual students into the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and direct the group toward prearranged political conclusions. As the diversity czar and activist teachers at Buffalo Public Schools recently explained, school districts that follow the “pedagogy of liberation” begin “preparing [students] at four years old,” train them to achieve “critical consciousness,” and transform them into “activists for antiracism.”8
And just as it was for the revolutionaries in the Third World, the goal for Giroux, McLaren, and the second-generation critical pedagogists is always the same: dismantling the criminal justice system, disrupting the nuclear family, overthrowing the system of capitalism, and, in the words of Freire, turning the schools into “an extraordinary instrument to help build a new society and a new man.”9
The critical pedagogists of today have combined that long-standing vision with the latest techniques of the social and behavioral sciences. Freire’s techniques have been adapted, merged, and combined with a range of other educational approaches, including critical social justice, critical ethnic studies, critical whiteness studies, culturally responsive teaching, anti-racist pedagogy, and social-emotional learning. The theoreticians divide the world into identity hierarchies; the teachers engage in the work of decolonization; the students become entries in sprawling databases; the bureaucracies process human data into social change.10
“It’s important to recognize that now is the time to brush hard against the grain of teaching until the full range of revolutionary pedagogical options are made available in the public schools of the nation,” says the pedagogist McLaren. “Part of the task is ethical: to make liberation and the abolition of human suffering the goal of the educative enterprise itself. Part of the task is political: to create a democratic socialist society in which democracy will be called upon daily to live up to its promise.”11
When Stalin toasted the artists of postrevolutionary Russia as “engineers of the human soul,” he was speaking metaphorically, imagining the day that artists could create new men with scientific precision. That time, the critical pedagogists believe, has now come. The cherished goal of liberation through education, emblazoned in the sky by Guevara and implanted in the soul by Freire, might finally be within reach. After students are primed emotionally, categorized individually, and mobilized collectively, they can set about doing the work of revolution.
* * *
The “pedagogy of liberation” is, in practice, composed of two parallel pedagogies: one for the oppressor, another for the oppressed.
The dominant method, given the racial demographics of the United States, could be described as the “pedagogy of whiteness.” The foundation of this approach is the reification of white identity, which is reduced and hardened into an essentialist category—“Whiteness”—then loaded with negative connotations. Barbara Applebaum, a leading scholar in the field of “critical whiteness studies,” describes this racialist metaphysics in her book Being White, Being Good: “Critical whiteness studies begins with the acknowledgement that whiteness and its concomitant privileges tend to remain invisible to most white people. In order to dislodge whiteness from its position of dominance, whiteness must be studied in order to ‘make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence.’ From this perspective, racism is essentially a white problem. . . . For white people then, it is impossible to gain an understanding of systemic racism without naming whiteness and understanding how whiteness works.”12
Applebaum argues that all white people are “infected” by a cluster of psychological evils: “white ignorance,” “white complicity,” “white privilege,” “white denial,” and “white supremacy.”13 Individual whites might insist on their own moral goodness, but, in truth, “all whites, by virtue of systemic white privilege that is inseparable from white ways of being, are implicated in the production and reproduction of systemic racial injustice”—in other words, as Applebaum summarizes, “‘all whites are racist,’” or, at minimum, complicit, no matter their individual behavior, character, or beliefs.14 Racism is baked into the very ontology of whiteness. It is a collective psychological condition that emanates through and upholds the oppressive structures of society.
Within such a system, what can be done? For Applebaum and the critical pedagogists, it begins with confession. One pair of theorists describes it simply: “A big step would be for whites to admit that we are racist, and then to consider what to do about it.”15
The San Diego Unified School District provides a concrete example of this process of renunciation. In a district-wide training program, administrators delivered the blunt commands of the pedagogy of whiteness, telling white teachers: “you are racist”; “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies”; “confront and examine your white privilege.” It is the pedagogical equivalent of shock therapy: stun the subject, send him into emotional disarray, and purge the sickness from the body. The administrators concede that this technique will likely cause “guilt, anger, apathy, frustration, closed-mindedness, [and] defensiveness.”16 But that is part of the process: teachers should recoil in horror at their whiteness.
The running theme of this pedagogy is the production of guilt. In another training, a consultant for San Diego Unified explained that white teachers were guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and that their “whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.” The cure, according to the district, is racial renunciation and “antiracist therapy for White educators,” who must “acknowledge,” “confront,” and “use” their whiteness for the cause of “antiracism”17 and, in the words of one school official, “racial healing.”18 Such is the tenor of the critical pedagogy in practice: whiteness is seen as a malevolent, invisible force that shapes the material world and manifests as a sickness within an entire race.
While this confessional method could theoretically solve whiteness as a psychological problem, it does not solve “whiteness” as an economic and political problem. Here one must turn to another theorist, Noel Ignatiev, who was the first activist, then scholar, to elaborate the theory of “white-skin privilege.”
Ignatiev was a man who bridged the old and the new Left: he had worked in the steel mills and organized for the Communist Party USA before pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In an influential 1967 pamphlet, White Blindspot, Ignatiev laid out his theory that American capitalists and labor leaders had struck an unholy bargain, dispensing racial privileges to the white working class in order to appease them with material comforts, divide them from oppressed minorities, and prevent the development of a class-based socialist revolution.19
“The U.S. ruling class has made a deal with the misleaders of American labor, and through them with the masses of white workers,” Ignatiev wrote. “The terms of the deal, worked out over the three hundred year history of the development of capitalism in our country, are these: you white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force, and we will repay you with a monopoly of the skilled jobs, we will cushion you against the most severe shocks of the economic cycle, provide you with health and education facilities superior to those of the non-white population, grant you the freedom to spend your money and leisure time as you wish without social restrictions, enable you on occasion to promote one of your number out of the ranks of the laboring class, and in general confer on you the material and spiritual privileges befitting your white skin.”20
For Ignatiev, whites must shed this “white-skin privilege” in order to create cross-racial solidarity and then subvert the system of capitalism. Thus, the renunciation of “whiteness” becomes more than a personal act of purification. It becomes a political act against the entire racial and economic order. Just as Freire urged the bourgeoisie to commit class suicide in Guinea-Bissau, Ignatiev urged whites to commit race suicide in America—all, of course, to advance the revolution.
“Communists,” Ignatiev pleaded, “must go to the white workers and say frankly: you must renounce the privileges you now hold, must join the Negro, Puerto Rican and other colored workers in fighting white supremacy, must make this the first, immediate and most urgent task of the entire working class, in exchange for which you, together with the rest of the workers will receive all the benefits which are sure to come from one working class (of several colors) fighting together.”21
Decades later, after earning his PhD from Harvard and becoming a whiteness studies professor, Ignatiev founded the magazine Race Traitor and intensified his rhetoric: “abolish the white race”; “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”; “we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”22 As one of Ignatiev’s collaborators put it, the new radicals must see “the attack against white supremacy as the key to strategy in the struggle for socialism in the United States.”23
Ignatiev’s worldview, as radical as it was, was not limited to the confines of academia. His concepts and rhetoric, which serve as the crucial link between individual and collective action, have made their way into the public education system.
At the East Side Community School in New York City, for example, principal Mark Federman sent a letter encouraging white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”—the precise terminology developed by Ignatiev decades prior. The letter included a graphic outlining eight stages of white identity development—from the lowest form, “white supremacist,” to the intermediate forms of “white confessional” and “white traitor,” to the highest form, “white abolitionist.”24
The goal of this process, according to the graphic’s creator, Northwestern University professor Barnor Hesse, is to challenge the “regime of whiteness” and eventually to “subvert white authority” and “not [allow] whiteness to reassert itself.”25 For Hesse, the Western concepts of “‘rationality,’ ‘liberalism,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘secularism,’ [and] ‘rule of law’” are “white mythologies” that are used to justify, extend, and perpetuate white domination.26 Hesse’s theoretical work buries itself in dense critiques of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Foucault, but his “8 white identities” schematic is easily digested by schoolteachers and left-wing activists. Hesse describes his method as creating a “shock to the system” that can begin to prepare the grounds for “abolishing white institutions that rest on the authority of structural racism and white supremacy.”27
The ambition of the pedagogy of whiteness is sweeping: from the initial changes to “white identity,” to the condemnation of “white mythologies,” to the subversion of the entire “regime of whiteness,” the critical pedagogists see the manipulation of racial identity as a key mechanism for advancing the left-wing revolution. American parents might wince at submitting their children to “white privilege” exercises, but they are often reassured by the soft, therapeutic language of many educators. “It’s just acknowledging that some people start life with more advantages than others,” a teacher might say. Or, if there is resistance, school officials can use harder tactics of guilt and shame: as the East Side Community School told parents, white people who hesitate in “owning [their] privilege” are upholding white supremacy itself. “Racism and hate [are] the underlying cause fueling their beliefs.”28
But underneath the rhetoric, the critical pedagogists are playing a serious game. They want to dismantle the pillars of Western society—rationalism, individualism, capitalism, natural rights, the rule of law—and usher in a post-liberal, or post-whiteness, political order. This process begins with the engineering of the human soul: the educator can reshape the psychology of the child, then lead him down the path of political activism.
Although it might be translated into brightly colored illustrations for kindergartners, the beating heart of the pedagogy of whiteness is to enact a revolution of values against the West and install another set of values that will lead, they hope, to the realization of Paulo Freire’s elusive dream: the suicide of the bourgeoisie.
* * *
The pedagogy for minority students—the true “pedagogy of the oppressed”—is the mirror image of the pedagogy of whiteness.
Freire and his disciples conceptualized minority communities in America as “the Third World in the First World”: the ruling power has created a web of structures and mythologies that secure the interests of white elites and submerge the consciousness of the oppressed.29 Like the native populations in Mozambique or Guinea-Bissau, racial minorities in the United States must fight to decolonize their communities and liberate themselves from their oppressor.
For Freire, liberation cannot be achieved through individual cultivation, but requires the transformation of society as a whole. “The relationship between the metropolitan society and the dependent society [is] the source of their respective ways of being, thinking, and expression,” he wrote in The Politics of Education. “Both the metropolitan society and the dependent society, totalities in themselves, are part of a greater whole, the economic, historical, cultural, and political context in which their mutual relationships evolve.”30
Therefore, Freire says, the oppressed must learn how to “read the world” in order “read the word.”31 That is, the starting point of education is to gain political consciousness, rather than basic literacy. He poses his ideal as “a society that is increasingly decolonized, that increasingly cuts the chains that made it, and that make it remain the object of others, which they are subjected to.”32
In the American context, the relationship between colonizer and colonized takes on an explicit racial dimension: the social categories of oppressor and oppressed can be neatly transposed onto the racial categories of “whiteness” and “blackness.” While white children are directed to dismantle “whiteness” as an internalized psychological phenomenon, black children must dismantle “whiteness” as externalized social structures that imprison, denigrate, and repress their “blackness.”
This interpretation can be either literal or figurative. In Freire’s time, the decolonizers fought physical wars to banish whites from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the current day, the decolonizers fight symbolic wars to banish “whiteness” from American institutions, beginning in the classroom and ending, they hope, with the institutions of culture, economy, and law. The enemy is dispersed through the superstructure—and “blackness” is seen as the antidote to “whiteness.”
Freire’s disciple Peter McLaren makes the point explicit. “Blackness and whiteness are not symmetrical; rather, they exist in society within a dependent hierarchy, with whiteness constraining the social power of blackness: by colonizing the definition of what is normal; by institutionalizing a greater allocation of resources for white constituencies; and by maintaining laws that favor Whites,” he says. Consequently, society must free itself from “the shackles of whiteness,” engage in “antiwhite struggle,” and adopt the politics of “blackness” and the “Reason of the Other”—an entirely separate epistemological framework that negates Western rationality and opposes the “violent, coercive, genocidal reason” of whiteness.
“I call for the denial, disassembly, and destruction of whiteness as we know it,” McLaren declares. “Revolutionary multiculturalism is not limited to transforming attitudinal discrimination, but is dedicated to reconstituting the deep structures of political economy, culture, and power in contemporary social arrangements. It is not about reforming capitalist democracy but rather transforming it by cutting it at its joints and then rebuilding the social order from the vantage point of the oppressed.”33
How does the “pedagogy of blackness” work in practice? It begins with teaching minority students how to “read the world” through the lens of critical pedagogy.
Buffalo Public Schools provides a vivid illustration. The district, which serves a student population that is 45 percent black and 80 percent minority,34 has adopted a “pedagogy of liberation” that follows the principles of Paulo Freire. Instead of focusing on improving academic achievement—dismissed as a myth used to perpetuate whiteness—school administrators have adopted the full suite of fashionable, left-wing methods: “culturally responsive teaching,” “equity-based instructional strategies,” “Black Lives Matter at School,” and an “emancipatory curriculum.”35 As the district’s diversity czar, Fatima Morrell, explained to teachers, the solution to the challenges facing American society is to “be woke, which is basically critically conscious.”36
The predicate to Buffalo’s “pedagogy of liberation” is to establish the narrative that the white power structure in the United States systematically oppresses minorities—in other words, to establish the conditions from which students must be liberated. During an all-hands training session for teachers introducing the new curriculum, Morrell explained that America “is built on racism” and that all Americans are guilty of “implicit racial bias.” She argued that “America’s sickness” leads some whites to believe that blacks are “not human,” which makes it “easier to shoot someone in the back seven times if you feel like it.”37
The curriculum constantly reprises these themes. In kindergarten, teachers ask students to compare their skin color with an arrangement of crayons, which establishes their position in the racial hierarchy, and then play a video that dramatizes dead black children speaking to them from beyond the grave, warning black students they could be killed by “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” at any moment. By fifth grade, students are taught that America has created a “school-to-grave pipeline” for black children and that, as adults, “one million Black people are locked in cages.”
In middle and high school, students learn the theory of “systemic racism,” which teaches that America was designed for the “impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people.” Students are told that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism” and that white elites, in particular, “work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media.” By the end of high school, the predicate is firmly established: the regime of whiteness, from epistemology to economics to criminal justice, is the omnipresent force that has reduced minorities to a life of misery, failure, and oppression.38
What then? The pedagogy of blackness. Buffalo’s curriculum is explicitly opposed to Western epistemology, values, and institutions. Schools are instructed to promote the fourteen “Black Lives Matter principles,” which teach students to disrupt “Western nuclear family dynamics,” dismantle “structural racism and white supremacy,” challenge “cisgender privilege,” break “the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” and abolish “sexism, misogyny, and male-centeredness.” In their place, schools must become “unapologetically Black,” support “Black villages,” create “queer-affirming network[s],” embrace “Black families,” uplift “Black trans folk,” and hire “more Black teachers.”39
In a series of lessons on government, the district encourages students to imagine replacing the white European system of justice with a traditional African system of justice. According to the materials, whites have created a “retributive,” “merit-based” justice system, which relies on harsh punishment and creates inequalities. Traditional Africans, on the other hand, rely on a “restorative,” “need-based” justice system focused on healing, prioritizing “collective value” over individual rights, prohibiting ownership of private property, and providing for each according to his needs—a primitive communism that preceded European contact.40
The district utilizes Chancellor Williams’s 1971 book The Destruction of Black Civilization, which argues that ancient black civilizations had superior constitutions and systems of government, which, following colonization, “all Africans lost and of which their descendants do not have even a memory.” Williams proposes rediscovering this tradition of blackness, summoning the power of the ancient civilizations, and reconquering white institutions in their image. “The re-education of Blacks and a possible solution of racial crises can begin, strangely enough, only when Blacks fully realize this central fact in their lives: the white man is their bitter enemy,” Williams writes. “For this is not the ranting of wild-eyed militancy, but the calm and unmistakable verdict of several thousand years of documented history.”41
The pedagogy of blackness quickly becomes naked political activism, which is often smuggled under the label of “anti-racism.”
In the School District of Philadelphia, for instance, administrators, unions, and teachers have all converged on racial politics as the new North Star. Following the George Floyd riots, the district superintendent released an Antiracism Declaration promising to dismantle “systems of racial inequity”42 and circulated a memo recommending racially segregated training programs for white and black educators. Meanwhile, the local teachers’ union produced a video denouncing the United States as a “settler colony built on white supremacy and capitalism” that has created a “system that lifts up white people over everyone else.”43 The solution, according to the union, is to overthrow the “racist structure of capitalism,” provide “reparations for Black and Indigenous people,” and “uproot white supremacy and plant the seeds for a new world.”44
At Philadelphia’s William D. Kelley elementary school, which is 94 percent black and 100 percent poor,45 administrators have overhauled the school’s programming to focus on political activism. As part of the social studies curriculum, for example, the school’s fifth-grade teacher created a unit celebrating Angela Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” At the end of the lesson, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.
The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa, appealed to their tribal ancestors, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.46 Even the school’s public artwork illustrates this shift: administrators painted over a mural of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama and replaced it with the iconography of Davis and Huey P. Newton.47
The theory in Buffalo, Philadelphia, and other majority-minority districts is that, by focusing on the development of racial and political consciousness, schools can prepare students to reshape the world. Paulo Freire believed the schools could “extroject” the oppressor ideology and establish a new method of liberation on the grounds of indigenous knowledge. But this is an illusion. The call to abandon Western epistemology and retribalize Marcuse’s “ghetto population” is a dead end. The appeal to tribal ancestors or the primitive communism of ancient black civilizations cannot provide a stable foundation for success in the modern world.
The schoolhouse protests can provide psychological compensation—the fantasy of liberation and revenge—but, after the crowds disperse and the cardboard signs are broken down, they offer nothing for the future. As one William D. Kelley School teacher remarked, “One of the saddest things about [the] Angela Davis assignment is that most of the children in the class are either barely literate or functionally illiterate.”48
And this is the problem. The pedagogy of liberation in America functions about as well as Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in Guinea-Bissau—that is to say, not much at all. Buffalo Public Schools and the School District of Philadelphia have annual budgets of more than $30,000 per child,49 significantly higher than the average educational expenditure of every other nation on earth, including rich countries such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.50 Yet the results are dismal. In Buffalo, only 18 percent of black students reach basic proficiency in English and 13 percent reach basic proficiency in math.51 In Philadelphia, only 27 percent of black students reach basic proficiency in English and 11 percent reach basic proficiency in math.52 In other words, the majority of these children enter the modern world functionally illiterate and innumerate.
They are condemned: not by “Western nuclear family dynamics” and “heteronormative thinking,” but by the heartbreaking pathologies in their communities and the immense failures of the institutions that are supposed to serve them. The gap between rhetoric and reality is almost beyond comprehension. The ten- and eleven-year-olds at William D. Kelley march for the utopia of “black communism,” but they are unable to read and write. School officials promise to transform society, but they can barely teach rudimentary skills.
In Freire’s case, one might have some sympathy: Guinea-Bissau was a desperately poor nation, emerging from a bloody war, unable to produce enough food for its own citizens. But the same is not true for the “Third World in the First World.” The internal colonies of Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and other majority-minority cities have large budgets at their disposal, as well as an ostensibly “postcolonial” leadership class of black mayors, council members, police chiefs, and district attorneys, many of whom preach the gospel of liberation. That students in these cities could leave school virtually bereft of basic literacy is a tragedy for them and a shame for the political and educational leaders promising to “plant the seeds for a new world.”53
Sadly, administrators have chosen to double down. As Freire said of his efforts in Guinea-Bissau, they believe that “their methodological errors have ideological roots,”54 and, consequently, they focus even more on political activism. They conduct lengthier self-criticisms, seek greater ideological purity, and blame any failures on a lack of commitment.
In Buffalo, according to a veteran teacher, the district’s “pedagogy of liberation” has, in practice, become a series of “scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel ‘empowered.’” Teachers must submit to “manipulative mind games” and express support for the administration’s left-wing politics, or else risk professional retaliation.55
In Philadelphia, rather than come to terms with the pedagogical failure of the public schools, educators shift the blame to “systemic racism” and make renewed promises of “racial justice.” Meanwhile, the activists and the teachers’ union intensify their commitment to racial politics and create new lists of demands, including “eliminating inherently biased practices like standardized testing,” “ongoing antiracist training for all school and district staff,” and “firing of racist teachers and administrators.”56
The solution for the failure of the revolution, they believe, is more revolution. As in Guinea-Bissau, the Freirean method promises to rebuild the social structure in the image of the oppressed, but in practice it offers a cheap simulation of political power that cannot provide a viable substitute for the achievement of competency.
* * *
What do the critical pedagogists want? There are many names for their desires—decolonization, liberation, equity, anti-racism—but the most revealing is “abolition.”
The phrase has a double meaning. On the surface, it appeals to the cachet of the anti-slavery movement. Beneath this linguistic shell, however, it is pure critical theory, operating on a ruthless dialectic of negation.
As Bettina Love, the most prominent advocate of abolitionist education, explains in her book We Want to Do More Than Survive, the program of abolition is a totalizing one. America, she says, is a “superpredator” that systematically “spirit-murders” minority children and “has a long history of passing laws that protect Whites when they kill, torture, and displace dark people.”57 In order for the oppressed to emerge from these eternal cruelties, Love argues, activists must abolish the entire range of American institutions, down to the foundations. The demolition list includes tangible institutions such as traditional schools, prisons, immigration enforcement, gun ownership, drug laws, cash bail, and standardized testing, as well as deep abstractions such as rationality, whiteness, and capitalism, which perpetuate “dark suffering” and ensure that “the rich get richer and the poor get disposed of.”58
Love would destroy all of these. She believes that rationality should be suspended in favor of imagination, whiteness should be eradicated in favor of blackness, and capitalism should be destroyed in favor of collectivism. “Dark folx,” Love argues, have access to secret knowledge that can transform societies beyond the restrictions of the white oppressor. Quoting the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, Love suggests that “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.”59
This process, for Love, can be initiated by administrators and teachers in the public school system, which is a scale-model representation of the larger society. “We like to think that education is untouched by White supremacy, White rage, and anti-Blackness, that educators are somehow immune to perpetuating dark suffering,” she writes. “Education from the outset was built on White supremacy.”60 Therefore, the work of abolition begins with the elimination of white pathologies such as “White privilege,” “White fragility,” “White emotionality,” “White violence,” and “White rage.”61
Love tells white teachers that they must constantly interrogate themselves and relinquish authority to “dark folx,” who can provide the “collective vision and knowledge” that is required to build the new society.62 “White folx have to get well on their own terms before they engage with abolitionist teaching. More than just attending antiracist workshops and culturally relevant pedagogy professional developments, they need to come to terms with what Whiteness is, how violence is needed to maintain it, and how their successes in life are by-products of Whiteness,” Love explains. “White folx cannot lose their Whiteness; it is not possible. But they can daily try to deal with and reject the Whiteness that is obsessed with oppressing others, centering itself, and maintaining White supremacy through White rage. Being well and White is rejecting Whiteness for the good of humanity.”63
From there, Love believes, the revolution can proceed. Educators can work to excavate America’s rotten roots and smash them into dust. Again quoting Robin D. G. Kelley, Love argues that the solution to America’s problems “cannot be traced to the founding fathers or the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Instead, it is manifest in the struggles of the dispossessed to overturn the Eurocentric, elitist, patriarchal, and dehumanizing structures of racial capitalism and its liberal underpinnings.”64
Whatever one calls it—“Abolitionist,” “decolonizing,” “liberatory”—the new pedagogy marks a significant advancement from Freire’s original pedagogy of the oppressed. The second generation of theorists has retained the basic structure of his revolutionary neo-Marxism, then burrowed into the soft ground of identity and learned how to manipulate the primal emotions of guilt, shame, envy, and pride. They have taken Freire’s analysis of “capitalism as the root of domination”65 and added a racial politics that can guide students into identity-driven activism.
And their ambitions are just as strong. As Love told an audience of teachers and US Department of Education officials, whites must sacrifice their wealth, privilege, and power. Activists must lay waste to the prisons, the schools, capitalism, and the constitution. Minorities must be ready to receive their due. “If you’ve been oppressed for 400 years, you’d want to start over,” she said, according to notes from the seminar. “This world was not set up for people of color, so [we] need to tear [it] down.”66
For the critical pedagogists, nothing can be left standing. The endpoint of abolition is, ultimately, the abolition of America itself.