CHAPTER 1
“WE WHO ARE DARK”
What do we want? What is the thing we are after? … We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?
—W. E. B. DU BOIS1
WE WHO ARE DARK. WE WHO ARE DARK. WE WHO ARE DARK. When I read Du Bois’s words for the first time, they seemed to lift right off the page, as if they were meant expressly for me. Du Bois’s indictment of America is plain and simple, yet at the same time shattering, because we as dark people see—which White Americans cannot—a country with enough promise to capture and hold four hundred years of freedom dreams while systematically attacking, reducing, and/or destroying each and every aspiration. So, what do we want, knowing what we know? What is this thing we are after? Although no one person is equipped or has the right to speak for millions, particularly on the issues of race and racism, there is one thing that I know with everything I am: we who are dark want to matter and live, not just to survive but to thrive. Matter not for recognition or acknowledgment but to create new systems and structures for educational, political, economic, and community freedom. It would mean we matter enough that our citizenship, and the rights that come with it, are never questioned, reduced, or taken away regardless of our birthplace or the amount of melanin in our skin. Mattering, citizenship, community sovereignty, and humanity go hand in hand with the ideas of democracy, liberty, and justice for all, which are the unalienable rights needed to thrive.
This book is about mattering, surviving, resisting, thriving, healing, imagining, freedom, love, and joy: all elements of abolitionist work and teaching. Abolitionist teaching is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.
To begin the work of abolitionist teaching and fighting for justice, the idea of mattering is essential in that you must matter enough to yourself, to your students, and to your students’ community to fight. But for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize when your country finds you disposable. How do you matter to a country that is at once obsessed with and dismissive about how it kills you? How do you matter to a country that would rather incarcerate you than educate you? How do you matter to a country that poisoned your child’s drinking water? How do you matter to a country that sees your skin as a weapon? How do you matter to a country that steals your land, breaks treaty after treaty, and then calls you a savage? How do you matter to a country that tears families apart because of arbitrary lines that instill terror, violence, and geographical separation rather than a compassion for humanity? How do you matter to a country that will ban you because of how you pray and who you pray to? How do you matter to a country that ultimately only sees you as property or a commodity? How do you matter to a country that rips children out of the hands of their parents and locks them in dog cages for seeking a better life? How do you matter to a country that measures your knowledge against a “gap” it created? How do you matter to a country that labels you a “model minority” in order to fuel anti-Blackness? How do you matter to a country that would rather arm teachers with rocks than have courageous conversations with itself about gun control, eliminating guns, and White male rage? How do you matter to a country where the idea of “consent” seems alien to its conquering culture? How do you matter to a country where the president calls immigrants animals, particularly those from Mexico? How do you matter to a country where Betsy DeVos, a billionaire heiress and staunch advocate of privatizing public education, who refuses to protect our most vulnerable students in public schools, is the secretary of education? How do you matter to a country that is incapable of loving dark bodies and, therefore, incapable of loving you?
We who are dark are complex—we are more than our skin hues of Blacks and Browns. We intersect our moonlit darkness with our culture(s), language(s), race(s), gender(s), sexuality(ies), ability(ies), religion(s), and spirituality(ies). Our complicated identities cannot be discussed or examined in isolation from one another. These identity complexities, which create our multifaceted range of beings, must matter too.
Kimberlé Crenshaw refers to these multiple markers of identity as “intersectionality.” Intersectionality is not just about listing and naming your identities—it is a necessary analytic tool to explain the complexities and the realities of discrimination and of power or the lack thereof, and how they intersect with identities. The idea of intersectionality is not new; Black women writers and thinkers throughout history, like Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Frances Beal, Patricia Hill Collins, and the women of the Combahee River Collective, articulated the need to discuss race and gender together, understanding that “multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”2 Further, intersectionality cannot be conflated with diversity. “Diversity” is a catchall term that includes different types of people in terms of race, gender, sexuality, or religion within an organization, community, company, or school. “Intersectionality” is more than counting representation in a room or within a group; it is understanding community power, or its lack, and ensuring inclusivity in social justice movements. It is a way to build alliances in organizing for social change.
For example, there was a significant need for an intersectional lens when, in 1991, law professor Anita Hill accused US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his tenure as her boss at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Many Americans, including many folx of color, did not believe Hill simply because she was a Black woman calling out a high-profile Black man. Thomas called the allegations a “high-tech lynching” to invoke Black male racial suffering and simultaneously erase Black women’s history of racial and sexual trauma. Thomas’s lynching comment caused people to view the case through the lens of race and racism, but only from a male perspective. His rhetorical maneuver painted Hill as a bitter Black woman trying to bring a Black man down like so many White people had done before. Thus, while diversity was present in the proceedings involving a Black man and a Black woman, both of them extremely accomplished, Thomas’s male privilege, along with America’s ignorance and outright disregard of Black women’s own history of lynchings and sexual trauma due to assault, harassment, and rape, made it easy for America to ignore Hill’s accusations. And even today, we see the “high-tech lynching” claim used to excuse Bill Cosby’s numerous sexual assaults. Intersectionality would have allowed both race and Black women’s history of sexual trauma to enter the conversation.
Sadly, in addition to Bill Cosby being a rapist, he is also a great example of someone who stood for racial uplift but not intersectional social justice; the two terms are often conflated. Cosby generously gave to historically Black colleges and universities and initiatives that supported the racial uplift of Black people, but his justice stopped there. The racial uplift of dark people is crucial, but that uplift cannot come at the expense of trans folx, folx with disabilities, or women.
Another useful example of the need for intersectionality can be seen in the pay discrepancies in the medical field. Male doctors make about $20,000 more per year than female doctors.3 White male doctors make about $65,000 more than Black male doctors. Black female doctors make $25,000 less than White female doctors.4 White male, Black male, and White female doctors all make more than Black female doctors. Black female doctors are paid less because of their race and their gender. Their pay is not an indication of skill level or education; it is an example of the intersections of discrimination.
In education, it is not well publicized that Black girls are suspended at a rate that is six times higher than that of their White female peers. In 2012, in New York City, fifty-three Black girls were expelled compared with zero White girls.5 In every state in America, Black girls are more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as White girls.6 And darker-skinned Black girls are suspended at a rate that is three times greater than those with lighter skin.7 Research shows that these higher rates of suspension are not because of misbehavior (a determination that is incredibly subjective, especially when race is a part of the equation) but because of racist and sexist stereotypes that teachers and school officials hold against Black girls. For too many, suspension is a birthright of being young and Black.
In Monique W. Morris’s book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in School, she documents how Black girls are branded “disruptive” or “defiant” by their teachers, then expelled or suspended because of such subjective labels.8 Morris’s book, as well as the work of many other activists and scholars, sparked a national conversation centered on Black girls who feel ignored and disrespected by their teachers and/or administrators, all while dealing with poverty, sexual abuse, emotional numbing, disabilities, low self-esteem, mental health issues, gender transitions, or the trials of simply being Black and a young girl trying to navigate adolescence. Morris argues that Black girls never get to be girls, a phenomenon she describes as “age compression,” in which Black girls are seen as Black women, with all the stereotypes that go along with Black womanhood (e.g., hypersexual, loud, rude, and aggressive). By examining age compression of Black girls in school using intersectionality, we complicate the phenomenon and can ask important, unanswered questions: What does this school reality mean for Black girls who are a part of the LGBTQ community, Black girls who are Muslim, Black girls who are immigrants, Black girls who are disabled, and Black girls who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated? What does this school reality mean for a Latinx girl who is queer, undocumented, and disabled? How do Black girls who are a combination of these identities deal with the complexities and the realities of discrimination, harassment, and violence? In this way, intersectionality not only provides a way in which to think about the communities we belong to but also a means to discuss all of our communities in ways that are inclusive of how oppression intersects our everyday lives inside and outside of school. Importantly, intersectionality does not ignore Black and Brown boys, who endure many similar issues; it merely adds complexity to our understandings of how institutions such as public schools are oppressive in different ways to different people.
Another timely example that highlights the need for intersectionality is the ridiculous proposal to arm teachers with guns. After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed seventeen people, President Donald Trump, other Republicans, and, of course, the National Rifle Association suggested that giving teachers guns would prevent school shootings. Not only is this a terrible idea for obvious reasons (e.g., the armed sheriff assigned to protect Stoneman Douglas High School did not enter the school while the gunman was inside), but the conversation about arming teachers was silent on race and disability.
Over the past few years, we have watched video after video of dark children being assaulted in classrooms by teachers and school police officers. School officials grossly and racially punish dark students. The American Civil Liberties Union reported that “students of color, students with disabilities, and students of color with disabilities are more likely to be funneled into the criminal justice system for behavior that may warrant supportive interventions or a trip to the principal’s office, not a criminal record.”9 Thus, on a day-to-day basis, arming teachers with guns would threaten the lives of dark students and dark students with disabilities more than a mass school shooter, particularly because data tell us that mass shootings are rare in urban schools. Policy agendas devoid of intersectionality do not allow questions and dialogues that reflect the lives of the people who will be impacted by policy. As preposterous as the conversation is around arming teachers, the discussion shows that racial and disability analyses are necessary for dialogues about schools because schools are inherently violent to dark children and children with disabilities.
Intersectionality also allows educators to dialogue around a set of questions that will lead them to a better sense of their students’ full selves, their students’ challenges, the grace and beauty that is needed to juggle multiple identities seamlessly, and how schools perpetuate injustice. When teachers shy away from intersectionality, they shy away from ever fully knowing their students’ humanity and the richness of their identities. Mattering cannot happen if identities are isolated and students cannot be their full selves.
SO, WHAT IS MATTERING?
I am certain that dark people have never truly mattered in this country except as property and labor. However, we have mattered to our communities, to our families, and to ourselves. Our impact on this country, whether it is recognized or not, is where mattering rests; it is where thriving rests. Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity. I do not mean civics narrowly defined as voting, paying taxes, and knowing how the government works; instead, I am referring to something much deeper: the practice of abolitionist teaching rooted in the internal desire we all have for freedom, joy, restorative justice (restoring humanity, not just rules), and to matter to ourselves, our community, our family, and our country with the profound understanding that we must “demand the impossible”10 by refusing injustice and the disposability of dark children. Demanding the impossible means we understand that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, mass incarceration, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are protected systems that will not be dismantled because we ask; they will be dismantled because we fight, demanding what they said was impossible, remembering through the words of Angela Y. Davis that “freedom is a constant struggle.”11
Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the “human hierarchy” was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological racial inferiority to “those Americans who believe that they are White.”12 Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to his son, “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”13 America’s legacy of oppression and dispossession of dark people is in large part met with the ethos of “We Shall Overcome,” “Si Se Puede,” and “We Gon’ Be Alright.” This is not to say that we have not resisted, rioted, and rebelled, rightfully so and with righteous rage. It is these acts of rebellion that have allowed us to create a collective identity and, therefore, build schools, educate our children, use the church as a place of worship and community building, gather the best legal minds to argue for basic human rights, take to the streets as a demonstration of our commitment, and withdraw or withhold our money from companies and institutions that demean and deny us. It is these acts that have allowed us to produce beautiful, visceral, and eloquent literature, photography, visual art, and films that explain and endure our suffering, soundscapes for all to enjoy (but which only those in the struggle can feel and heal from), body movements that express pain and joy simultaneously, food that can only be made from love, and a joy that cannot be replicated outside of the dark body. We have created in the void, defiant of the country’s persistent efforts to kill and commodify us. Finding ways to matter.
WELCOME STRUGGLE
For those of us who are dark, our lives are entrenched, whether we like it or not, in creating what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a “beloved community,” a community that strives for economic, housing, racial, health, and queer justice and citizenship for all. This is the work of mattering to one another. It is the work of pursuing freedom. It is the work of our survival, and how we will one day thrive together. It is how dark folx in this country have always mattered to each other, by attempting to carve out, on the edges of total degradation, common goals for justice, liberation, liberty, and freedom that inspire and make this country better for all. We have not always agreed on the methods of liberation, but the work has never ceased. The approach of Dr. King, often guided by civil rights activist and strategist Bayard Rustin, was one of nonviolence, coalition building, and courageous acts of resistance for social change. Ella Baker joined King and Rustin in their nonviolent approach but insisted that the more sustainable method was robust grassroots organizing, which cultivated civic and community leaders from within. The Black Panther Party fought for liberation by policing the police, preaching self-determination, and serving their communities through social and educational programming such as health clinics and food-justice programs. Political activist and scholar Angela Davis’s mandate for fighting injustice is systemic change by way of mass movements for community sovereignty. None of these approaches is new or removed from the long history of abolitionist envisioning, mobilizing, and revolting against racial oppression. Indeed, these multiple methods remind us of the profound words of Michael Hames-García: “The very fact of freedom’s incompleteness (no one is free so long as others remain unfree) necessitates action directed at changing society. Freedom, therefore, is ultimately a practice, rather than a possession or a state of being.”14 To want freedom is to welcome struggle. This idea is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. We are not asking for struggle; we just understand that justice will not happen without it.
When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no shortcuts and no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination. Educational justice is going to take people power, driven by the spirit and ideas of the folx who have done the work of antiracism before: abolitionists. The fact that dark people are tasked with the work of dismantling these centuries-old oppressions is a continuation of racism. Toni Morrison once said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”15 This endless, and habitually thankless, job of radical collective freedom-building is an act of survival, but we who are dark want to do more than survive: we want to thrive. A life of survival is not really living.
REFORM AIN’T JUSTICE
Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive. Individuals with little to no experience are tasked with working in struggling schools that were designed to fail (e.g., they are underfunded, with high teacher burnout, tests that punish students, and low-quality teachers) and given only two years—if they can make it that long—to “make a difference,” when hundreds more qualified have tried and failed before them. These educational parasites need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative and the financial reason for their existence. Education reform is big business, just like prisons. Creating the narrative that dark people are criminals to justify locking them up for profit is no different from continuously reminding the American public that there is an educational achievement gap while conveniently never mentioning America’s role in creating the gap. Both prisons and schools create a narrative of public outrage and fear that dark bodies need saving from themselves. The two industries play off each other, and America believes that criminality and low achievement go hand in hand. The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments.16 Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.17
Education reformers take up space in urban schools offering nothing more than survival tactics to children of color in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education. The barriers of racism, discrimination, concentrated poverty, and access to college—persistent, structural barriers—cannot be eradicated by tweaking the system or making adjustments. We must struggle together not only to reimagine schools but to build new schools that we are taught to believe are impossible: schools based on intersectional justice, antiracism, love, healing, and joy. This book is about that struggle and the possibilities of committing ourselves to an abolitionist pursuit to educational freedom—freedom, not reform. Abolitionist teaching is built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving.
I know as an educator that this task seems daunting and overwhelming in an already taxing mission, but courage and vision are required. Abolitionist teaching is choosing to engage in the struggle for educational justice knowing that you have the ability and human right to refuse oppression and refuse to oppress others, mainly your students. What does this approach look like in the classroom and beyond? Teachers working with community groups in solidarity to address issues impacting their students and their students’ communities. Reimagining and rewriting curriculums with local and national activists to provide students with not only examples of resistance but also strategies of resistance. Protecting and standing in solidarity with immigrant children and their families. Joining pro-immigrant community organizations in the fight for rights for all. Knowing that freedom is impossible without women and queer leaders being the thinkers and doers of abolitionist movements. Engaging in civics education that teaches direct action and civil disobedience while incorporating the techniques of the millennial freedom-fighting generation, such as social media, impactful hashtags, and online petitions.
Abolitionist teaching is refusing to take part in zero-tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline. Demanding restorative justice in our schools as the only schoolwide or districtwide approach to improving school culture. Refusing the idea that children do not need recess and insisting that all children need to play. Abolitionist teaching ensures that students feel safe in schools and that schools are not perpetrators of violence toward the very students they are supposed to protect. Abolitionist teaching is calling out your fellow teachers who degrade and diminish dark children and do not think dark children matter—we must demand that they leave the profession; we have to call them out. Abolitionist teaching stands in solidarity with parents and fellow teachers opposing standardized testing, English-only education, racist teachers, arming teachers with guns, and turning schools into prisons. Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist, discriminatory, and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving. To learn the sociopolitical landscape of their students’ communities through a historical, intersectional justice lens. To abandon teaching gimmicks like “grit” that present the experiences of dark youth as ahistorical and further pathologize them and evoke collective freedom dreaming. These dreams are spaces of love, solidarity, and resiliency, as we demand what seems impossible from a place of love and joy. While we do not forget injustice, we are focused instead on love, well-being, and joy and refuse to be oppressed any longer. Lastly, teachers must embrace theories such as critical race theory, settler colonialism, Black feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies, and other critical theories that have the ability to interrogate anti-Blackness and frame experiences with injustice, focusing the moral compass toward a North Star that is ready for a long and dissenting fight for educational justice. These theories additionally help in understanding that educational justice can happen only through a simultaneous fight for economic justice, racial justice, housing justice, environmental justice, religious justice, queer justice, trans justice, citizenship justice, and disability justice.
DO WE REALLY LOVE ALL CHILDREN?
To achieve the goals of abolitionist teaching, we must demand the impossible and employ a radical imagination focused on intersectional justice through community building and grassroots organizing. To even begin to attack our destructive and punitive educational system, pedagogies that promote social justice must have teeth. They must move beyond feel-good language and gimmicks to help educators understand and recognize America and its schools as spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and White supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color. For example, too much of the field of education is filled with quick fixes or slogans (e.g., No Excuses), gimmicks (e.g., grit), best practices (e.g., benchmarking), and professional developments (e.g., Understanding Poverty) that focus on dark students through the lenses of daily struggles with trauma, gaps in learning, poverty, hunger, and language barriers. Each fix falls short precisely because it fails to acknowledge how these struggles are direct consequences of injustice.
Education research is crowded with studies that acknowledge dark children’s pain but never the source of their pain, the legacy that pain has left, or how that pain can be healed. I have seen professional development sessions titled “The Crisis in Black Education,” “The Problem with Black Boys,” and “Addressing a Poverty Mindset.” These types of workshops White-splain Black folx’ challenges to White folx but rarely discuss the topics of redlining, housing discrimination, White flight, gentrification, police brutality, racial health disparities, and high unemployment, problems that are not due to low levels of education but to the racism discussed.18 Teaching strategies and education reform models must offer more than educational survival tactics to dark children—test-taking skills, acronyms, character education, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, charter schools, school choice. They need to be rooted in an abolitionist praxis that, with urgency, embraces what seems impossible: education for collective dignity and human power for justice.
Teachers who say they are deeply concerned about social justice or that they “love all children” but cannot say the words “Black Lives Matter” have no real understanding of what social justice is and what it truly means to love, find joy, and appreciate their students and their students’ culture. For the past ten years I have taught future teachers at the collegiate level. In 2016, right after the election of Trump, one of my White students, who “loves all children,” posted a picture on Instagram with her boyfriend wearing a sweater that read “All I Want for Christmas Is Hillary’s Emails,” captioned “#buildthatwall.” Throughout the semester this student said and wrote all the right things to demonstrate a belief in social justice and an assumption that all students could learn, that diversity was important, and that community building was a vital part of education. However, moving theory to practice was shattered with that one post. In actuality, for most students—not all, but most—one course focused on social justice cannot undo a lifetime of racist thinking and of learning in racial isolation. My point here is not to endorse Hillary Clinton—especially since many of her policies were anti-Black—but to highlight how a future educator can engage the language of justice and culturally relevant teaching, while webbed to a disposition that is harmful to all students.
In reality, many of these teachers who “love all children” are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia. These teachers do not belong in classrooms with dark children or even White children because antidarkness can happen without dark children in the room. Antidarkness is the social disregard for dark bodies and the denial of dark people’s existence and humanity.19 When White students attend nearly all-White schools, intentionally removed from America’s darkness to reinforce White dominance, that is antidarkness. When dark people are presented in school curriculums as unfortunate circumstances of history, that is antidarkness. When schools are filled with White faces in positions of authority and dark faces in the school’s help staff, that is antidarkness. The idea that dark people have had no impact on history or the progress of mankind is one of the foundational ideas of White supremacy. Denying dark people’s existence and contributions to human progress relegates dark folx to being takers and not cocreators of history or their lives. If we are being truly honest, if a teacher believes Mexicans are “animals,” that teacher cannot teach Mexican children. Simply said, a teacher cannot support hateful rhetoric about dark children and their families and still teach them with kindness, love, and care and see the beauty in that child’s culture.
Simply put, many of our schools function as spaces of dark suffering. Education researcher Michael Dumas argues that schools operate as spaces of “racial suffering” because “educational access and opportunity seems increasingly (and even intentionally) elusive” to dark children.20 To understand schools as sites of dark suffering is to understand how antidarkness works in the day-to-day lives of both dark and White children. Antidarkness in our schools cannot be remedied by advocating for charter schools, No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush’s education reform policy), the Common Core, or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama’s education reform policy); the perpetual suffering dark families endure in yearning for an education for their children is the elucidation of survival, the conundrum of a dark reality. What is astonishing is that through all the suffering the dark body endures, there is joy, Black joy. I do not mean the type of fabricated and forced joy found in a Pepsi commercial; I am talking about joy that originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life’s greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering.
This book is about struggle and the possibilities of committing ourselves to an abolitionist approach to educational freedom, not reform, built on criticality civics, joy, theory, love, refusal, creativity, community, and, ultimately, mattering. Because through flashes of clairvoyance, present goals and ideals reveal that what we who are dark want is to matter to this country and thrive as full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of White American citizens.