CHAPTER 2

EDUCATIONAL SURVIVAL

Survival: The state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.

—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

—JAMES BALDWIN¹

I STARTED MY TEACHING CAREER MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS ago in Homestead, Florida, not far from Everglades National Park and Turkey Point. In 2016, a nuclear power plant leaked dangerous water waste into Biscayne Bay, ultimately polluting nearby drinking supplies. Like most teachers, I did not live near my school; I lived in Miami, approximately forty miles away. I was young and wanted nothing more than to call my family in cold upstate New York to casually remind them that I was living in tropical Miami, just miles from the beach. However, Monday through Friday, and on some weekends, I drove down what felt like the never-ending highway of US 1 and entered what seemed to be a different world unfamiliar to most. It was my first time living in a place where saying the word “diversity” felt genuine. There were so many shades of dark children who spoke with the tongue of my ancestors unknown to me. Although my school was filled with mostly Black students, the halls were packed with teachers, administrators, and students from Haiti, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Guatemala. The school printed permission slips in three languages: English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. As diverse as the school was, and still is, its diversity was held together by poverty. The school was a perfect example of the need for intersectionality in the field of education, of how race, ethnicity, nationality, and class intersect and leave students living and learning in enclaves of racial (dark) and economic isolation.

Back in 2003, when I was teaching second and third grade, I did not have the sociopolitical awareness or language to know that I was witnessing and participating in dark suffering and the educational survival complex. I remember feeling overwhelmed with confusion the first time I learned that many of my students had never gone to South Beach in Miami, or that a few were repeating the third grade because their parents were migrant workers, so they never completed a full year of school in the same year. A student of a migrant family would start at our school, leave in the middle of the year, and then return after their parents’ seasonal work had ended. The flux of work coupled with the high-stakes testing of No Child Left Behind perpetually and deliberately did, in fact, leave these students to flounder; to be blunt, they were not even playing in the same game as their peers who lived on the pristine roads of South Florida.

A good number of my students came from poor working families. These parents went to work every day at the bottom of the US wage distribution; they worked simply, at best, to survive. The reality is that “our political economy is structured to create poverty and inequality.”² Schools reflect our political economy. The fact that schools are funded by local property taxes ensures that students who live in poor communities receive an education that will maintain, and, in fact, widen the gap between the über-rich, the rich, the rapidly shrinking middle class, the working poor, and the poor. This system renders schools ineffective in providing poor students any type of real social mobility. Schools in higher-income districts or rich enclaves are well-resourced, have high-quality teachers, and have low teacher turnover. In addition, the Parent Teacher Associations of affluent schools work to ensure that extracurricular activities, community initiatives, and field trips are offered to the already privileged.

To put some real numbers to the lives of average families, in 2017, 95 percent of wealth created went directly into the pockets of the top 1 percent of society.³ Meanwhile, the median income for a family of four was $54,000, with $16,000 in credit card debt, more than $172,806 in home mortgages, $28,535 in car loans, and just under $50,000 in student loans.⁴ This economic state is what our country calls the middle class—folx in debt, barely hanging on, living paycheck to paycheck. This perpetual state of financial precariousness is only exacerbated when you are dark, poor, and living in isolation.

In terms of race, a 2014 study found that the wealth gap between White and Black families had widened to its highest levels since 1989.⁵ The children of Black families that do reach the middle class have a more difficult time maintaining that status, much less achieving more than their parents. For example, Black college graduates are twice as likely to experience unemployment as their White counterparts. College-educated Hispanics were hit hard by the collapse of the housing market: their net worth crashed 72 percent between 2007 and 2013.⁶

Although these reported statistics paint a bleak picture, they do not even come close to capturing the lives of my former students in South Florida. My students were far from middle class; the median household income in that area for 2003 was roughly $36,850, with 28.3 percent of people living below the poverty line ($19,500 for a family of four). Today the poverty line is roughly $24,250, with racism and sexism still at the core of poverty, woven into the fabric of the US. According to 2016 US Census data, women were 35 percent more likely to live in poverty than men.⁷ Of the 16.9 million women living in poverty, 45.7 percent live in extreme poverty, with an income at or below 50 percent of the federal poverty level.⁸ It is no coincidence that women of color and their children make up a vast majority of women living in poverty.

Education researchers know that without a long-term strategy to eradicate the causes of racial and economic isolation—such as discrimination, predatory lending, housing displacement, the gender wage gap, rising healthcare costs, and unemployment (which leads to the 99 percent being no better than indentured servants to the 1 percent)—“heroic attempts to restructure schools or to introduce new pedagogical techniques in the classroom will be difficult to sustain.”⁹ No type of pedagogy, however effective, can single-handedly remove the barriers of racism, discrimination, homophobia, segregation, Islamophobia, homelessness, access to college, and concentrated poverty, but antiracist pedagogy combined with grassroots organizing can prepare students and their families to demand the impossible in the fight for eradicating these persistent and structural barriers. Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice.

To that end, the state of Florida labeled my school a failing school, an “F” school. In Florida, individual schools are given letter grades based on Florida’s Standards Assessment, with the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) being a significant portion of the grade. Yearly, these grades are released in the newspaper for all to see. As a first-year teacher, I was confused about what my job was as an educator. What were my priorities? I felt as though my job centered on teaching to the test to raise test scores so the school would not be taken over by the state or closed down. At times it felt like our students’ low test scores threatened our ability to keep our jobs, our homes, our livelihoods. It was also the first time in my life I was making enough money to cover my bills. I didn’t want to give that security up, even though I was underpaid. I was struggling to remember why I became a teacher, and the students were struggling with the purpose of it all. We were all trying to survive.

As a parent, I cannot imagine the frustration, anger, and hopelessness of waking up your child every morning to attend a failing school. But what about the students? What does it mean to walk into a building every day thinking the school is failing not because of teachers or administrators, nor a sociopolitical history of dark communities being intentionally destabilized, terrorized, and put into a carceral state, but because of your dark skin? A good number of my students in Homestead, especially those whose second language was English—language being a critical component of a person’s identity—had failed the FCAT multiple times because it was administered in English. Failing a test because your language is deemed inferior communicates a message about your identity and ideas of who is and what is smart.

Some of my students were repeating the third grade for the second or third time. The FCAT did not measure their intelligence; it just served as another reminder that their darkness and language were not valued in a country that may require the completion of a Spanish-language class to graduate from high school but condemns you for speaking Spanish as your first language. This paradox is what it means for your culture to be invisible and visible at the same time. Surrounded by inequalities, dark students begin to think that dark suffering is normal. How do children with the world in front of them make peace with their suffering? How and should they make peace with their suffering? Faced with these issues, I was lost as a new teacher.

As I relate my experiences, and put the pieces together after all these years, the words of James Baldwin seem appropriate and clairvoyant in regard to the lives of my students and me: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish… . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”¹⁰ These dark families were “casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable.”¹¹

Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” begins by asking the question: “What happens to a dream deferred?”¹² My students were smart, funny, kind, hardworking, and hopeful, with dreams of their own. However, my students were physically, emotionally, financially, geographically, and educationally trapped. Telling them they could be whatever they wanted to be was simply a lie, and they knew it. The barriers of race, language, and class predetermined their place in the world. My students were angry and I understood this anger firsthand. I grew up in the inner city of Rochester, New York, where I attended subpar schools. I was able to flee my own version of Harlem on a college basketball scholarship, but I arrived academically unprepared and broke.

Ultimately, my students in Homestead pushed me to become a better teacher by prompting me to ask myself difficult questions about our existence as dark people and my role in helping us unpack our trapped shared fates. Over the course of my time there, which was not long because I left to enter a PhD program, I did not move beyond the surface of teaching educational survival skills—high-stakes standardized testing, assessments, grades, character education—because the fate of my students had little relation to such lessons; it was their lives, their humanity, their dignity playing out in that school every day. As I write this book, I am expected to humanize my students, write vignettes about my educational experiences that highlighted ups and downs in the classroom, but the simple truth is, my students and I were merely trying to survive. We all carried the inflicted weight of America’s dark suffering.

Looking back now, I see my first year as a teacher was riddled with insecurities. Although my students were new to me, I felt as though I knew them all personally because there were pieces of me inside each of them. I knew the shape of their noses, the fullness of their lips. I shared with them what it feels like on a hot summer day to watch your skin made darker by the kiss of the sun, but I also know that our beautiful skin functions as a biological, ebony-colored tattoo that labels our bodies and our spirits as disposable to those who produce and consume racist ideas. I heard the whispered racist comments about dark children in the halls of a building filled with the elusive hopes and dreams of racial progress. I personally witnessed educators lower their expectations for students of color while insisting they were doing what was best for their students. I knew the face and crooked smile of a child who walks into a school building every day determined to be the extraordinary, magical Negro who proves teachers wrong about his or her intellectual abilities, and I knew the face of anger and anguish of a child who has analyzed with great complexity the rigged and unjust system of public education for dark children, who has experienced suffering and sits in a class infuriated by the circumstances that dictate his or her life. I was watching, living, and teaching education for survival, at best, without an understanding of why I could not get out of survival mode. I did not truly understand what came before me that set the stage for the dark suffering I was experiencing, which, while contextually different from my own childhood as a little Black girl in upstate New York, felt so familiar: growing up dark.

WHITE RAGE

The conditions that preserve dark suffering are the result of hundreds of years and multiple continents’ commitment to creating and maintaining destructive, insidious, racist ideals that uphold White supremacy and anti-Blackness. The field of education is anchored in White rage, especially public education. 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. But education from the outset was built on White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and sexism. America’s first public schools, often called grammar schools, were only for White, wealthy males. And over time, when any group outside of the established norm fought for the right to educate their children, particularly by way of their culture and/or language, they were met with White rage. Native American children were taken away from their families and put into boarding schools (such as Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School), African American children were told second-class schooling was fine by way of “separate but equal,” California school codes excluded Asian American children from public schools, and in 1855, California required that all school instruction be conducted in English.

When the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and took over the country in what former president Ulysses S. Grant called “the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,”¹³ Spanish was replaced with English and teachers were brought from America to teach Puerto Rican children. Education is one of the primary tools used to maintain White supremacy and anti-immigrant hate. Teachers entering the field of education must know this history, acknowledge this history, and understand why it matters in the present-day context of education, White rage, and dark suffering.

In discussions of the South, oftentimes, Florida is not included. Conversations about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement primarily focus on Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, because many significant court cases and historic marches and protests took place in these states. But Florida’s history is important to understanding present-day injustices (the killings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, the “stand your ground” law) and my former school.

You cannot discuss White supremacy without considering White rage. Historian Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, argues, “The trigger of White rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”¹⁴ A devastating example of White rage, which is always present, festering, and plotting, occurred in the town of Ocoee, Florida, on November 2, 1920. The region was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. According to reports, until at least 1959, a sign hung at the town’s line that read “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcomed.”¹⁵ Ocoee was also considered a sundown town, described by historian and author James W. Loewen as an “organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus ‘all-White’ on purpose.”¹⁶ White rage erupted when John Moses Cheney, a white judge who supported efforts to register Black voters to win his campaign, and two Black businessmen, Mose Norman and Julius “July” Perry, publicly encouraged Black folx to vote. Perry “encouraged young blacks to be educated and stand up for themselves as first-class citizens.”¹⁷ As Black folx arrived at the polls on Election Day, they were met by a growing White mob. When the dust settled, sixty Black citizens had been killed and their property destroyed for having ambition, drive, and purpose: for mattering. Perry was lynched for daring to matter.

Almost sixty years later, on December 17, 1979, and 250 miles south down Florida’s turnpike in Miami, Arthur McDuffie, a Black former Marine, ran a red light on his motorcycle and led four White police officers on an eight-minute high-speed chase. When the police finally stopped him, they beat him into a coma. He died four days later at a nearby hospital. The officers were charged with manslaughter and tampering with evidence. Due to fear of an uprising, the trial was moved to Tampa, where an all-White, all-male jury found the four officers not guilty. Miles away in Miami, a city of dark folx tired of being collectively punished and disempowered, people took to the streets in protest, which quickly escalated into a riot. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” For three days in Miami, dark folx screamed at the top of their lungs but to deaf ears. In a city divided and enraged—darkness on one side, Whiteness on the other—eighteen people died and over four hundred were injured. More than 3,500 National Guard officers flooded the streets. In the days following the uprising, the police officers responsible for McDuffie’s death were reinstated after the Miami Fraternal Order of Police threatened a walkout.

While the McDuffie incident made national news, many similar instances of White Rage in Florida went unnoticed. Just one year earlier, in 1978, a White state trooper sexually molested an eleven-year-old Black girl. He received no jail time. That same year, an off-duty police officer working as a security guard shot and killed a twenty-two-year-old Black man. The officer faced no jail time. In 1979, detectives mistakenly served a search warrant at the home of a retired Black educator, who was then seriously injured in a struggle with police. No criminal charges were brought against the officers. Janet Reno, then the state’s attorney for Miami-Dade County, upheld White rage by presiding over all of these cases. Black leaders demanded her removal from office, to no avail. Thirteen years later, President Bill Clinton nominated Reno to become the first woman to serve as United States attorney general. Reno’s appointment came after two other female nominees withdrew (both were found to have employed undocumented workers).

In 2005, with the financial support and influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and in a country that had spent centuries criminalizing dark bodies, Florida passed its “stand your ground” law. The law was written to protect White rage and to uphold the power of conservative state legislators and private companies such as Walmart, America’s largest seller of guns. Conservative lawmakers, the NRA, and Walmart were all members of the America Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the organization that fought to expand the scope of the “castle doctrine” law, which allowed for violent self-defense in the home. The stand your ground law moved “home-defense principles into the streets.”¹⁸ In short, stand your ground gave immunity to White rage, the same White rage that has repeatedly and systematically kidnapped and killed dark children.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago, was visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi. The eighth grader was kidnapped and beaten to death for allegedly flirting with a White woman, Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his halfbrother, J. W. Milam, brutally beat Emmett and then shot him in the head. His body was found days later in the Tallahatchie River. An all-White, all-male jury acquitted both men even after they admitted to kidnapping Emmett. In 2008, Carolyn Bryant, speaking to Timothy B. Tyson for his book on Emmett’s death, admitted that Emmett never “grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities,” which she had asserted under oath on the witness stand.¹⁹ She later said in the same interview: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”²⁰

White rage also claimed Addie Mae Collins (ten years old), Cynthia Wesley (fourteen), Carole Robertson (fourteen), and Denise McNair (eleven), the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Four Klan members placed fifteen sticks of dynamite underneath the front steps of the church and lit the fuse. These men were not charged with murder until 1977. Two were convicted and sent to prison in 2002, almost forty years after the bombing. The accounts of these children and their murderers are blatant, violent examples of this country’s deep investment in White rage, in turn empowered by an (in)justice system that renders this nation a superpredator.

The United States has a long history of passing laws that protect Whites when they kill, torture, and displace dark people. The slave codes of the 1700s and 1800s allowed White men to kill Black people with impunity. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 killed thousands of Native Americans by forcefully removing them from their land in the Deep South to make room for White settlers who would become slaveholders. After Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws were enacted to maintain racial segregation and White rage. According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, between 1877 and 1950, nearly four thousand Black men, women, and children were lynched.²¹ During World War II, Japanese Americans were forcibly taken to internment camps. The federal government apologized and disbursed over $36 million in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans.²² In the summer of 2018, the US government labeled individuals seeking asylum along the US–Mexico border as criminals and placed their children in government foster care; some were put in cages. From October 1, 2017, to May 31, 2018, the government took more than 2,700 children from their families.²³ These horrific practices—lynchings, shootings, separating families, and beatings—were all protected by the US (in)justice superpredator system.

My experiences teaching in Florida represent just one statewide example of dark suffering at the hands of White rage. Backward-mapping Florida’s history of White rage, in conversation with the US as a whole, provides some of the sociopolitical context needed to understand how George Zimmerman was free to shoot and kill unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. That night, Trayvon was simply walking with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea in a gated community, which he had visited several times before, when the superpredator, White rage, took his life. Jurors at Zimmerman’s trial were informed that Trayvon’s killer had the right to stand his ground; no instructions were given regarding Trayvon’s right to defend himself. Zimmerman was found not guilty.

Less than a year after Trayvon’s murder, seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Florida for playing loud rap music and not obeying a White man’s command to turn his music down. Michael Dunn fired ten bullets into Jordan’s SUV, almost killing Jordan’s friends in the backset. After he fired those fatal shots, Dunn and his fiancée drove off, ordered pizza, walked their dog, and never called the police. Dunn’s first trial resulted in a mistrial, but he was eventually convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder. He will spend the rest of his life in prison, while Jordan’s parents mourn their son for the rest of their lives. Trayvon and Jordan, like all dark children, had dreams. Their dreams were destroyed by White rage, rage that is endorsed, celebrated, and profited from in our schools because dark children are educated only to survive.

EDUCATIONAL SURVIVAL COMPLEX

Most dark suffering does not make the nightly news or our social media posts. If we are honest, most dark suffering goes unnoticed by too many Americans, but America’s educational history is overrun with dark suffering. Native American boarding schools, school segregation, English-only instruction, Brown v. Board of Education, No Child Left Behind, school choice, charter schools, character education, Race to the Top … all have been components of an educational system built on the suffering of students of color. I call this the educational survival complex, in which students are left learning to merely survive, learning how schools mimic the world they live in, thus making schools a training site for a life of exhaustion.

This reality makes it difficult to digest the dark suffering that goes on in our schools because we want to believe that our schools can repair the sins of our nation. To mitigate their suffering and uphold Whiteness, dark families are given one short-sighted, often racist education reform model after another. First, the racist educational survival complex snatched Native American children away from their parents for religious and cultural conversion—nothing short of cultural and linguistic genocide. They established English-only schools. The racist educational survival complex told dark families that schools were “separate but equal.” More than a lie, it was a legal tactic to maintain White superiority as Black folx demanded to matter. Next came the racial experiment of desegregating schools. Legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that Black folx would have been better served if the court had ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education and enforced the “equal” part of “separate but equal.” W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument in 1935; he proclaimed, “Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.”²⁴

Before the landmark decision of Brown in 1954, Black schools were proud institutions that “provided Black communities with cohesion and leadership.”²⁵ Though Black schools’ facilities and books were inferior to their White counterparts, the education they provided was not. In oral-history interviews, Black teachers reflecting on Black schools before Brown constantly made remarks like, “Black schools were places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded respect, and where parents supported teachers.” Educating Black children was viewed as the collective responsibility of the community. Schools were the anchors for the Black community, and teachers were leaders inside and outside school walls. Schools represented spaces of solidarity, places to build power amid White rage. Schools were the foundation of moving toward thriving. The educational survival complex ensured that after Brown, Black folx would remain unable to thrive. White rage and White flight after Brown left Blacks in the inner cities in racial and economic isolation as Whites moved to the suburbs, thereby excluding dark people from employment, housing, higher property values (which help create generational wealth), and educational opportunities, while manufacturing imaginary school zone lines, which ensured that dark children could never attend schools with their White children. As schools desegregated, more than thirty-eight thousand Black teachers and principals lost their jobs due to the closing of all-Black schools and the fact that White parents did not want their children taught by Black teachers.²⁶ Brown promised educational opportunity, social mobility, and higher graduation rates. Six decades later, researchers have found that students of color make up a majority of public school enrollment, while White students make up more than half of the nation’s overall enrollment; most White students attend a school where three-quarters of their peers are White too. Currently, less than 2 percent of teachers are Black men; White men and women make up more than 80 percent of the teaching force.²⁷ Teacher retention is also at an all-time low.²⁸ Many White teachers are by-products of White flight and White rage. They have grown up living and learning in communities created by their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ hate and fear of darkness. Many of these teachers are unaware of how their lily-White communities were established in and have upheld Whiteness. This lack of awareness, of course, often leads them to measure their communities against the urban school communities they teach in, which makes subscribing to stereotypes easier.

For example, some of the most hypersegregated schools are concentrated in the urban centers of Chicago, New York, Detroit, Boston, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. In metro Los Angeles, 30 percent of Latinx students attend a school where Whites make up 1 percent or less of the enrollment.²⁹ Nationwide, 80 percent of Latinx students and 74 percent of Black students attend majority non-White schools. America’s schools are also segregated based on class. On the sixtieth anniversary of Brown, the federal Government Accountability Office released a predictable report, if you understand White rage, stating that “high-poverty, high-minority schools are under-resourced and over-disciplined.”³⁰ Schools located in low-income neighborhoods are underfunded, which means they have fewer school resources, less school personnel, and, ultimately, less social and economic mobility. Black students are six times more likely than White students to attend a high-poverty school. Latinx students face triple segregation: by race, poverty, and language. Overall, only 9 percent of low-income students graduate from college.³¹ Given the hypersegregation of today’s schools and the lack of economic and social mobility for dark students, it is safe to say that Brown‘s mission has failed.

The latest iteration of the educational survival complex is the charter school movement. Like most liberal egalitarian efforts, charter schools perpetuate inequalities, pulling high-achieving students from traditional public schools. Many charter schools are operated by education management organizations (EMOs) that work to privatize public education, indirectly and directly. Moreover, successful charter schools push low-income dark families out of their own neighborhoods. Gentrification is displacing millions of such families. Atlanta, where I live, is gentrifying at twice the rate of other American cities such as Washington, DC, New Orleans, Portland, and Seattle. I have watched traditionally Black neighborhoods become overwhelmingly White in a matter of years. In 2014, Atlanta’s inequality gap was the highest in the nation, and by 2016 it was still third.³² Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods like the Old Fourth Ward—where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up, a prominent Black community sixty years ago—are almost half White, with rising home prices pushing dark folx to the edges of the city and society. A high-performing school, whether charter or traditional, will expedite the displacement of dark families.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the “no excuses” teaching approach of many charter schools around the country. Charter school networks such as Success Academy and KIPP popularized aggressive, paternalistic, and racist ideological teaching practices on dark bodies. The boards of directors operating these charter schools are typically composed of wealthy philanthropists, corporate foundations, and Wall Street hedge fund managers who believe dark children need discipline, character education, rudimentary academic skills, and full submission to White economic demands.³³ In his book Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching, Jim Horn documents in great detail the unrelenting pressure on students to meet education benchmarks—what some KIPP school officials called the “plan of attack”—and the resulting suffering that dark families experience at charter schools. For example, when a group of fourth-grade students failed to use test-taking strategies, the leader at the school sent this email to fourth-grade teachers:

We can NOT let up on them… . Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business, and there has to be misery felt for kids who are not doing what is expected of them.³⁴

Dark children at KIPP cannot fail, cannot express their stress, cannot feel pain from a world that rejects them, and cannot make mistakes, one of the critical and necessary experiences of childhood. The “no excuses” model is just another form of zero tolerance. These schools function to feed the school-to-prison pipeline that targets dark children. In March 2016, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA released data from one of the largest studies ever to research school discipline records, involving more than 5,250 charter schools.³⁵ The study found that charter schools suspend Black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared with White and nondisabled students. For example, the study reported that five hundred charter schools suspended Black students at a rate of 10 percentage points higher than their White peers. This has a direct impact on children’s futures, as extensive research demonstrates that high suspension rates are part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Again, it’s another way in which the educational survival complex and the prison-industrial complex are tied together to profit from dark suffering.

In 2015, officials at Brooklyn’s Success Academy Fort Greene were publicly shamed for maintaining a “Got to Go” list of students who were blacklisted from the school’s network because of repeated suspensions and/or their parents not complying with school rules. Charter school networks like Success Academy are notorious for “coaching” students and their families out of school. In 2017, parents sued KIPP Houston for charging students for reading materials and classroom supplies. KIPP is a free public charter that receives state and local funds to pay for school supplies and books, like any other public school, but is also well-supported nationally by corporate and private donors. An investigation found that KIPP’s Houston branch collected approximately $2.3 million in student fees from low-income families during the 2015–2016 school year.³⁶ These families are now demanding their money back.

After all the dark suffering in and outside of school, students of charter schools who are not pushed out—particularly at those schools that serve dark, low-income communities—do not graduate from college at dramatically higher rates than the same demographic of students who attend traditional public schools. According to the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard University, the American dream, if there ever was one for dark people, is fading fast. Children have a 50 percent chance of earning more or the same as their parents. A half century ago, that possibility was 90 percent. Even a person’s life expectancy is tied to his or her education, income, and location. Data suggest that “for the poorest Americans, life expectancies are 6 years higher in New York than in Detroit.”³⁷

Profiting from dark children’s suffering is not just for the testing, prison, and textbook industries but also for private investors and hedge funds. In 2016, a group of education researchers sounded the alarm comparing charter schools to subprime mortgages.³⁸ Subprime mortgages are high-risk mortgage loans that were common leading up to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Banks specifically targeted Black people by issuing loans they knew they could not repay by imposing unfair and aggressive loan terms, a practice called predatory lending. This practice is one of the many reasons the housing bubble burst. Also, a high number of Black people were deceived into taking out home loans that ruined their chances of ever building wealth. Similarly, researchers point out that there is a charter school bubble growing too.

One investment strategy used by corporate school reformers (akin to disaster capitalists) is the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000, which provides tax incentives for seven years to businesses that reside and hire residents in economically depressed communities. To increase profits, investors lobby federal and local governments to ease regulations and restrictions that limit the number of charter schools in a particular state or school district. Deregulating charter school growth allows corporate school reformers to open up public schools to the highest bidder. This scheme motivates investors such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to donate half a million dollars of stock to organizations that distribute charter school funding.³⁹ Zuckerberg also opened his own foundation, Startup:Education, to build more charter schools.⁴⁰ The real estate industry receives massive tax cuts for buying inner-city schools, homes, and buildings. Many of the most über-rich hedge fund operators have close ties to charter schools. David Tepper ($3.5 billion in earnings in 2013) founded Appaloosa Management and Better Education for Kids; Steven A. Cohen ($2.4 billion in 2013) of SAC Capital Advisors donated $10 million to the Achievement First charter school network.⁴¹

The push to open so many charter schools, when only 17 percent of them academically outperform public schools, is tied to profiting from dark suffering. Corporate school reformers prey on the suffering and hopes of dark communities, and just like the subprime-mortgages practice of predatory lending, they lack regulation and oversight. Once the charter school bubble bursts, dark communities will be left with what education researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings calls “education debt.”⁴² According to Ladson-Billings, education debt has accumulated over time, composed of the US’ historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debts.⁴³ Corporate school reformers profit from the history of oppression of dark people. Their earnings rely on the stability of dark children and their families surviving while preying on their desire to do more than just survive. They make money on dark families’ dreams of thriving through education.

All of this reform implemented by the educational survival complex has made billions for the testing industry, the hedge fund industry, the textbook industry, the housing industry, and elitist nonprofit organizations that perpetuate and operate from a stereotypical master narrative regarding dark children and their families but, without fail, leave dark families struggling to survive. Corporate school reformers are superpredators too. But what about the spirit enduring in constant survival mode, which is violence by another name? This type of violence is less visceral and seemingly less tragic than the physical acts of murder at the hands of White mobs or White men acting on their White rage, but the racist, hateful language and systemic, institutionalized, antidark, state-sanctioned violence that dark children endure on a daily basis in the educational survival complex murders the spirit; it’s a slow death, but a death nonetheless.

SPIRIT-MURDERING

In October 2015, a Black girl at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, was thrown from her desk and across the floor by the school’s resource officer, Ben Fields. According to reports, Fields was called when the student refused to hand over her cell phone to her teacher. The incident was recorded by two classmates in the room. To add insult to injury, when another Black female student spoke out about the incident, she was arrested for “disturbing the school.” Little is known about the young Black girl who was body-slammed by her school’s resource officer; however, we know she was recently placed in foster care after the death of her mother. After the assault, reports did surface that the students of Spring Valley referred to Fields as “the Incredible Hulk” because of his violent behavior with students at the school.

Six months before the Spring Valley High School incident in South Carolina, a Georgia principal verbally assaulted the students and families of TNT Academy, an alternative high school, at the school’s graduation ceremony. After the school’s principal, Nancy Gordeuk, erroneously dismissed the graduating class before the school’s valedictorian gave his speech, she asked the crowd to return to hear his remarks. When it seemed that attendees were not following Gordeuk’s instructions, she snidely remarked to a predominantly Black audience, “Look who’s leaving—all the Black people.” Not unexpectedly, students and their families were offended by her racist statement, and the crowd exploded in protest.

In 2016, Ryan Turk, a Black middle school student in Prince William County, Virginia, took a sixty-five-cent milk carton from the school’s cafeteria. Ryan admitted he cut the lunch line and proceeded to take a carton of milk without going through the line. The school’s resource officer witnessed the incident, then took Ryan to the principal’s office, where his mother says he was searched for drugs. According to police, Ryan became hostile and was placed in handcuffs. Ultimately, Ryan was charged with disorderly conduct and petit larceny. Ryan is allowed free milk as part of the school’s free- and reduced-price-lunch program. Instead of having a conversation with Ryan about following procedures, police arrested him. Ryan turned down a plea of nonjudicial punishment because he felt that he did not steal the carton of milk since he received free lunch, raising the question: how can you steal something that is rightfully yours? The prosecutor dropped the charges before the case went to trial.

In 2013, Vanessa VanDyke, a Black twelve-year-old student in Orlando, was threatened with expulsion from her private Christian school for not cutting her natural hair because school officials characterized her hair as a “distraction.” Vanessa was being teased and bullied about her beautiful Afro. Vanessa told local reporters, “I’m depressed about leaving my friends and people that I’ve known for a while, but I’d rather have that than the principals and administrators picking on me and saying that I should change my hair.”⁴⁴ Facing public pressure and outrage, Vanessa’s school withdrew the threat of expulsion. That same year, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a seven-year-old Black girl, Tiana Parker, was sent home from school for having locked hair. The school’s official policy stated, “Hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros, mohawks, and other faddish styles are unacceptable.” This policy is not just about hair; the policy is informed by racist ideas of Black peoples’ unfitness, unattractiveness, and inferiority.

In June 2016, Kim Stidham, a charter school principal in Duval County, Florida, posted on Facebook a song with the lyrics, “Take all of the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree, round up all them bad boys, hang them high in the street for all the people to see.”⁴⁵ Stidham released a statement after she came under fire for her post:

I am absolutely devastated that my personal political views were perceived to be racist in any way. I am a firm believer in equality, justice and respect for all individuals and I recognize now that some of my posts could have been misunderstood. I appreciate the fact that those who were offended brought this to my attention so that I could rectify the situation. I encourage anyone who has any concerns about this to come to me directly so that we can discuss it further.⁴⁶

Her statement is a perfect example of how racist educators believe their actions outside the class in no way impact their classroom or school. She is “devastated” that her personal views could be seen as racist, but history confirms her racism. Black women, men, and children were rounded up and killed by White mobs; there is no other way to “perceive” her words. Also, people who are “firm believer[s] in equality, justice and respect” can be racist; merely saying the words does not make you a freedom fighter—your actions do. Lastly, Stidham did not apologize because in her mind she did nothing wrong. Racist educators seldom take responsibility for their racist actions and believe the resulting situation is just a misunderstanding or a lack of cultural awareness; again, this denies dark people’s knowledge of how racism works, and we should know.

To be clear, all of these racist, antidark, emotionally and physically violent school incidents happened before the election of Donald Trump. After the election of 2016, Mother Jones published an article titled “Bullying in Schools Is Out of Control Since Election Day.”⁴⁷ The article documented cases of anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic incidents that were normalizing everyday racial aggression in classrooms and on college campuses across the country. The day after the election, at DeWitt Junior High School in Michigan, a group of boys formed a wall, using their bodies, to block a fellow student, Maliah Gonzalez, from her locker. As they blocked her, they chanted, “Donald Trump for president. Let’s build the wall. Let’s make America great again. You need to go back to Mexico.”⁴⁸ In York, Pennsylvania, a video was reported that showed two students carrying a Donald Trump/Mike Pence sign and shouting, “White power” in the hallways of York Country School of Technology.⁴⁹ At Council Rock High School North in Newtown, Pennsylvania, someone wrote, “I Love Trump,” drew swastikas, and added homophobic language on a piece of paper found in the girls’ bathroom.⁵⁰ At the same school, another student in the girls’ bathroom found a note stating, “If Trump wins, watch out!”⁵¹ A Latinx student also uncovered a note in her backpack telling her to return to Mexico.

In the summer of 2017, Nicholas Dean, principal of the Crescent Leadership Academy in New Orleans, was fired for wearing rings associated with White nationalism and the Nazi movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center stated that Dean’s entire outfit, not just the rings, was the attire of someone in the alt-right. Crescent Leadership Academy’s student body is predominantly Black. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, two high school students Photoshopped a picture showing two Black students surrounded by White students wearing KKK hoods. In Ohio, a teacher was caught dragging a little Black girl down the hallway by her arm like a hunter after killing her prey. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a principal was arrested for felony cruelty to a juvenile for locking a five-year-old girl in a closet at school. In 2018, a third-grade teacher in Scottsdale, Arizona, Bonnie Godin Verne, suggested that killing immigrants is a better option than deporting them. In New York City’s Bronx borough, Patricia Cummings, while teaching a lesson about slavery, put her foot on a Black student’s back and asked the student, “See how it feels to be a slave?”⁵²

I must also mention the alt-right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. These emboldened White supremacists, who take their lead from President Trump, shouted their racist and hateful rallying cries of “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” while surrounding a statue of Thomas Jefferson (who owned slaves) and condemning the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general, in Charlottesville. A thirty-two-year-old White woman, Heather Heyer, who was there to counterprotest White nationalists, was killed at the protest when James Alex Fields, a White supremacist, drove his car into the group of protesters who were standing up for justice. Trump refused to condemn these White supremacists and their action, and days following Heyer’s death, Trump called the White supremacists who invaded Charlottesville “some very fine people.”

In the spring of 2018, school officials in Citrus County School District in Florida learned that one of their social studies teachers, Dayanna Volitich, was the host of a White nationalist podcast called Unapologetic. Volitich used the pseudonym Tiana Dalichov on her show. On her podcast she declared that science has proven that certain races are smarter, bragged about teaching White nationalism in her classroom, suggested that Muslims be eradicated from the earth, pitched anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and, of course, denounced White privilege as not being real. School officials removed Volitich from the classroom; however, she was not fired immediately. I guess they needed time to determine just how racist she was outside and inside of school. In the summer of 2018, Geye Hamby, superintendent of Buford City Schools in Georgia, was caught on tape talking about killing “niggers.” He was put on leave by the district. This atmosphere is no way to live or learn. School districts’ spokespersons and President Trump portray these incidents as isolated events, the work of a few overzealous, culturally insensitive but “good” teachers, students, and community members. Mainstream society uses the “few bad apples” argument, which misdiagnoses the “systemic and ideological production of race itself which is squarely centered in White supremacy.”⁵³ These school attacks are more than just racist acts by misguided school officials, youth, and community members; put into a historical context, these attacks “draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of Whiteness and non-Whiteness.”⁵⁴

These school attacks also spirit-murder dark children. Legal scholar Patricia Williams argued that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs dark people of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries.⁵⁵ Racism literally murders your spirit. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance—all things children need to be educated.⁵⁶ The White rage in our schools murders dark students’ spirits. Physical survival is not enough. Spirit-murder is not only about race and racism; dark people’s other identity categories, such as gender, citizenship, religion, language, class, ethnicity, nationality, and queerness, are additional, distinct factors driving discrimination, bigotry, and violence.⁵⁷ This state of affairs underlines the importance of intersectionality: “Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that they need better frameworks to grapple with complex discrimination that they face.”⁵⁸ We must use all the analytic tools available to understand how our children are spirit-murdered and educated in a state of perpetual survival mode for the benefit of the educational survival complex.

LIFE

What I am describing is a life of exhaustion, a life of doubt, a life of state-sanctioned violence, and a life consumed with the objective of surviving. Survival is existing and being educated in an antidark world, which is not living or learning at all. It is trying to survive in, and at the same time understand and make sense of, a world and its schools that are reliant on dark disposability and the narratives necessary to bring about that disposability. This existence is not truly living nor is it a life of mattering. As dark people, we are trying to survive the conditions that make the dark body, mind, and spirit breakable and disposable.

The racist ideas that condition all of us and take hold of so many, according to Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, are not the work of ignorant and hateful people: “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.” Kendi’s words are an introduction to understanding that America’s deep entrenchment in racist ideas that produce discriminatory policies, which engineered “mass incarceration, beatings, and the killings of Black people by law enforcement,” is the same reality that functions as a site of dispensability for dark people in America’s schools.⁵⁹ Living under the surveillance of a superpredator is a slow death of the body, mind, and spirit—if the system does not speed up your expiration date.

Schools are mirrors of our society; educational justice cannot and will not happen in a vacuum or with pedagogies that undergird the educational survival complex. We need pedagogies that support social movements. I hear teachers say all the time, “I close my classroom door and teach.” This strategy helps teachers survive the disempowering and stressful environment, irrelevant curriculums, and bureaucratic mess of education, but it does not change the field or the context in which youth are being disposed of; it may just prolong the inevitable. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes,

The streets were not my only problem. If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. Suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more… . The world had no time for the childhoods of Black boys and girls… . When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing… . Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.⁶⁰

At the heart of this thing are racism, persisting segregation, and violence. Dark people within America are the disposable class of people, inside and outside the classroom. As educators, we must accept that schools are spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and disempowerment. We cannot fall into narratives of racial progress that romanticize “how far we’ve come” or suggest that success comes from darks being more like Whites. Jean Anyon reminds us, “As a nation, we have been counting on education to solve the problems of unemployment, joblessness, and poverty for many years. But education did not cause these problems, and education cannot solve them.”⁶¹ Education is not the antecedent of failing schools, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, and/or crime. Racism is; racism that is built on centuries of ideas that seek to confuse and manipulate we who are dark into never mattering to one another or this country.