CHAPTER 3
MATTERING
When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
—TONI MORRISON1
It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten… . We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.
—EDUARDO GALEANO2
GIVE THEM HELL
As a kid, I did not take school seriously. I liked my teachers and my classmates, but I never felt a connection to the school beyond my mother, Patty, telling me I had to go. I took her instructions to heart. My mother and father were hardworking Black folx, and they required the same of their kids. They went to work every day, and so did we: school was our job. Then, at the age of sixteen, my siblings and I, in addition to attending school, had to get jobs, a requirement for living in Patty’s house. With that level of independence came the responsibility of paying our own bills for school supplies and clothes, especially sneakers (like my $150 Jordans). Though my parents were far from perfect, they instilled in their children the values of hard work and education. Reflecting on that dynamic as an adult, I realize the reasons for their insistence.
My parents wholeheartedly trusted my teachers with my education; they had no choice. My father had an eighth-grade education, and my mother earned her GED. They believed education was the great equalizer, but there was a caveat: education was not to be confused with common sense in the Love house. Education was what you learned in school and common sense was what you learned to survive, and they taught us that upward mobility done with your dignity intact depended on a combination of the two. Common sense meant trusting your gut, reading between the lines, listening before speaking, and never, I mean never, telling your family’s business, especially to White folx.
We never explicitly discussed racism because it needed no exploration; racism was simply an ever-present part of our lives, like oxygen—but unlike racism, oxygen is necessary to survive. It was implicitly understood in our house that you had to be twice as smart as White folx, had to never let down your guard, never lower your head in defeat, and had to possess a confidence that should never be mistaken for arrogance. To my parents, if you were going to be something in this world, being an A student was just the tip of the iceberg.
Before I left for school in the morning, especially if I had a big basketball game, my mother always said, “Give them hell.” Of course, “them” referred to anyone standing in the way of the basketball hoop or my dreams. She still gives me that advice to this day. Though not an activist or a community organizer, my mother, a retired school lunch lady, practices a politics of refusal, whether or not she identifies it as such. She says she is just blunt and forthright, and does not let anyone stop her from getting where she has to go in the world. Still, her particular brand of politics of refusal was instilled in me as a young child. A politics of refusal is one of the necessary components of activism vital to dark folx’ survival and is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. Patty experienced racism growing up in Rochester, New York. She and her nine brothers and sisters lived through the 1964 Rochester riots, sparked by police brutality, which spanned three days, killing four people and injuring 350.
She attended school during the early years of desegregation. Her stories of growing up as a Black girl in Rochester are stories of struggle, perseverance, and learning how to survive to make the world not better for her children but a bit easier. She survived because her mother was a master of the politics of refusal. My grandmother was from South Carolina. She moved to upstate New York for the same reasons many Black folx moved from the South: jobs and the hope of less racial violence. Thus, these two women are my survival blueprints. They taught me to stand up for myself because it was the one thing Whiteness could not take, and maybe the one thing that would postpone the inevitable: the obstruction of my dreams because I was a little Black girl.
Therefore, I learned above all else to protect my dignity. My dignity was never to be compromised, which meant never compromising my voice and my connection to how I mattered in this world. When you compromise your voice, you compromise your dignity. No dignity, no power. Knowing I had a voice backed by common sense, which I understood was supposed to be used to protect myself, was one of the most powerful things I have ever been taught. To my mother, common sense was everything; that’s where you speak from and then education follows. When I called my mother to inform her that I wanted to go back to school to pursue a PhD, she simply told me, “Don’t be an educated fool.” That was it, but I knew exactly what she meant: earning a PhD would mean nothing to my mother if I forgot where I came from and how to relate to the people who protected my dreams and my education. What good is an education if you must shed who you are? Authenticity was a fundamental component to “giving them hell.” My mother desperately wanted her children to be themselves. I never once had a conversation with my mother about my sexuality. We both knew I was a lesbian, so there was really nothing else to discuss. To be honest, Patty knew before me.
That said, my siblings and I would be in deep trouble if we tried to pretend to be something we were not. My mother did not like people who changed their voices around White folx to sound more proper or Black folx who put other Black folx down in front of Whites folx. She taught us to take pride in who we were: working-class Black kids from upstate New York who always walked into a room with their heads held high. So, with that upbringing, I went to elementary school a confident, skinny little girl without one shy bone in my body. I was Patty and Honey Love’s daughter, but, unfortunately, that was not enough.
IRRELEVANCY
From kindergarten to third grade, I attended a diverse Catholic school in the heart of Rochester. By diverse, in upstate New York, I mean Black and White kids went to school together. The school was predominantly Black; however, about 20 percent of the students were White. Inside the walls of the school, students were loved. The teachers were kind, tolerant, and compassionate but focused mainly on academic rigor. I liked going there, but I did not understand why school was so important. There was no connection to my history or my community, nor any discussion to explain why drugs, guns, and violence were becoming everyday problems in my city. I did not have the language or understanding to express it, but I knew the city was changing. Working-class Black families—families I knew—were falling apart due to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, the stresses of financial instability, and the Reagan administration’s “War on Drugs.” In what felt like the blink of an eye, dark kids, like myself, were labeled criminals; First Lady Nancy Reagan was on TV telling us to “Just Say No,” and we were all given DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) shirts as Officer Friendly reminded us not to become another statistic.
The racial divide in the city was high, and the last few White folx who could afford to leave the city did. Dark children were deemed lazy, unruly, promiscuous, and violent. Our humanity rested in White America’s racist imagination, which always turns to antidark policy. Take, for example, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, also called the Moynihan Report, released in 1965, a year after the Rochester riots, by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. It argued that discrimination forced Black families into “a matriarchal structure” that “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro, and in consequence, on a great many Negro women.”3 The Moynihan Report—which was leaked—claimed that Black men’s feelings of alienation led to high rates of poverty and child abuse and to low educational outcomes. In short, Moynihan branded and blamed the Black family structure for Black folx’ inability and unwillingness to assimilate into White American culture.
When uprisings occurred and dark folx took to the streets in protest, according to the Moynihan Report, “rioters” suffered from schizophrenia, which was labeled a “Black disease.” Rioters embodied what racist criminologist Marvin Wolfgang called, in reference to urban Blacks folx, a “subculture of violence.”4 Moynihan’s views became widespread and dominated the narrative explaining dark life to White folx (and to some dark folx too). To be clear, conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute still celebrate the report and used aspects of it to explain the uprisings after the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.5
Moynihan, a Democrat, wrote the 1965 report in his role as assistant secretary of labor under President Johnson. Four years after the report’s publication, Moynihan was named President Richard Nixon’s urban affairs adviser. Nixon named himself the law and order president; he believed that Blacks and Puerto Ricans, especially those with their fists in the air shouting Black and Brown Power, were the reason the country lacked law and order. Nixon’s racist, combative, state-sanctioned, violent tactics killed and criminalized dark folx in order to appeal to White voters.
Back in Rochester, I was living under the conditions of a “human hierarchy,” unaware of the history that produced this feeling of irrelevancy. I knew my family loved me, that my dreams mattered to them, that my voice had power, but I could not see myself as the world saw me. Tucked away inside St. Monica’s, teachers either did not know the conditions of “human hierarchy” or saw themselves as liberators with their anti-Black, color-blind rhetoric. As a result, I was a lost kid. I needed more than love and compassion; I needed to know what folx who looked like me meant to the world beyond what Officer Friendly thought of my friends and me.
In a series of unfortunate events, I left St. Monica’s at the end of third grade. My parents fell behind in tuition, I was steadily falling behind academically, and I was mad at the world for letting me down. School did not come easily to me; it never has. I needed more time; I needed school to slow down. From the outset, I remember wishing my teachers and my classmates would just come to a screeching halt so I could catch up. My voice, the voice needed for survival, could not be heard from so far behind. My most important tools—my opinions, my ideas of right and wrong—were in a holding cell. I could not find a space where I mattered. I was an average student—sometimes below average. I do not remember winning any awards or thinking deeply about anything. I entered school every day because I had to.
My teachers were concerned; they did not understand how a child from a two-parent home, with a brother and sister who had been exceptional students, could be so disengaged. My mother was furious at my teachers for letting me fall behind and waiting until the end of third grade to inform her. By the time my mother was done giving those teachers hell, we needed to leave St. Monica’s, and the teachers were happy to see us go.
With a Jheri curl and legs as long and skinny as telephone poles, I started fourth grade at School #19, a public school. A Black school. The students and most of the teachers were Black. There, I was introduced to my first Black teacher, Mrs. Johnson. I had never seen a woman, regardless of race, so powerful, so commanding, and so stern. She was also tall and skinny, like me, and wore braces, which I needed. Most intriguing of all, Mrs. Johnson was from the South—New Orleans, to be exact. Mrs. Johnson did not just love her students, she fundamentally believed that we mattered. She made us believe that our lives were entangled with hers and that caring for us meant caring for herself. Not to mention, parents feared Mrs. Johnson, even my mother. I distinctly remember walking into class, looking up at Mrs. Johnson, and realizing my class-clown days were over. I was relieved. I was ready to get my voice back. I was not scared of Mrs. Johnson; I wanted her to think I was smart, funny, and kind, characteristics I knew she valued.
Mrs. Johnson had beautiful penmanship; she wore colorful dresses to school and demanded excellence. She was also keenly aware that school had to matter to us beyond our grades; we needed a survival plan. Mrs. Johnson taught as if the fate of her and her children was tied to ours. She shared stories with her students of her childhood in New Orleans. She was vulnerable in front of the class. She called home to speak to your parents about you as a person, not just a student. She had a sense of responsibility for her students, and we were a family. You did not want to disappoint Mrs. Johnson because then you disappointed the class and your family. It was a collective spirit of accountability, love, and purpose. She genuinely listened to us, took up our concerns in her teaching, and made sure each voice in the classroom was heard. After I had been in her class for a few weeks she knew I was behind and that my home life was unraveling. At the time, my mother and father were hooked on drugs and my siblings were off living their adult lives. I am not sure how Mrs. Johnson knew, but she did. She never looked down on me or lowered her expectations of me. If anything, she demanded more, with a keen understanding of my life and what was in front of me.
Of course, Mrs. Johnson could not work a miracle and bring me to grade level in one year, but she gave me purpose, and I grew as a person. Mrs. Johnson allowed me to see why I mattered to myself, and another local program, FIST (Fighting Ignorance and Spending Truth), politicized me. Without these two imperative elements (mattering and becoming politicized), I would not have survived school and the larger systems of the world. Those of us who make it through school leave with skills and scars that are necessary for survival in this racist, sexist, and capitalistic world. The scars of systemic oppression are real and traumatic. Sadly, in that way, school is a battlefield. For many dark children, if you cannot survive school, it will be almost impossible to survive outside its walls.
FIST
During my year with Mrs. Johnson, I also participated in a program run by a local college student, Thabiti Bruce Boone, focused on youth empowerment and activism for neighborhood kids ages ten to sixteen: FIST. It was my first experience with a male teacher, a Black male teacher. Thabiti, a young single dad, was a great basketball player and loved hip-hop. He had something in common with every kid in the room. On Saturday mornings and some weekdays, we would gather and Thabiti would introduce the work and ideas of Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, Black Liberation, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and leaders of our own community. At the time, I did not think of the program as civics education or ideas of mattering; I just knew it felt freeing, empowering, and secretive. Even in Mrs. Johnson’s class we did not learn about Black people who resisted oppression outside of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Their stories were diluted of any ideas of Black Power. King, Parks, Malcolm, and the Black Panthers all believed in empowerment, self-determination, unity, and cultural pride. King, when speaking at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told the crowd that the Negro must “say to himself and to the world … I’m Black, but I’m Black and beautiful.” Being in FIST help me find meaning and purpose as a Black kid.
In FIST we learned that being Black was beautiful, to love our skin, that our darkness had a history of resistance, pride, community, joy, love, and understanding, and that we mattered to our community, to the world, and to ourselves. We also learned that Black power meant grassroots organizing, human rights, and cooperative economic strategies. The basis of our work was self-determination. We saw ourselves taking up physical, intellectual, political, and creative space in places we had thought were unimaginable. We walked around with our little fists held proudly in the air, feeling powerful, in love with ourselves and one another, giving them hell, civically engaged, and unified.
LOVING BLACKNESS
The writer bell hooks argues that loving Blackness is an act of political resistance because we all have internalized racism, regardless of the color of our skin, which operates to devalue Blackness, but she argues that Black people need to love themselves not in spite of their Blackness but because of their Blackness.6 I learned to truly love myself as a member of FIST. Loving my Blackness was the first step in my politicization, mattering, and wanting to thrive.
I kept my membership in FIST a secret from my teachers at school because it felt different from anything I had experienced at St. Monica’s or #19. My parents knew I was in FIST; however, they did not know the extent of what I was learning. I was afraid another adult would take my newfound power away. My mother wanted me to use my voice but she was old school; a child stays in a child’s place, and we were doing grown-up business (one of the many contradictions of her parenting). So, I found my voice by using my mother’s advice, grounded in a history that, intentional or not, was kept from me. Through FIST, I was beginning to understand the ways in which school did and did not matter while also learning how I mattered.
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks walks the reader through how her schooling experiences changed after desegregation. Before her school was integrated—I would say colonized—teachers understood that their job of teaching Black children was a political act rooted in antiracist struggle. She writes that she experienced her all-Black grade school as a space of “learning as revolution.”7 After her school was colonized, she writes,
School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-Black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle… . When we entered racist, desegregated, White school we left a world where teachers believed that to educate Black children rightly would require a political commitment.8
The kind of schooling hooks experienced once her school was filled with White teachers is the only experience I knew until third grade. I have taught so many future educators and worked with hundreds of in-service teachers who profess to love all kids and have good intentions to be fair and just in their classrooms, yet they write, say, and partake in racist actions and posts online about dark children loosely masked in the language of low expectations, of judging low-income parents and dark children’s behavior. Furthermore, there are so many White liberal teachers who think racism is something singular to the far right. Racism is not exclusive to one political party or a particular type of White person. White, well-meaning, liberal teachers can be racist too. Therefore, understanding how racism works and understanding how White privilege functions within our society does not bring us any closer to justice, and it certainly does not undo the educational survival complex. Knowing these truths is the first step to justice, but it’s only a start.
Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal. It is explicit, with a deep and intense understanding that loving Blackness is an act of political resistance, and therefore it is the fundamental aspect to teaching dark kids. I do not mean just to teach dark children their ABCs and 123s; I mean to teach them to demand what Anna Julia Cooper called “undisputed dignity.” To call for “recognition of one’s inherent humanity” with the courage, persistence, vigilance, and the visionary imagination of an abolitionist.9
For those reasons, the work must be straightforward. FIST and Thabiti were explicit, and explicit was exactly what I needed. In FIST there was no questioning why we were there and what the objective was: we were being politicized through antiracist struggle with a global perspective, specifically emphasizing our own communities. Attending school Monday through Friday and FIST on weekends for three years, I was able to draw a sharp distinction between the two. School talked a good game, but my teachers’ actions spoke louder than their words, even in Mrs. Johnson’s class. I had to learn despite school, not because of it. School mattered because it provided the testing ground in which I learned ways to resist and navigate racism, the low expectations, the stereotypes, the spirit-murdering, all the forms of dark suffering, gender suffering, queer suffering, religious suffering, and class suffering. I learned that to succeed at school—by “succeed” I do not mean getting good grades but leaving every day with my darkness intact or only slightly bruised—I had to practice a politics of refusal, love my Blackness as an act of political resistance, and give them hell. FIST provided the fuel and roadmap to survive school unbroken. It added bass to my voice so I could critique, provoke, and resist. FIST taught me that if I could survive school, I had a better chance of surviving the world.
In FIST we felt like leaders because the structure of the organization was dependent on youth leadership in the board of directors, committee members, and the staff. We learned to understand our community needs by studying our community and studying the philosophies of freedom fighters who resisted oppression. Too often in schools we learn and teach about oppression and injustice, but rarely are we taught or do we teach how ordinary people fought for justice. In schools, we occasionally learn that injustice is met with resistance; we do not learn that dark folx have always practiced a politics of refusal that looks different depending on the person or the community. Today we hardly ever teach that dark people fought to matter, wishing one day to thrive and taking calculated steps to benefit the next generation.
The year after Mrs. Johnson’s class, I was in Mr. Clayton’s class Monday through Friday. On the weekends, I learned what I would need as a dark person to thrive beyond the walls of my school. School was for my survival; FIST taught me to thrive as a dark child. Both of these learning experiences were equally important to me. Mr. Clayton wore a tie and slacks every day to school. He was my first and only Black male teacher in a formal school setting until college. Like Mrs. Johnson, he never wore sneakers or dressed down. He called all his students by their last names with a Mr. or Miss inserted in the front.
Around that time, I started coming to class dirty after playing basketball with some of the boys before school started. My parents left for work in the mornings so it was my responsibility to get to school on time. I would play basketball in the rain and snow; I did not care, I just wanted to play. One morning I came in looking a mess. Mr. Clayton called me, Miss Love, over to his desk. I felt so important. As I smiled at him, he said, “Miss Love, you are pretty good.” At the time, those words from my Black male teacher were all the validation I needed to keep playing. But Mr. Clayton never let my love for basketball stop my development as a young woman. He told me that he knew I played basketball before school every day and that he did not want me to stop, but I could not continue to come to his class filthy. I remember him saying it from such a place of love and real concern. He told me to start ironing a change of clothes in the morning to bring to school. He also told me that he knew something was going on at home and that I could talk to him. I never did. Reflecting on it now, I wish I had. But being young and juggling so many emotions, I simply was not able to do so.
Mr. Clayton and Mrs. Johnson were my teacher twins: they both were tall, skinny, and demanded respect. To me, they were both more than teachers or role models; they were necessary parental figures. Of course, I needed my own parents, too, but I required a village to survive and understand how I mattered in this world. My parents could not do it all. Dark children cannot thrive without a community of love, refusal, protection, knowledge, and resource-sharing. Mrs. Johnson, Mr. Clayton, and Thabiti knew all too well this reality for their students.
A recent study examining the school records of more than one hundred thousand Black elementary students in North Carolina found that having just one Black teacher in third, fourth, or fifth grade could reduce the dropout/push-out rate for low-income Black students.10 Researchers also found that Black students in high school have a stronger expectation of going to college if they have a Black high school teacher. Dark children need teachers who not only look like them but who are engaged in an active, antiracist orientation. The conversation around the need for Black teachers must expand to having Black teachers—having all teachers, really—who teach from an abolitionist agenda. A teacher working from such an approach understands what Bernice Johnson Reagon calls “the sweetness of the struggle.”11 An antiracist approach elicits the understanding that the work of living and learning is about the solidarity created through shared struggle. Antiracist teaching is not just about acknowledging that racism exists but about consciously committing to the struggle of fighting for racial justice, and it is fundamental to abolitionist teaching. Antiracist educators seek to understand the everyday experiences of dark people living, enduring, and resisting White supremacy and White rage.
All teachers, regardless of race or ethnicity, need to know that racism is not separate from economic class and that resistance, in its various forms, is always an option. We also need to recognize the specific nuances of different types of dark oppression, recognizing that not all injustices are the same. For example, Indigenous rights are defined more by land than race, meaning that the US consistently and violently takes Indigenous land. The plight of our Indigenous students is different from that of our Latinx students. Both groups face oppression, but not the same oppression, and they have their own distinctions. All Latinx people do not face the same type of discrimination. Afro-Latinx Americans or Black Latin Americans face colorism. Latinx who are lighter-skinned do not face the same discrimination as their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. Research shows that in Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia lighter-skinned Latinxs achieve the highest educational outcomes.12 Black Latinxs achieve the lowest. For me, I learned this lesson firsthand when teaching and living in Miami: one of my coworker’s Cuban parents decided to throw her a birthday party, but she shamefully had to tell her darker Cuban coworkers and all other dark coworkers that they were not invited because of the color of their skin.
My Black students in Homestead faced racism and poverty, while my students from Mexico met the additional barriers of racism, language, and citizenship. My Haitian students encountered these same issues, with an additional difficulty: their nationality made them Haitian while their skin color made them Black; thus, they were forced to adapt to address bigotry in both of those worlds. It is important for educators to know how deeply unjust systems affect people and their communities in unique ways, but it is also imperative to understand the intersections of injustice. Pedagogies must call out and teach students how racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and inequality are structural, not people behaving poorly. They must criticize the systems that perpetuate injustice, such as the educational survival complex, while pushing for equitable communities, schools, and classrooms. Antiracist education also works to undo these systems while working to create new ones built upon the collective vision and knowledge of dark folx. For educators, this work starts in the classroom, school, and school community.
COMMUNITY
A few miles from my childhood home in Rochester, New York, which was first the land of the Iroquois Nation, is the Mount Hope Cemetery, where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony are buried. Some of the most revered and feared activists and abolitionists worked and lived in my hometown. Rochester is considered the birthplace of the women’s movement that is famously associated with Seneca Falls. Rochester was one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad before enslaved Black folx crossed the Niagara River into Canada for freedom. There were numerous Underground Railroad stops and stations in western New York. Harriet Tubman lived and died just sixty miles from Rochester in Auburn, New York. Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper office was located at 25 East Main Street from 1847 to 1863; it was also a stop on the Underground Railroad, meaning Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman walked the streets of Rochester. Less than a mile from the home I grew up in stands the George Harvey Humphrey house, which is said to have tunnels and secret hiding spaces throughout it. I used to daydream as a teenager that Harriet Tubman walked down the very neighborhood streets that I called home, the Nineteenth Ward. Rochester has a rich history of activism and community building. In the 1960s, Black folx in the city had street dance parties on the weekend. During the summer months, different festivals that represented the African diaspora filled the air with good food, music, and communal love for one another’s cultures. However, racial tensions in the city were high in the 1960s due to the severe housing shortage and high unemployment rate for dark people. Although at the time Rochester was known for having a robust industrial market, dark folx, when employed, were at the bottom of the pay scale, while their White coworkers got the high-paying jobs. This reality, coupled with police brutality, sparked the riot of 1962 after police beat a well-known Black store owner, Rufus Fairwell. After the riot, many groups got together to organize around the disenfranchisement that many dark folx lived prior to the uproar. Black politicians, church leaders, organizations such as FIGHT (Freedom, Independence, God, Honor, and Today), and political organizer Saul Alinsky, who wrote the book Rules for Radicals, came to Rochester to help efforts on the ground.13 The work of these individuals and groups, which focused on grassroots organizing, direct-action tactics, and cooperative economic strategies, laid the foundation for the community I grew up in, which is called the Nineteenth Ward. The Nineteenth Ward knew me. Meaning, my community knew me. I was Pat and Honey Love’s youngest daughter (yes, my dad’s nickname was Honey). I was Gene and Johnette’s baby sister (my brother is fourteen years older than me and my sister is ten years my senior). Everyone in the community knew each other and each other’s business; sometimes others knew your family’s business before you did. We were a close-knit community where news traveled fast and gossip even faster.
My parents were popular because they loved to throw parties. Honey was a good cook who kept cold beers in the fridge. Patty was the entertainer; she always had a joke or a story—clean or dirty—to tell. In the eyes of music enthusiasts, my parents had more than a respectable music collection; our downstairs front room was filled with records and 8-tracks. Although I went to a Catholic school, my family did not go to church. On Sunday mornings, my mother cleaned the house from top to bottom to the soundtrack of Bobby “Blue” Bland, Minnie Riperton, The Whispers, The Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Frankie Beverly & Maze, Curtis Mayfield, Patti La-Belle, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. Blasting that music was my mother’s way of saying, “Good morning, now clean your room.” Once you heard James Brown shouting, it was time to get up. Sundays were my family’s day to prepare for the week. We washed and folded clothes, cooked, and cleaned. During the week I was a latch-key kid, so I got to show off my independence before and after school. Even though I had to check in with our neighbors, the Nineteenth Ward was mine to explore. Before I could tell time I knew to leave for school after G.I. Joe. TV served as my entertainment and alarm clock.
In my neighborhood there were city recreation centers everywhere. Near my house alone there was a Boys & Girls Club and the Flint Street City Rec Center about five football fields away from each other. Just yards from the rec center was the Southwest Area Neighborhood Association. SWAN also had a summer camp filled with field trips, ran after-school programs, and provided family emergency services such as food, bus passes, and rental/mortgage and utility bill assistance. SWAN is the Nineteenth Ward’s rock and has served the area since 1976. I would frequent SWAN, the Flint Street Rec Center, and the Boys & Girls Club throughout the week depending on what field trips or programs were being offered. As kids living in the Nineteenth Ward, we had several options and could explore our interests as we pleased.
There were after-school and summer arts programs, sports leagues, writing and poetry competitions, cooking classes, and community awards. My senior year of high school, I was named Youth Citizen of the Year for the city. At any moment my friends and I would hop into the community centers’ white vans to go to museums, sporting events, plays, and movies—sometimes with only a few dollars in our pockets or no money at all. No permission slips were needed; all you had to do was call your parents, grandmother, older cousin, uncle, or aunt and let them know where and with whom you were going. No questions asked. If you were going to get back late at night, you did your homework before the van left and dropped you off at your doorstep. My mom and dad knew all the people who worked at the organizations, either through me or from their own childhoods. The grownups running the day-to-day operations of these organizations treated us like their little sisters and brothers or their kids. We were a family.
The centers were well-staffed and -resourced (art supplies, gym equipment, snacks). We were safe and loved and our talents were nurtured. SWAN, the Boys & Girls Club, and the Flint Street Rec Center were my second homes. They were extensions of my family. There were so many safe places for us to go after school, but more than that these organizations were critical to our sense of community and survival. The folx who ran them lived in the community, graduated from the same schools we attended as kids, knew our families, raised their kids in the centers, and loved our community and city. As children and young adults, we were responsible to them like we were responsible to our teachers, but it was more authentic because it was our choice to enter these spaces.
Many of my friends and I got summer jobs through these organizations. On my sixteenth birthday at 8 a.m. I started my first job at the Flint Street Rec Center as a youth counselor. The roles had changed; I was now supervising the same field trips I had gone on as a kid. I was one of the people little kids looked up to. My job gave me a sense of pride that reflected in my work and they decided to keep me on during the school year. I got a ride home every day after work from my boss, Karen, a little Italian lady who had the biggest heart, or my coworker Karl, a math whiz who could make anybody laugh. Miss James, Karl, Karen, Tony, Spanky, Twinkie, Ryan, Rick, Porter, Cookie, Tiff, Fat-Daddy, Antwan, Sally, Coach Nally, Mrs. Knight, and Eddie are the people who made sure I got home safe at night, taught me how to play basketball, mentored me, loved me, and required more of me sometimes than my parents did. I mattered to them, and the Nineteenth Ward raised me.
One major reason why my friends and I needed so much support outside of our homes is because our parents were at work. In the early 1980s, growing up in Rochester, someone in your household or a family member worked at Wegmans (a western New York grocery store chain,) Paychex (payroll and tax services), Xerox (copiers), Bausch and Lomb (one of the world’s largest suppliers of eye health products), or Eastman Kodak (for most of the twentieth century, Kodak was number one in the photographic film industry). These companies had been founded and were headquartered in Rochester. At the time, because Rochester had so many booming industries, the airport was named Greater Rochester International Airport (Concourse A is called the Frederick Douglass Concourse and Concourse B is the Susan B. Anthony Concourse). Rochester was once known for its manufacturing jobs. In 1982, Kodak posted record profits and accounted for half of the city’s economic activity. My mother worked at Kodak, and my dad worked as a skycap at the airport. Our strong community, which was mostly Black, was strengthened by decent-paying jobs. As it turns out, my childhood marked the end of an era for those companies, our community, the ways we learned to matter, and our survival.
THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD
Thirty years ago, Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb accounted for 60 percent of Rochester’s workforce. In 2012 these companies made up just 6 percent.14 In the 1980s Kodak employed sixty-two thousand mothers, brothers, fathers, daughters, grandfathers, sons, and aunts. Today, that number is less than seven thousand. In 2012 Kodak declared bankruptcy after failing to embrace the digital era, which resulted in their prices being undercut by Fujifilm. The economic downturn that led to an employment crisis was happening in my city at the same time America rebooted slavery through a war on drugs, which is code for a “War on Dark People,” or what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow.”
Before the War on Drugs slogan took hold, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” However, it is the administration of President Ronald Reagan that is responsible for the mass imprisonment of dark people. In 1980, there were less than half a million people in prison in the US. Twenty years later that number had reached close to 2.2 million.15 President Reagan’s policies emphasized imprisoning drug offenders while cutting funding for addiction treatment, privatizing prisons, and disenfranchising millions of dark Americans from their right to vote. The Clinton administration intensified the “War on Dark People” with the 1994 crime bill, which required federal prisoners to serve 85 percent of their sentence before they could be eligible for parole. President Bill Clinton also introduced the notorious “three strikes” rule, under which repeat offenders are given sentences of twenty-five years to life. Hillary Clinton called young Black men “superpredators” with “no conscience” and “no empathy.” Her words were used to validate the harsh punishment of dark youth and emphasize why their lives did not matter.
However, before the Reagan and Clinton administrations, in 1973, New York, my home state, adopted the harshest mandatory minimum sentencing in the US: the Rockefeller Drug Laws. These laws, named for then New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, required judges to give drug offenders mandatory minimum sentences and were intended to prosecute drug “kingpins.” Instead, for decades, they locked up tens of thousands of dark men and women for possessing drugs for their own use or for being low-level sellers or couriers. This “War on Dark People” is a reboot of slavery in the same way that, after the Civil War, slavery persisted through a system of convict leasing. The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but those convicted of a “crime” could be subject to penal labor, another form of slavery. Convict leasing allowed private companies to lease the labor of inmates. Black people were locked up and put back into slavery for loitering, not carrying proof of employment, breaking curfew, and vagrancy.
Southern states also passed laws that limited the liberties of newly freed Black people in order to maintain a labor force and an economy built on unpaid labor. For example, the Black Code laws were passed to ensure Black folx remained poor and indebted to Whites. Black Codes required Black people to obtain a license from a White person before opening a business, and Black women could not testify in court against a White man with whom she had a child (which often occurred through rape). The Black Codes also required Blacks to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they could be arrested or fined. No matter what, Black folx were going to work for White folx for pennies or nothing at all. Thus, while this colored system of punishment for profit is not new, in the twentieth century, the fall of manufacturing giants, an increase in language that justifies a carceral state, and the sociopolitical power structure that keeps Whites at the top, left dark people in my hometown without a survival kit or a way to matter.
The racial disparities of the incarceration rate demonstrate another example of the human hierarchy that was codified by slavery, denies dark Americans citizenship, fails to make good on America’s promises of democracy, and continually reinscribes itself as legitimate, natural, and even moral. For example, in 2016, Blacks and Hispanics made up 71 percent of the US prison population, even though these groups made up just one-quarter of the population.16 More than 1.5 million children have a parent in prison, and more than 8.3 million have a parent under correctional supervision.17 I would be remiss if I did not point out that 37 percent of female and 28 percent of male prisoners have monthly incomes of less than $600 before their arrest. A quarter of women in state prison have a history of mental illness, while 80 percent of all women in jails are mothers.18 In New York, 18.2 percent of women inmates are HIV-positive. And, all too often, incarcerated women are survivors of physical abuse (47 percent) or sexual abuse (39 percent), with many surviving both. Upward of 90 percent of women in prison for killing a man were abused by the man they killed.19 To add insult to injury, dark women also face extreme amounts of violence in prisons.
Our juvenile justice system is no better. According to a 2016 report by the Sentencing Project, youth incarceration had declined over the previous decade; however, racial disparities had increased. Dark youth are still more likely than White youth to be committed to a juvenile facility. Hispanic youth are 61 percent more likely than White youth to be committed, Black youth are four times more likely, and Native Americans are three times more likely. The vulnerability of being young and dark alongside the multiple intersections of being human intensifies the unjust nature of the justice system. For example, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are more likely to be deported. Undocumented youth experience high levels of criminalization, poverty, and profiling by law enforcement at schools. The educational survival complex adopts the school-to-prison pipeline because we all live in a carceral state, increasing deportation for queer undocumented youth. In general, gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming dark youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. Our most vulnerable youth are walking targets for White rage inside and outside the walls of schools.
One of the most cruel and inhumane examples of our violent and racially discriminatory justice system is the case of Kalief Browder, who committed suicide at his parents’ home after spending three years in custody in one of the most notorious jail complexes in the US—New York’s Rikers Island—for allegedly stealing a backpack. Arrested at age sixteen, he spent two of those three years in solitary confinement, twenty-three hours a day, locked in a cell, alone. Because Kalief could not afford an attorney, and his parents could not post the $3,000 bail, his spirit was murdered in the solitude of his innocence. Kalief refused all plea deals, even one that would have secured his immediate release, because he knew he was innocent. His court-appointed public defender, Brendan O’Meara, felt the case was “relatively straightforward,” but the Bronx District Attorney’s office was extremely backlogged.20 Kalief was beaten by officers and attacked by inmates in jail; he tried to commit suicide several times.
After three years of abuse and being treated like a caged wild animal, Kalief was released when prosecutors dropped the charges, citing a lack of evidence. Once released, Kalief tried to put the past behind him, but the trauma of being in jail followed him around even in his home. His family members describe him as living in fear of being attacked like he was in jail, and checking all the windows in the house to make sure they were locked before going to sleep. He was even hospitalized in a psychiatric ward at Harlem Hospital Center. Then, at the age of twenty-two, Kalief hanged himself at his parents’ home in the Bronx.
What happened to Kalief Browder is beyond tragic, even more so because it is common. It helps us sleep at night to think that Kalief’s story is an anomaly, and that his death was caused by multiple unfortunate events. But the reality is that dark innocent bodies are held in prison for no other reason than being dark and poor, and therefore disposable. Between 2014 and 2015, six counties in the state of California spent $37.5 million to jail people whose cases were dismissed or never filed.21 Poor Black folx ages eighteen to twenty-nine typically receive higher bail amounts than any other group. Unable to afford bail, many people plead guilty. Only 4 percent of convictions result from trials. Civil and human rights groups around the country are organizing to reform and abolish the prison-industrial complex and the bail system that pushes families and communities apart. Through their work, perhaps those like Kalief—dark bodies who can never return whole with their souls intact—can have the opportunity to feel like home is where they matter.
HOME
When I was young, the most important measure of success was leaving Rochester. Our parents, grandparents, teachers, and community role models all said the same thing: “You have to leave this place.” This was because Rochester’s “homeplace” had collapsed. Described by bell hooks, “homeplace” is a space where Blacks folx truly matter to each other, where souls are nurtured, comforted, and fed. Homeplace is a community, typically led by women, where White power and the damages done by it are healed by loving Blackness and restoring dignity. She argues that “homeplace” is a site of resistance. Understanding the gutting of dark communities’ homeplaces is critical to a teacher’s analysis of the community in which he or she teaches.
For example, in 1985, there were twenty-six murders in the city of Rochester and 1,072 robberies. By 1990, there were forty murders in the city and 1,254 robberies. In 1995, fifty-three murders and 1,576 robberies took place. In 2002, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Mean Streets of New York? Increasingly, They’re Found in Rochester.” The article stated that 93 percent of school-age children lived in poverty, and only a quarter of high school freshmen lasted the four years to graduation. In 2013, Rochester had the lowest graduation rate in the state at 50 percent, with pockets of concentrated poverty throughout the city. Currently, Rochester is one of the poorest cities in America, with more people living at or below the federal poverty level than any other city with similar demographics.22 The typical family of four in Rochester lives off $11,925 or less a year, which is classified as extreme poverty. And according to a 2017 study by researchers at Stanford University, the Rochester City School District had the lowest academic growth among the eleven thousand school districts.23
Rochester is not an anomaly; many US cities mirror these statistics. And just as Rochester did not become riddled by crime, high unemployment, drugs, and low-performing schools overnight, neither did Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Atlanta. White rage methodically destroyed these cities for their dark residents in the form of Jim Crow, school desegregation, urban development or gentrification (which is code for removing and displacing dark bodies), the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, police brutality, school rezoning and closings, redlining (from 1934 to 1968 the Federal Housing Administration denied dark people home loans), globalization of the US manufacturing industry, vanishing public sector jobs, and the educational survival complex. What is truly amazing is that dark folx have always found ways to survive it all. Despite the fact that almost all the sites of resistance created by early abolitionists, teachers, community organizers, civil rights leaders, and, ultimately, dark women, have been gradually and methodically destroyed by White rage. This is why homeplace is needed, because it is a place that honors the emotional, physical, spiritual, and financial struggle of living under what hooks calls “the brutal reality of racial apartheid” in the US and finding one’s humanity within the struggle against it.24 FIST was my homeplace. Mrs. Johnson’s and Mr. Clayton’s classrooms were my homeplace. The community centers were my homeplace. And my home, with a mother who did everything in her power to protect me from the realities of racism and armed me with the tools to survive in hopes that I would one day thrive, was my homeplace.
THRIVE
For dark folx, thriving cannot happen without a community that is deeply invested in racial uplift, human and workers’ rights, affordable housing, food and environmental justice, land rights, free or affordable healthcare, healing, joy, cooperative economic strategies, and high political participation that is free of heteropatriarchy, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, sexism, ageism, and the politics of respectability. These structural ideologies police who is worthy of dignity within our communities. One of the most prolific, courageous, intellectual thinkers and acute political organizers for social change of all time is Ella Baker, though her work is rarely discussed. She worked from the premise that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” She devoted her life to grassroots organizing and critiqued not only racism but also sexism and classism. Baker’s strategic mind was fundamental in establishing and guiding organizations such as In Friendship, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Crusade for Citizenship, and the Southern Conference Education Fund. She organized for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and later in her life she supported the Free Angela Davis campaign, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and ending apartheid in South Africa.
Baker was critical of charismatic male leaders, or the singular charismatic leader who did not empower people with the tools to transform their lived conditions. She believed in the power of oppressed people and communities to create pathways to leadership that were decentralized and not hierarchical. She wanted people to understand just how strong and brilliant they were both individually and collectively. Baker was driven by the idea of a radical democratic practice in which the oppressed, excluded, and powerless became active in positions of power with decision-making opportunities.25 This idea is why FIST made such an impact on me; it was a site of resistance where I had power and made decisions that affected my friends and my community.
In a 1970 interview, Baker said, “In my organizational work, I have never thought in terms of my ‘making a contribution.’ I just thought of myself as functioning where there was a need.”26 In the book Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, author Barbara Ransby documents how Baker, as a member of the Harlem Adult Education Experiment during the 1930s, was the main facilitator for bringing together different sectors of the Black community, collapsing generational barriers, and creating spaces for people to exchange their goods and services. Baker invited the most prominent speakers of her time to encourage youth to be active participants in their world. She aimed to instill a sense of power in young people by teaching them to critically analyze their world and to articulate their own beliefs about injustice. According to Ransby, Baker believed “that education and the exchange and dissemination of ideas could make a difference in people’s lives.”27 Baker knew that her work as an educator was also tied with the fight for economic justice: “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everyone a job.”28 She worked toward organizing Black economic power and ran voter registration drives. But what made Baker such a powerhouse was her relentless development of new and young activists. She wanted to harness the ambition, passion, creativity, rebelliousness, courage, and openness of youth to confront injustice. Baker helped organize one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
SNCC’s conception is a testament to Baker’s leadership style. More than three hundred students, inspired by the civil rights movement, were invited to a planning meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Baker had graduated as valedictorian. Baker planned the meeting with deliberation and precision. For example, she made sure that those who were politically engaged were at the center of deliberations, not the so-called experts. She urged everyone in attendance to meet with Southern students who were Black and less politically experienced to make sure they learned the fundamental skills needed to organize. She made sure that those in attendance knew that “the leadership for the South had to be a southern leadership.”29 At the meeting, she also encouraged closed-door strategy sessions where young people could express themselves and discuss policy without reporters watching. Her second reason for the closed-door sessions was to prevent any one student from stealing the spotlight for the work of the conference. Baker did not like grandstanding. She wanted the students to get organized, and she wanted adults and young people to work together from a vision for participatory democracy. From this meeting, without Baker making any unilateral decisions, SNCC was created. SNCC members would go on to lead the Freedom Riders, organize voter registration drives, and shape the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A true measure of SNCC’s participatory democracy is how many Black women held prominent positions in the civil rights movement and government because of their training and participation in SNCC, including Bernice Reagon, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Baker approached all her work through participatory democracy, which rejected top-down, hierarchal, male-centered leadership. Participatory democracy uplifts voices that have been deliberately placed in the margins and seeks to organize, strategize, and mobilize through consensus building. Baker wanted everyday people to resist oppression through their collective power, which, she argued, was a more sustainable and transformative method to attain freedom. Through meetings, reading groups, debates, and strategy sessions, everyday people were centered in their communities for the fight for justice.
Baker never wrote an organizing manual; she led by her actions. Her power was subtle yet deliberate. She stressed grassroots organizing and mass mobilization. Participatory democracy’s egalitarian structure allowed for women to move from second-class status to leaders within the civil rights movement. White women who were members of SNCC learned the practices of participatory democracy from Baker and other organizers. Many organizations of the women’s movement, which was founded on the heels of the civil rights movement, centered participatory democracy as the leadership model. Baker’s participatory democracy, dependent on individual citizens learning and growing together, focused on a layered agenda for justice that utilized everyone’s skill sets to emphasize self-worth and collective liberation. In sum, Baker’s philosophy of community is how dark folx move from surviving to thriving, so that we matter to one another and the world. We cannot pursue educational freedom or any type of justice without a model of democracy that empowers all. We all thrive when everyday people resist, when everyday people find their voice, when everyday people demand schools that are students’ homeplaces, and when everyday people understand that loving darkness is our path to humanity.
Taking the lead from Baker, abolitionist teaching is built on the cultural wealth of students’ communities and creating classrooms in parallel with those communities aimed at facilitating interactions where people matter to each other, fight together in the pursuit of creating a homeplace that represents their hopes and dreams, and resist oppression all while building a new future. Growing up, I had multiple homeplaces that valued me, all of me, all the time. Looking back, I see that these spaces were abolitionist spaces in that they protected my humanity, my dignity, and not only told me I was powerful but taught me how to be powerful. These abolitionist spaces loved Blackness and understood that, to be dark, you must give this world hell to survive.