Billie Holiday and Racial Justice

• In Event: Disrupting Carceral Logics and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

Drawing data from a multi-case study this article examines how teachers teach current racial violence and for racial justice in rural school spaces in the American South. Using Abolitionist Teaching and Trauma Informed Pedagogy as theoretical lenses, the author argues that racial violence and racial justice can be taught well even in schools in complex political, social, and ideological communities. Teachers need to assume racial trauma in all students, connect the past and present of racial violence and resistance, teaching must be framed for the space in which the teaching is done, and finally, there is affirmation of the experiences of students of color, they recognize both the violence and the resistance.

Author

• Brian C. Gibbs, California State University - Los Angeles