The Vallejo Abolition Project: Geography and the Liminalities of Black and Brown Childhood

• In Event: (Re)Conceptualizing Action-Oriented Social Justice Leadership for Such a Time as This

Abstract

Objectives: Since the Great Migration, the white spatial imaginary (WSI) (2007) has worked to dehumanize and enclose (Sojoyner, 2016) Black families in California into particular spaces through discriminatory policies and practices. This paper uses genealogical and archival research to identify the practices of the white spatial imaginary during one family’s migration, and highlights the efforts of Black school leaders to eradicate practices of sociospatial discrimination.

Theoretical frameworks: The white spatial imaginary (2007) is a worldview in which white people have the sole right to space, and is enacted as a set of practices. Within schools, WSI is enacted as segregation, enclosure (Sojoyner, 2016), dehumanization/humiliation, interpersonal, and educational violence. As a theoretical lens, it explains the violence, anti-Blackness, and dehumanization Black children experience in schools.

Abolitionist leadership (Gray et al., 2021; Harvey, 2021) is a response to the white spatial imaginary in education. As praxis, abolitionist leadership draws on critical race theory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017), prison abolition (Davis, 2003; Kaba 2021) and abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019, Anderson-Zavala et al., 2017) to center the dismantling of anti-Blackness and carcerality in education. Abolitionist leaders understand that schools are microcosms of an anti-Black, carceral society, and that anti-Blackness and carceral logics structure every part of our educational system.

Methods: This case study uses genealogy/family history and archival research to highlight the educational impact of WSI from 1940 until the present day, and the abolitionist efforts of Black school leaders to heal a community. It draws on interviews with Myrna Herndon, a black student who attended Vallejo schools in the 1940s. Historical records (photographs, yearbooks, maps) ground the reader in the history of Vallejo schools, while disaggregated policing, suspension and achievement data provide evidence of Black youth’s enduring dehumanization (Dumas, 2014; Stovall, 2018) and enclosure (Sojoyner, 2016). The educational community’s efforts to engage in abolitionist leadership are documented in interviews with educational leaders, school board meeting records, and newspaper accounts.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The data reveal that school is “a site of suffering” (Dumas, 2014) and a “survival complex” (Love, 2019) for many of Vallejo’s Black children. This is evidenced by Myrna’s educational experience: “The principal “called me to the office and laughed at me with one of the teachers... my teacher [repeatedly] called me nigger.” Such manifestations of the white spatial imaginary prevented Black students from experiencing joy and humanity in 1940s Vallejo, and still do today. In response to this violence, a small group of Black educators in Vallejo have taken up abolitionist leadership. This case study links Vallejo’s past with present-day efforts to create a liberatory educational system.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work. This study, its findings and recommendations highlight the potential of genealogical case study as educational research method, the praxis of abolitionist leadership, and the white spatial imaginary as an explanatory lens for study of white supremacy in educational spaces.

Author

• Mariama Gray, California State University - East Bay