We Tryna Get Free on Our Own Terms: A Conversation

• In Event: Lessons in Liberation: Growing Movements Through Abolitionist Praxis

Abstract

As educator-scholars who have worked with young people, classroom educators, parents, and community organizers at the intersections of racial and educational justice for multiple decades, we consider the necessity and relevance of abolition in K–12 education contexts. Our work has included long term collaborations at the grassroots level with our communities, as well as work that aims to grow educational justice for Black and Brown young people at the national level.

Drawing from these experiences and the frameworks that guide our work, which include abolition, Critical Race Theory, Black Joy, and anti-racism, this conversational essay considers abolition as a praxis of freedom, on our own terms.

We begin by considering why we utilize abolition to describe the practices that we’re trying to engage and why it resonates with us. For one co-author, abolition means that we protect, destroy, build, and love. While many conversations about abolition focus on the abolition of schools, ICE, or police, not many people are studying the practices and the methods of what it means to abolish—the actual fight. These four words - protect, destroy, build, and love - bring the wholeness of abolition into focus. While abolition may mean that we are going to destroy something that was never created for us in the first place, we’re not just gonna leave you there; we’re also gonna build something new at the exact same time. The second co-author elaborates that we must also abolish the conditions that got us to this point. This means when we talk about prison abolition we’re not solely talking about the prison—which is part of it—but largely about the conditions that get us to imprisonment. This includes practices like disenfranchisement, dispossession, law enforcement activity, redlining; all of these policies, and more, that put pressure on Black and Brown bodies to move in particular ways that may or may not be conducive to a healthy life or full humanity.

Drawing from the work of abolitionists like Angela Davis (2003 & 2010) and Erica Meiners (2007 &2016), we consider how we can abolish the conditions that normalize incarceration. We discuss how this requires a commitment to understanding the conditions that make the rationale of going after people palatable to the masses. We also consider what abolition means for each of us in the context of our teaching and learning in K - 12 schools and ask “Are we really ready for School Abolition?” (Stovall, 2018), knowing that U.S. public schools were never really intended to educate anybody, and especially not Black or Brown folx. This analysis also reminds us that what is often called “abolitionist pedagogy” is actually just good teaching (Love, 2019). Finally, we make connections between love, Black Joy, as well as accountability and responsibility as central to our abolitionist praxis as educator-scholars.

Authors

• Bettina L. Love, Teachers College, Columbia University

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago