Bounded Liberation: Black Educators’ Strategic Deference and Defiance in the White Institutional Space

• In Event: Imagining Beyond the Epistemes, Structures, and Practices of Schooling: Black Intergenerational and Interdisciplinary Abolitionist Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, I use data from an ethnographic case study at three urban charter high schools to trace a set of Black educators’ strategic employment of both subversive and deferential strategies in response to their schools’ attempt at “antiracist” school discipline reform. Informed by the theoretical and practical framework of school abolition, I draw upon interview and observational data to propose patterns in the strategic, political responses of Black educators to a historically punitive school administration aiming to redress anti-Black harm by means of policy reform. I suggest that this group of Black educators engaged in practices of subversive care, or the disregard of institutional policies perceived as ineffective or harmful to students, and taught situational deference, encouraging their students to submit to authority as a protective measure from racial harm. Findings from this study point to practical tensions of employing abolitionist praxis within a reformist institutional context.
Black educators have long engaged in practices of subversion, resistance, and disruption in response to institutional perpetuation of racial hegemony and harm (Ladson-Billings & Henry, 1990; Dixson, 2003; Givens, 2021); and Black and other minoritized children, whether students or not, continue to constitute the backbone of both organized and sporadic movement in pursuit of racial freedom (Clay & Turner, 2021; Ginwright, 2007). In this paper, I build upon previous literature about the political strategies of Black people in their roles as educators within white-central institutional spaces (see: Ray, 2019; Moore, 2008; Moore & Bell, 2022). I present a set of Black educators that employ unique combinations of the following educational strategies: 1) emphasizing rigorous preparation of Black children for the experience of racism by managing the way they are perceived by institutional actors, 2) teaching children to recognize injustice and collectively advocate for themselves in non-institutionally sanctioned methods of resistance, and/or 3) practicing separate modes of interaction and expectations for students’ behavior in their own classrooms and in spaces outside of their classrooms. I explore educators' employment of these strategies, separately and in tandem, and the contexts that contribute to their use.
I argue that the set of Black educators in this study bound their ideologies and pedagogies of liberation, resulting in a selective use of abolitionist praxis. Findings from this study point to a tension inherent in the operationalization of abolition in the types of schools typically attended by Black and Latine students: while Black educators engage in subversive, fugitive, and/or resistant practices, they must reckon with the potentiality of their own exclusion from the institution in response to their political movements and teachings. In this analysis, I highlight Black educators’ wariness of reformist strategies as catalytic forces toward the Black liberation that they seek, suggesting a practical need for further development and dissemination of abolitionist practices within reform-minded institutions.

Author

• Ana Vasan, University of Chicago