“If you think this vilifies the police, then you think police are villains”: Teaching Reparations Won as an antidote to copaganda

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  In Roundtable Session: Revisiting the Past to Reimagine the Future: Liberation, Joy, and Community as Frameworks for Educational Justice and Renewal

Abstract

This paper examines teachers' experiences with the Reparations Won curriculum. Drawing on in-depth interviews with teachers in Chicago Public Schools and building on prior research about copaganda and pro-police socialization, we position Reparations Won as an antidote to police legitimization efforts. The curriculum contests reductive and anomalous representations of policing by situating local histories as inseparable from broader social structures, affirms student experiences not accounted for in worldviews constrained by the "police definition of reality" (Wall, 2020, p. 322), and emphasizes relationship-building and collectivism that resists the alienation enforced by and required for a police-centered order. Reparations Won provides the structure needed to grapple with taken-for-granted assumptions regarding the benevolence and necessity of policing, and from there, to build alternative futures.

Authors

• Kaitlyn Selman, Illinois State University

• Hannah Carson Baggett, Auburn University

• Justin Turner, Illinois State University