Building Abolitionist Futures of Education with NYC Black, Latine, and Working-Class Community Organizers of Color

• In Event: Writing, Righting, and Rioting Against Colonial-Carceral Machineries: School Abolition in Real Life, Time, and Context

Abstract

The priorities and goals of American schooling continually inflict punishment and carceral violence through practices, norms, and institutional structures of schooling, especially toward Black, Indigenous, and poor communities of color (Givens & Ison, 2023; Dumas, 2014). Its roots in racial capitalist order, compliance, and continued carceral violence indicate how schooling historically and today is antithetical to the inherently liberatory project of education (Stovall, 2018; Rodriguez, 2008). If schools are not and have not been sites of an education for liberation, then what will? What organizing is necessary to build a liberatory system of education led for and by Black, Indigenous, and poor youth, families, and communities of color?

An abolitionist praxis invites us to reckon with the harms of carceral schooling and to draw on community organizing strategies to build liberatory education practices, sites, and structures that center the freedom, joy, and creativity of Black, Indigenous, and other students and families of color (Gilmore, 2022). Community organizing is the collective process by which people build power to address shared injustices (Ganz, 2002; Brown, 2017; Ransby, 2024). For centuries, Black, Indigenous, and poor communities of color have organized against the carceral violence of American schooling (Stovall, 2024) by advocating for school desegregation (Highsmith & Erickson, 2015) and community control of schooling (Green, 1970), freedom schools (Howard, 2016), removal of police from schools (Li & Freelon, 2025), resisting school closures and budget cuts (Green, 2017), and an end to the school-prison nexus (Fernández, et al., 2016). Today, Black, Latine and working class community organizers of color lead an abolitionist education justice movement aimed to repair the trauma of schooling, dismantle all forms of school carcerality and ties to all other carceral systems, and create community-based spaces of care and liberatory education while disrupting racial capitalist carceral ways of knowing and relating (Kaba, 2021; Love, 2019; Critical Resistance; Education for Liberation Network).

This project emerges from my experience as an NYC community organizer over the past 6 years, working with youth and families of color for educational justice and building liberatory education spaces beyond schooling. Using participatory action research (PAR) methods (Torre et al., 2012), we formed a PAR team of 9 Black, Latine, immigrant, and poor youth and parent organizers in NYC. Through transcribed focus group conversations, we explored how these organizers conceptualize, practice, and imagine abolitionist praxis in K–12 education justice organizing. We analyzed the data collaboratively through inductive coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Richards & Hemphill, 2018).

Findings show that organizing for liberatory education requires popular education about the carceral nature of schooling and building a community-controlled public education system. Youth and families expressed concern about unmet basic needs such as food, housing, safety, childcare, afterschool programs, and access to community spaces. Carceral violence experienced by Black, Latine, and poor communities through policing, prisons, privatized housing, healthcare, and labor systems limits the potential for liberatory education. Thus, abolitionist education organizing must build on traditions of Black power and community control of systems to actualize education futures rooted in care, justice, and freedom.

Author

• Sohini Das, New York University