by Lucien Baskin and Mieasia Edwards

 

Question Explored 

How can educators be accountable to and in solidarity with abolitionist movements? Examining the ways that time-space configurations, racial, societal, political, and economic systems flourish to create transformative ruptures in education through abolition.

 

Abstract

This paper examines how transformative ruptures in education through abolition as presence can be leveraged to create social and institutional movements thereby positively impacting students’ experiences. Through the lens of abolition pedagogies, black livingness, and time-space configurations within geographies, we explore how racial, societal, political and economic systems flourish to perpetuate colonial logics in an effort to eliminate oppressive barriers while reimagining educational reform. Leveraging portraiture, student and administrator autoethnographic vignettes reveal how institutional systems and norms further perpetuate rather than eradicate racist pedagogies, policies and practices. We connect abolitionist pedagogy to social movements and transformative ruptures to envision life-affirming institutions and create non-carceral schools and classrooms where education is liberatory. 

 

I’m a young Black man
Doin’ all that I can…to stand,

Oh but when I look around

And I see what’s being done to my kind

Everyday

I’m being hunted as prey

My people don’t want no trouble

We’ve had enough struggle

I just wanna live

God protect me,

I just wanna live,

I just wanna live.

-Keedron Bryant

 

On May 28, 2020, Keedron Bryant a twelve-year-old Black boy recorded a song written by his mother entitled, “I just want to live”. The lyrics above, and the recording found here, embody the sentiment of black livingness, defined by McKittrick (2021, p. 187) as “fluctuating codes and stories of black life, new and longstanding, that honor and study, imperfectly, our collaborative efforts to seek liberation. This is mindful work that is not interested in seizing, expropriating, place. Mnemonic black livingness is liberation unrealized (black geography, verb, is the process of seeking liberation).” She points out, “the biocentric logic of race, which sorts and assesses bodies according to phenotype and attendant evolutionary scripts, is part of a larger commonsense belief system that seemingly knows and thus stabilizes the biological data that validates unevolved black deviance; this belief system thus knows, in advance, who should live and who should survive and who should die and who is naturally selected and who is naturally not-selected (McKittrick, 2021, p. 56).” This stratification process is ultimately deleterious to racialized groups of people leaving some to thrive and others to die. 

At the institutional level, discriminatory pedagogies, policies and practices exist based on the aforementioned biocentric logics of race, and other social constructs, under the guise of ability and intelligence. It is however important to note, measures of ability and intelligence have their root not, solely, in the tradition of scientific inquiry, as we often believe, but in the formation of a fallacious ideology of biological determinism, which guarantees the creation of a stratified society (haves and have-nots) and the pseudo legitimization of that stratification process (Oakes, 2006, p. 486). How do we engage and interrogate the system to delegitimize fallacious ideologies while creating life-affirming structures and institutions across time, space, and place, and beyond social constructs such as race, class and gender? How can we imagine a future where Keedron is selected to live? Who decides? The answer is, the collective “we” decide. In this paper we explore ways to create and sustain livingness across time, space, place, and social constructs through abolition, social movements and transformative ruptures as we examine how institutions intentionally or unintentionally reinforce rather than ameliorate or eliminate racist policies, pedagogies and practices. 

 

Literature Review & Theory

This paper is grounded in abolitionist theory and praxis, and draws heavily upon scholarship that allows us to ask deeper questions and envision different possibilities in our schools and classrooms. We engage work theorizing the state in order to understand the locations where we are as sites of struggle, and histories of organizing illuminate what these past, present, and future struggles encompass. Katherine McKittrick’s writing on black livingness and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of abolition as presence clarify the political stakes of this project, while critical pedagogy and the long tradition of education for liberation demonstrate this praxis through the creation of transformative ruptures in education. 

 

The Struggle is Real: Abolitionist Organizing

As educators working and studying within large public sector institutions–the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York–we seek to understand these institutions in order to struggle within them as we imagine reform from within. In “Restating the Obvious,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore (2007, p. 145) argue that “the state” is comprised of antagonistic and contradictory institutions that are both sites and consequences of struggles. Drawing on the foundational work of James O’Connor in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, they ask how organized public sector workers in the fields of health, education, and welfare could be mobilized with an abolitionist politics, and in doing so reclaim the meaning and purpose of the state from the death-dealing work of organized violence toward the life-affirming possibilities of social reproduction (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2007, p. 157). 

Indeed, some of the most exciting abolitionist organizing in recent years has taken place among workers engaged in the work of social reproduction, and in particular among those in public sector unions. As Elizabeth Todd-Breland and Eve Ewing have shown in their respective books, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s and Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, the Chicago Teachers Union, which is led by a radical caucus largely composed of Black women, went on strike with an expansive vision for the city that included public housing and arts education (Ewing, 2018; Todd-Breland, 2018). They protested the closure of schools in Black neighborhoods, life-affirming institutions deeply embedded in their communities (though these schools were also sites of policing, a contradiction we will engage, but not resolve, in this paper). This is the abolitionist work of organizing against organized abandonment. 

 

Expansion of Policing & Disciplinary Practices within Institutions

In addition to social and political organizing against organized abandonment, economic variables intersect in profound ways to create multi-layered struggles, co-dependent upon, and in solidarity with one another. Budgetary decision-making reinforces the prioritization of capitalist countries in order to further perpetuate inequalities. For example, Gilmore and Gilmore (2007, p. 148) argue that an analysis of the ways in which California’s budget has changed over time, “signals a profound change in the state’s priorities—away from public education, away from health care, away from affordable housing and environmental protection—and toward prisons, jails, policing, and courts.” Importantly, they write that this can not only be seen in the movement of money between agencies, but also in the expansion of policing functions within the institutions of the social welfare state, including schools and universities (Gilmore & Gilmore, 2007, p. 148; Hinton, 2017; Kohler-Hausmann, 2017). In California’s educational institutions these processes have taken place with a vengeance; at the same time as the state was firing tens of thousands of teachers and raising fees exorbitantly in the community college and public university systems, the police forces in the University of California and California State University systems have grown (Gilmore & Gilmore, 2007, p. 153; Davis, Abdullah, and Kelley, 2021). Illinois and California are not isolated places where based on discriminatory practices, including excessive policing and school-based discipline there is a need for organized social movements – we also see a need for organizing systemically across states, nationally and internationally. 

 

Black Livingness & Geographic Dispossession

In her discussion of anti-colonial work in the academy, McKittrick (2021, p. 53) writes that, “the work of discipline, so neatly and so quietly tied to the biocentric infrastructures of empire, forbids a genre of blackness that is not solely and absolutely defined by and through abjection, subjection, and objectification.” By attending to black livingness and black life–by the poetic and the creative and the theoretical and the scientific, knowledge can be created differently to enable a new discursive space (McKittrick, 2013, p. 5). In her work on the plantation, McKittrick (2013, pp. 4-5) theorizes geography not as a site of dismal futures defined solely by antiblack violence, but rather argues that approaches that refuse the reinscription of violence “serve as the shadow to my tracing of the geographic workings of dispossession, which intends to contextualize the plantation as a location that might also open up a discussion of black life within the context of contemporary global cities and futures.” She understands black life to be scientifically creative, “a way of being where black is not just signifying blackness but is living and resisting— psychically, physiologically, narratively—the brutal fictions of race (we do not just signify) (McKittrick, 2021, p. 58).” McKittrick (2021, p. 58) continues by noting that, “Reading black this way demands a different analytical frame, a scientifically creative frame, that unfolds into a different future; this is a future that honors black creative praxis—the practice of making black life through, in, and as creative text.” If teaching and education are the work of social reproduction and the creation of new futures, our pedagogy too must demand a different analytical frame that honors Black creative praxis. When determining transformative ruptures in education, consideration of social movements and scientifically creative frames centered in livingness will launch us into a different future, one with life-affirming institutions where life is precious.

 

Life-Affirming Institutions: Life is Precious

These struggles against organized abandonment and policing are struggles for abolitionist presence and the development of life-affirming institutions. We look to a long tradition of freedom schooling and militant education to understand what this looks like in schools, universities, and other educational institutions (Freire, 2018; hooks, 2014; Naidoo, 2015; Payne and Strickland, 2008; Moses and Cobb, 2001). W. E. B. Du Bois (2017) taught us the importance of life-affirming institutions to the project of abolition in Black Reconstruction in America, where he shows the origins of public education in the US South in the project of reconstruction (Anderson, 1988). Similarly, Woods (2007, p. 55) understood the making of free public education in the South to be part of a larger vision of freedom, writing that “During Reconstruction, African Americans attempted to realize a social agenda informed by African philosophies of sustainable development and the lessons of the Americas: genocide, colonization, and slavery.” These contested social agendas are struggles over the meaning of the state and to what purposes state capacity should be deployed. This was the case in the South during reconstruction, when there was a struggle over whether the state should take up the work of education, which it had not done previously. As Woods’ (2007) and Du Bois’ (2017) analyses of reconstruction show, making such life-affirming institutions requires organized struggle as a social agenda and in furtherance of freedom. This is what Sara Clarke Kaplan (2021, p. 25) defines as the politics of Black freedom–“a conjuncture of ‘the desire for some degree of collective self-legislation, the desire to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life,’ and the collective practice of ‘struggling for futures’ with the understanding that ‘our survival is mutual.’” 

The tradition of educating for freedom–one that extends from the PAIGC schools and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império to the Oakland Community School and the classrooms of radical educators working in the SEEK program at CUNY such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, Andaiye, and Margaret Prescod– is rooted in the practice of black livingness (Robinson, 2020; Borges, 2019; Reed, 2019; de Sousa, 2020; Center for the Humanities). Following this tradition, we ask our fellow educators, those inside and outside of public sector institutions, how we can create abolitionist schools, universities, classrooms, curricula, and pedagogies–education shaped by the radical claim that “where life is precious, life is precious” (Kushner, 2019). 

 

Autoethnographic Vignettes on “Otherness” not Livingness

By leveraging portraiture through autoethnographic vignettes from student, teacher, parent, and administrative lenses we explore how transformative experiences evoke ideas for transformative ruptures in education through struggle, social movements, and in furtherance of livingness in our discussion.

As Ladson-Billings (2000) notes, “The notions of double-consciousness, mestiza consciousness, and “tribal secrets” discovered and uncovered by scholars of color explicate the ways that discursive, social, and institutional structures have created a sense of “otherness” for those who are outside of the paradigm” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 258).  The following vignettes highlight how institutional practices, systems, and structures place some children outside of the margins, thereby creating spaces that “other”, rather than affirm and cultivate livingness. Feminist scholars, from Carby (2019) to Prescod (1980), have taught us that the intimate, the familial, and the domestic are sites of struggle, and warrant close study. Transformative ruptures are introduced and exist within the vignettes to create historical geographies of the present and future as we write towards liberation.

 

Vignette #1

“How does abolition work?” – G

“How does abolition work?” G asked. A serious student who always comes to class dressed sharply in a suit and tie, he wasted no time asking his question about the week’s reading, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s forward to “The Struggle Within”, approaching the text with a curiosity that I think extends beyond a surface level skepticism. His greatest fear was that as a Black man he would end up on Rikers Island, even though he was a stellar student, followed the law, and he clearly understood the violence of the Prison Industrial Complex, responding with anger but not shock as we discussed COINTELPRO and the murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. As we dug into the book as a class, students were captivated by two sentences in the text, “Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death (Berger, 2014, p. viii).” G was not the only student excited by Gilmore’s writing and the idea of abolition. Student after student shared their own experiences with organized abandonment in the places they live, work, and study, brilliantly connecting the lack of grocery stores in their neighborhoods and CUNY’s perpetually broken elevators with structures of organized violence in capitalist society. The connections were palpable.

Transformative Rupture #1: Create social movements within institutions birthed out of struggle to address organized violence.

Essential Question: How can we engage all stakeholders within institutions in understanding and implementing the phases social movements embody, such as reflection on shared grievances through struggle, creating a sense of hope for the future, and mobilizing people towards action to create liberatory spaces where livingness is centered?

 

Vignette #2

“…The most radical book I ever read” – M

When we read Assata, M’s excitement bubbled over, calling it the most radical book she’d ever read. After class that day I gave her my copy and she smiled from ear to ear; a couple of months later she wrote a brilliant book report on Assata, building on the internationalist abolitionist politics she explored earlier in the semester when she wrote a letter to Nelson Mandela, the late South African liberation movement leader. Later in the semester, when a former political prisoner came to speak with the class, M told me that meeting her was like meeting Assata herself. At her request, I took a photograph of the two of them together, yet I can’t share the photograph or the name of the political prisoner here, as she continues to face an assault on her teaching from CUNY, where she is precariously employed. 

J and L gravitated to the poetry in Assata’s autobiography, sharing their favorite poems beautifully with the class. With my attention dedicated to the discussion at hand and my students’ engagement with abolitionist texts, it was almost impossible to ignore that at the very moment we were discussing Gilmore’s work, two of my students, E and A, were at the NYPD for their hiring interviews and physicals. This was not the only reason that students missed class. One student, a generally quiet participant who reads deeply and will occasionally talk passionately at length in class, drawing brilliant connections between state repression in the US and her home country of Honduras, had to leave class early every week to work as a garbage remover not far from John Jay in one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, and at the end of the semester she needed to miss weeks on end to care for her sick parents who felt unable to safely access medical care in the US due to the expansive policing of immigrants, particularly those who live at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression. She was not the only student trying to survive despite the violence of the US immigration system that semester, and John Jay prides itself on being a Hispanic Serving Institution with support services for immigrant students, yet at the same time a number of my students were minoring in international criminal justice and homeland security–feeder programs into a career with ICE and other immigration policing agencies, and all of these students were Latinx themselves and may well have came from families of varying immigration statuses. 

This is, after all, what it means to teach at John Jay–an institution that prepares Black and Brown New Yorkers for careers in the NYPD and other parts of the PIC. As an abolitionist, as well as a student of critical educators such as Freire, hooks, and Cabral, I felt that I had to teach into the contradictions, which can be shockingly stark at John Jay, and reflect on what abolitionist teaching means in this specific institutional context. 

Transformative Rupture #2: Deeply engage abolitionist pedagogies for student survival while leaning into contradictions, intersections and articulation to increase liberatory consciousness (awareness, analysis, acting, and accountability/ally-ship) towards action to promote non-static and non-fixed institutions, classrooms, and ways of thinking, being, knowing, and acting (Love, 2000, p. 600).  

Essential Question: How can we as educators engage our students in pedagogies where they are centered and affirmed that nurture and cultivate socio-political consciousness to address their lived needs?

 

Vignette #3

“It’s because my skin is dark” – N

On one Sunday evening, on the way home from Nana’s house, N expressed she did not want to go to her beloved school the next day. When asked why, she remarked, “I don’t want to go because P she said she does not want to play with me because my skin is not light”. As a parent, I wanted to see what my four-year-old understood about what was being expressed by P. I asked, “Why do you think P said that”, to which N responded, “Mommy, it’s because my skin is dark. I have Black skin. It is not light so she does not want to play with me.” It was easily my deepest fear playing out in front of me. I immediately thought about the first day we received the class list and realizing that sending my child to a private white institution meant she would likely not be in the majority, I eagerly searched for other Black students on her roster. To my dismay, N was the only Black girl in her class. There were two Black boys, but N was the only child where race and gender intersect, further isolating her experience in her community. I was deeply surprised that in 2021 she would be the “only one”. I shared with my husband that she was the Ruby Bridges in her class. Although seemingly hyperbolic, in N’s eyes, she is the only one…and not included…because she has dark skin.

Transformative Rupture #3: Intentional and Intersectional Integration Across All Stakeholders in Institutions to Create & Sustain Welcoming and Life-Affirming Spaces –  It is powerful when students are in places where they see themselves in their peers, as well as the adults, and where there is intentionality around planning designed to reflect the students in front of them.

Essential Question: How can institutions meaningfully diversify their space as they recruit, retain and nurture students and adults in life-affirming ways promoting love, equity, impartiality, similarity and dissimilarity in furtherance of justice?  

What is to be done?

How can educators be accountable to and in solidarity with abolitionist movements? All of these vignettes, transformative ruptures, and essential questions serve to create space and wonderings to begin thinking about, “What is to be done?” (Lenin, 1935; Gilmore, 2007, p. 241). “These places of and for blackness and black thought, laden with lingering racisms, can, we well know, seep into analyses too: disciplining, through the production of academic space and through the racial codification of scholarly rules, often determines how race is lived, debated, departmentalized, interdepartmentalized, and mapped out in university settings (McKittrick, 2021, p. 56).”

In the instances above, race is mapped out in university and educational settings in a way that creates otherness versus livingness. Moreover, given the intersectionalities referred to herein, “As pointed out by scholars theorizing the relationship between race and class, neither phenomenon is reducible to the other; political ideologies, economic rationalities, and cultural and juridical practices operate in conjunction to produce structures of domination that work through and continually reproduce relations of class, racial difference, gender, and sexuality” (Bhendar, 2018, p. 9). Rather than reproduce structures of domination, we can promote and create places of affirmation. Exploring what is to be done can create entry-points, intersections, roadmaps, conceptual maps, spatial strategies, and multiple pathways towards abolition and black livingness. Transformative ruptures grounded in abolition, articulation, and black livingness is a lifesaving aspiration of this work. 

 

Discussion

As McKittrick (2021) writes, “part of our intellectual task is to work out how different kinds and types of voices, [studies] relate to each other and open up unexpected and surprising ways to think about liberation, knowledge, history, race, gender, narrative, and black [living]ness as we imagine life outside of colonial logics” (McKittrick, p. 58). Imagining life outside of colonial logics requires action catapulted by reflection, liberation, accountability and hope spanning far beyond the past, rupturing through the present, and existing in the future. Colonial logics, when explored, reveal the intersections among time-space configurations, racial, societal, political, and economic systems, evident in institutional systems and structures. As Crenshaw (1991) notes, race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different…the view that the social power in delineated difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. Students and adults can actively engage and enforce social empowerment and reconstruction in institutions today. 

When examining institutional systems and structures through time, space, race, class, gender, and the like, the goal is to create life-affirming institutions that thoroughly promote and activate entelechy for all students, through abolitionist pedagogies, policies and practices. As Shedd (2015, p. 18) writes, schools, which should be an equalizing force in American society, are instead more likely to reproduce existing social stratification by race, gender, class, and neighborhood. We can disrupt these social stratifications laid by settler colonists and continue today with an intentional lens on research-based practices and increased criticality as students, educators, parents, policy-makers, and researchers in this field. 

Through abolitionist organizing, non-policing, restorative rather than disciplinary practices, black livingness, and geographic expansion/non-dispossession, we can create and sustain life-affirming institutions where life is precious. In McKittrick (2021) writes, “I have to confront something I keep grasping for but cannot seem to explicate well: Black rebellion, the work of liberation, regardless of scale, is livingness; black livingness is unmeasurable; our despair and heartbreak and friendships and ways of loving and moving, are tethered to a dehumanizing system of knowledge, a monumental story, that is measured (unfaltering) and precise (quantifiable) (McKittrick, p. 190).” Keedron’s livingness is unmeasurable. His relational voice and perspective is an intellectual site that can be lifted to create an anticolonial future because as McKittrick (2021, p. 57) explicates, “we see from the work of many scholars of black studies, the liberatory task is not to measure and assess the unfree—and seek consolation in naming violence—but to posit that many divergent and different and relational voices of unfreedom are analytical and intellectual sites that can tell us something new about our academic concerns and our anticolonial futures.” 

 

Conclusion 

“Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything” (Gilmore, 2022). The beauty of this expansive vision is that changing everything means that everywhere is a site of struggle and everyone can be brought into the movement. Students, teachers, non-teaching staff, administrators, professors, parents, policy analysts and makers, school board members, scholars of education, organizers, and community members can all take part in the work of making transformative ruptures in education through the building of life-affirming schools, classrooms, universities, curricula, and pedagogies. Gilmore writes that, “the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order” (Gilmore, 2007, p. 242). Therefore, to answer the question of “what is to be done?”, we must break with the old order, lean into the conjuncture in which we are struggling, and join forces with struggles in other people and places across time in order to scale up the movement in furtherance of a liberatory education for all. In reverence for, and inspired by Zong!, NourbeSe Phillip’s written yet somehow auditory book where she revives voices with poetry, as this paper concludes, we continue to hear reverberations of Keedron’s words through song in our minds and our hearts as his sentiment of Black livingness overwhelms, yet anchors us as we vision-forward…

                                                             young      Black       man

 

                                                                                                         Can

                                                                               stand

 

                                             look

 

                                                                                                                                             my kind

 

                                                    hunted                                                          prey

 

                                                                            struggle

 

          I
                                            just
                                                                                                 wanna
                                                                                                                                             live

 

                                  God                                     protect                                      me.

 

Notes on Contributors

Lucien Baskin is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. He is writing a dissertation on organizing at CUNY, as well as collaborative projects on Black radical education in the United States and Britain. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. Lucien organizes with CUNY for Palestine and is a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzmBWQ2p1sk Retrieved on 12/14/21