by Atasi Das, Robert Robinson, Brian Jones, and Edwin Mayorga with Jordan Bell and Karen Zaino

 

Jordan Bell: On behalf of myself and Karen Zaino, we want to welcome you all for getting down with what we’re doing here today. And what we’re framing this as today is a TRAUE alumni community gathering. I think that’s how we want to think about this, and the focus of our gathering is going center around the idea of abolition. And we’re going to really use abolition as the theme that we’re going to be really focused on throughout our time together.

Brian Jones, Edwin Mayorga, Robert Robertson, and Atasi Das, thank you all for coming through and showing love, representing Urban Ed and CUNY, and just doing y’all in the way that you do. I’m kind of excited about this. And I just really hope that this is the start of something more. And with that said, instead of asking people to introduce themselves, or talk about who you are, we decided for a different entry point today. And so what we’d like to do is, instead of doing a typical introduction, we’re wondering what brought you to your abolition work, or what was your abolitionist entry point? And so that’s something that we’d like to start off with. And anybody who wants to just get that going, start us off and then popcorn into somebody else.

 

Atasi Das: I’d be happy to go first. Yeah, my thoughts are kind of floating around me, so I hope to to be as clear as possible. I would say I’ve come to this work inspired and in community with folks who are alive and no longer alive, from folks and books from folks on this call I’ve learned so much from. And so, my journey has been kind of living in this world, asking what’s going on and why it is this way, you know, just simply like that and whether it’s since visiting family in India, or in the States, or living in Atlanta from the nineties onwards. You know, there’s these historical moments that I experienced. I noticed that I always kind of ask, what’s going on? And so I like became more politically conscious, and then I kind of was able to go into study and think about abolition more intentionally through other [K-12] educators. The folks who were thinking of and critiquing international development introduced me to Angela Davis, WEB Du Bois, and a plethora of scholars. And I would say that I’ve just been inspired by folks who generally are opposing and saying no to processes that dehumanize others, and that could be in the classroom. You know, it’s not okay to use detention [in schools], like as often as we do, and this or that should not be our go to, you know. Thinking of curriculum, and thinking of it [it’s relevance and impact] in the street, and like who’s incarcerated, who’s locked up and who’s supported. And so that kind of has come out in so many forms. But anyone who’s kind of done that [opposing] like in the face of that [dehumanization], I’ve always always been kind of like inspired by. And you know, I’m just always learning and trying myself, and sometimes not doing a great job, and sometimes just like whatever, wherever I am, I am. So I don’t know if it’s meant to be like a more a “scholarly” thing. I can give you more citations or whatever. But my colleagues like Latoya Strong and Robert Robinson, of course, and you know Brian and Edwin. I just know you guys are awesome and have taught me a lot. So I think it’s like ordinary folks and folks who are like deeply studied, but in general just really acknowledging humanity — that what folks produce have value and [do] honor that, I mean that, in the deepest of ways. So that’s what kind of brought me here.

 

Jordan Bell: Before anybody else gets in, first, I want to thank you for that. But the other thing that I really want to focus on, and kind of just uplift in this moment, is this idea of ordinary folks. It’s so often that in spaces like we’re in right now, we talk about this stuff. It seems to be so heady, in the clouds, and all for people in the Academy. But when I think about like real abolition work, I don’t think of all these academics. There’s so many other folks who come to the front of my brain. And so I just really appreciate how you [Atasi], like, you’re really trying to expand this conversation about who it’s about. 

Dr. Robinson, you ready?

 

Robert P. Robinson: So thank you [Atasi] for going first. Second is just as hard, I think. But I think for me, so there’s like a joint entry point. I think my first time kind of really taking up the question of abolition, It was I was going back to my undergrad to do this talk, and it was the same weekend that Angela Davis was going to be the keynote. And so I was like, you know, young Robert, 23, my first year teaching high school. I had taught elementary 2 years, so I had a little bit of skin in the game, but like it was my first year teaching high school. I’m still fairly new, and and she [Angela Davis] starts talking about her project. That was the first time I ever heard the term Restorative Justice. And so they paired a reading of Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying, and then that’s how they brought Angela Davis in for the talk. So 3 years later we had this One Book, One San Diego Project, and we have the same book, and I was like Ding [lightbulb going off]! I know where I’m going. And so there’s a Professor at UCSD who is doing work on the prison industrial complex. Dennis Childs, shout out to Dennis Childs, who was also an alum of the school where I [taught]. So it was like this really big, full circle moment. So as a part of their culminating projects, I had them look at the discussion of carcerality and spaces outside of what we see as prisons. And so that was like my first time playing around with like, what does this look like in my teaching,  curriculum-wise? But I ultimately started to do a deeper dive when I returned to school to go to grad school. And so then I was like, what does it look like to embody this [abolition]? It’s not just enough to study, but like, what does what does that look like in practice?

I’m going to pass it to Brian Jones.

 

Brian Jones: There’s no greater challenge than going third. I really appreciate being here, in this conversation, and am excited to contribute whatever I can. I am in awe of Edwin’s Emoji game so far [in the Zoom chat box], and I’m concerned that that might not be fully captured in the Transcript. But maybe it will somehow… You know, I have a lot of admiration for the people who take on this mantle of abolitionism. And in all honesty, while I appreciate being included in this conversation, I’m not sure that I’m always living up to this possibility. So I guess what I want to say is, let me talk about abolitionism as I see it. I hold those folks and their work, including people here in very high esteem because I think they are holding open a very broad horizon of freedom, which is what the name implies. And I mean that also thinking about the nineteenth century. Isn’t it so interesting that this is the word that the radicalizing young people of our moment are gravitating towards? How interesting that its only other connotation that I know of is the nineteenth century struggle against slavery. And so it’s a great mantle to take up. But it’s a big one. I mean that. What a change that [ending slavery] was, and how impossible did that seem until it seemed inevitable.

And so similarly, we’re living in times where the things that the abolitionists say to a lot of people’s ears sound downright crazy, impossible, impractical, a total Utopia. But we might have easily said the same thing about the nineteenth century abolitionists and the things that they proposed. So that’s important. And I’m also inspired by the people who are thinking about how to apply these ideas in the space of education. What does it mean to be an abolitionist in the field of education? I was so lucky to get to moderate a panel discussion in the throes of the pandemic with Bettina Love and Gholdy Muhammad and Dina Simmons. And when I asked Gholdy Muhammad, and when I asked Bettina Love, does that mean abolish school? They said yes. And you know what, it was an interesting answer! What it means to me is that there’s a way in which the horizon of freedom, of abolition, means that it might be that for us to live out our freest lives, we might have to rebuild the institutions that we know so well, such that they would be abolished, that is unrecognizable to people who know them today–not in a kind of like anarcho individualist way, but collectively and in a shared way, collaboratively.

And so what do you do in education? If that’s your project, how do you hold a job? I think that it’s hard to answer that question. And again, this is why sometimes I feel so meager in comparison to the horizon, so I try to make space for this kind of a conversation. I think the ideas of abolition should be on the agenda, they should be up for consideration. 

Thinking of the coming generation. Where else in our society can young people think something through, investigate something, follow the investigation wherever it leads, and come to their own conclusions about it, if not in school? And where else can they grapple with all of the questions to which, you know, the textbook publishers have no answers? Which is, how are we going to survive as a species? How are we going to really live together in a humane way? 

Let me try to wrap this up. I guess I think what’s happening now is that we’re seeing this attack on that space. We’re seeing people freak out that that space widened in any way to include black history and queer themes. And they’re trying to constrict that space and narrow the reading list and chop the curriculum. And so, unfortunately, what’s before us is defending that horizon and keeping what’s available to young people to consider–what can even be considered and thought about in school. There’s a very important struggle right now to keep that horizon as wide as possible.

 

Edwin Mayorga: Brian, if you feel meager, I don’t know. I don’t know what I got in my life. I don’t know. I don’t know what I got in my life to be true. Thank you all for giving me the opportunity to be in community with such brilliant and loved ones like each and every one of you. And Jordan, I know we’re just meeting, but you know I’ve had deep appreciation for your energy, your vibe, your perspective, and these little little moments online primarily, but I appreciate you and my other comrades here. [JORDAN: ❤️] You know, we’ve been at this for a minute, at different points in time, so I appreciate you. 

I think a lot of you have hit on a lot of what I’ll say. So just to put the personal into it. And I was thinking about what you were just saying, Brian, around this kind of nineteenth century-ness of it. But I’m gonna give a shout out to the 1900s, you know the twentieth century, in terms of what’s interesting for me. And I think about my own biography and emergence, and walking in the traditions and histories and futurities/futures of abolition. There is a kind of shifting of names where I think for a lot of the twentieth century we didn’t precisely say abolition. But now, looking back,.. when we’re talking about black liberation, we’re talking about emancipation for all of us, or how do we all get free? Abolition is there. The Abolitionist traditions, abolitionist horizons, anchors, visions, it’s all there. But it’s changed names right? 

So for me I look back, coming up primarily in the 1990s, you know way back in the twentieth century. I was coming into my own kind of critical consciousness, coming out of working class neighborhoods in the LA county area in California, you know Southern California and going to UC San Diego. Shout out, Dego! I’ve got you, Robert. But you know the work, the movement work that I stepped into around Proposition 187, the borders, right? And all of that…the politics, right? We didn’t say abolition. We cannot disentangle the relationship, I think, between abolition, carcerality, plantation economies and practices like enslavement and border building. All of those things. They’re inextricable from each other. And so, while we were working on the border right, or propositions that were really about racialized state violence, were kind of the foundations for me around my own kind of critical consciousness… coming into a kind of critical understanding of the world. The things that I was feeling, right, like those felt theories that we have, those hunches and those things that eat at us inside. I was starting to develop that language,  aqnd so I came to abolition, specifically the term, later. But now, looking back, it was …the seeds were already there. In seeing some of these other flowers blooming, other movements blooming, seeing working class, immigrant, undocumented, black folks, brown folks fights around ethnic studies. All of those pieces have been deeply shaped by this. 

I moved to New York City in 2000. And I look back again, and I attribute much of my coming to abolition to both the times–Grace Lee Boggs asked us to think about, what time it is on the clock of the world?–and I think about, for those of you who are old enough to remember, the WTO, the Battle of Seattle, and Amadou Diallo. We were fighting this kind of police violence. State sanctioned violence, and other iterations, which become one of the birthing points of NYCoRE [New York Collective of Radical Educators]. I think all of you are familiar with NYCoRE, and its various interfaces. I won’t get into too much of the history of the organization. But that’s when I became a member–I’m not a founding member, but I’m one of the old heads, like very early on [ROBERT: ❤️], and you know part of it then was against policing and criminalization of young people. And then 9/11, right, and the cover that that gives to rationalize perpetual war on the globe. And so where does Abolition fit into that? 

I’ll give one specific shout out right? And like Atasi, I was ready–you were going to give the citations in APA style. You know, I was like, okay, but I appreciate it. Everything you kind of laid out, I’m like, these are people. Abolition is a people-led movement… people on the ground, our ancestors, our mothers, our fathers, our uncle, whoever. But I’ll shout out Ruth Wilson Gilmore [KAREN: ❤️] Karen knows. But I realized now I didn’t have direct contact with her until she became a faculty member at CUNY. But before that she was an abolitionist already, and so the work she was doing with Critical Resistance, and the conference Critical Resistance used to be put up here in New York and in the Bay Area… I was there in those days.

And so the idea of the school-prison pipeline, and I think more later iterations of the school-prison nexus, which is, I think, part of the language that I try to use. Those were the conversations we were having. And the calls for justice and dismantling of those systems. So Ruth Wilson Gilmore was already influencing my life, as you know, as a member and part of critical resistance, and so many others that worked alongside them. And so to come at it like 10, 15 years later, to come at it from an intellectual perspective, I think, was deeply influential for me to give name to, again, those felt theories.  I can feel that this is wrong, but what’s the alternative? Right? Or what’s the pathway? I know that we’ve been organizing around justice work. And ending high-stakes testing. You’re getting police and military out of school, all that stuff. 

And then, you know, I was already done with classes when Ruthie came to the GC, but I was, like, “let me audit this,” and I really couldn’t, because I had  a 2 year old at the time, who is now 14, and I was just… I was a damn fool. But I don’t regret it because, I go back to what Ruthie says, abolition requires us to change one thing: everything. And I’m said, Damn, okay, like this is the truth, right. And so for me, well, what does that? What does changing everything–which is something that each of you has said in different ways, eloquently, here in our conversation–what does that look like in practice in our relationships with people,  my relationship with my spouse, my relationship with you all as friends and colleagues and comrades? What does that? Where does it look like that? What does it look like on an institutional scale? What does it look like when we abolish the university? Or what does it look like when we abolish school districts or a city, and create, imagine, and change everything to also be in the part of inventing a world that already exists but hasn’t been fully materialized because of the oppressiveness of the world? in that material world that we live in. So yeah, that’s kind of where I’ve been coming at it from and continuing to explore. I don’t pretend to like, I don’t call myself an Abolitionist in that sense. But I’m really deeply interested and engaged in the idea of being in the practice of abolition.

 

Karen Zaino: Thanks. And I think we can all agree that whether it’s harder to go first, second, third, or fourth, the best position of all easily, the winner is to be me and Jordan, right? Because we just get to see here and listen and soak up your wisdom and be like the next question. But actually I was writing frantic notes. I don’t know if you can see them with my blurred background, but I am taking notes on you, on all of you. 

And I was thinking, as you all were talking, starting with you, Atasi, as you talking about international development as the sort of fear that first grab your attention, and then you have Robert talking about restorative justice, Brian, you mentioned the horizon right, which is maybe the greatest grandest scale of all. But then we also have schools. We have the police. We have borders that Edwin brought in. We have 9/11. We have the relationships that we have with each other. And I was just thinking about how, because unfreedom is multi scalar, because unfreedom happens at every single level of existence, all of our battles right, all of our abolitionist practices have to be at every single scale of existence. And that’s from Ruthie. 

And at the same time as I was thinking about the levels that we have to do this work on, I was also thinking, Brian, about how much I resonated with your sort of ambivalence around this claiming of this title, right? And Edwin you kind of pick that up as well toward the end of what you were talking about, this sort of uncertainty–and you said meager, which I think I don’t think anybody here really agrees with that characterization of you in any possible way, there’s just no part of you that could ever be framed that way–like, I also empathize with the idea that am I abolitionist enough? Have I done enough work to be able to say, like I should be, you know, hosting this conversation? And what strikes me again and again is how abolitionism is a generous movement. It’s the most generous movement that I’ve seen, and it’s generous, because it says over and over again, yes, you are welcome. It says you might not know what the language it says. You might kind of come in or leave or come back. but it just wants more people, because people is all it has. I was also flipping through my Lessons in Liberation toolkit as you were talking, and I was looking for Erica Meiners talking about how in some ways there’s a fear that abolition will be co-opted, and also we want people to say the word abolition, we want abolition to be popular enough that it is susceptible to co-optation. 

I’m sort of doing all this to kind of lead into this next question, as a way of really thinking now about our own positions and our own practice, and the ways that we are embodying across multiple scales all the different possible practices that could be construed as abolitionist practice, that is, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore would say, building the future in the present, in whatever way that we can, in whatever way that we can, in having a conversation, in deciding that you’re not going to ever use exclusionary discipline with your child, in deciding that you’re going to write to a comrade in prison, in deciding that you’re going to work with teachers to help them understand what abolition is, so they can have that seed planted. And so that’s where I wanted to go next: what brought us to the intellectual investment, the ethical investment, the emotional investment? What does it look like for you today? What does it look like for you in your life? And that may be in your institutional life, but we have lives that definitely exist and expand beyond the institution. What does it mean to you to practice that?

 

Atasi Das: It’s a hard question. I think, because it’s difficult in that I engage in practices with an intention, I always speak of them as experimentations, particularly if I’m thinking of school and teaching. So, I’m teaching at Lehman this semester, and I’ve been thinking of just the curriculum for teacher educators and future educators, and how we think about what learning is, or have them engage in processes of learning, or assessment. In that way, I kind of think of this practice as experimentations to further encourage the fulfillment of oneself to develop oneself in the fullest of ways. 

And within a CUNY, within an educational institution, in a teacher ed program, I feel like it’s this type of experiment that I’m trying this thing. Maybe I have flexible assignments and engagements? Maybe we look at things that are really rigid in terms of learning theories and turn it on its head? And so, you know, I don’t know, maybe that can be categorized as like an abolitionist practice? I’m just trying some things out.

Outside of that workspace, for me, it feels like how I do relationships, or how I engage in maintaining them and the work that it is to actually be in relationship with others. So if that’s having your space available for folks that need it, and having parameters of that. Or feeding, you know, like we all have these particular needs. And so it feels really loose, like, just be a human kind of thing. 

And that’s why I’m having a hard time kind of really nailing down what are the practices I’m doing? I don’t know. I’m just trying some stuff, and then seeing what it’s doing, and then reflecting upon it. At the same time, saying, well, maybe this this was an attempt, and maybe it didn’t land the way it needed to. Or maybe I’m not understanding my students and where they’re coming from when I’m I’m talking about particular assignments or practices or policies, and I need to understand that. And so this is an ongoing thing. 

 

Robert P. Robinson:  I was thinking about how you started last time you were saying you had a bunch of things going on in your head, and I thought I had one thing, and I’ll have 12, and so I’ll try to not do 12.

So one thing I was thinking about is the feminist motto the personal is political, and I always say this, like anyone who’s been in conversation with me in the past two years. I think about like under curriculum studies with the broad ”C”  right, like everything is curriculum. So I think about the personal, political, and pedagogical. 

I was reading Mariame Kaba’s book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, and also thinking about my very complicated relationship with my family. and picking up on questions of retributive justice. and then asking myself, in what ways am I trying to punish my family through my engagements or lack of engagements with them? Simultaneously, while being in my first semester at John Jay, coming in kicking the door open with the Fuck the police t-shirt on…not literally, but like that was the kind of energy I was giving. And so I had to kind of challenge myself to think about, if I’m picking up the question of restoring, what am I trying to restore? How am I trying to restore it? As a person, as a human, as an individual? And how is that going to translate pedagogically?

And so the first semester was kind of hard thinking about all of those things at once. Like not to say that they’re directly connected, but they are directly connected, because I’m the person in the classroom. But when I first came in, I realized that there are students who are in my classroom who are committed to becoming cops. And I was like, alright, how do I have the same conversation? And then the next semester I was just like, you’re an educator, and you’re a historian; start with the history. 

And this is after I kind of had this reconciliatory moment with my family, it was almost like they both aligned at the same time. I didn’t think about this until this very moment, so thank you all for giving me something for therapy this weekend. The second semester I was like, okay, we’ll do the history of policing and of slave patrols, and then using that when I open up the discussion of abolition broadly, and then talk about abolition as it pertains to education. 

And for the students, the first semester was all this pushback and then the second semester was just like that makes sense. Instead of having the pushback to even thinking about the question of liberation, the questions of why someone would even want to disrupt our current notions of carceral institutions, to being like yeah this shit is fucked up, where do we go next? 

And not to say that that was something that’s always gonna happen, because it looks different every semester. But to also recognize my relationship to this institution. So like for me, part of it is coming back to who am I? I’m an educator. I’m a historian. What are my tools of engagement, and how am I going to show up? 

And then what is my relationship to myself? And I always think that my pedagogy is always relational. And so as a SEEK counselor, the other thing, too, is every time somebody’s come in and they’re like, I just want to be a cop, I’m like, and you’re also an artist, and you also love philosophy, and you have a really good voice. And so conversations with students are my small moments of chipping away at the number of cops in the field. It’s kind of like helping them to see themselves as whole human beings. And in our relationships, highlighting those things about themselves that actually are not committed to this life of state sanctioned violence. And also recognizing that there’s no way that I’m going to be able to undo all of this work solo, but also recognizing that my contributions are the ways that I show up relationally, pedagogically, holistically. [ATASI: ❤️]

 

Brian Jones: I said it before, and I’ll say it again. There is no greater challenge than going third [EDWIN: 💀]. You know, this is such an interesting conversation, and I wish we could do this once a month. I love hearing these responses. It’s sparking so much in me. It’s tough to put my finger on why this is a hard question to answer, and Karen, I appreciate your generous reaction to me. It had to be dealt with in order to get us to the second question, so well done! I think that if I had to cop to what it is that I’m trying to do — let me think some more about what this means in terms of personal relations. Maybe I’ll just kind of second what Atasi says, like, having authentic and strong relationships, and nurturing them, and being open to the ways that they might change or should change is a lot of work, and it’s hard work by itself. And then being in an intentional relationship with one’s students is complicated and challenging work, but I don’t have students right now, not directly. So let me just say what my professional work is. 

If you had to put it all together and say, What does it amount to, or what is it about?, I’d say, a common thread is trying to leverage historical archives to make them accessible and available to young people, legible to young people, and in doing so to help them develop for themselves new perspectives about the world, and wider, richer stories about their place in the world. And particularly, of course, I’m doing that most of the time with archives that speak to the histories of social movements. I think these histories cut many different ways and are very open-ended. I mean, what do you make of a thing when not filtered through a secondary source, but when you’re holding it in your hands? What you make of it could go in many different directions, as it should. But I think there’s power in putting young people in that authorial role to think through those questions, and to think with evidence of people who have been trying to change our world in the past. That evidence should be a resource for them in trying to figure out, and for all of us trying to figure out, where we go from here. So, three of those I’ll just knit together.

One of the most long-standing ones is through an organization called Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which was founded by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, based on the anthology of radical texts of US History. You’ve probably seen us putting on a show with actors, etc. But we also go to schools and have young people encounter the anthology, find pieces that speak to them, and do deep dives into the people, the history, put those words in their own mouths and perform it, and make it their own. Whether those are the voices of Indigenous people, or Muhammad Ali, or somebody you’ve never heard of — all kinds of people. But generally, they’re radical social movement voices. An interesting reaction that young people have to those voices is that they vacillate between being inspired, that their gut, like Edwin talked about, is validated by this person who put it so well, you know, like, Angela Davis just nailed it. She just said it. It’s like that thing I’ve been feeling, she said it, and now I get to say and perform it. 

But then there’s another way. There’s another valence to it, which is like, damn! She said it 50 years ago, and it still has to be said, and if you remove the date from the speech, you could say this almost this exact way and it could be a speech from yesterday or five minutes ago. And I think my role as somebody bringing this material to young people is not to tell them how to resolve that tension, but to wade into it with them because that is something that we struggle with. It seems like it’s hard for us to win in a way that prevents these same issues and strains of our struggles from recurring. 

Then, of course, I have and am doing work related to this at the New York Public Library, first at the Schomburg Center, and now through this new unit called the Center for Educators and Schools. 

And then another interesting project popped up recently. There was this moment where a bunch of different youth-led organizations around the city were bird-dogging then-Mayor Bill de Blasio over segregation and inequalities in the city schools. So these teens were heated about inequality and segregation. And actually, they kind of approached Jeanne Theoharris, and later also Ansley Erickson, and me, and said, “You know, we’ve just discovered that there was a massive protest against school segregation like 50 years ago in New York City. How come we grew up in New York City and never learned anything about this?”

And so this is an example of where the history cuts towards inspiration and validation. They said, “This was exactly what we were fighting over, and it was huge.” And they would say things to us like, “I took AP US History; how come I never learned this? How do you grow up in New York City and never know this?” And it turns out the biggest single protest of what we think of as the US Civil Rights Movement was in New York City, not Mississippi. And they didn’t learn that at school. So now we got funding from the Federal Government to build a website to make all these archives available to students. But it’s an interesting case because it was youth activists who brought it to us, and we had the institutional levers to create something out of it. [EDWIN: 🎉] It’s the most explicit example of historical work in service to a movement in motion. What can we make that would be useful to other people who might be trying to do similar work? So let me stop there.

 

Edwin Mayorga: What I’ve really been thinking about right now is abolition plus sanctuary. So abolition and sanctuary as praxis is what I’ve been thinking a lot about in all aspects of my professional and personal activist life. So let me just talk about it real quick. So abolition, I feel like I’ve already spoken about, so let me just get to sanctuary real quick. You know, and I think as we’re all familiar with in particular post-2016 election, and so on, that the revival of sanctuary and the creation, in particular, of refuge spaces for those that are undocumented or feel that they’re in precarious kinds of conditions.

One of the things that I think has been particularly important in this era of sanctuary is expanding that to thinking about borders, walls, containment, persecution, and policing, and that these are all things that do not necessarily have to do with the border itself or with crossing these fictitious political walls. But rather it has everything to do with policing, state violence, structural racism, capitalism, profiteering — all the things that abolition is about. And so for me, it’s been thinking about, How do we put these things into conversation with one another? Not to blend them, but to actually think about them as distinct projects that have deep mutual shared goals. It’s not neat: Eve Tuck and  Wayne Yang, of course, talk about this notion of incommensurability, and, in fact, I’m sitting with that tension of, they might be cousins, but they ain’t brother and sister, so what does this mean? But I’m using that tension in my head and in my work as a way to ask something generative rather than it being something that forecloses the possibility that, hey, we could actually be on to something here in really thinking about how sanctuary for all on a global scale would be what Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about freedom as a place. Perhaps another way of saying that is sanctuary as a place, as a lived experience, and that abolition would be kind of the groundwork, the vision, the envisioning, but also the relationship work of of dismantling, but also then imagining what this place that we call freedom, or that we call sanctuary actually is and what it looks like, and how we’re going to get there.

Those are the things I’ve been thinking about. The privileges of being at these elite, three billion dollar endowed small liberal arts colleges right? Like low-key, it’s weird to be talking about abolition and burning shit down when you’re like… I mean, I don’t see the money as a faculty member because we be fighting about wages right now. But it does afford structural things: I have autonomy, a sense of agency around my work. I did the adjunct hustle at CUNY, NYU, Columbia, all those different kinds of settings. I worked and hustled in them, and I could see that they each have limitations and possibilities, you know, respective to their context and the conditions of working and teaching and living in these spaces. What it’s afforded me is the opportunity to think and do, Atasi what you were just saying, which is like, you know, I was thinking about Saidiya Hartman, you know, it’s about what she calls these beautiful experiments, right? Just kicking around ideas and putting them into play, and seeing what happens. I think there’s a lot of the beautiful kind of experimentation of abolition that we sometimes lose sight of when we’re talking about burning prison down and a world without prisons, a world without borders. I’m like, yes, all of those things. But can we walk and chew gum at the same time and think about okay, no prisons, so safety, right? Like community safety. What does that mean? What does that look like? Let’s put these two things into conversation. I think the same thing about abolition and sanctuary. Let’s talk. And so, being in this little posh space has afforded me and the department I’m in the opportunity to do a three-year kind of exploration, an interrogation of our own department and the way we do things, to focus on anti-racism and abolition. 

Abolition is our North Star, to take from Bettina Love and other abolitionists. So what does teacher education or educational foundations look like? We’re kind of a mishmash as a small department, all those things rolled into one. But what is the educational experience? What’s the work that we do? What’s the work and experiences of our students? What relationships do we have with surrounding communities, surrounding schools if we have abolition as a North Star? So, you know, it’s by no means perfect. I’m not interested in hyping it up or anything or to take credit for anything, but I will hype up the commitment that my colleagues and I have made to the experimentation, right, to the journey. And we’ve made headway. Again, it’s not perfect, and it’s humbling work. But I think we’re trying to put these things together. So I’ll say that and thinking really about the intersection specifically to our students and what kinds of practices they’re experiencing and engaging in, both in the classroom and out in the world. And those things are not separated. And so for our student teachers, what does that kind of experience look like then, when they’re out there in the field as student teachers? And then as first-years, as young teachers, and navigating a world that doesn’t want that, a world that wants to salvage a particular social order that oppresses and profits off of the exploitation and suffering, particularly Black suffering–shoutout alumni Michael Dumas? What’s to be done when you’re coming from an abolitionist perspective or experience in your teacher education training? And then you’re out in the real world. So how do we give them both tools of having vision but also tools of navigation, like how to manage, navigate, take care of yourself, and be engaged in mutual aid and solidarity work? All those pieces, I think, are the things that we’re trying to practice as we’re preaching. And I think that’s important. 

And so, and then the other piece is just in my own research. I’m trying to ask the same questions in different ways, in particular, I’ll just give one example, the work I’ve been doing around school and community partnerships in Philly schools. Shout out to Robert Robinson, coming in and doing workshops on historical archiving one nice summer online, a little ways back. [ROBERT: ❤️] But what we’re thinking about there from both an intellectual and political perspective is a kind of queer intersectional and abolitionist framework for making sense of these things, right? And Philly schools get done wrong, right? Don’t get me wrong, there’s all kinds of messed up stuff happening in Philly schools. And yeah, there are places, there are sanctuaries, there are moments and relationships that we need to document and highlight and lift up because it’s there, it’s important that we see that these abolitionist and transformative possibilities actually exist. But those are not the ones that make the headlines. And so, really trying to excavate, unearth, and honor those things that are already here as laying the groundwork for what a sanctuary is. Philly, New York and New York State are sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. If we really lived up to that, how do abolition and sanctuary feed into what that would actually look like? And some of those answers, as Ruthie says, those solutions are already here. It’s about kind of creating groundswell around them, like rallying ourselves around these already pre-existing things, to put them together and to scale them up and really make this a true campaign. Those are just some things that I’ve been thinking about, trying to be in good practice with. I’m trying to authentically mobilize these things as I’m continuing my own journey around deepening my reading, my understanding, and my relationships with others around these ideas.

 

Karen Zaino: Thank you. Thank you all. I was again taking frantic notes. As I was listening, I heard three questions that I feel like I’m going to continue to sit with, and I think will really guide my own thinking and practice as I move forward. The first one is, What is self-determination? And what is collective determination, or sanctuary, as Edwin put it? What do they actually feel like, what do they look like? What do they sound like? What is the actual embodied experience of self-determination and collective sanctuary? and then second, How are these things stifled and smothered? A couple of you talked about teacher education, and the roles that we are provided as teachers are so limiting. And so how do we embody and role model for students another way of being a teacher that is not just being a cop? And, Robert, you were talking about the roles that are put on to your students, who are forced to equate an interest in justice with being a cop. And what are the other possibilities that they might inhabit that have been denied them? And I also think about the histories that have been dismissed or erased, in ways that have impaired our ability to move towards something else — histories like, as Brian talked about, the histories of these other struggles and these other activists and movements that can serve as powerful inspirations. 

And so then that leads me to the final question I’m thinking about, which is this question of, What resources do we need and what resources will help us with these experiments? What resources will move us toward this self-determination and this collective sanctuary? What texts do we need access to? What other people do we need? What ways of relating to each other do we need, what histories, what archives? What relationship with our families, what access to free therapy do we need, in order to be able to really live out and spread these practices in ways that are meaningful? And Jordan, from here I’ll pass it on to you.

 

Jordan Bell: Really, yeah, I think you already know that we really appreciate you, sharing your genius, your brilliance, your knowledge with all of us, and just thank you for really helping us engage and think more deeply about what abolition means in the context of the work that we do, and specifically for a lot of us in education spaces. [EDWIN: ❤️] And so I’m just really trying to wind this down right now, I’m wondering, and Brian, you know you gotta go third, but what I’m wondering right now is, does anybody want to just provide some final words, just a final thought to just send this off until we get to meet again? Because something tells me this isn’t going to be our last time in community. 

 

Brian Jones: I’m gonna go first this time. Ha! Ha! I’ll let somebody else have the hardest job.

I really struggle with how we’re going to do what we need to do at multiple scales. I wish I had a beautiful answer for this. I used to think that I did have an answer. But now I don’t know, and I’m curious about what people are saying about the kind of intimate level of relationships and the people immediate in our lives, like, I think, in community and mutual aid. And like all of that, it’s like that’s part of it, too.

But then there are other scales at which things are happening, where I think that what we need — when you ask the question, what do we need, I think we need public spaces and resources that are available to us to sometimes gather and have conversations and conferences and meetings at many different scale, to bring ourselves together and be inspired by each other. And to me, the last time that happened on a really big scale was the summer of 2020 uprising, which reminded me that there is something more than just that intimate scale. There is this larger scale, and when we manifest at that scale, it ends up affecting the smaller scales as well. And it ripples, it changes us, and it changes the landscape in which we do all the other kinds of work that we’re trying to do. So, I want that for us. I want us to be powerful on many different scales, and that disruptive power of mass action has always been an important ingredient in anything that we might call progress in this country. I think these scales are connected to each other. I look forward to seeing us, you know, make some magic in the years ahead.

 

Atasi Das: Brian, that was awesome. I was thinking of the power of movements. You know, when I’m thinking and others are talking about movements towards freedom, the sixties are often brought up, and then sometimes now it’s even going to other different times and spaces. Considering what you just said, we have different gifts to offer, and I think maintaining and opening a relationship among these different scales or whatever those people are doing in that space to honor them, not just the feeling of it, but to really see the power of that work, is important. It’s different from coming on the streets, you know, there were moments that brought everybody into marching, right? And it was so pointed. And so when we’re thinking of spaces of learning or housing, there’s all these different kinds of things happening, like people are being evicted. It’s a little bit diffuse. And so we have these siloed activities, and coming together, we’re honoring those and uplifting and just kind of giving encouragement to one another. Some get more airtime than others, you know, but it is connected, and it can be, and we can support one another’s work in deeply historicizing ways and just become a little more powerful together. And so that’s my hope. And I’m really curious how folks can speak back or speak in conversation. You know, as you’re reading, something like everyone has their own thoughts and like who knows how to bring this back. But I’m curious how other folks resonate or what they want to build from it. But anyway, yeah, that was really awesome and gave me a lot to think about.

 

Robert P. Robinson: I’ll take up the difficult third space this time (laughs). Brian, you were not lying. It is harder than second.

But yeah, like check check to everything said. And also, coming back to that question of hope, my hope is that we keep dreaming and building and mapping and doing it out loud in real time and in community, drawing on our collective resources and powers of the present, drawing on our histories and like Atasi and Brian have talked about, our histories and models from the past, and our dreams of our future [EDWIN: ❤️]. The part that we didn’t record was the fact that I’m not a parent, I mean I am a parent, but my foster son is 25. But it’s so cool that when we started off folks were talking about what makes them smile, and all the parents started talking about their kids, and I’m like, I would love to dream with you all about those futures for your kids where they are both beneficiaries and leaders of what that liberatory future could look like. 

 

Edwin Mayorga: I don’t know if I have much to say except yeah, yes to freedom dreaming, yes to radical possibilities. Let me say two things. I want to bring us back to Jean Anyon. When she was talking about social movements, one of the pieces that I think I’ve talked about with some of you before, it’s a little paragraph in Radical Possibilities. She talks about the importance of spade work. When I was hearing you talk, Brian, I was thinking about the multi-scalarness of movements. And in those quiet times where it feels like movements are not happening, that’s actually some of the most active moments of spade work, nourishing the garden, building solidarity, doing relationship work. 

Since we’ve been back in person for classes, one of the things I’ve been assigning, and you know I had the honor of teaching our Urban Ed policy course to our current cohort of students at the Graduate Center, which has been, it has been a whole journey. But in the end I really loved it, and I love that group of emerging colleagues there. But with that class and many other classes, I’ve been finishing courses by asking people to read two things. One is “Hope is a Discipline,” the conversation and interview with Mariame Kaba, and then the Cornel West commencement speech at Wesleyan back in 1993, which is where he talks about audacious hope. I like to pair the two because, as Cornel West reminds us, it’s not about optimism. It’s this leap of faith, right? That’s what hope requires of us, and to hope in an audacious way is critical. 

My colleagues’ responses all remind me of what those are, the things that make me hopeful are things that are already happening in certain corners of the world. In certain places, the spade work of movements is still happening. We are all part of them, and contributing and engaging, each according to our abilities, to bring in our comrade Marx for a hot second. But I’m really thinking about how that is a kind of audacious hope in action. So that’s where I also then come back to hope as a discipline, that, in fact, it requires us to be both disciplined and unruly simultaneously. And that’s hard ass work, y’all, what does that actually mean for us?

And what I hope sustains all of us is being in those beautiful experiments, having the opportunity and stretching ourselves in audaciously hopeful ways to take those risks, to be engaged in those beautiful experiments, trying ideas. Most of them are going to fail, right? But even in those failures there are wins in the people you meet and the trust and the relationships that you build, the visions that we collectively create and imagine in that freedom dreaming process. So even in failure, you know, quote unquote, failure, there’s so much success. There’s so much winning happening, and we have to honor that. I think about the politics of refusal — I refuse to be a prisoner of despair. I’m really gonna double down on hope and double down on us, and like, I’m gonna ride it out right until the work is done. And so, it’s just a pleasure to be with y’all. I love you all. So let me stop talking.

 

Jordan Bell: I don’t think you need to stop talking, but I appreciate you just bringing up these ideas of hope as a discipline and this audacious hope. Just thinking about this idea of hope right now, there’s two things that really resonate with me in this moment. One is, I do hope this abolition work gets co-opted one day, and not that co-optation is a good thing, but I hope that this language becomes so popular that it signifies a shift in the way that we collectively engage in the world, and I don’t mean us individually, I just mean it on a larger idea of us as people. And then the other thing that I hope is, I really hope this isn’t the last time we all get to collab and connect, because this was dope AF. And yeah, y’all just so beautiful. And you know, I feel warm inside, even though I’m sitting by myself in Poughkeepsie, New York as we speak. I hope all y’all feel warm too, and nothing but love, just thank you. Can’t wait till we do this again [ROBERT: ❤️].

 

Suggested Readings and Resources: 

Anyon, J. (2014). Radical possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement. Routledge. 

Podcast Episodes — Abolition Science

Childs, D. R. (2015). Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary. University of Minnesota Press. 

Cornel West at Wesleyan University (1993)

Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press. 

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935/1998). Black Reconstruction in America. Free Press. 

Dumas, M. J. (2016). Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse. Theory Into Practice.

The Education for Liberation Network and Critical Resistance Editorial Collective. (2021). Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators. AK Press. 

Gaines, E. J. (1993). A Lesson Before Dying. Knopf.

Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso Books. 

Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W. W. Norton & Company.

Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State

Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition

Kaba, M. (2021). We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press.

Love, B. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press. 

Love, B. L. & Muhammad, G. E. (Eds.). (2020). What do we have to lose?: Toward disruption, agitation and abolition in Black education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Marx, K. (1891/2022). Critique of the Gotha Program. PM Press/Spectre. 

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1 (1), 1-40.

 

Notes on Contributors

Atasi Das (Urban Ed Cohort 15) is an Assistant Professor in the the Early Childhood and Childhood Education program at Lehman College. Her research interests include rehumanizing mathematics, transdisciplinary approaches to critical numeracy, anti-racist teacher education, and abolitionist teaching practices in STEM.  

Brian Jones (Urban Ed Cohort 12) is director of the Center for Educators and School at The New York Public Library. He is the former associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he was also a scholar in residence. Brian writes about Black education history and politics and his first book, The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s 2023 Nonfiction Literary Award.

Edwin Mayorga (he/him/his) (Urban Ed Cohort 7), is a parent-educator-activist-scholar, and Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Latin American/Latino Studies at Swarthmore College (PA). Edwin teaches and writes about racial neoliberal urbanism, scholar-activism, participatory action research (PAR) entremundos, decolonization, critical racial/ethnic studies, antiracist & abolitionist teacher education and community+school collaboration. He is also a board member of the Education Law Center and on the K16 advisory board for PHENND. While committed to research, teaching and activism, Edwin strives to prioritize being an engaged spouse and parent, and as a result is often found at local parks and baseball fields with his spouse Jen and their sons Teo and Julian (Juju).

Robert P. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. His forthcoming book project is a history of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School (OCS) as a site for understanding Black self-determination, the shift in mainstream curriculum and pedagogy, and the Black radical imagination in education.

Dr. Jordan Bell is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow at the Erikson Institute. He is an award-winning Black Studies, English, Philosophy, and Teacher Education educator who teaches courses through a critical lens. Jordan obtained his Ph.D. in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Jordan has research interests that center around Critical Race Theory, BlackCrit, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE), Healing Centered Engagement, and Racial Literacy. Those research interests culminate into two primary research strands: One is on developing educators’ and students’ racial literacy so that they can successfully respond to and engage in a multicultural world, and the other is in learning about and creating the conditions for Black Educational Spaces that are designed to center Black students’ healing. Jordan has been awarded a Spencer Foundation Grant, been named as a 2022-24 Cultivating New Voices for Scholars of Color Fellow by the National Council of Teachers of English, and his work has been published in journals such as Comparative Education Review and Equity & Excellence in Education.

Karen Zaino is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry at Miami University of Ohio and a recent graduate of the PhD program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include teacher education, youth participatory action research, anti-oppressive education, open pedagogy, and queer and trans studies in education.