“We who are dark want to matter and live, not just to survive and thrive.”
Quoting W.E.B. Du Bois's powerful statement, educator and activist Bettina Love begins her abolitionist teaching missive “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” underscoring the terrible underpinnings of the school-to-prison pipeline and the key tenets of the modern abolition movement, which seeks to abolish systemic and institutional racism in all its myriad insidious forms.
Love, an associate education theory professor at the University of Georgia, is the architect of the abolitionist teaching theory, which is built upon the foundational concept that white teachers often struggle to teach Black students holistically. Instead of allowing white teachers to throw their hands in the air or implying that only Black teachers can teach Black students, abolitionist teaching provides the groundwork for those teachers to do better.
In an interview with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Love defined abolitionist teaching as a framework that “tries to restore humanity for kids in schools.” A simple enough goal, it seems, but not one without risk: Love noted that abolitionist teachers must be “willing to put their reputation, home and lives on the line for other people's children.”
Because she is an educator, Love’s framework goes far beyond the theoretical. She provides fellow educators with free abolitionist teaching tools like the Hip Hop Civics curriculum, which helps connect classrooms with community leaders and activists and uses the spirit of hip hop to teach students about “democracy, citizenship, freedom, community, civic engagement and intersectional justice,” as its website proclaims.
Along with providing such progressive curricula, Love also gives straightforward advice on how to undo the intrinsic biases white teachers bring to their classrooms that harm their Black and brown students: active recruitment and mentorship of teachers of color and required courses in “African studies, African-American studies, Latinx studies, Caribbean studies, Chicana/o studies, Asian and Southeast Asian studies and Native American studies,” as she noted in Education Weekly.
By boldly asserting that education in the United States suffers from systemic racism—and indeed, that the system profits from the harm it does to Black children—Love and her abolitionist teaching framework are the educational answer to calls for the abolition of policing and prisons, to abolish ICE and to overhaul the nation’s broken immigration system. Unsurprisingly, she counts as inspirations prison abolitionist Angela Davis and Alicia Garza; and Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometti, the Black women who founded the Black Lives Matter movement.
Less than a decade ago, educational theories and practices like Love’s would have been considered too radical for implementation in American classrooms. Now, abolitionist teaching has an entire network and is being used in classrooms across the United States. As the progressive world continues to wake up to the realities of systemic racism, so too will it keep prioritizing the work of such bold thinkers and doers as Bettina Love.
