Abolitionist Teaching in Action: Q&A with Bettina L. Love

We Want to Do More Than Survive urges educators to tear down schools as they know them and rebuild using the intersectional tactics of past and present abolitionists. Love, an associate professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia, spoke with ASCD by phone about the theories and practices behind an abolitionist lens and the journey toward imagining schools where all students thrive.

Your book coins the term "abolitionist teaching," the idea of bringing abolitionist methods and stories into the education sphere. What does that mean?

Abolitionist teaching tries to restore humanity for kids in schools. Abolitionist teachers are willing to put their reputation, home, and lives on the line for other people's children. I was intrigued by the ingenuity and creativity and stories and methods of abolitionists in the past and present day. The work Angela Davis has done on prisons, the three women who started the Black Lives Matter movement, and the folks trying to abolish ICE were big inspirations. I wanted to highlight organizations like United We Dream, Dream Defenders, and Herstory; activist Mary Hooks and the work she's doing to bail out mothers in prison; Cathy J. Cohen with the Black Youth Project; FM SUPREME, a rap artist who does amazing work with youth and women's empowerment. It's not just a teaching practice, it's a way of life.

What does abolitionist teaching and pedagogy look like?

Abolitionist teaching looks different in every school. It comes from a critical race lens and applies methods like protest, boycotting, and calling out other teachers who are racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic. It's also about Black joy and always putting love at the center of what we're doing. [Abolitionist] teachers know how to talk about racism and homophobia in their classrooms; they organize marches and boycotts. So often, people are waiting for a leader to come along. You don't have to wait for someone else.

What is your vision for schools?

My vision for schooling would be a school where there's no standardized testing. Yes, there are tests, but they are not high-stakes and have nothing to do with a billion-dollar industry. Second, no police, no dogs, no metal detectors. Children walk into beautiful, bright buildings that look like someone is ready to love them in that space. There would be as many therapists and healers and counselors as teachers, because what we don't talk about is the generational and everyday trauma, regardless of race and nationality, that children are dealing with. We wouldn't suspend kids. Teachers would be skillful in their content and in Latinx, Native American, and African-American culture. Teachers would live in the school's community and be paid more than they're paid now. We'd be recruiting kids to be teachers and mentoring them throughout high school and into college and paying for their schooling.

You describe our current education system as the "educational survival complex," a system built on the suffering of students of color in which they are never educated to thrive, only to survive. How did you experience this as a student?

I was getting recruited by schools to play basketball and went to a high school teacher for extra help on the SAT, and she said, "I don't think you're college material." That hurt me to the core. She shot me down on a personal level but also a systematic level. I went into high school with a class of 1,000 and maybe 200 of us graduated. What happened to those kids? The education survival complex mirrors the prison industrial complex. Both industries are making money off these narratives about Black and Brown children—that we're defiant, violent, thugs—and it's just not true. This is about racism and how it plays out on Black and Brown bodies. The complex doesn't want to remove any barriers, it's just going to try to measure how well you can jump over them. Mattering is about building a community where people love, protect, and understand Black and Brown children. We want our full humanity recognized with dignity.

What does the history of Brown v. Board of Education teach us about the U.S. approach to integration?

I don't think we will ever understand what we lost in terms of Black education leaders and communities. We have to remember that Black and Brown schools were inferior when it came to textbooks and buildings and teaching salaries, but there were great educators in those buildings. It wasn't an intellectual capacity problem. Educators lost their jobs, white flight happened, and white people took resources and equity to the suburbs. We are now living with the repercussions of the gutting of Black education. We have a teaching force where less than 2 percent of teachers are African-American males. We have "apartheid schools"—where Black and Brown students are going to schools where less than 1 percent of students are white. When integration works, that's great, but you can't make folks integrate. As long as people believe these myths about Black and Brown folks, they're not going want to live by us, be taught by us, or have their children go to school with ours.

Many well-meaning educators are eager to mark themselves as "allies" or "social justice educators." You advocate for more "coconspirators." What does that look like?

The bar for allyship is low. Reading about racism is not the same as living it. A coconspirator says, "I know the terms, I know what white privilege and white supremacy mean, now what risks am I willing to take?" It's saying, "I'm going to put my white straight male privilege on the line for somebody. I'm going to stand up at the faculty meeting." If you're a white teacher and you have a classroom of white kids, talk to them about their privilege. We need reformers to say, "This is an all-white club of charter school reformers—why is that?" "I'm looking at this organization and everybody of color makes less. Why is that?" You need to want diversity not for the sake of diversity, but because you actually want us at the table. I heard a young man in Rhode Island say, "We don't [just] want a seat at the table. We want a seat at the table with power." Have some teeth in it.