We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom QUOTES

1 " The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

2 " Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal. It is explicit, with a deep and "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

3 " Abolitionist teaching is not a teaching approach: It is a way of life, a way of seeing the world, and a way of taking action against injustice. It seeks to resist, agitate, and tear down the educational survival complex through teachers who work in solidarity with their schools’ community to achieve incremental changes in their classrooms and schools for students in the present day, while simultaneously freedom dreaming and vigorously creating a vision for what schools will be when the educational survival complex is destroyed. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

4 " Theory does not solve issues—only action and solidarity can do that—but theory gives you language to fight, knowledge to stand on, and a humbling reality of what intersectional social justice is up against. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

5 " Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

6 " Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

7 " Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive. Individuals with little to no experience are tasked with working in struggling schools that were designed to fail (e.g., they are underfunded, with high teacher burnout, tests that punish students, and low-quality teachers) and given only two years—if they can make it that long—to “make a difference,” when hundreds more qualified have tried and failed before them. These educational parasites need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative and the financial reason for their existence. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

8 " The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

9 " Racism "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

10 " Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the "human hierarchy" was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological inferiority to "those Americans who believe that they are White." Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

11 " America's legacy of oppression and dispossession of dark people is in large part met with the ethos of "We Shall Overcome," "Si Se Puede," and "We Gon' Be Alright." This is not to say that we have not resisted, rioted, rebelled, rightfully so and with righteous rage. It is these acts of rebellion that have allowed us to create a collective identity and, therefore, build schools, educate our children, use the church as a place of worship and community building, gather the best legal minds to argue for basic human rights, take to the streets as a demonstration of our commitment, and withdraw or withhold our money from companies and institutions that demean us and deny us. It is these acts that have allowed us to produce beautiful, visceral, and eloquent literature, photography, visual art, and films that explain and endure our suffering, soundscapes for all to enjoy (but which only those in the struggle can feel and heal from), body movements that express pain and joy simultaneously, food that can only be made from love, and a joy that cannot be replicated outside of the dark body. We have created in the void, defiant of the country's persistent efforts to killed and commodify us. Finding ways to matter. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

12 " When you understand how these theories function, when they become your North Star, you understand why progress is so hard and why survival is a constant struggle. Theories are more than just academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how structures uphold oppression. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

13 " Dark students and their families are sharecroppers, never able to make up the cost or close the gap because they are learning in a state of perpetual debt with no relief in sight. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

14 " Too often, though not always, our allies are eager White folx who have not questioned their Whiteness, White supremacy, White emotions of guilt and shame, the craving for admiration, or the structures that maintain White power. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

15 " Coconspirators can also be men who understand their privilege and work to challenge and undo patriarchy. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

16 " Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive. Individuals with little to no experience are tasked with working in struggling schools that were designed to fail (e.g., they are underfunded, with high teacher burnout, tests that punish students, and low-quality teachers) and given only two years—if they can make it that long—to “make a difference,” when hundreds more qualified have tried and failed before them. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

17 " Abolitionist teaching is not just about tearing down and building up but also about the joy necessary to be in solidarity with others, knowing that your struggle for freedom is constant but that there is beauty in the camaraderie of creating a just world. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

18 " We cannot create a new educational system for all with a lack of understanding of what cripples our current system. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

19 " confuse and manipulate we who are dark into never mattering to one another or this country. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

20 " Theories are more than just academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how structures uphold oppression. "

― , We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom