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

Abolitionist teaching, or abolitionist pedagogy, is a way of life, not merely an educational model. In addition to promoting social justice, abolitionist teaching focuses on thriving—not just surviving—mattering, resisting, healing, freedom, joy, and love. It requires working in solidarity with people of color and drawing on the visionary thinking, creativity, determination, courage, rebellious spirit, and subversiveness of abolitionists to end injustice inside and outside schools.

Allyship implies working toward goals that are mutually beneficial to all parties. According to Love, it does not require white people to love or have meaningful relationships with people of color, question White privilege, or de-center whiteness. By contrast, coconspirators understand how whiteness functions in society. They use their privilege and leverage their power to support people of color and confront racism. In social justice circles, the term coconspirator functions as a verb and a noun.

CRT provides a framework for understanding how power is concentrated in the hands of affluent white men through capitalism and institutional racism, despite the existence of laws promising equality. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as statistics, the social sciences, and personal experiences, it provides tools to expose systemic racism and they ways it operates in society. The field of education began engaging with CRT in the late-1990s as a means of combating racism in education.