Abolitionist Dreaming:
Protecting our Future from the Commodified Ego
How do you preserve what is sacred
amongst
the nuance of words?
The restraints of sentencing
colonized into compartmental judicial counterparts
and a people are illiterate.
Language lost in the limitations of dreams
drowned in limited definitions
wielding nightmarish grammatical armies seeking
washed restructuring of the tense
emotion boiling under ancestors breath.
Restrictions bound by clouded views
choosing few to be the chosen ones
to seek third eyed visions and forethought
of martyrdom mystified into consumerism.
Messages bottled found drifted
mass marketed and taste tested
telephone wire twisted
but there’s something missing.
The internal reflection and process of holding yourself accountable within interpersonal connection is the one of the hardest parts of doing the work as an abolitionist teacher. But it has to be the first. Leading with integrity is the only way forward. That includes all of it, past and present. And the willingness to embrace what it means to admit to mistakes, and actively making mistakes, in an effort to participate in a community of belonging. The conscious restructuring of foundations laden in boobytrapped conditioning. This is an active and on-going shift in what is understood as a life-long process. The work of doing repair and seeking harm reduction strategies, continues to perpetuate the conditions that create the faulty systems to begin with. What is required is so internal that it is often ugly and isolating. Intergenerational traumas and biases that align with rigid and racist systems must be confronted and examined in transformational ways. Circles of trust can often become smaller and a constant heightened state of awareness creates a distrust so deep, navigating the system seems impossible.
Abolitionist studies, and social justice pedagogies, focus on how hegemony systemically and institutionally perpetuates and causes mass inequities that impact people at intersectionally different degrees. Struggle becomes statistic, and trauma becomes funded through grant initiatives and gala functions. Humanity is lost. Demographics become assigned values, while corporations and non-profits thrive off of tax write-offs, and bank on continued inequity. What is often a misstep is forgetting the way in which people can replicate the same capitalist and individualist driven structures and systems, within interpersonal relationships. What is necessary or needed in order for the individual to detach from ego-centric motives? bell hooks champions ways in which love allows us to break from the stifled personified perspectives of fixed capital and instead allow for nuance, change, and hope. In witnessing many people begin to embrace, or as I call “getting their feet wet” in the work, all too often they jump to exculpatory means of absolving themselves of the mess they tracked in, when they didn’t take their shoes off. Harm has already been committed, and without that acknowledgement, everything forward is on fractured foundation.
At the school site level, immediately a child is subjected to a variety of oppressive and harmful policies that challenge every aspect of identity development and joy. As Dr. Bettina Love calls it, schools are actively “spirit murdering.” Policies will always play an intermediary between the community and the police, because of their limited ability to dream radically. They are inherently carceral and punitive driven, outlining what one can do, and can not do. The rules controlling the masses with no discretion of difference, agency, or need. Safety is defined, rather than conjured. The true radical magic is when the subjectivity of the word ‘safety’ is caught and encompassed amongst the mental, physical, and emotional structures created by the community, to ensure everyone is cared for and has the agency to advocate for their needs. The community cares about you, and you trust the community enough to listen, when you advocate for what you need. Instead, safety is masked through oppressor-created systems, like “background checks”. Gate keepers of value, like auctioneers. Equity frameworks laid out like bracketed tournaments. Competitive, tiered, prioritized, linear.
Breaking from frameworks means to participate in cyclical environments of dialogue and community accountability. This however requires trust, which until the individual can relinquish the fear of holding onto that power, that has mindfully been commodified to be associated with value, the engagement with the work in a pedagogical way, will be less meaningful and authentic. In abolitionist work, there has to be a commitment to not having the answers. To seek things out through gradual change that tries new and innovative ways to imagine radically, that have not been done before. Control has to be let go of, in every sense of the word. Black, Indigenous, and other people of color do not need any more allies. No more people trying to prove they are down. No badge, or pass is earned for past transactions of serviced based work to use as leverage for positioning in the struggle. Abolitionists show up in the present. Accountable and committed. There is no invitation to the revolution addressed to the ego.
Just like policies, our language too becomes controlled, commodified, and subjugated. We use words like emancipatory in education because even that, in its most radical structures, still remains implicative of a power dynamic that requires some outside assistance. Concepts like inclusivity assume a knowledge of what a community needs without its sense of agency or social equity. The way in which power and privilege activate words is a subtlety that is often overlooked, but the semantics matter. Self-love has become commodified. Its very purpose to sustain the healthy community turned into selfish motives that only have an end goal of the individual. The very idea of schools needs to be rethought, because it has created such a traumatic experience for so many, that it is truly no longer a place of learning, but monetized repetition into a normalized zombie state of complacency. What would a world look like without schools? How can we imagine learning and joy flourishing within spaces of communities of belonging and love? Dreaming of a world without schools means to dream of one without police. Without pipelines, black snakes, and white masks.
The manifestations of our narrowed perspectives only allow us to incrementally provide some sense of mental relief, when in reality, we continue to enforce and systemically replicate colonization through diversity and equity efforts. If we are to dream in a more liberatory and radical way, what are we missing that can break from the restraints, ingrained through capitalism, that can lead us towards a more abolitionist driven community? Focusing on the needs of the people is essential to understanding how it can best function together. Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ commodified and appropriated the concepts of self-actualization from indigenous practices. His design centers the individual, as opposed to the collective. The words we share, our vulnerabilities, our willingness to be raw and wrong, those are the moments of romance and resistance. Those are the moments of light for abolitionists. Glimmers of hope.
Love was the thing that allowed me to dream in limitless ways about my future. The ways in which the revolution held me in transformations that halted intergenerational trauma and grief, helped me find home. The manifestations of radical dreaming in lived reality. But even that became stifled by the present, too caught up in the past. Individualism took that over too. On my part, and theirs. We both abandoned the dialogue, the restoration, and healing. We both turned to capital, to policy, to possession, to limitations. Even for a glimpse though, I saw it. What it looks like when we are fully committed to an abolitionist practice. There were flowers, growth, and plants everywhere. Belly laughter. Gratitude. Hope. Joy. It was beautiful.