From now until Juneteenth 2020, I will share resources that have deeply challenged my thinking and guided my activism for racial justice. I will share my learning and my story, too.
I once got attacked by the Alt-right on Twitter for sharing my thoughts about standpoint theory, which I studied at an anti-racist teacher training. What was intended to be a call for educators to listen to Black educators became a call for hundreds of unknown white men and white women to assert their philosophical superiority over me, along with “you’re an idiot who should never be allowed to teach,” and “you’re disgusting.” The tweet, by the way, was something along the lines of:
“We have the most to learn from the most oppressed; the most oppressed have the greatest access to the ugliest truths.”
Standpoint theory, and James Baldwin (to be discussed below), taught me about the paradoxical nature of knowledge. People in oppressed positions are crippled in justifying their truths, because existing social and scientific knowledge, and the systems that are used to produce such knowledge, exclude them, and at worst, are designed specifically to oppress them. People in privileged positions are crippled in seeing the truth, because these very people created the biased systems that produce knowledge, which is intended to empower them.
The responses to my tweet confirmed my support of the theory.
If we were to step back in time just 3 months, the concept of an American city committing to defund and dismantle a police department would have been unfathomable. But over the past few weeks, the movement to “defund the police”, led by the decades old international human rights movement Critical Resistance, has surged in public dialogue. The confluence of the disproportionate COVID-19 deaths of Black Americans, the egregious murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery captured in broad daylight, and the violence inflicted on peaceful protestors, have created a moment that longstanding Black civil rights leaders, activists, and scholars describe as different.
“The unifying theme, for the first time in America’s history, is at last: Black Lives Matter.” — Jenna Wortham
According to survey data from Civiqs referenced in the NY Times, “In the last two weeks, American voters’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased almost as much as it had in the preceding two years.” The technologies and media that have too often been used to exclude and oppress Black Americans have been co-opted to bring truth from their oppressed standpoint to unquestionable light. Perhaps being stuck at home looking at screens made it impossible for even the most indifferent to ignore?
Regardless of how we arrived at this moment, it’s a fact that thousands of Americans are inhaling anti-racist books, and are standing in solidarity with Black Lives Matter at protests like never before. Indeed, the virtue signaling is out there, but the real work of changing policies in our work places and in our cities is in progress. For the first time in my teaching career, a critical mass of my colleagues are fighting to dismantle tracking, and for restorative justice. All the while, teachers across the city are coming together across racial and political lines to demand the defunding and removal of NYPD from all public schools.
I live in the third most racially segregated city in America, so unsurprisingly, my friend groups are pretty intensely racially segregated. In the global pandemic era, this segregation is visible in the form of my BIPOC-friend-text-threads, and my white-friend-text-threads. I toggle between these conversations daily. I mention this because we’ve all been discussing the issue of police reform vs. police abolishment, and I can’t help but notice a stark racial divide among my own friends on this issue.
While most of my white friends are in support of policies that address root-cause problems, such as shifting funds from police to public schools and social services, some of them have expressed concern with the radical branding of “defunding police” and “abolishing police”. The argument (from friends and some progressive media), is that the language of “abolishing police” demands too much explaining, or reads as untenable; that the language itself may create a wedge issue, and may weaken public sentiment.
I instinctively disagreed with this argument, and needed the time to think more deeply about why. Should we be choosing language that frees us from explaining? Should we be planning backwards from what is received by the middle as “tenable”?
I’ve been reflecting on these questions for the past few days, not only within the context of the criminal justice system, but also within the context of public education. I’ve been thinking about how much simply explaining “Black lives matter” has demanded of me as both a teacher, and as an activist, and how much learning has grown from that explaining. Isn’t creating the demand for discourse from the standpoint of the oppressed the whole point?
Alex Vitale, the author of End Policing, explains that the movement to abolish police, and the prison-industrial complex more broadly, is about “building a new political narrative.” In Freeing Ourselves from Standard, I urge educators to free themselves from what a select few define as “standard“. I urge educators to build a meaningful narrative that centers the lived experiences of our students; that empowers students to address the most critical issues facing their communities. That narrative, whether it be racial justice or community resilience to climate change, not only gives purpose to our students, but purpose for an entire school community. The narrative challenges us to listen, research, unlearn, learn and teach to, an end-goal. The narrative is our end-goal, and our end-goal cannot and should not be defined by what is currently tenable.
If we want to eradicate racism in America, then we cannot ask the Black Americans and other activists leading the movement for racial justice to use “tenable” language, or to choose language that demands no explaining. This would fall victim to the bias paradox outlined in standpoint theory. Asking this would be the equivalent of “looking at one’s self through the eyes,” of another racial group, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois. Softening language will inevitably soften policy, and this would be precisely what Dr. Ibram X. Kendi would defines as assimilationist in How to Be an Antiracist. “Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists typically position White people as the superior standard.” Assimilationist ideas center the feelings and tenability from the white standpoint.
Without embracing the narrative, the seemingly unfathomable dreams of the most oppressed, we fall victim to assimilationist policies. The “abolish the police” narrative brings discomfort and conflict, because it actually recognizes the police as an institution that was designed to control Black bodies and preserve racial hierarchy, and the need to dismantle it.
The demands of Black Lives Matter have never been radical. The demand to shift funds from militarized police forces to public education, public health, and social services, is not radical. The demand to build new structures that eliminate the need for law enforcement is not radical. The demand to challenge what’s currently tenable, to build humane systems that do not kill Black people, is not radical. These demands are simply humane.
What the broader left in the US must always remember is that policy almost always follows narrative, not the other way around. Narrative establishes extremely clear moral stakes. It forces everybody involved in the discussion to occupy your story, rather than you winding up in somebody else’s. And if nothing else, “abolish the police” more than sets clear moral stakes in a way just about anybody can understand immediately. That’s why it’s such an effective political statement. — Emily VanDerWerff
As of yet, I’ve not had one BIPOC friend challenge the language of “abolish the police.” This comes as no surprise. The narrative, from many of our standpoints, has already been informed by our varying degrees of oppression. Our role in #Blacklivesmatter, has already been decided. We’re fighting for racial justice. The end of policing is critical to that end-goal.
This week, I revisited one of my favorite speeches, “A Talk to Teachers,” by James Baldwin, for perspective and grounding. Baldwin delivered this speech during a heart-wrenching, racially contentious time, shortly after the Birmingham bombing of the four girls in the church at 16th Street Baptist Church, and the assassination of JFK. In his speech, Baldwin addresses the paradox of education, and the challenges in teaching students to grapple with the suppressed truths of American history. He urges us teachers to “Go For Broke”. Baldwin encourages us teachers to prepare for the most “determined resistance,” in a call to risk everything in an all-out effort. Reading his speech helped give me clarity and confidence on the language I will use, and the policies I will fight for, in this moment. Here is a paragraph that particularly stuck with me:
It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad. — James Baldwin
Please read “A Talk to Teachers” for courage, and, to refer back to the language of standpoint theory, for access to more objective truths.
The second resource I hope you will study is a powerful interview with James Baldwin in 1960 on being Black in America. His words, during the Civil Rights Movement, as in his speech to teachers, remain perfectly relevant today. This particular statement stuck with me:
If I were to describe a hypothetical white liberal… Well I know what he thinks he’s doing. But…what he’s mainly doing is something that demands my tacit cooperation. I have to agree that I am what he says I am in order for us to have any dialogue at all. — James Baldwin
The next two resources, I believe, are helpful in guiding and informing our time-sensitive advocacy work around “defunding the police” and “abolishing the police.”
The “Abolitionist Toolkit” was created by Critical Resistance, a movement founded by Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rose Braz more than 2 decades ago, to support organizers, activists, and educators in dismantling the prison-industrial complex. The toolkit includes data, historical context, and critical-thinking prompts to help guide teaching and decision making. The “Abolitionist Toolkit” helped me to understand that “abolitionist steps are about gaining ground in the constant effort to radically transform society.” The end-goal is to chip away at “oppressive institutions rather than helping them live longer.” Abolitionist work is about “pushing critical consciousness, gaining more resources, building larger coalitions, and developing more skills for future campaigns.” Abolitionist work is not about what is tenable; it is about making “the ultimate goal of abolition possible.”
History shows us that it’s important to carry out work along abolitionist lines. I think that history shows us that reforms have temporarily made things better at some points, and some reforms have been incredibly important in improving conditions inside prisons or giving basic rights to prisoners…but if we don’t approach that work with a critical eye to what it is that we’re creating in its place, and if we’re not doing the work in a way that actually undermines the power structure, then that’s where we have a problem, because if we’re not questioning the underlying — not just causes and reasons for why people become incarcerated but the underlying causes and reasons that give others a vested interest in seeing more and more people being locked up, then we’re not addressing the problem. We’re simply putting band-aids on some underlying issues of inequality and power in our society… If we don’t attack the systemic structures and institutions and power structures that lead to the problem in the first place, then rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as people say, isn’t ultimately going to get us where we all say we want to be. — Melissa Burch
Last but not least, Campaign Zero, a national campaign which previously pushed for police reform, has released a new campaign called “8 Can’t Wait,” which is advocating for the complete disbanding and dismantling of police. Please read their eight step plan. This new, more radical, campaign is an outgrowth of this powerful moment in history — evidence that we should not compromise the narrative.
Given the length of this essay, and the research and time it took to write, I’ll be taking a few days for my own self-preservation. The road is long, but I know where I’m headed.
