Abolitionist teachers need to first step outside of themselves to examine and deeply understand the structures that perpetuate inequities in schools. Then, we must insert ourselves personally into those structures to examine how we can be the reproducers of that harm and conversely, how we can fracture those systems and build new conditions for our students. Abolitionist teachers seek to carve out the spaces for the work we can do within the problematic structures that unfortunately exist.
Critical Race Theory is sometimes seen as a pessimistic framework, but it can be useful in that abolitionist teachers only start by recognizing and naming what creates the oppressive conditions that exist for students of color in schools. Then, we can ask the larger questions about how these systems got to be the way they are, and ultimately better understand and support the traumas that our minority students experience on a daily and inter-generational basis.
Dr. Asif Wilson illuminates how abolitionist teachers can be more aware of their own whiteness and the ways in which it can cloud their gaze and be reproduced by the people around them. What sort of structures are bound to our responses and actions as teachers? We need to challenge our whiteness and recognize white supremacy over racism, as bell hooks asserts. Racism implies a power structure, but white supremacy is embodied in all of us and we all participate in it.
On a hopeful note, Dr. Wilson claims that abolitionist teachers can still do the work in small ways before we can actually dismantle these systems. If we can understand how white supremacy, capitalism, and the patriarchy are entrenched in everything in our lives, we can start by using our curriculum materials and restorative practices to guide students to critically examine and interrogate these structures.