Dialogue
Abolitionist Theology Can Help Us Reimagine Schooling
Illustration by Mark Harris
By Ashley Y. Lipscomb
I’ll never forget the moment I was facilitating a focus group for high school students and one of them, a Black student, took a deep breath and with an exhale said, “Especially in middle school, and in elementary school, too, but I think it worsened in middle school, I definitely wanted to be white. Like, I’m gonna be honest, I wanted to be white.” I have facilitated several focus groups with students, but this is the one moment that sticks to my grieving soul. As a Black woman, I know that feeling, but as an educator, I hoped that schools would never make a child feel like this in 2022. Looking at that student, I had no words. My grief whispered, “What have we done?” and my rage screamed, “Burn this shit down!”
To hear a student say, “I’m still struggling with accepting myself even now” should dishearten us all. According to UCLA Health, the second-leading cause of death for young people ages 15–24 is suicide.1 These numbers are rising. I ask us to consider how we have gotten here. How have we not listened to the hearts of students who want to be loved and accepted? How have we let bigotry and baseless fears over critical race theory, banning books, and the like distort what is most important—loving students? How did we do this? Who is responsible? We all are. As an educator in public schools, I used to think I had to be strict and make students respect me, because that is how they will learn. I was trained to get students to be more compliant and that when they exhibit “deviant” behavior, they must be punished, isolated, and face harsh consequences.
Unfortunately, I thought this way for my first few years of teaching, even though it never felt like me. My blackness always made me feel inferior, even as a teacher; I would laugh at the racist jokes and be overly nice to the racist staff members, so they knew not all Black people are bad. All of the code-switching and shrinking were murdering my spirit and the spirits of my students.
Then, one day something shifted in me. I decided to stop shrinking and be my authentic self. I spoke up when high student discipline rates were blamed on students and families and not on the predominately white staff that struggled to make connections with their students of the global majority, I spoke up when those same students should have been in my honors language arts class, but they weren’t because they had a little too much “attitude,” and I spoke up when my students asked me to advocate on their behalf. My journey home to myself as a loving educator had been ignited and I knew there was more to explore. I felt complicit in the systems that further harmed students, so I applied and was admitted to Harvard Divinity School, where I sought to explore ways to reduce harm in my own teaching practices inside and outside of the classroom.
Studying racial healing and justice in schools, I learned that there is an insidious poison distorting the ways schools operate—Christian supremacy. White Christian supremacist nationalism continues to have a chokehold on our schools, policies, government, and institutions. Christian supremacy in schools is not a new phenomenon. At their inception, schooling institutions were founded with the mission of conversion and assimilation into white Christianity. Historically, we know that Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. These boarding schools aided in what Dorothy Roberts, author of Torn Apart, calls “the ongoing white supremacist nation-building project.”2 This project’s foundational logic is punitive and carceral.
In her article “Penitence, Plantation and the Penitentiary: A Liberation Theology for Lockdown America,” Nikia Smith Robert calls us to acknowledge the ways atonement models of the early church in the East and West set the premise of Christian interpretation to be punitive and to employ carceral logics.3 We have allowed atonement models to make us believe that, as human beings, we are inherently deserving of punishment and should be sacrificed to state-sanctioned violence to atone for our sins. Unfortunately, these models have permeated our schools and continue to sacrifice our most brilliant, beautiful, and vulnerable students. Betinna Love’s abolitionist teaching and educational freedom dreaming work discuss the ways schools mirror society and the punitive and carceral logics that are deeply embedded in the policies and practices of schooling institutions.4 These logics are choking students, educational practitioners, leaders, and communities that cannot thrive in these conditions.
For example, Khalil Abdur-Rashid, the first full-time Muslim chaplain at Harvard University, was a featured panelist at a convening of the Leadership Institute for Faith and Education that I attended. He asked educators and school leaders in attendance to consider how their rigid punitive structures would impede the thriving of Muslim students who are fasting during Ramadan. From sunup until sundown, Muslim students observing Ramadan do not eat or drink, which could make them more lethargic and distracted. “Instead of punishing them for falling asleep or missing an assignment, how can schooling institutions be more intentional about supporting these students?” he asked the attendees. Our Muslim students, educators, and families in the United States already feel they live in a world that punishes them for existing. Does that punishment have to continue in our schools?
I believe we have the capacity to uproot the foundational carceral logics and ideologies of schooling institutions and to create new ways of learning and participating in educational spaces. As a theologian, I offer that abolitionist theology provides a path toward healing and liberation for young people and educational practitioners left merely to survive in schools. Abolitionist theology employs a radical imaginary to redefine safety for all students in schools and calls us to create new ways of being and doing in educational spaces. Schooling must be abolished so that education can begin, and abolitionist theology is a starting point.
Schooling institutions and sites of educational thriving are two different entities that have been conflated for far too long. Essentially, schooling institutions are schools whose policies and practices mirror and employ the punitive and carceral logics of our society. These are schools that value white comfort over the psychological, physical, emotional, and spiritual safety of their most vulnerable students. These schools rely on “traditional” forms of schooling and create conditions that marginalize, other, and push out certain students. Schools force students to dress, speak, act, and learn according to the standards of whiteness. These “norms” will always marginalize Queer students, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian students, students of the global majority, students with disabilities, and students for whom these categories are too limiting.
If schooling is to be abolished and educational freedom dreaming to be imagined, we must be able to name the systems of oppression and carceral logics that must be dismantled.
Sites of educational freedom dreaming and thriving seek to create educational experiences we have yet to witness on a national level. These are sites where students are affirmed because their experiences are reflected in the curriculum; they receive interventions, accommodations, and supports that humanize their experiences; and they know that they are in a place where they belong and are loved. To create these educational spaces, we must engage a radical imaginary. According to David Stoval, a radical imaginary calls us to “understand the world in its current state while vehemently working with others to change the current condition.”5 Engaging a radical imaginary moves us beyond simply creating more diverse and inclusive classrooms. It also functions as an analysis of social structures that create the school-to-prison nexus and employs us to design educational experiences created for the purpose of imagining new ways of being and building outside of the current heteronormative, ableist, anti-Black, and violent systems. If schooling is to be abolished and educational freedom dreaming to be imagined, we must be able to name the systems of oppression and carceral logics that must be dismantled. It is here that abolitionist theology offers us a path forward.
Why use theology to insist schools release their hold on Christian supremacy? Harmful theologies lead to violent and problematic practices. It is the work of Christians to undo the harms we have caused. Let me say that again: It is the social and ethical responsibility of Christians to abolish the theologies that enabled Christianity’s carceral and punitive logics to create toxic practices and policies in schooling institutions. Abolitionist theology examines the methods by which we do theology and provides a critical framework for the questions we ask of biblical texts, the sources we engage, and the connections we attempt to make in our interpretations.
In doing so, abolitionist theology, which is deeply embedded with a love ethic, employs a hermeneutic of suspicion that recognizes the ways theology in practice has produced harmful practices that have contributed to the carceral logics that created mass incarceration and, in tandem, the chokehold we experience in schools. As a method for engaging biblical texts, abolitionist theology examines and names oppression, domination, power, and privilege, draws inspiration from the God who is on the side of justice, and provides a clear direction of how we learn from Christ’s approach for honoring, loving, and affirming the humanity of God’s people. Abolitionist theology utilizes Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection not as something that absolves the sins of wretched heathens; instead, it is a liberative framing that recognizes the divine within us and prioritizes the experiences and voices of those who are being spirit murdered at the hands of state-sanctioned violence. The cross then becomes “a life-altering space of resistance to restore social breaches and call into unity God and the oppressed.”6
In addition to naming the tactics of empire and its crimes against humanity, abolitionist theology also provides tangible pragmatic solutions for social transformation. These solutions would not require prisons, policing, or surveillance of any kind. They would create policies that recognize that everyone is deserving of love, from birth on, and that love in action looks like guaranteed housing, free health care, free education, accessible programs and spaces for those with disabilities, and access to organically sourced foods for all. They would also ensure community accountability and repair and restoration and would center practices that support people being in right relationships with themselves, their communities, the land, and other living creatures.
Abolitionist theology has so much to offer to the school abolition movement because, we must remember—and to employ a radical imaginary—the creation of humanity is an act of love in and of itself. In her book Red Lip Theology, Candice Marie Benbow calls us to acknowledge that when humanity was created, the Holy Maker called the design good. When we start our relationship with the Creator from a place of shame, we lose a rich and loving relationship with ourselves. Releasing a radical imaginary in education starts from the place of learning to truly love ourselves and others deeply, because we recognize we are good and not insufficient from birth. Schools as they exist have been designed to disconnect us from loving ourselves this way. When schools focus on compliance, control, and obedience, they deny students the opportunity to explore their identities and love themselves, thereby fracturing their relationships with themselves and others. A radical imaginary calls us to explore other ways of creating safe spaces for students and educational practitioners to be and thrive in educational spaces.
A radical imaginary deconstructs what it means to be safe in educational spaces, and requires us to redefine what safety is, what it does, and what it means to students, communities, and educational practitioners. In my work, I have the honor and privilege of listening to students, educators, and community members share their experiences in school and discuss their visions for creating transformative educational experiences. When I ask students and educators how they define a safe and secure learning environment, not one of them ever responds with police, more security, or metal detectors. Yet, in 2018, nationwide spending on school safety reached an estimated $1.4 billion,7 and, according to a US Department of Education study, there are “14 million students in schools with police presence but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker.”8 A radical imaginary would listen to students across the country who define a safe and secure learning environment as one that affirms them, validates their experiences, gives them space to process current events, and helps them build healthy relationships with themselves, their peers, their teachers, and family. Instead of spending billions on more police or security officers, schooling institutions should honor the genius of students by utilizing their budgets to support the mental, social, and emotional well-being of students.
Whenever I suggest that schools should remove school resource officers, I get responses like “That’s unrealistic” or “How will we keep students safe?” Arguably, the first step to ensuring safety for students is unlearning the notion that punitive measures “correct behavior.” They never have. According to the ACLU, “There is no evidence that increased police presence improves school safety.”9 A radical imaginary calls us to create policies that secure the psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual safety of all students. Accomplishing this will take a community of individuals deeply committed to abolishing schooling institutions. It requires school leaders to admit that they do not have all the solutions to address the problems and issues currently plaguing the field of education. Instead of being “school leaders,” they should become educational facilitators who partner with students, caretakers, community members, grassroots organizations, and other important stakeholders to meet the needs of every student. Schools do not operate in silos, and the most impactful solutions for educational transformation must happen in partnership with surrounding communities. Coalescing a collective of educational freedom dreamers and visionaries will create new holistic and healing policies and practices in educational spaces.
A radical imaginary calls us to create policies that secure the psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual safety of all students. Accomplishing this will take a community of individuals deeply committed to abolishing schooling institutions.
Abolitionist theology calls us to create a world we have not seen, and utilizing a radical imaginary to abolish schooling requires schools to heal from punitive and carceral logics. Then and only then can they create educational experiences that we have never witnessed before. Educational policies and practices should be healing-centered. Students, educational practitioners, families, and communities are already living through a gauntlet of traumas and tumultuous circumstances, and being in school should not further contribute to these experiences. Policies that are healing-centered do not utilize control and compliance; instead, they consider the ways learning can help students feel affirmed and love themselves more deeply. They do not lead with standardized testing data as an assessment of student learning or as the only indicators of student success. Policies that are healing-centered assess rigor by measuring student well-being. They teach students how to address and repair harm within their school community and how to advocate for themselves. They also let students have autonomy over their own learning.
These policies are not limited to social-emotional learning and antiracist pedagogy. For example, they consider how a school’s schedule is impeding educators from co-creating with their colleagues and is inducing burnout. They do not have dress codes that regulate whose bodies are more presentable than others, nor do they control how any student wears their hair. Policies that are healing-centered incorporate processes that enable collectives of loving adults and students to develop care-terventions. It is not about order and compliance; it’s about creativity. To have healing-centered policies is to work with the community, grassroots organizations, and resourceful partnerships to ensure that every student’s family is housed, gets nutritional meals, has access to family therapy and counseling, has quality and affordable health care, and is offered any other services that determine a student’s well-being.
It is also important to develop curricula that cultivate the genius of students. Gholdy Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy framework provides ways to consider how curriculum can help students to learn more about their identity, develop skills, cultivate intellectual curiosity, build criticality or deep analytical thinking to understand power, equity, and oppression, and, most importantly, cultivate joy. These approaches will disrupt the school-to-prison nexus and create experiences for young people that will enable them to love themselves and their communities fully. Creating these holistic experiences for students, educators, and communities will build toward our liberated and loving futures.
Abolitionist theology is a path toward our collective healing and liberation, though it is not the only way. The spirit of abolition reminds us there is no one right way toward our collective freedom. Where theology is limited, abolition offers us a framework to open space for us to be creative. This work starts with accountability. As Christians, we must be accountable for the ways our theologies have created harmful and violent policies and practices within society and schools; only then will we be able to create sites of healing and transformation where education can happen. I say this as someone who has taught this way in the classroom. My last year of teaching was the first time I facilitated learning in my authentic voice and prioritized relationships with students over rigor, order, and compliance. I partnered with my co-teacher to cultivate lessons that were accommodating to all students, allowed myself to be wrong when students called me out, gave students space when they were emotionally overwhelmed, and encouraged students to advocate for themselves.
Some of my colleagues might say I was too lenient, too soft, and too “woke” to be effective, yet my students were getting top growth percentile scores in my building and my state. Improved reading levels and test scores are only a bonus. My true success came at eighth-grade graduation when a parent walked up to me and hugged me. She said, “I don’t know what you did or what you said to my daughter, but I’m so glad she had you as a teacher.” In that conversation, she told me how her daughter had made so many strides in her academics and was having better relationships with her family at home. I saw this with all my students: they were becoming better at their academics and becoming better young people. I saw them actively listening to each other, making connections even when they ideologically disagreed with each other, and cultivating joy. Teaching is a difficult profession, but I was less miserable teaching this way, and so were they.
How would our society and schools function if we weren’t so concerned with supporting the ongoing white supremacist nation-building project and, instead, we took action to make sure all of humanity had the resources needed to thrive as a divine creation? I believe that although we are living in a world of unbreathable circumstances that continue to choke us, we have the creativity and capacity—in the spirit of Alexis Pauline Gumbs—to create new ways of breathing.10 Those new ways of breathing will always love beyond measure and I know—borrowing from my Black Baptist church’s aspirations—they will create educational experiences that would ensure students, educational practitioners, and community members leave these places “better than they came.”
It is not too late to join the movement for our collective liberated futures, and our moral and ethical obligation to God’s creation is to start today. There are new ways of being and living in the world. We must find them. Our lives depend on it.
Notes:
- Sandy Cohen, “Suicide Rate Highest among Teens and Young Adults,” UCLA Health, March 15, 2022, connect.ucla.org. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (nami.org), “Nearly 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide and 9% have made an attempt to take their lives.”
- Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022). Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society.
- Nikia S. Robert’s article was published in The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School 12 (2017): 41–69.
- Bettina Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Penguin Random House, 2019) was the winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award.
- David Stoval, “Are We Ready for ‘School’ Abolition?: Thoughts and Practices of Radical Imaginary in Education,” Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 17 (2018): 51–61.
- Robert, “Penitence, Plantation and the Penitentiary,” 62.
- Carolyn Phenicie, “The State of School Security Spending: Here’s How States Have Poured $900 Million into Student Safety Since the Parkland Shooting,” The 74, August 20, 2018, the74million.org.
- ACLU, “Cops and No Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff Is Harming Students,” 2022, aclu.org/issues.
- Ibid.
- Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), a meditation based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. The book was a 2022 Whiting Foundation Winner in Nonfiction.
Ashley Y. Lipscomb (she/her), MDiv ’20, is a co-founder of The Institute for Anti-Racist Education, Inc. As a first-year PhD student at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education, her research interests include school abolition, the history of Christianity in schools, and education policy.
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