Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom

Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and other teachers to fight for genuine change. Topics include community self-defense, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, intersections between punk/DIY subculture and teaching, ESL, anarchist education, Palestinian resistance, trauma, working-class education, prison teaching, the resurgence of (and resistance to) the Far Right, special education, antifascist pedagogies, and more.

Edited by social studies teacher, author, and punk musician John Mink, the book features expanded entries from the monthly column in the politically insurgent punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll, plus new works and extensive interviews with subversive educators. Contributing teachers include Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Dwayne Dixon, Martín Sorrondeguy, Alice Bag, Miriam Klein Stahl, Ron Scapp, Kadijah Means, Mimi Nguyen, Murad Tamini, Yvette Felarca, Jessica Mills, and others, all of whom are unified against oppression and readily use their classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality.

Royalties will be donated to Teachers 4 Social Justice: t4sj.org

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781629637723

Book preview

Introduction

Misfits, outsiders, radicals, and marginalized people have always had a conflicted relationship with education. On one hand, they recognize that school is an oppressive institution. It is a potentially dangerous environment that is forced upon them as kids. Then, when they finally finish or escape it, they are pressured into often ruinously expensive higher education. On the other hand, education has also been an escape valve for people who are otherwise stuck in grim or disadvantaged life situations, helping provide them with structure and intellectual skills that have the potential to improve their lives and those of others.

Although the institutions of education are historically problematic and often oppressive, students who have experienced them as outsiders understand the importance of learning from teachers who have developed radical notions of what education is and how it works. Sometimes these students become teachers themselves, helping subvert the educational institutions or finding alternatives outside of them. In recent decades, one of the most subversive, transgressive, and misunderstood global subcultures—punk—has seen many of its consummate outsider adherents become teachers. This makes sense, given that a large percentage of punks embrace radical idealism, strong personal ethics, and intellectualism. These teachers retain their punk identity, or at least acknowledge the significant role of the subculture in their radicalization.

I am an activist, a fairly new teacher, and a punk. I play in bands and participate in the DIY- and DIT-oriented subculture. Coming to teaching as a politically radical punk, I was not interested in being a one-way fount of information and judgment to my students. Rather, I was hopeful about the potential to explore different approaches to classroom practice—universally reciprocal and justice-oriented, respectful, and centering of a wide array of life experiences; equitable and committed to diversity and demarginalization on a deep level, critical thought–oriented and self-reflective, counter-hierarchical, and antiauthoritarian; intersectionally feminist, decolonizing, and liberatory.

Unsurprisingly, I found there was little real support for such goals in the state credentialing process I was required to undergo. Many of these kinds of ideas are reflected in the rhetoric found in modern teacher training programs, representing a belated acknowledgment by collegiate academies of the newfound visibility of some very hard-fought (and often deeply contentious) radical concepts. This superficial rhetoric, however, is contradicted when it comes to how teachers are trained in actual practice, and the structural nature of many educational institutions results in problematic norms of instruction and learning being perpetuated by default.

In his seminal 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige draws from Althusser’s theories on unconscious ideology to describe how broader social divisions, processes, and hierarchies are replicated in schools, from the physical structure of campuses separated into traditional arts and sciences divisions (further divided by specific subject) to the act and shape of classroom instruction itself:

The hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught is inscribed in the very lay-out of the lecture theatre where the seating arrangements—benches rising in tiers before a raised lectern—dictate the flow of information and serve to naturalize professorial authority. Thus, a whole range of decisions about what is and what is not possible within education have been made, however unconsciously, before the content of individual courses is even decided.

These decisions help to set the limits not only on what is taught, but on how it is taught.¹

Seemingly intractable structures such as these, physical and otherwise, can carry strong (sub)conscious connotations of support for a status quo that is often harmful to marginalized people and groups, recasting the well-meaning educator into a role that perpetuates injustice. My own student teaching assessments and pedagogy courses were undertaken in two liberal-leaning institutions that have been repeatedly excoriated by the reactionary right-wing outrage crowd for their reputed leftist extremism. In these institutions, I was struck by how much pressure was placed on teachers to maintain a veneer of neutrality and lack of bias. Of course, neither of these positions truly exist in a broader society. We cannot separate ourselves from our learned, unconscious frames of reference, implicit biases, and positionality in the world—things our students see in us even when we don’t. Many diverse perspectives can and should be considered in any classroom setting, and an open-minded, accepting teacher who is also transparent about their own worldview helps to set a standard of honesty for the entire class. But the pressure to conform to a model of purported neutrality serves the purpose of perpetuating some of the most harmful aspects of the status quo, continuing to effectively marginalize many student identities and stifle critical dissent.

Fortunately, we live in a world where insurgent pushback against rotten institutions and injustice is growing stronger. There are many genuine radicals among teachers. Under the weight of administrative, parental, and social pressures (including the threat of doxxing by reactionaries), these teachers must often learn to be quite creative in teaching students to ask a more challenging set of questions, in fighting to push back against the oppressive status quo, and in using subversion to reinvent education from within by putting new and transgressive ideas into practice. As an aspirational radical and student teacher coming from a subculture/community that is used to being defined as outsider and consistently needs to create its own spaces, I wanted to connect with and learn from others who knew how to radicalize and subvert teaching pedagogy; those who treated their students as equals. I needed to learn from those who thought more like me.

The Teaching Resistance column, which this book is drawn from, began in January 2015, the month I got my teaching credential. It ran monthly in the infamous politically and culturally insurgent punk magazine Maximumrocknroll (aka MRR, est. 1982). I started the column on the suggestion of Megan March, my life partner and bandmate in Street Eaters, who had the idea after hearing me repeatedly bemoan the lack of a network and skill share for all the radical, punk-affiliated teachers I was meeting on tour and wanted to learn from. Although Teaching Resistance was born in a punk context, it was designed to be a platform for subversive educators of many stripes to share their innovative ideas and to draw attention to important issues around education. All of the authors in this book are personally dedicated to a deeply intersectional fight against oppression, lifting up transformative social justice ideals through direct action in their own classrooms and a wide array of other educational contexts.

In this book, you will find stories that directly document and reflect on classroom teaching practice, personal journeys in education, a little bit of theory, crucial labor struggles, and the challenges educators and students face in a wider world that is increasingly hostile to radical thought and to marginalized people in general. There are also several long-form interviews with iconic figures in punk and education that dive deeply into the backgrounds and motivations of these fascinating individuals.

The powerful, diverse voices in the column have given me countless insights and have been a major component in my education as a radical teacher, lessons hard to come by in institutional settings. I hope it can do the same for you, whether you are a teacher of any kind, a student, or a curious person who wants a greater understanding of how education can be used to center often marginalized voices, question and subvert the dominant narratives, rethink classroom structures and methods, and hopefully make the world a slightly better place.

I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education a practice of freedom.

—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

1 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 12–13.

One of the most consistent undercurrents in this book is that of intersectionality. This often misunderstood but absolutely crucial concept, theorized in 1989 by feminist scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, involves the understanding that any system of power that confers advantages or disadvantages on one group over another group (and among individuals within those groups) requires analysis of how these different categories—such as race, gender, sexuality, and class—are interdependent and overlapping, as are the power systems that generate such discriminations.

An effective approach to radical pedagogy recognizes that an intersectional lens is vital to understanding the big picture, and that keeping various types of oppression in separate, discrete categories makes it much easier for the structural forces (and their agents) driving such oppression to prevent people from finding solidarity in their struggles, keeping resistance diffuse and myopic and thus cutting effective opposition off at the knees. Intersectionality’s wide scope does not, however, require its advocates to eschew a specific focus or rhetorical emphasis on their individual struggles and battles with systems of oppression. In contrast, the intersectional lens encourages ever more crucial and detailed focus on the deep, underlying problem(s), with one eye always trained on the wider context—the big picture.

The following essay is intersectional as fuck, to put it mildly, but it is also centered on wrangling with what is inarguably a primary concern for teachers: the long, difficult battle to combat racism in the United States, a chronic, historic cancer that is directly reflected in the fundamental structures and failures of the American school system. It is by Melissa Merin, known to some as Shakes, who has worked for many years with kids in a variety of counseling and teaching roles at public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

School Is a Riot

by Melissa Merin

External control, are you gonna let ’em getcha?

Do you wanna be a prisoner to the boundaries they set ya?

You say you wanna be yourself, by christ, you think they’ll let ya?

They’re out to getcha getcha getcha getcha getcha getcha.

—Crass, Big A Little A

A GUIDE TO THIS CHAPTER

You’re going to see u.s./usa/america in lower case. Stylistically, I find that it causes people to pause and wonder: Why the lack of capitalization? As a practice, I believe that it is one small step in un-essentializing america and american values and power, a minor subversion of sorts.

I cite about seventeen different radical writers, educators, and general badasses. You mighta heard of Noam Chomsky or Pedro Noguera, but a lot of these folks are largely unknown outside of academia related to education. This is largely because unless someone has produced something fit for mass consumption, we are trained to believe it’s unattainable, unrelatable, elitist, or simply not for us. I challenge us to think beyond what capitalism teaches us is good or worthy. When you see these citations, imagine the words incomparable badass scholar or decolonial educator or something to that effect. I’ll add a small guide to these folk at the end.

Footnotes are either exciting or intimidating. I like to think of them as a statement that just won’t fit in (parenthesis). They’re not critical to understanding what I’m trying to get at here, but they’re interesting and might lead you to some things you didn’t know.

STPP = school-to-prison pipeline; STCP = school-to-confinement pathways

On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the L.A. riots, my social media was saturated with tomes dedicated to the notorious urban revolt. The riots left human and economic casualties and devastation in their wake, and yet they also revitalized a revolutionary sentiment that seemed to lie dormant for so many years for so many people after the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. This anniversary called me to remember my young self in 1992 and to recollect, in particular, how the L.A. riots were catalysts that allowed me to draw clear lines from my early experiences with covert and overt racism to my nascent introductions to radical thought and waking. It wasn’t just that Rodney King coulda been me. It was that in so many ways I’d been experiencing a different kind of beating from the first time I entered a schoolyard. The images of folks destroying buildings that seemed concretely impenetrable were affirming and exciting to my young mind, because, as terrifying as it was to see block after block engulfed in flame, I knew that those burning buildings would later become empty charred lots, and then what? The possibilities seemed endless. I hoped I could bring that fire to school with me from middle school through high school and into college(s).

Decades later, I find it important to continue to link my political awakenings and my experiences in school. Though I was never a model student, I have managed to stay connected to institutional education in one way or another. Once in a while, I attempt to reconcile my distrust and outright rebellion toward education with my understanding that school is necessary, and yet doesn’t necessarily need to be an evil. It is within the framework of critical race theory that I find the most success in uniting my love of education and my never-ending quest for collective liberation from racist and heterosexist capitalist oppression. From this place of desire, I enter education as an educator and see as my responsibility as a punker, an antiauthoritarian, and a Black human in america to hone my practice in order to build and perpetuate transformative, restorative practices at the elementary school/early childhood education level. That’s where most of us begin our more formal educational journeys.

The year before the riots, when I watched the beating of Rodney King on television so casually reported and with so little context, I felt a familiar rage. The grainy moving image of him lying on the ground surrounded by bright lights and uniformed officers beating him again and again felt familiar. I identified with his brutalization. He was trapped, alone, and vulnerable. The military agents of the state had dehumanized him and all anyone could do was watch. I was only twelve and a half and had already had at least half a dozen encounters with police officers, none of them good. Though I knew I’d been targeted in each interaction, and though I was aware that it was because I was Black, I didn’t realize until Rodney King was writhing on the side of the road, surrounded, that they could rise to that specific level of brutality. I didn’t realize that I had been smoldering.

The riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who beat King reflected the frequent and spontaneous inner explosions I experienced in my early adolescence, and the utter annihilation on the landscape seemed to be a reckoning to me. The news reported the riots as a tragedy, and that’s how we talked about them at home, but secretly I saw them as revelatory—a fervent call for the destruction of oppression. A burned-out building was an indictment of capitalism, of racism. In the year following the beating, a sort of hopelessness burrowed inside of me. Nothing and no one was safe. However, a year later, as I watched L.A. burning on the nightly news, I felt almost relieved. The riots were seventy long miles away from me, yet they felt dangerously—inspiringly—close.

In our current epoch of protest, rebellion, and riot, it is not uncommon to see or hear folks in radical left circles quote Martin Luther King Jr. from 1968, when he declared that riots are the language of the unheard. King was making the point that one can’t condemn folks engaged in riotous behavior without also condemning the conditions and actions that preceded them. I believe this is true, and I believe that is why the L.A. riots spoke to me so deeply. This notion of the unheard, however King intended it to be interpreted, is analogous to children in early childhood education settings who are often misinterpreted, pathologized, and misunderstood, and whose voices are rarely heard or valued. Adding to this quandary is the slippery slope of school discipline. Though the root of discipline is literally to instruct (a disciple is a student), through the ages and especially in western educational institutions, discipline is synonymous with punishment and is usually informed by a teacher’s interpretation of a student’s behavior.

Educational policy centered around discipline on local, state, and federal levels generally asks educators to look at the behavior of the students, while the mirror rarely faces in toward the institution and the adults inside, who are often the source and cause of student suffering. Kids like the kid I once was are suffering in our institutions, and when kids are suffering, their behavior tells us. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that all kids who misbehave are suffering nor am I saying that all suffering is due to all teachers. I am also not saying that all misbehavior is problematic. I do not believe in absolutes, especially those concerning kids and education. I am making the argument that often an educator’s perceptions of a child combined with their ideas of what discipline is or is not can exacerbate stressors for students, and that their behavior is often a good indicator not only of problems at home but of foundational problems in the classroom and school.

Shawn Ginwright works around healing and transformational justice with urban youth in the Bay Area. He writes, suffering is the internal consequence of oppression. Suffering is the result of the psycho-spiritual injury resulting from oppression.¹ There are degrees to suffering, as in most things. The damage caused by daily microaggressions causes suffering. Witnessing the brutalizing of people who look like you causes suffering. Worrying constantly about your safety and well-being causes suffering. Being made aware of your difference in the world as a negative causes suffering. Suffering accrues incrementally, and as it does it draws in more alarming terms: violence, crime, trauma, and abuse. As we take in these terms, we also necessarily distance ourselves from them so that we may alleviate the potential damage that suffering will cause. Suffering occurs in many realms of human existence. It persists especially in education.

CONCRETE

The way that I entered education is similar to the way many folks in the u.s. do. I went to kindergarten, learned how to write letters with monkey tails and wanted to draw and play all day. School is also where I learned about racism and sexism and homophobia, though not because I had radically transformative teachers. School is where I learned to internalize those things, to hide aspects of my interior life to make everyone else comfortable, and, more importantly, to avoid the ridicule and abuse to which I was subject by students and teachers alike. School is where I learned to internalize punishment; where I discovered an inner voice that relayed messages that declared I wasn’t good enough for anything although I could read and write for comprehension at an early age and was relatively bright. All I ever wanted to do was to learn and get better at it and be smarter and to understand everything, including my own brain, yet school is where I learned how to sabotage my own potential. Elaborating on the work of Dr. Carol Dweck, Zaretta Hammond breaks down the four critical elements that imprint learning mindsets in the schema of a learner, building either fixed or growth mindsets. In her work on cultural responsiveness in education, Hammond explains that microaggressions/assaults play a vital role in imprinting a fixed mindset on a young learner.² I understood from a very early age that shit just wasn’t going to be fair for me. I just knew it, the way most kids knew it. But it wasn’t because I didn’t get an ice cream cone, or because I had to stop playing and do school work. It wasn’t fair because no matter who was talking in class, I was always called out the loudest; because if there was a conflict and I was involved, the assumption was that I caused it; because life is sometimes outlandish when you’re a kid, but adults rarely believed me when I told my versions of what happened. In The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, Van Ausdale and Feagin present astounding evidence confirming what I and many children of color growing up in the u.s. intrinsically know; children know about race and racism and experience it deeply. In their authoritative study, the authors noted that children operate and understand racialization in three distinct social worlds; the first is categorized as adult to adult interaction that encodes racial-ethnic distinctions and concepts … essential for social life. The second world occurs as child to adult interaction, where kids take in the coded racial meanings and images they digest from adults without expressly letting the adults know what they understand. The third and likely most important and impressionable world exists among children to the exclusion of adults, where children experiment and interact with the dynamic information gleaned from the other two worlds.³ Having worked with young children for over two decades, I recognize that kids, like adults, have skewed perceptions of what happens, when, and why. I am quite aware of the trouble that I was responsible for and the mischief that I created. I was naturally a very curious, inventive, and inquisitive kid, and like many kids I yearned for social connection and meaningful relationships. However, it was within Van Ausdale’s and Feagin’s category of the third social world that I most often found myself, usually alone and working against experimentation with racialized power by other (usually white) kids. In this third world, the concept of fairness continued to elude me.

A child’s world is rarely a democratic one. There were many instances where my treatment by other students and the teachers was categorically unfair. Third grade is when this notion became concrete for me. In third grade, I punched a kid and broke his nose and got suspended. I punched a kid who called me a nigger. I punched a kid because after he called me a nigger. I asked him what a nigger was, because I didn’t really know, and I thought we were friends, and he said, You! and everybody laughed. I punched that kid, because I didn’t know what a nigger was, but I knew that when he said that and the kids laughed, there was nothing I could do or say that would stop that laughter, and with their laughter they were threatening my life.

There were no protocols for understanding what was happening to me. Van Ausdale and Feagin remind us that As a group, children are not socially naive and inexperienced, but develop complex social skills for dealing with a variety of people and situations that they are likely to encounter throughout their lives.⁴ The white boy who called me a nigger denied it vehemently to anyone who would listen, to the point of tears. Given my young reputation, the teachers and the principal did not believe that the boy had actually called me a nigger or that a punch in the nose was the appropriate way to handle it even if he had. A study out of Yale revealed that teachers in early childhood education show a tendency to more closely observe [B]lack students … when challenging behaviors are expected. The study also found that while having the low expectation that Black students will present more problem behaviors [B]lack teachers hold [B]lack students to a higher standard of behavior, possibly demonstrating a belief that [B]lack children require harsh assessment and discipline to prepare them for a harsh world.⁵ Though the Yale study focused more on the disparate discipline policies focused on young boys, the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Monique Morris, and Connie Wun, among others, highlights that these disparities occur for Black female students at astoundingly high rates as well, and that pushout and confinement often take different forms than school-to-prison. Connie Wun notes that discipline and punishment in schools is rooted in foundational anti-[B]lack logic that unnecessarily punishes Black girls for being Black. She writes, consciously or unconsciously—[B]lack girls are rendered vulnerable to racialized and gendered forms of discipline and punishment.⁶ In my case the school chose to eject me for a period of time. Even though the white boy had called me a nigger, in the perspective of my teacher and the principal, I was expected to have behaved with more restraint—civilized and ladylike. Calling a Black girl a nigger was not considered violent, yet the boldness of this particular moment created a laceration that I carry to this day. No repairs were made, no conversations had, and there was never an attempt to understand why I had done what I’d done. There was a victim and a perpetrator, and I was the latter. I went home for two days and returned to the same classroom with the same kids and the same teachers and the same sense that inside that building I was always going to be in danger. Following this incident, I would be suspended four more times in third grade alone. This situation mirrored countless others, in and out of school, where I could find no authority figure to hear what I had to say or to take my concerns or inquiries seriously. By purposefully being left out of equitable opportunities to discuss issues and problem solve, I was inadvertently taught another skill: question authority at all times. By the end of third grade, I was highly literate, skilled in math, and quite honestly didn’t give a fuck about what anyone anywhere had to tell me about anything.

I highlight this incident and my general turmoil in the third grade because it directly connects to my growing judiciousness. The ways in which I was experiencing racism profoundly affected my worldview, and as my capacity for empathy deepened, my sense of justice began to extend to other folks, and my worldview became broader. It also began to dawn on me that the adults around me could not adequately address or repair the wounds that constant microassaults inflicted on me and people like me, especially in the world of education; indeed, many adults would commit a number of these microassaults.

Being a lover of learning meant that I worked very hard to find things that would help me to describe what was happening, but school was never the place for that. School is where I experienced damage but not where I learned how to analyze or cope with or combat it. Noam Chomsky reminds us that as far as school is concerned:

The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told and to be where you’re supposed to be…. [T]he institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity.⁷

Chomsky is not saying this in order that we may eschew education entirely—he is after all an accomplished intellectual who has spent his entire adult life embedded in academia. Here, he is making a broader point about discipline, in particular what discipline looks like and means within the institution of school. Chomsky counterposes the mission of traditional discipline to that of independence of mind and spirit, noting that education is largely useless/serves only to indoctrinate if it doesn’t mean anything to the students who are on the receiving end of the learning. He states, "just reading does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow…. And there’s nothing valuable about that" (emphasis added).⁸ The dominant narrative says that school is where you learn the things that are important, but my experience has taught me how rarely that is true, especially for Black kids. Pedro Noguera sums it up brilliantly when he writes of discussing education with other Black men:

We all attended public schools, but each of us felt that we had succeeded in spite of, and not because of, the schools we attended…. [W]e threw out the possibility that the only thing that spared us the fate of so many of our brethren was luck—not getting caught for past indiscretions and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.⁹

Somewhere in the morass of adult voices were pleas to me to do better and some version of how I needed more discipline, and though I’d looked up the word and attempted to contextualize it many times, I still didn’t know what they meant when they told me that I needed it. What I knew was that there would be deprivation and there would be punishment—both of which I would have to learn to avoid.

I find the works of Damien Sojoyner and the work of Daniel Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal instructive as I consider and reconfigure ideas around discipline and equity in schools. They propose transformational resistance in their work, noting that many Black and Brown students arrive at school sites with an alertness that brings them to specific points of rebellion and release throughout their educational careers. These rebellions become classified as disciplinary problems; however, in light of the ongoing suppression of student life and identity in public schools, it is fair to say, as Sojoyner might, that these acts of rebellion qualify as forms of political resistance. In January 2009, in Oakland, California, undisciplined and militant political resistance drew the nation’s attention to the endemic and systemic problem of police violence. The rebellions that raged for days (and were resparked in the subsequent weeks and months) set a new tone for demonstrating against racist oppression and would be followed by later rebellions in New York, Ferguson, South Carolina, and Baltimore, among myriad other places. Various adults, from politicians to teachers to community leaders, called for calm, called rioters thugs and outside agitators and saw no point to the destruction the rebellions left. Others saw these rebellions as acts of principled defiance against a system designed to promulgate racist oppression. If the streets of Oakland were one giant classroom, then the smashed windows of banks and Footlocker were the desks upended by students of the streets who had taken in one too many indignities while simply trying to survive. Whose ideas of discipline are more valuable? And who gets to decide?

K. Wayne Yang, in the article Discipline or Punish? Some Suggestions for School Policy and Teacher Practice, defines punishment as retribution for an offense, an exclusionary act by which students are removed from the opportunity to learn; it is harm inflicted … through which outside regulation becomes internalized subjectivity.¹⁰ Yang goes on to define discipline as an act of rigorous physical or mental training, a practice of will that can lead paradoxically to docile compliance or emancipatory possibilities.¹¹ Yang emphasizes that punishment masked as discipline in schools relies on exclusion from participation. This type of exclusion correlates with lower achievement and higher pushout rates. Yang also notes that punishment in public schools is revealed along lines of race, gender, and class, which is to say, it’s fairly obvious who the targets of school punishment are. Yang writes, furthermore, this racially disproportionate punishment and preference is not invisible to our students. They are collectively impacted by the culture of removal—even if they themselves are not punished.¹² So-called zero tolerance policies negatively impact everybody, as even students who don’t fit the demographic profile for punishment see themselves as always being available for punishment.¹³ More damningly, however, these students begin to believe that some are more deserving of punishment than others. This reinforces and perpetuates the cycles of exclusion, as all students grow into adults who are conditioned to believe that Black people are more deserving of punishment; some of these students grow up to be teachers, principals, store clerks, cops, judges…

FIRE

[T]he anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every [B]rown or [B]lack person lives simply because of skin color. This other kind of anger in time can prevent, rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness.

You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.¹⁴

In high school, I was the only Black student in my grade for a while and only one of about five Black people altogether. Not even the janitors were Black. I was tallish, tomboyish, loudish, and strong. I had an awkward body and a beautifully masculine face that everyone felt entitled to comment on, constantly. By then, I’d learned that fistfighting with people who threatened my sense of self, my spirit, or my well-being would not be tolerated by the adults who held my future in their hands, so I made it a mission to become smarter and better in the hopes that I would begin to feel worthy of my own humanity.

By all accounts I was a fairly run-of-the-mill to average student. My growing attitude problem kept me from being moved forward in math, and I internalized that, believing I simply couldn’t do it. Though I stayed ambivalent about school, my desire to learn continued to grow. I sought out random books in libraries and bookstores that I would spend hours perusing, looking for the right title or topic, anything that would jump out at me. In conjunction with books and magazines, I consumed a broad variety of music that not only informed my spiritual well-being but nourished my intellect. I taught myself how to play guitar. I became involved with youth organizing groups, taggers, troublemakers, gangsters, and punk subcultures. I maintained a B/C average.

I listened to Bikini Kill and the Dead Kennedys and X-Ray Spex and Sepultura. I brooded along to Tori Amos and Nina Simone. I smoked cigarettes and weed after school. I read Malcolm X and classic literature when I was alone—Wuthering Heights was my shit! My favorite writers were Hemingway, Audre Lord, and William Butler Yeats. I was weird and out of place anywhere that I went. Had it not been for my desire to learn more and be better, I would not have discovered a love of myself—a love rooted in my Black skin and my kinky hair and my strong body—and my weirdness and out of place–ness might have destroyed me.

Between my disparate interactions with school and the racist and heterosexist world we interact with in america, it’s no wonder that my path to the academy was so divergent. In conversations with friends and colleagues, I frequently tell them that I believe I am lucky and that there are privileges that I had access to which kept me from being confined or destitute (sometimes by very narrow margins). The common dialogue among those of us who made it or made it out about not being in the wrong place at the wrong time is an endless echo for us, one which we rarely get to turn down or tune out. For however lucky I was, there are many more who are not as lucky. Students who are suspended and/or expelled from school are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than students who have never been suspended. Black youth are disproportionately suspended and expelled from public schools at exorbitant rates: in 2003, in grades K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade), 20 percent of Black students were suspended across the country, and 5 percent were expelled, compared to 9 percent and 1 percent, respectively, for white students, and the numbers continue to trend negatively.

These statistics are critical to the overall understanding of race and equity so necessary in today’s educators and vital to conversations about race and equity in america. I spent many hours (which add up to days) in and out of hallways and principal’s offices, exited for infractions so slight as dropping a pencil and not picking it up fast enough, talking too loudly during class discussion time, and talking back, which really means speaking without permission. In theory, I was prime fodder for the epic pipeline. However, there are problems with consistently drawing connections between school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline. Sojoyner explains that when considering this pipeline, policy frequently fails to address the historical development of public schools in that the structure of public education is responding to the actions taken by Black students that are perceived to threaten the status quo.¹⁵ What this means for education policy is that while institutions routinely focus on discipline and behavior, they consistently ignore what Sojoyner terms the ethos of anti-Blackness that the very core of american public education and approaches to discipline center around, while simultaneously driving the deficient behaviors of Black kids. This creates a seemingly impenetrable bind; how can Black kids succeed in a system that requires that you either dispense of your dignity and your identity or that you believe that you deserve to be disrespected, undervalued, and mistreated? When the institution is designed to deal with you only as a problem, it becomes an ethical quandary: Stay or go? In my case, I opted to hang on by a very thin rope, understanding that, from time to time, I would need to collaborate with this system to avoid being sucked beneath it.

I cannot pretend to begin to approach curriculum policy with any sort of authoritative mind nor would I want to. I’ve worked in many classrooms and alongside many teachers and administrators, but I am not a classroom teacher. I’ve always been more effective working with kids on areas that help develop their academic, intellectual, social, and emotional skills without constraints like Common Core or teaching to tests. I find our methods of educating kids to be antiquated, colonial, and problematic. This being said (and unlike many folks in my field), I do not buy into the popular campaign year narrative that says that our schools are failing. I believe that neoliberal policy is failing and that the colonial educational strategy has been a failure for some time, but I don’t believe that education itself can fail.

Let me back up for just a moment. In 1992, the beauty and hope I saw in the L.A. riots was not predicated on a nihilist excitement for destruction. In the burning and the crumbling concrete ruins, I saw potential. I saw hope. I wasn’t from the place that was on fire but my people were, and I held