CHAPTER ONE
“We Who Are Dark”
CHAPTER TWO
Educational Survival
CHAPTER THREE
Mattering
CHAPTER FOUR
Grit, Zest, and Racism (The Hunger Games)
CHAPTER FIVE
Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy
CHAPTER SIX
Theory Over Gimmicks: Finding Your North Star
CHAPTER SEVEN
We Gon’ Be Alright, but That Ain’t Alright
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Bettina L. Love is an award-winning author and an associate professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on how teachers and schools working with parents and communities can build communal, civically engaged, antiracist, antihomophobic, and antisexist educational, equitable classrooms. A sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including hip-hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, hip-hop feminism, art-based education to foster youth civic engagement, and issues of diversity, Love has also provided commentary for news outlets including NPR, the Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“A useful rejoinder, half a century on, to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed; deserving of a broad audience among teachers and
educational policymakers.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This text is helpful for gaining a better grasp of oppression and
what teachers can do about it.”
—Library Journal
“Love’s new book is uncategorizable in the best way possible. It is
memoir, history, indictment, textbook, guide, and manifesto . . .
Educators who aspire to activism will find inspiration in the pages
of this book.”
—Rethinking Schools
“Offering readers a profoundly fresh perspective on teaching,
Bettina Love breaks new ground. Using both the language of critical
thinking and radical resistance, this book challenges and dares us
all to teach for justice.”
—bell hooks
“Through unflinching and daring inquiry, Dr. Bettina Love has
stepped out on faith to articulate our pain, suffering, and eternal
search for joy. Her words resurrect the abolitionist credo of
‘education’ over ‘school.’ Because they are two different things,
the question remains: can school be the place where education
happens or do we need to radically rethink what we’re doing? Dr.
Love’s work suggests that if we do not choose the latter, we are
complicit in our own demise.”
—David Stovall, professor of African American studies and
criminology, law, and justice, University of Illinois at Chicago,
and coauthor of Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools
“This book is exactly what we need: a powerful indictment of our
education system as an industry that robs dark children of their
potential. Dr. Love challenges us to become abolitionists by
holding ourselves and our colleagues accountable for our complicity
in perpetuating the ‘educational survival complex.’ As educators,
we must recognize the impact of whiteness on our classrooms, demand
the impossible, welcome the struggle, and refuse to oppress dark
children by calling out racism, recognizing our students’ cultures
and histories, and showing them they matter to our communities and
to our world. This isn’t about reform; it’s about freedom, and I’m
moving from ally to coconspirator. Every educator needs to read
this book, to freedom dream, and to challenge oppression with
intersectional justice.”
—Mandy Manning, 2018 National Teacher of the Year
“This much-needed book is at once personal, analytic, poetic,
exacting, and soaring. Dr. Bettina Love brilliantly weaves, in
artisanal and scholarly fashion, the threads and fabric of history,
the present, and the possible future. She weaves in a way that we
are invited to understand what moving past survival means, in
personal, communal, and nation-building ways. This book is a call
to building a different future: one made for freedom.”
—Leigh Patel, author of Decolonizing Educational Research
“This book is a treasure! With rigorous intersectional theory,
careful cultural criticism, and brave personal reflection, We Want
To Do More Than Survive dares us to dream and struggle toward
richer and thicker forms of educational freedom. With the mind of a
scholar and the heart of a revolutionary, Bettina Love has penned a
book that places her in the tradition of Freire, Giroux, hooks, and
Ladson-Billlings. This beautiful text also affirms her position as
one of the leading education scholars of her generation.”
—Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on
the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
“We Want To Do More Than Survive is endarkened feminist wisdom in
dark times. In the tradition of a skilled kente weaver, Dr. Love
brings together abolitionist traditions of educational freedom work
with contemporary struggles for Black humanity and creates a
stunning tribute to the absolute necessity of joy and love in
resistance struggles. What sets this book apart is Love’s critical
understanding that the splendor of kente is seen not in the
weaver’s individual efforts or strips of cloth, but instead when
those pieces are woven together to illuminate our larger narrative
as people of color in community. That narrative of Black freedom
dreaming is this book you hold in your hands. And it is a must-read
for those who love dark people, who love education, and who love
the possibilities of educational freedom as intersectional justice
right now.”
—Cynthia B. Dillard (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana), Mary Frances
Early Endowed Professor of Teacher Education, University of
Georgia, and author of On Spiritual Strivings: Transforming an
African American Woman's Academic Life
“Bettina Love has managed to write a book that is both a love song
to our children and a potent weapon. Part memoir, part manual, part
manifesto, We Want to Do More Than Survive explains that
abolitionist teaching is neither a new set of standards nor a
social justice curriculum, but a revolutionary commitment to
transforming ourselves, our country, and the world. Written in
breathtaking prose and bold cadences, it reminds us that
‘mattering’ is a verb, and making sure all of our kids truly matter
is unfinished business for which we are all responsible. Educator
or not, read this book: it is our North Star.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination
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