Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

On page 167 in the Questions for Teachers, #5, Shange asks "What does 'teaching for social justice' mean to you?" I think for anyone picking up this book, answering this question before and after you read it will provide you with some good information on how you understand the concept of social justice, and how you see yourself as part/or not part of the movement.I am not a teacher, I am a non profit workers, so I took the question as "what does believing in and practicing social justice mean to me?" In short, to me it means: to always think about what I don't know or can't see, and to complicate every thought word and deed with that "unseen and unknown" in order to force myself to look at the inculturated and indoctrinated beliefs I hold that I do not even realize I hold. When you become aware of these beliefs, the nature of choice changes. It becomes not merely selecting from a set of options made available to you within your particular inherited rubric, but transforms into a choice to reject the rubric altogether.In that way, I found this book both validating and challenging, as it unapologetically complicates that when we do things right, there is a high likelihood of unseen collateral damage. Shange's marquee point for me is not that we should therefore stop all social justice efforts because there will always be something we don't see and therefore some damage. Instead we should double down and question/ complicate every single one of those social justice actions/efforts because liberation comes in the process of liberation.

Informed by abolition democracy and Afropessimism, this is a sobering, beautifully written, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of one "progressive" school in San Francisco. The author illuminates the antiblackness that underlies the everyday "progressive carcerality" of Robeson Justice Academy and the abolition practices that Black students engage in. I greatly enjoyed this book.

If you call yourself antiracist, progressive, or even liberal, read this book! It will lovingly hold you accountable for the ways in which you are still failing in your practices.