Narrator: In October 2015, a video from a classroom at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina went viral. It showed a Black female student, sitting quietly at her desk, being violently grabbed by a school resource officer. He flipped her desk backward, with her still in it, and dragged her across the floor. Her crime? Refusing to hand over her cell phone. Another Black female student who spoke up in protest was arrested for "disturbing the school." This incident is not an anomaly; it is a symptom of a much deeper sickness within the American educational system. It raises a terrifying question: what happens when the very institutions designed to nurture children become sites of violence and psychological harm, especially for Black students?

In her powerful book, We Who Are Dark: The Psychological, Emotional, and Spiritual Costs of Surviving While Black in America, Dr. Bettina L. Love provides a searing diagnosis of this sickness. She argues that for Black children, school is often not a place of thriving but a battleground for survival, a system she calls the "educational survival complex." The book is a call to move beyond mere survival and to dismantle the very foundations of this system through a radical practice of hope, resistance, and joy.

Narrator: Dr. Love argues that the American education system was never designed for Black children to thrive. Instead, it functions as an "educational survival complex," a system that perpetuates suffering through policies and practices rooted in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. This complex forces students of color into a state of mere survival, where their success is measured by their ability to endure rather than to flourish.

Dr. Love illustrates this through her own early teaching experiences in Homestead, Florida, a community held together by its diversity and its poverty. Her students, many from migrant families, were brilliant and resilient, but they were trapped. She saw third graders who had to repeat the year because their families followed the harvest, and she felt the immense pressure of No Child Left Behind, which labeled her school a failure based on test scores that ignored the students' realities. The system wasn't interested in their joy, their culture, or their well-being; it was only interested in whether they could pass a test. This experience revealed a profound truth: the system isn't broken; it is working exactly as it was designed, to manage and contain dark children, not to liberate them.

Narrator: The educational survival complex is fueled by what historian Carol Anderson calls "White rage"—the fierce, often subtle backlash that follows any sign of Black advancement. This isn't the overt hatred of tiki torches and hoods; it's the administrative violence of underfunded schools, biased policies, and the criminalization of childhood behavior. Dr. Love argues this rage leads to what she, borrowing from legal scholar Patricia Williams, calls "spirit-murdering." It is the slow, daily erosion of a child's soul, robbing them of their dignity and humanity.

Consider the 2016 case of Ryan Turk, a Black middle schooler in Virginia who was on the free-lunch program. He went back to the lunch line to get a 65-cent carton of milk he was entitled to. For this minor act, a school resource officer took him to the principal's office, searched him for drugs, handcuffed him, and charged him with petit larceny. The charges were eventually dropped, but the message was sent. For a minor infraction that would be a simple teaching moment for a White child, a Black child was treated like a criminal. This is spirit-murder in action—a system that sees Black children not as children, but as threats to be controlled.

Narrator: In recent years, education reform has become obsessed with character traits like "grit" and "zest." The message to dark children is that if they just work hard enough, persevere, and have enough passion, they can overcome any obstacle. Dr. Love powerfully refutes this, calling it a dangerous distraction that creates a real-life Hunger Games. It places the burden of overcoming systemic racism squarely on the shoulders of the children who are its victims, ignoring the rigged nature of the game itself.

The tragic story of Trayvon Martin serves as a devastating counter-argument. In 2012, the seventeen-year-old was walking home with Skittles and iced tea when he was profiled, followed, and killed by George Zimmerman. During the encounter, Trayvon was on the phone with his friend, Rachel Jeantel. He demonstrated immense social and emotional intelligence, recognizing the threat and trying to de-escalate. He had grit. He had awareness. But in a society steeped in anti-Blackness, none of it could save him. Focusing on a child's grit without dismantling the system that puts a target on their back is not only useless; it is cruel.

Narrator: In the face of such a deeply flawed system, Dr. Love argues that reform is not enough. What is needed is abolition. "Abolitionist teaching" is not just a set of classroom strategies; it is a way of life dedicated to tearing down the educational survival complex and dreaming a new, more just world into being. It is a practice rooted in community organizing, historical understanding, and what Dr. Love calls "freedom dreaming"—the radical act of imagining a world free from injustice.

A powerful example of abolitionism in practice occurred in Tucson, Arizona. In 1998, after demands from community activists, the school district began offering Mexican American studies classes. The results were transformative: students who took the classes had drastically higher attendance, graduation rates, and college enrollment. They found a homeplace in school. Yet, in 2010, driven by White rage, the state of Arizona banned the program. But the community fought back. For ten years, they organized, protested, and litigated, until a federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional. This long, difficult struggle to reclaim a space of learning and affirmation for their children is the very essence of abolitionist teaching.

Narrator: Abolitionist teaching cannot be done alone. It requires deep, meaningful solidarity. However, Dr. Love pushes beyond the often passive and performative concept of "allyship." An ally might stand with you, but a "coconspirator" is willing to get in trouble with you. A coconspirator understands that their liberation is tied to yours and is willing to risk their privilege and comfort to dismantle the systems that benefit them.

The most vivid illustration of this is the 2015 removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House. The activist Bree Newsome was the one who bravely scaled the flagpole to take the flag down. But she was not alone. Her coconspirator, a White man named James Tyson, stood at the base of the pole, ready to be tased alongside her if the police electrified it. He used his body as a shield, deliberately putting himself in harm's way to protect a Black woman leading an act of justice. This is the model for the kind of solidarity Dr. Love advocates for—a shared struggle where risks are shared, and the goal is collective liberation.

Narrator: In a world of quick fixes and corporate-sponsored diversity initiatives, Dr. Love makes a powerful case for theory. She argues that without a theoretical framework—like Critical Race Theory, Black Feminism, or Settler Colonial Studies—we cannot truly understand the complex, interlocking systems of oppression we are fighting against. Gimmicks, like one-off racial-bias trainings, often fail because they lack this deep structural analysis.

In 2018, after two Black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks for simply waiting, the company closed 8,000 stores for a half-day of racial-bias training. While well-intentioned, the effort was widely seen as superficial. It was a corporate solution to a deeply-rooted societal problem. Dr. Love argues that such gimmicks are like putting a bandage on a bullet wound. Theory, in contrast, is the North Star. It provides the language to name injustice, the history to understand its roots, and the framework to build something new. It is the essential tool for any educator who truly wants to engage in the work of abolition.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from We Who Are Dark is that the fight for educational justice is not about fixing a few broken parts of a machine. It is about recognizing that the machine itself was designed to produce inequality. The goal, therefore, cannot be to simply help more Black children survive the machine; it must be to build a new world where they are free to thrive. This requires a radical shift from a mindset of survival to one of freedom, from individual grit to collective action, and from superficial reforms to abolitionist dreaming.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It asks us to listen to the refrain "we gon' be alright"—a mantra of Black resilience and survival—and to respond, "but that ain't alright." It is not alright that an entire people must be preternaturally resilient just to exist. The ultimate challenge, then, is to stop settling for survival and to begin the difficult, joyful, and necessary work of building a world where Black children are not just alright, but are unconditionally, gloriously, and unapologetically free.