We Will Not Walk Through Rotten Orchards: Abolition and (Re)nourishing the Soil of Black Communities Through Insulated Praxis in Education

ABSTRACT

During a time of racial unrest and attention to social justice, Black communities are developing a deeper understanding of prevailing systemic flaws in policing, policies, and education. There are movements within the Black community toward rebuilding systems constructed to subjugate. While much of the existing research focuses on ways to reform or refine these systems, my concept of insulated praxis seeks to create institutions within Black communities designed for the betterment and well-being of Black people, with a particular focus on applications in education. Using frameworks based on Black, Indigenous, Women of Color feminist theory as well as resistance theory with the extended application of abolitionist theory, insulated praxis aims to spread toward other subjugated communities with local, national, and global applications. The hypothesis that this concept, embodied in particular by the educational organization Making Us Matter, will enrich Black educational experiences and, by extension, Black lives while (re)invigorating Black communities, is the basis of this work.

Introduction

Do you understand the metaphoric phrase “Lyte as a rock” It’s explainin,’ how heavy the young lady is.

—MC Lyte (1988)

When my high school students walk in the door, they often have an ahistorical view of Black history. They come in with a view that is limited and does not recognize or obscures the weighted existence of Black people, and Black women in particular. This heaviness affixed to Black women cannot be left unattended. Similar to heavy soil, or clay soil, which is used to anchor plants, this heaviness can be difficult to manage without the care needed to cultivate growth. This is illuminated by Rosa Parks’s story, often taught in a way that minimizes, mutes, or erases her resistance and political substance. Theoharis (2015) wrote that it is a “major mental acrobatic feat” (p. x) to survive as a Black person. Twice burdened as a Black woman, the heaviness of her refusal and championing of civil rights forced her, like many Black people, to develop additional strengths to carry the heaviness society placed on her.

As a Black woman, I’ve always felt this additional and unexpected weight that I have had no choice but to carry. No research can fully articulate this heaviness. The heaviness of code-switching and respectability politics, or the weight of masking our pain with strength. How do we articulate the weight of never letting our work smiles falter, lest we be perceived as aggressive or threatening? There is an expectation that we accept bad apples from rotting trees without question. How can we reject the fruit these trees bear and uproot the putrescent soil from which they grow? This work involves a conceptual analysis that draws on established theoretical frameworks to formulate a freedom-dreaming praxis. I aim to illuminate this heaviness and articulate the ways in which Black people can support one another in unloading these burdens in pursuit of weightlessness. The concept of weightlessness embodies the desire to remove the heavy force of structural oppression from our backs. I envision weightlessness as the ability for Black people to dream—exist, float—differently without the weighted existence caused by hegemonic institutions. We are often buried beneath the violent structures that perpetually animate and color our experiences. This weightlessness seeks to uproot the soil and allow Black people to exist unrestricted and create insulated spaces. In my conceptual work, I look toward Black, Indigenous, Women of Color (BIWOC) thought, resistance theory, abolition, and organizations like Making Us Matter (MUM) to articulate the ways communities can work toward flourishing, not just surviving (Love, 2019). I want to know how much weight can be released when we begin the work of (re)spiriting and (re)nourishing our communities (Dillard, 2021).

In examining antiblackness transnationally, Dumas and Ross (2016) insist that we need to understand that “Black people become situated as (just) ‘race,’ whereas other groups … offer and benefit from more detailed, nuanced, historicized, and embodied theorizations of their lived racial conditions under specific formations of racial oppression” (p. 417). The pointed animus to Black existence in the world is historically rooted. Bledsoe and Wright (2019) speak to global antiblackness as an “ever-present factor that exists as the basis for expansion” (p. 12) that is persistent, unending, and aspatial because Black people are rendered “ungeographic.” Considering the perpetual and unrelenting nature of antiblackness, the need for insulated praxis is boundaryless.

In this conceptual piece, I will explain why insulated praxis—which I define as a means to disrupt institutional educational oppression and empower Black communities—is necessary based on the prevalence of antiblackness in schools. Then, I argue that insulated praxis is a critical vehicle toward the pursuit of weightlessness—defined as removing the pressure of structural oppression—for Black people. I use the nonprofit organization MUM as the tangible embodiment of this work. Finally, this conceptual piece concludes by advocating for the transformation of education for Black students and Black teachers through the application of insulated praxis.

Why we tend this garden

I remember how every doorway I tried to enter required leaving some part of myself behind.

—Levins Morales (2001, p. 31)

In Jarvis Givens’ (2021) work, he highlights Carter G. Woodson and other Black educators by underscoring the artillery they used to fight against the “mis-education of the Negro” still rampant within the current educational apparatus. He terms this work “fugitive pedagogy,” which he defines as a subversive theory that “reveals the heritage of Black education to be a plot of perpetual escape” (p. 25), where Black people exist within and against the schooling system. It is crucial to highlight that Givens characterizes Black teachers as a “distinct group of political actors” (p. 9) because today, the pedagogical practices employed by Black teachers are rooted in that history. Black teachers draw on that lineage and forge paths of escape through unique curriculum curation and relationship building. Oftentimes, this creativity is infused within the context of their sociopolitical location. For this reason, insulated praxis seeks to create space for Black students and teachers to thrive, disrupt dominant narratives, and be immersed in the rich history, artistry, and assets of Blackness.

In 2020, comedian Dave Chappelle opened his Saturday Night Live performance with a fiery monologue: “Oooh, I know he doesn’t wear his mask. I don’t know why poor white people don’t like wearing masks. What is the problem? You wear masks at the Klan rally, wear it to the Walmart, too. Wear your Klan hood at Walmart so we can all feel safe … [you] don’t even want to wear your mask because it’s oppressive. Try wearing the mask I been wearing all these years!” (Chappelle, 2020, author’s emphasis). The monologue elicited both laughter and discomfort from the crowd, but it was his comment on the mask he had been wearing all his life that struck me. As Black people, we are tasked with putting on different masks (Fanon, 2008) while carrying the weight of how other people perceive us. Thinking about the institution of education, these masks and this performance are critical to our survival, but my theory of insulated praxis seeks to honor our struggle and shed the weight we are forced to wear and carry so we can grow.

It is crucial, however, to recognize that our institutions are rotten; they are decomposing and impeding the growth of not just those they are designed to subjugate, but every facet of society. I posit that space to be, learn, and create can be developed through insulated praxis. Praxis, as defined by Paulo Freire (1970), is a critical reflection of the world as a vehicle toward transformation. Praxis, therefore, becomes an integral part of pursuing a more liberatory society. My development of insulated praxis is rooted in Freire’s work, in which he merges theory and practice: “Those who recognize, or begin to recognize, themselves as oppressed must be among the developers of this pedagogy” (pp. 53–54). Freire highlights the need for those often excluded to be the producers of knowledge and practices that best serve their communities and take action for, and within, those communities. Through this praxis, communities will be empowered to take part in disrupting and transforming oppressive conditions while keeping their foot on the neck of institutions designed to oppress.

Insulated praxis is an extension of Freire’s work, with a hyperfocus on the Black community, specifically within the context of education. Insulation is, by definition, protecting or covering something as a means of preservation or safeguarding. I intend for insulated praxis to be just that: a way to preserve the energy and spirits of Black people by focusing inward and toward the nourishment of our communities. Insulated praxis is a three-pronged process that includes (a) a focus on the spiritual nourishment (Obaizamomwan-Hamilton & Jenkins, 2023) of Black communities by creating a protective shield from hegemonic institutions, (b) grassroots organizing by and for Black people, and (c) planting the seeds of self-sustaining collectives and practices with Black women at the helm.

Deep rooted antiblackness

In Michael Dumas’s (2014) work, he uses Octavia Butler’s Kindred to articulate the experience of school for Black students. The novel begins, “I lost an arm on my last trip home,” indicating that “there is no way we could have survived slavery … and not have lost something” (Butler, 2004, p. 25). To that end, Black students lose something by attending school. Parts of their spirit, parts of their identity, parts of their history. Parts of themselves. The structural oppression inherently wedded to schooling takes away Black energy (Wilderson, 2018). It is for this reason that insulated praxis can serve as a means of nourishing the spirits of Black students and Black people. Insulated praxis is a tool to remind us of our genius, o remind us that we can save ourselves from the pain embedded in schooling.

Schooling, however, is inherently a site of Black suffering (Dumas, 2014), and in the vein of Frank Wilderson (2016), who argues that human life is dependent on Black death, antiblackness is foundational to the continued existence of schools, and that is profoundly irreconcilable. Insulated praxis acknowledges that the nexus between schools and prisons is cemented (Stovall, 2018). The soil of schooling is corrosive and deadening, planting seeds meant to dislodge Black communities from education and liberation. With insulated praxis, the soil, the tree, and the fruit it bears must be eradicated because the harm students are experiencing is far too great.

Zarreta Hammond (2014) explicates on this harm by making connections between the brain and students’ experience in schools. She illustrates how unsafe school environments are for Black students and how the brain responds to this danger by developing a protective shield. Black students often walk onto campuses knowing they need their armor on and perform the same mental acrobatics discussed by Parks. They understand the need for defensiveness and are prepared for expected attacks that come with being Black in any space. Hammond describes this defense as amygdala hijacking, where the amygdala sounds the alarm, and cognitive functions such as learning and creative thinking are put on pause. The constant threat management poses additional challenges to the ever-present concerns about the quality of education Black students receive. As Black students often navigate this threat awareness, insulated praxis highlights ways to disrupt this neural response, mitigate the weighted existence they experience, and focus their energy inward. Insulated praxis, therefore, becomes an empowered space, enabling students to play offense, shedding much of their armor so that they can learn, be innovative, be joyful, be free.

Uprooting the soil

Bettina Love (2019) explains that abolition is “as much about tearing down old structures and ways of thinking as it is about forming new ideas, new forms of social interactions” (p. 88). Abolition seeks to resist, agitate, and tear down forms of injustice, finding strength in the imagination of and dedication to constructing something new. Love argues that the key to abolition is to move “beyond gimmicks and quick fixes” (2019, p. 104) to examine things at their roots. To examine at the roots is to go beyond the outcome of the tree—its branches and leaves—and instead focus on the sources that created its structure and appearance, which will guide us toward rooting out the perpetual growth of the same old outcomes. Love describes the possibilities of new ideas, new ways to resist, new ways of being, and new ways to attack the very systems that thrive on our oppression. It is this newness that was the catalyst for insulated praxis, where Love inspired me to envision freedom and explore freedom dreaming as not “whimsical, unattainable daydreams [but] critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance” (2019, p. 101).

As an educator and former student, I have always been well aware of the disservice done to Black students by the institution of education. Chezare Warren (2021a) discusses how Woodson “encourages his readers to recognize how the institution of education has been used as a tool of the oppressor to retain ownership of the Black person’s mind, despite no longer having a legal claim to their physical body” (p. 30). With insulated praxis, we reclaim both our minds and bodies. We reject the “invisible cultural logic that urges a deep disdain for blackness and Black life” (Warren, 2021a, p. 8). Insulated praxis reads Black bodies as empowered, creative, and full of knowledge. Christina Sharpe (2016) states, “Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake” (p. 11). The wake work articulated by Sharpe encourages us to find ways to breathe life into the constant and accompanying spirit of Black social death, and insulated praxis serves as a revitalizing respite.

Earthseed to insulated praxis

Zenzele Isoke’s (2013) work on framing Black women’s resistance discusses the importance of Fannie Lou Hamer and her radical formation of community coalitions. Hamer worked with poor Black Southerners to create food and clothing spaces where the community could feel empowered and collectively challenge their oppression. At the local level, this bottom-up approach can turn small-scale community organizations into larger collective acts of abolition, which has been inspirational for insulated praxis. Echoing Hamer’s work with community organizing, Octavia Butler’s (1993) Parable of the Sower follows Lauren on her journey toward creating a new community in the midst of social and environmental collapse.

Lauren finds inspiration in planting seeds in her garden because of their ability to breathe new life into the soil. As society fails around her, the simple act of planting seeds inspires her to enact change through collective action, and leads her to what she calls Earthseed. The principle behind Earthseed is rooted in her observations of the growth and movement of seeds. Their ability to be uprooted, replanted, and restore themselves helped her reimagine a future that hinged on the collective. Earthseed is described as a collective that learns with forethought and works to educate and benefit the community so that they may fulfill the destiny of self-sustained living.

The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars or among the ashes … We might also provide education plus reading and writing services to adult illiterates … So many people, children and adults, are illiterate these days … We might be able to do it—grow our own food, grow ourselves and our neighbors into something brand new. Into Earthseed.

(Butler, 1993, p. 230)

The core of Earthseed serves as an inspiration for insulated praxis because “the community’s first responsibility is to protect its children—the ones we have now and the ones we will have” (Butler, 1993, p. 325). Insulated praxis is rooted in creating space within education for the next generation of ancestors.

Insulated praxis is not about uprooting systems; instead, it is focused on repairing, restoring, and healing within. Ford and Bobb (2012) articulate that,

successful Black students in White academic settings and Black refu­gees in the U.S. often draw strength from their home communities as a way to insulate themselves from being brought down by the racism they face in their new settings.

(p. 18)

This speaks to the spiritual nourishment of Black students being rooted in home communities, which serve to insulate them from the harmful effects of the educational system. To that end, my conceptual framework makes space for Black education (Warren & Coles, 2020) by identifying areas in previous research that necessitate insulation.

The roots of theory

Insulated praxis is rooted in BIWOC feminist thought, which is foundational to the concept; resistance theory serves as a functional underpinning, and abolitionist theory as the ultimate mechanism for facilitating insulated praxis’s employment. My connection to BIWOC theory grounds my understanding of abolitionist and resistance theories. Although resistance theory is incipient to my work, abolitionist theory provides the primary framework for insulated praxis. This work aims to extend abolitionist theory and build toward insulated praxis in a way that honors the epistemologies of Black communities.

These frameworks help position my theory of insulated praxis in a context that can disarm and dispose of the weighted masks we wear. To do this, we must first refuse to participate in systems set up to constrict and weigh down our existence. We must pause on putting energy into dismantling and rebuilding existing systems that sustain our subjugation and instead devote our energy to centering and humanizing Blackness (Warren, 2021b).

BIWOC feminist thought

Our production of knowledge begins in the bodies of our mothers and grandmothers, in the acknowledgment of the critical practices of women of color before us.

—Cruz (p. 658)

Cynthia Dillard’s (2000) endarkened feminist epistemology is pivotal to my work, as it puts the experiences of Black women against a Black backdrop. She frames thinking about the self within the context of and in relation to other Black women across the diaspora, highlighting the importance of Blackness in its own right. Insulated praxis was built on the construction of Black women’s lived experiences. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) and Audre Lorde (1984) articulate that race and gender cannot be mutually exclusive and denote the ways race and gender animate Black women’s experiences. This intersectional approach makes Black women the key drivers behind insulated praxis. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, T. Gertrude Jenkins and I—two Black women educators—created MUM in response to the school shutdowns at the height of COVID-19. We utilized memory-responsive teaching (Obaizamomwan-Hamilton et al., 2023), informed by our experiences as Black girl students as well as our current experiences as Black women educators to freedom dream our way into a space devoid of the toxic educational grounds many Black students are forced to endure. Our work is supported by Dillard, Lorde, and Crenshaw, who underscore their positionalities and highlight the need for a theoretical framework that focuses on BIWOC experiences.

Too often, those deemed knowledgeable and worth amplifying in academia do not reflect where my knowledge was born. BIWOC feminist thought rejects the silencing and appropriation of knowledge by highlighting BIWOC scholars. BIWOC feminist thought challenges us to move away from theories that frame Blackness as a deficit. This is amplified by hooks (1994) when she states, “Our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” (p. 61). BIWOC are vital to my development of insulated praxis, allowing me to focus on Black women’s knowledge and strength while problematizing institutions that seek to minimize or erase our contributions.

There is a strength and humanity that these women afford to the dark body (Love, 2019) that infuses me with the confidence to center my framework on my lived experiences. Black women have always been at the forefront of educational liberation (Perlstein, 2002; Huggins & Leblanc-Ernest, 2009; Robinson, 2020), and when Black women educators are present, Black student outcomes improve (Farinde Wu et al., 2020; Maylor, 2009; Samuels et al., 2021; Wynter-Hoyte et al., 2020). In part, this is what made the creation of MUM so impactful, and it is clear that Black women’s embodied knowledge, lived experiences, and historical role in educational liberation, played a pivotal part.

Aurora Levins Morales (2001) further underscores the importance of life as a tool for theory building, noting that her “thinking grew directly out of listening to [her] own discomforts, finding out who shared them, who validated them, and in exchanging stories about common experiences, finding patterns, systemic explanations of how and why things happened” (p. 27). Insulated praxis was born by theorizing from within, where the embodied knowledges of Black women took center stage. Cruz (2001) argues that the Brown body must be acknowledged as a central part of new epistemologies so that we can continue foregrounding our narratives and challenge the censure of our embodied knowledge. By situating knowledge in our bodies as Black women, we validate our narratives, histories, and transformative legacies. In doing this, we are able to hold on to our stories, our ancestry, and ourselves.

Moving BIWOC feminist thought from theory to praxis

Insulated praxis went from theory to praxis, reminding us of the possibilities that can be dreamt up within suffocating oppression. BIWOC feminist thought underscores the work being done around the globe. Specifically, in Palestine, elements of insulated praxis connect to a broader mass movement that was necessary to combat Israeli occupation. A disenfranchised people organized and mobilized to assert their humanity and center collective moves toward sustaining practices. Intifada was born out of the need for social, cultural, and economic relief (Peretz, 2019) the way insulated praxis was born out of educational degradation.

Intifada was a movement in Palestine mainly led by women. They used resistance as a starting point in the form of protests and labor strikes (Peretz, 2019; Said, 1989). Much like abolition and insulated praxis, they created insulated initiatives to rebuild institutions, drawing on strength from within and building systems separate from the ones that thrive on their subjugation. Through this collective cooperative, they organized self-sufficient institutions that challenged the dependency on Israeli structures and goods. They created their own rainbow coalition, à la Fred Hampton, of economic cooperatives, mobile health clinics, and underground schools (López, 2019). At the movement’s core, the women of Intifada exemplify the power of insulated praxis, harnessing their own strength and making it possible to disintegrate the weight and move collectively toward liberation.

Resistance

Insulated praxis asks that the Black community’s cultural knowledge and lived experience be insulated from the fight of resistance, thereby increasing our capacity to cultivate our own gardens. Resistance theory acknowledges personal experience, ancestral knowledge, and the body as valuable assets for understanding and critiquing social systems (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). By building on the strength across communities, resistance theory rests on the ability of people to come together and fight from within a system and “demand more from institutions than they were ever designed to do” (Tuck & Yang, 2013, p. 2). Eve Tuck and Yang (2013) posit that the very systems that reproduce inequities are precisely where the push for change should occur because “schools … are sites of both social reproduction and possibility” (p. 2). The possibility lies within the ability to refuse and redirect institutions toward the needs of the community. Insulated praxis can not thrive in this possibility because the energy to refuse and redirect directly conflicts with nourishing Black communities.

Given the historicity and impact of Black educators in native, segregated, and integrated schools, it is important to actualize their legacies of resistance as they have always toiled the soil that nourishes Black students. Black teachers concealed their pedagogical objectives in the presence of intrusive white power, and Black students bore witness to this subversive practice (Givens, 2021). This constant threat of discovery did not impede acts of resistance. In 2022, more than 100 bills or proposals were aimed at preventing teachers from discussing historical truths (Gross, 2022). These bills are aimed at silencing not only Black voices but all excluded voices. The educational system is invested in revisionist history and dominant narratives that are ahistorical, thereby forcing students to exist within a hostile apparatus saturated in cultural erasure. Resistance work inherently depends on students and teachers within systems built on Black subjugation, and it is onerous for those individuals to sustain it. Insulated praxis asks that the Black community’s ways of knowing and resistance work be insulated from the fight altogether.

The cost-benefit analysis of resistance is a nuanced and complex calculus. Resistance for the Black community often becomes heavy and falls victim to incremental shifts. Gumbs and Eisen-Martin (2021) stated, “We’ve been trained to act as if we consent to the extraction of everything beautiful about us (50:11),” and insulated praxis works to stop this extraction of all we possess and serves as a reinfusion of the joy and liberation we no longer consent to sacrifice. Resistance has created a forward movement for excluded groups (Tuck & Yang, 2014), but it inherently requires a perpetual fight. Although these contradictions are fruitful and part of a collective analysis (Davis et al., 2022), these limitations, at times, maintain the very structures that are oppressive when we fight to reform from within.

Creating insulated praxis for Black students and teachers works to remove the looming and ubiquitous white gaze (Howell et al., 2019) and decrease Black teacher burnout rates (Benson et al., 2021). It seeks to create spaces outside oppressive institutions (Patel, 2016), whereby “Black life is not distorted as ‘a negligible factor in the thought of the world’” (Givens, 2021, p. 25). It also works to eliminate the duality that exists for Black students and teachers within schooling, where we have “one mind for [us] and another for the master to see” (Givens, 2021, p. 12) by insulating ourselves from oppressive structures that glorify compliance and deplete Black energy (Wilderson, 2018). Resistance for Black people is akin to harvesting fruit but being prevented from accessing the harvest’s bounty. Insulated praxis rejects the toiling done through resistance work as it has limitations that ask us to accept each incremental shift in the status quo, impeding our access to the seeds necessary to create our own orchards.

Moving resistance from theory to praxis

The film Queen & Slim (2019) asks, “Why do Black people always feel the need to be excellent?” Resistance theory as it pertains to the Black community, is characterized by the unwillingness and, quite frankly, inability to be aggressively mediocre in this country the way the dominant culture has afforded its most privileged members. It is this inability that adds to our heaviness, and it is why resistance theory is challenging and at times pyrrhic for the Black community. Resistance theory requires us to be excellent in how we resist, when we resist, and why we resist, only to get a fraction of what we need to protect and nourish from within. The energy it takes to be Black and resist detracts from our ability to foster agency and build up our communities.

The Black Lives Matter movement is one of resistance, as it aims to convince the world that Black people are not disposable. There is value in this approach and good work is being done, but there are flaws in the methodology. Similar to conversations around policing, it is arduous to reform a system that was built to maintain white-centered capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism that functions exactly as designed. Many Black educators spend their careers attempting to explain, convince, articulate, and show all the ways in which the educational system promotes and perpetuates antiblackness, but these efforts ultimately reach the same conclusion: There is no changing a system that does not want to be changed.

Conversely, the Black Panther Party subverted this notion of trying to convince anyone of their worth; they instead uprooted the tree of oppression and planted something new within the soil. They worked across communities to support one another through programs addressing food access, educational access, and community protection (Araiza, 2009). They took the fight for social equality further than tools and acts of resistance could because, while resistance involves fighting against established systems, abolition focuses on fighting for our communities in the larger paradigm of injustice. While insulated praxis takes fighting off the table, abolitionist theory, at its heart, is about finding strength in the collective approach to self-reflection, justice, liberation, and joy.

Abolition by any means

Calls for abolition are never simply about bringing harmful systems to an end but also about envisioning new ones.

—Benjamin (2019, p. 162)

In her 1987 speech at Spelman College, Angela Davis said, “To be radical is to grasp things at the root.” (1990, p. 14) To that end, abolition is a radical approach to change. Abolitionist movements—a challenge to the prison industrial complex by the likes of Ruth Wilson Gilmore or radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence through the work of INCITE!—have and will continue to fertilize the ground from which transformation can grow. It is no surprise that the calculated push away from reflection, justice, and joy intensified in 2017. The presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump was countered by an increased receptiveness to the transformative shift and urgency with which Black women wrote. That urgency is a nod to the ostensibly United States and our inability to suppress what was formerly the underbelly of racism as it moved to the forefront and thrived within systems designed to sustain it. It is for this reason that I have chosen to deliberately cite Black women scholars in my framing of abolition. Davis et al. (2022) argue that abolitionist practices are more compelling when they are also feminist: “Abolition feminism is a praxis … that demands intentional movement and insightful responses to the violence of systemic oppression” (p. 4). This feminism as praxis plays a crucial role in advancing insulated praxis as it reinscribes the narratives of Black women and their valuable perspectives forged at the intersection of subjugations. Education as a means of transformation is in the very DNA of Black teaching, and insulation allows us to tap into that ancestral heritage.

Abolition theory extends beyond resistance theory to uproot the noxious soil constructing these institutions by infusing liberation and justice into systems deemed deleterious while doing away with what is too rotten to be healed. It is helpful to understand that “the etymology of ‘abolition’ includes Latin root words for ‘destroy’ (abolere) and ‘grow’ (olere)” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 162). The need for destruction has been propagated in discussions on policing. Abolishing the police is firmly rooted in the understanding that the bad apple theory is a fallacy and does not address how enmeshed every apple on a given tree is in the health of the tree that produced it. The health of that tree starts at the roots, in the soil in which it grows. Abolition recognizes not only that the entire tree is destructive and will continue to produce apples with rotten cores but that the soil the tree grows from is where that toxicity begins. It does not matter how many new trees are planted or how much reform goes into the growth of these apples; if the soil is not rooted out, eradicated, and replaced, nothing changes. Abolition is hyper-focused on the need to replace, build anew, and renourish the soil. It is only through this deconstruction of broken systems that we stop growing trees that inevitably produce bad apples.

Savannah Shange (2019) posits that abolition is focused on much more than attempting to win control of the state and its resources; it pushes us to erase “the stadium of settler-slavery society for good” (p. 3) and she roots abolition in Africana diaspora studies. Shange (2019) uses the diaspora as a catalyst toward “breaking up with the state,” (p. 4) rooting out white supremacy and colonialism to encompass this theory fully. This break-up aligns with insulated praxis as it stops the reproduction of Black subjugation and the systemic replication of settler colonialism where “settlers keep settling, and slavery never stopped” (Shange, 2019, p. 2). The essential argument of abolition is that we should disrupt systems at their core and fight against the rotten institutions that do not water our well-being. Insulated praxis goes around the destruction of these systems and focuses on building up the Black community by imagining collective ways of being that push us toward new ideas, freedom, and mattering.

Moving abolition from theory to praxis

Insulated praxis is a radical approach to change that works to sustain itself independently. In Hakim Williams’s (2019) work, he discusses the need for a self-sustaining model of education through systemic restorative praxis. In his case study at a secondary school in Trinidad, he observed how colonialism reproduced alienation and control in school settings, which he called neocolonial warp. He posited that an epistemicide took place and buried the Indigenous ways of knowing, so much so that school curriculum served as a powerful way to control the minds and bodies of students and essentially became necrophilic education.

Williams suggests systemic restorative praxis as a way to disrupt and destabilize social control and neocolonial warp by exposing inequities while simultaneously empowering communities to pursue alternative systems. Insulated praxis is one alternative. The oppressive nature of education makes it imperative for not only the Black community to create pockets of insulated praxis that can be regenerated and reproduced, but also for other groups subjected to institutional oppression to do the same. Insulated praxis is explored as a way forward through the organization Making Us Matter.

Making us matter

It’s not about leaving [education] it’s about leaving some[thing that] is completely unwilling to be accountable for the harms they are causing and that the only way to inoculate ourselves from its spreading is to quarantine ourselves.

— Wortham & Morris, 2022 (40:03)

During the twin pandemics of structural antiblackness and COVID-19, Black educators and students encountered additional challenges while adapting to a changing educational landscape. MUM sought to intervene by providing virtual educational programming for middle and high school students (see Appendix A). This organization was created by myself and T. Gertrude Jenkins at the height of COVID-19. With parent support, students joined our Zoom classrooms from various regions to engage in learning with curricula rooted in Blackness. Through insulated praxis, all our courses were taught by Black teachers, primarily Black women, who used humanizing, culturally sustaining, and intersectional pedagogy to support student learning.

Making us matter through BIWOC feminist theory

The 1969 Black Panther Party (BPP) formed liberation schools centered on community organizing because they recognized education as a critical space to disrupt institutional forces (Robinson, 2020). Although Black women’s impact has been marginalized in the literature surrounding the BPP, they were crucial to the intersectional community and coalition building that made these schools a success. Even in the midst of violent resistance and institutional oppression, these women chose revolution through education (Huggins & Leblanc-Ernest, 2009). MUM builds on the work of the BPP and puts Black women at the forefront (Lane, 2017). Making Us Matter (MUM) is an educational organization that seeks to nourish Black communities through the embodiment of the healing that is Black teaching. In the middle of a viral and racial pandemic, we built a construct through insulated praxis that puts Black educators at the forefront and not only centers their lives and stories, but also creates insulated space for students to exist and see a reflection of themselves.

Our curriculum was a vital component of this insulated space and we knew we needed a collective of Black educators invested in Black students. We put out a call (see Appendix B) for Black educators interested in working with us. While not everyone we worked with was a credentialed teacher, everyone was an educator. We had everything from a law school graduate teaching our “Know Your Rights” course to a former student of Gertrude’s—a botanist—teaching our “Environmental Racism” course. Gertrude and I also taught courses like “Hip Hop Ed” and “African American Studies.” Additionally, we facilitated curriculum development workshops with our educators, where we worked to create a safe and healing space in a collective effort to build our community. We met with our educator cohort every week to share curriculum ideas, collaborate on activities, rehearse our lessons, and support each other in strengthening our work before engaging with students. After implementing our curriculum, we received positive feedback from many families. One parent wrote,

My daughter has thrived in Making Us Matter! She has had the opportunity to think deeply about issues that matter greatly to her and discuss these issues seriously with other young people and caring educators. Most importantly, she has begun to think of herself as someone who has an opinion that adults will listen to and that can make a difference in the world around her. She’s begun participating in conversations that she used to leave the room for. Thank you to Making Us Matter for helping young people find their voices on issues that are important to them!

As educators in MUM, we volunteered every hour we worked, whether on our curricula, with our students, or with each other. A collective of mostly Black women donated time in service of students and based on parent and student feedback, it paid off.

Making us matter through resistance

Prior to the founding of MUM, Gertrude and I both served as resistance leaders in our own educational institutions. As Black women educators, our existence in predominantly white institutions served as our original act of resistance, but upon realizing the impact and victories of resistance can be pyrrhic, we took things a step further by creating an educational organization with curricula (see Appendices C and D) focused on disrupting the required standards, amplifying student-run counter-narrative groups, and pushing back against oppressive administrations. While working in schools on opposite sides of the country, we took action to oppose the power hierarchies that reinforce structures of oppression through schooling. These acts of resistance were often perceived as “troublemaking” by those in positions of power, but students viewed these acts as an opportunity to engage in discourse, action, and agency. These student responses were a sign of resistance at work, but while students had agency and created organizations and movements to give themselves autonomy, the actual systems in place at these schools did not shift in transformative ways. This disappointment unearthed our desire to cultivate a transformative shift by establishing independence from the institution altogether.

In the summer of 2021, we wanted to think about ways to resist within the system as we returned to in-person schooling. We offered a free virtual webinar (Gumbs & Eisen-Martin, 2021) for educators with guest authors, troublemaker Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and educational activist, Tongo Eisen-Martin. For our event description, we wrote,

We must dream differently as we breathe a revolution. When K-12 schooling returns to the building in Fall 2021, what exactly will we be returning to? This webinar will unpack the myriad challenges our students, families, educators, and community leaders will face as we rethink curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and practice. As we grieve what we have lost, we also hold space for abundant flourishing. Join us for a robust discussion centering on the systemic inequities within our school systems that have been exposed in distance learning yet endured for generations before the pandemic. As a collective community, we will share insights on how we reimagine schooling and prepare to do the work of providing quality education that centers the needs of our students and communities.

As Black women educators, we are always plotting ways to protect our spirits and the spirits of our students, whether we are in or out of the schooling system.

Making us matter through abolition

In the vein of the Maroon communities, which worked to create independent spaces outside the control of oppressive systems (Fortes-Lima et al., 2017; Lockley, 2021), and native schools, which self-insulated by refusing to accept northern support that “threatened to undermine their own initiative and self-reliance” (Anderson, 1988, p. 12), MUM was created to operate outside of the confines of an educational system that does not serve Black teachers or students. Abolitionist frameworks have allowed MUM to curate a rich collective of Black people invested in education that serves our communities and an ecosystem rooted in the mutual exchange of knowledge, recognition, and love. At its core, MUM invests in Black epistemologies as a means of helping to shape and nourish students through transformative and humanizing pedagogy (Camangian, 2015; Freire, 1970/2007; hooks, 1994). In order to foster a new educational existence, we make space to recognize, emphasize, and humanize Blackness.

We aim to subvert educational systems intent on making Black communities wait for changes that may never come or serve us. Decentering the dominant narrative in education by (re)centering our richness, our lived experiences, and the production of knowledge in Black communities, MUM can capture the complex intersectionality of exclusion. When we put the call out to the community in 2020, we wrote:

How many teachers do you think were in the mob that stormed the capitol? How long will we continue to work amongst and alongside people we know do not have any of our interests at heart? As Black educators, we have grown accustomed to making due amidst administration initiatives and the pedagogies of co-workers that [sic] are anti-Black at their core. How many tongues will we bite or acts of dangerous dignity will we commit until we finally say, “enough”? Let this last display of white privilege, entitlement, and terror be the last; we don’t have to work among wolves in ill-fitting sheep clothing. The biggest lesson our ancestors have taught us is that the freedom we have, is the freedom we take.

Using insulated praxis as a foundational pillar, we co-constructed curriculum with Black educators to create a community where Black knowings and experiences were validated, fortified, and weaponized.

It has always been essential to use “literacy and formal education as means to liberation and freedom” (Anderson, 1998, p. 18). MUM provided free courses (see Appendix E) to disrupt the ways Black students are lobotomized by the current educational system. Spending time reforming oppressive institutions would quite simply be refining said systems. MUM no longer wants to deconstruct and refine but, instead, construct new systems that function independently of institutions designed to perpetuate subjugation. Insulated praxis is grassroots-led, community-organized, and focused on giving students access to Black-centered education. Insulated praxis aims to create transformative community spaces that value the epistemology of the Black body (Fanon, 2008), linking the acquisition of knowledge with collective efforts to overcome subjugation. In some ways, insulated praxis has always been a fixture in the DNA of Black teaching. The development and continued work of MUM safeguards the spirits of Black people by centering focus and nourishment within Black communities, exemplifying insulated praxis in practice.

I contend that insulated praxis can lead to weightlessness, allowing Black people to exist without feeling the burden of oppression that keeps us submerged within institutionalized violence. The concept of insulated praxis is rooted in the desire to protect and reinforce our communities while reallocating resources into our spirits, our communities, and our futures. It is the epitome of separate but equal, enacted by the communities intended to be kept separate, subverting the racist ideologies that make the equal element categorically untrue. It gives us the freedom to be simultaneously seen and unseen in a way that creates visibility for everything we are. Insulated praxis hinges on the idea that we cannot search for freedom and joy elsewhere if we do not first find it within ourselves and our communities.

Fruit of a nourished tree: freedom to, not freedom from

Love (2019) states that “the ultimate goal of abolitionist teaching is freedom” (p. 89), and I wonder—what kind of freedom should we grapple with? Is that freedom from microaggressions? Freedom from structural racism? Freedom from the inequities of the prison system? Freedom from the very systems that sustain this country? Abolition, at times, centers on creating systems focused on attaining freedom from things, and with insulated praxis, we can extend that and center our work on the freedom to, not just freedom from. We can make the conscious decision to stop struggling with the neoliberal frameworks of education and create a space without poisonous soil to constrict our growth. A space where microaggressions and respectability politics are checked well before students get to the door. A space where Black people are given humanity and become the centerpiece of knowledge building. Insulated praxis removes the heaviness so students and teachers have the space to learn, create, and just be. It takes time and energy to tear down systems that were not built for us. If we shift our focus from tearing down and restructuring an educational system rooted in upholding the status quo and instead set that energy inward, we can then make the decision to forge a space where our whole Black selves would have the freedom to create. The freedom to embody justice. The freedom to hone in on our radical imagination. The freedom to center Blackness. The freedom to exist with a weightlessness that cannot be duplicated within any fabric of U.S. institutions. The freedom to.

We have to extend abolition and build a self-sustaining model of humanity for us and by us. With that, tensions exist with any radical vision, and it is imperative that we hold onto this both/and concept by collectively working toward insulated praxis while also working to dismantle oppressive systems (Davis et al., 2022). We can work toward wholeness through insulated praxis and work to make schools a continued site of possibility.

MUM is modeling what can happen when energy is focused on the community, where we water the soil before branching out and work with others to dismantle the hypoxia of oppressive institutions. Octavia Butler posits that fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about. Insulated praxis similarly does not aim to fix the world; it is intended to create a blueprint by which communities can replicate the thriving and growth that happens in insulated spaces rather than being strangled at the roots and struggling to bloom.

Conclusion: bountiful orchards

What would institutions look like if we all acknowledged their inherent oppressiveness? Across the globe, those who are dark are working to survive the suffocating nature of oppression. Aligned with organizations like MUM, insulated praxis aims to disrupt institutional dependency by giving communities agency to assert their own ways of being and knowing. This work is rooted in creating an additional protective layer by producing organizations that are insulating Black students from the systems that oppress them and the expectation that they will accept and perpetuate those systems.

Why liberation is a constant struggle for Black people comes down to the lack of weightlessness and spiritual freedom we have. While plenty of Black networks are working to disrupt, dismantle, and resist, we still have room to grow into our collective power. We can no longer depend on modes of resistance, reforming strategies, or tearing down systems. Insulated praxis identifies that the communities being damaged need to plant their own seeds and insulate themselves with stories, knowledge, love, and imagination without attachment to the oppressive systems that continue to position Black communities as ignoble and manage to do so in pervasive ways. Insulation will ultimately strengthen our communities, enabling us to exist in a constant state of refusal to sacrifice ourselves to a society that undermines our right to be. Insulated praxis places value and faith in communities’ creation of their own tools to lift them out of the abyss of the broken institutions propped up by the ostensibly United States. Insulation asks us to carve out space for our weightless existence without the need to tear down, replace, or mimic the systems of the oppressor. It is this insulation that allows us the freedom to weave together a new fabric of existence, quilted with the thick 4C hair of our ancestors, by the melanin hands of our mothers—hands that continue to give us the strength to fight, create, and plant seeds for our bountiful orchard. Ultimately, insulated praxis allows us to delink from the oppressive apparatus of education and save ourselves.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2023.2297211.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton

Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton is a first-generation Nigerian and co-founder of Making Us Matter, a Black woman-owned nonprofit educational organization. She is also the co-editor of the newly launched Black Educology Journal. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in International and Multicultural Education with a concentration in Racial Justice at the University of San Francisco. Her sites of inquiry center on BlackCrit, Black feminist thought, critical pedagogy, endarkened epistemologies, Black methodologies, and intersectionality. She seeks collective liberation Page 4 of 5 and visibility for the most historically excluded, and with over 16 years of teaching experience – her writing, teaching, and research meet at these intersections.