ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Content Notice: policing in education, anti-blackness
Anonymous, Be Yourself, 2025. This graphic includes posters created at the Gender-Expansive Families Propaganda Party on March 23, 2025 at Interference Archive in Brooklyn.
My curriculum coach said your classroom is a society and you’re the president.
I feel like a cop most often, filing children into binary lines I believe beyond. The language of police and prisons comes easily, casually. It’s casual for me to call the corner behind my desk jail hoping to scare the children away from my personal space. When I come to my conscious mind, I cringe. I cringe even more when my students say we want to go to jail, we want to be next to you.
In her book In The Wake On Blackness and Being Christina Sharpe writes “the prison repeats the logics, architectural and otherwise, of the slave ship.” My students are always next to me on that ship, in the hold. Sharpe presents the reader with varied definitions. The hold is “a large space in the lower part of a ship or aircraft in which cargo is stowed.” To hold can mean “to continue to follow (a particular course); keep or detain (someone).” The hold can be “a fortress.” She also brings in beholding, as in, to witness or watch. I think of how I hold my students when they cry or hide or run from the little violences children inflict upon one another through play and unregulated emotion. Through the chaos, I hold them, scold them, and teach them when I can.
I am, according to my coach, more than just a warm body in the room. It’s been 3 cycles of surveillance, something about the naked reprimand in her language scathes me. I’ve been turning this phrase over in my head since she said it. In reaching into Sharpe's work, I recognize myself as being in the wake: “wake; the state of wakefulness; consciousness.” I always took the idiom warm body to mean someone lying in bed with a person who didn’t love them. That could not be what she meant. Even if she coaches me to smile and scan the room, there’s no way she could be making me into an object, like this.
Sharpe proposes that “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.” My body and its warmth is at use in the classroom space. When I am not policing, I am mothering. The children, mistaking me for their mother, whine at my feet, beg me and plead for some grace beyond another tempered plan I intend to lead. They want freedom; I feel I fail them when they speak to me as if I am a sister or a friend. It’s my first year leading a classroom, and as my students battle one another to hold my hand, or sit next to me, I regret how familiar we are to one another. They often accidentally call me mommy. And like any frightened Black mother in the world, I threaten them with discipline as protection from the everpresent violence that looms overhead, around, and all about us.
I describe my job as a kindergarten teacher as working at the citizen factory. According to the forefathers, or some other democratic declaration, the role of education is to produce good citizens. I talk about laboring in the citizen factory, striving to make these children of Africans into Great Americans but it’s a lost cause. Citizenship precludes the black subject. These children are already born outside of the promises this empire espouses, outside of the world at large.
A slave myself, I find their fugitivity endearing. I find their refusal refreshing, though it shows I am doing a poor job of teaching them to sit at attention, to become productive, college-bound indebted people pleasers like me. I tell them to stand in line, with their hands to their sides and a bubble in their mouths. I repeat myself every five minutes until a more authoritative adult comes to whip the line into shape.
In the wake of conversations about one colorful child I say, I wonder what kind of adult he’ll be, what kind of future he’ll have. The other kindergarten teacher says: prison bars. In the belly of Little Africa, this babified boy breaks out in Bambara after biting the overseers and other little slaves on their wrists. He was kicked out of The New Republic of Kindergarten for being too unruly, too unteachable. He will proceed in the public bucking against until he is broken or the society itself breaks. It’s true, I told him I would not rest until he was gone and now in his absence, the chaos of kindergarten has less color. Not for lack of Taki fingers and candy-dyed teeth, but for the loss of the fierce rejection he chose day by day. Certainly, I regret declaring he had to go, even if it ultimately wasn’t my decision.
One of my teacher refrains is you are not the police! Still, I had to tell the mother of one student he was so committed to policing his classmates that I called him a cop. Then I learned his mother warned him about his aggression in school: my mom said if I keep getting in trouble she’s gonna call the police. This spiral spins me into repeating and reinstating carceral logics in my classroom, against my better judgement; the subconscious impulse toward correction as protection, the futile attempts at teaching in the belly of the hold. The hold repeats in the classroom where all the students are Black and outside of The World. It’s more than a cycle, it’s a spiral winding tightly into itself, with my classroom–this society I have found myself in charge of–at its center.
When asked to fashion a hopeful conclusion or call toward a project at the end of this piece, I was confounded. All I can think of now is what Sharpe calls wake work. Wake work is “a theory and praxis of Black being in diaspora” one that “requires a turn away from existing disciplinary solutions to blackness’s ongoing abjection.” I want to follow her call to be undisciplined, to encounter the violences of “the past that is not past” by remembering my former student and hoping the society breaks before he does.
Hiwot Adilow is an Ethiopian American poet from Southwest Philadelphia. She is co-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and author of the chapbooks In the House of My Father (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and Prodigal Daughter (Akashic Books & African Poetry Book Fund, 2019). Her work appears in Vinyl, Callaloo, The Offing, Reconstructed Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in The BreakBeats Poets Vol 2.0: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books, 2018), Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2019), and The New Teacher Book (rethinking schools, 2019). Hiwot is a fellow of The Watering Hole and holds a BA in Anthropology with a certificate in African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a member of the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community. She also holds an M.Ed. in Early Childhood Education from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.