Somatic Abolitionism as Possibility for Rethinking Teachers’ Labor Activism

Issue #4

I come out of a writing binge Saturday night to news notifications on my phone that the United States has attacked Iran. Five months into taking office for his second term, Donald Trump has bombed three of the country’s nuclear facilities, pulling the United States deeper into the already-devastating conflict in the Middle East involving Palestine, Israel, and Yemen. Trump’s response to a reporter’s question on the White House lawn, “I may do it. I may not do it. I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do,” plays in my ears and alarm fleets through my body. I swipe and tap my way to Youtube, the algorithm already primed for my search, my feed already full of breaking news from various outlets. I wonder what are the facts of the matter? What is Iran’s response?

After watching a few videos, I see that I am caught up to speed; anything more would prolong the redundancy. I scan my body for biophysical responses. I soothe the areas the alarm passed through and acknowledge what I do and do not have control over in the world–very little and a whole lot, respectively. It’s past midnight when I turn to sleep, replacing Trump’s words with lyrics from a lullaby metabolized by my nervous system: “Collectivize your heart so that it breaks open and not apart. Let it hold all the pain of–and in–the world, without being numbed or overwhelmed” and “Condition your intellectual, political, and affective muscles for facing storms and running marathons in tortuous terrains.”¹

New and veteran teachers alike can experience feeling overwhelmed by the uncertainty in the world and conclude that there’s no point in taking action, succumbing to apathy. I started identifying as an activist teacher nearly twenty years ago and I find myself to this day continually trying on ways of being in the world that embody wholeness and justice.² I see my activism as the pursuit, as being in the inquiry.³ At times, it occurs to me that life would be easier if I were to give up activism because what difference am I actually making, so part of me can relate to the apathetic teacher. What I always return to, after critical contemplation, is a deep-seated belief that teachers want to know how they can be a contribution to the abolition of injustice and oppression in and beyond their schools. The missing that occurs to me is our lack of collective practice in healing the wounds of humanity.

In this post, I discuss the intentionality of adopting a decolonial framework and then explore an area of practice known as Somatic Abolitionism that I see as holding promise for rethinking teachers’ labor activism.

Teachers’ Modern Life

War, artificial intelligence, and immigration policy are topics that dominate U.S. headlines. As the last few school districts close for the summer, we educators continue to pay close attention to news on the status of the U.S. Department of Education and the potential impact of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” on the upcoming school year. Our two national unions–NEA and AFT–have performed their role of condemning the bill, highlighting how destructive it will be for children and families when it comes to healthcare and food security.⁴ Beyond this, I wonder how they are supporting state affiliates and locals in providing to the rank-and-file a kind of political education that would strengthen the social justice orientation of the labor movement and expand cultures of solidarity.⁵ I wonder how individual education workers and non-union teacher organizations will spend time over the summer being politically active so as not to experience a teacher’s version of “summer slide.”

I can attest to the struggle of organizing education workers both in terms of the logistics⁶ and in the development of our consciousness.⁷ My use of “our” is super intentional here because the experience of being a community and labor organizer dramatically changed the way I put theory and practice into interplay with each other when it came to my work as a teacher. My inquiry into being a teacher is ongoing. Nowadays, I think about being a teacher in the contexts of modernity and decoloniality, and I do so in community, particularly through a scholar-activist reading group over the last few years and now through this Substack.

I call from the forefront of my mind two texts in particular: Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument” and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Not gonna lie, Sylvia Wynter is not for the faint of heart. Poesis is the perfect way to describe her writing as her creative diction and curvy syntax entrance you into a metaphorical and metaphysical state of mind. You have no choice but to say, “Hold up. Let me read that again,” a literal disruption of colonial thinking. Wynter’s article sets a strong foundation for an understanding of how we wound up being this version of humanity. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira creates a bridge between this default context of being and the possibilities of created contexts that honor indigeneity and relationality. She has filled her book with stories, tools, and exercises to stretch the abilities of our minds and bodies to take on the tasks of hospicing our dying modernity and midwifing the birth of our collective futures.

In the process of building consciousness, we will unearth new knowledges about the world and ourselves, experiencing these in both our colonized minds and our racialized, gendered, and classed bodies.⁸ The reading group tips toward the mind. I now lean into the body when asking, in what ways can we build individual and collective capacity and resilience for worldmaking?

Somatic Abolitionism

In the opening vignette, do you remember what I did after watching the Youtube videos? I conducted a body scan, a somatic practice. Somatics refers to the interconnectedness of the mind and body, with particular attention given to the nervous system. Chronic stress and strong negative emotions often lead to a breakdown of the mind-body connection and manifest as pain and dis-ease in the body.

In My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem⁹ takes a body-centered approach to addressing systemic racism and provides practices for abolishing white-body supremacy in our quest to heal humanity. He founded Somatic Abolitionism, which “is living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building–a way of being in the world.” This is what Dr. Resmaa has to say about why we need Somatic Abolitionism:

Nearly all of our bodies–bodies of all culture–are infected by the virus of white-body supremacy.

This virus was created by human beings in a laboratory–the Virginia Assembly, in 1691–then let loose upon our continent. It quickly infected people of all culture and pigmentation, backgrounds, and economic circumstances.

Today, the WBS virus remains with us—in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the foods we eat, the institutions that govern us, and the social contracts under which we live. Most of all, though, it lives in our bodies.

Here’s a video of Dr. Resmaa elaborating on how Somatic Abolitionism is an expansion of our intelligences and supports our ability to grow up not only individually but communally. I am spotlighting about two minutes [27:56-30:10]; however, I encourage you to watch the talk in its entirety:

After listening to the audiobook version of My Grandmother's Hands and adopting some practices to regulate my nervous system, I increased my threshold for “hold[ing] all the pain of–and in–the world, without being numbed or overwhelmed,” consequently restoring more of my ability to experience joy in the face of modern crises rather than allowing them to drain all my energy, leaving me in a state of paralysis. Indeed, the modern world we have inherited has us “facing storms and running marathons in tortuous terrains.”

Furthering the Inquiry

What could labor activism, teachers’ work, and public education look like if teachers unions adopted a commitment to heal the virus of white-body supremacy? If they called on Dr. Resmaa and his colleagues to dispense their medicines? If they took the lead on honestly recognizing the collective nature of our struggle to build a just, equitable society? And I ask the same questions of the rank-and-file because they are not without agency. Either way, the point is that we cannot gloss over the modern world’s dependence upon the System of White Supremacy when implementing remedies to injustice. We cannot dismiss the importance of building relationships or educating each other on the sociopolitical nature of our work.¹⁰ And we cannot ignore the intelligence that lies in our bodies as we engage in labor activism.

If you don’t currently incorporate some kind of somatic practice into your life,¹¹ I invite you to review Dr. Resmaa’s work and share what you learn with others.

1. See Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism to learn more about these two statements which come from a series of statements that are part of a tool called “Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness.” Also, shout out to Mr. Kanthety, one of my student teachers who just graduated. Your love of civics is inspiring and has called on me to engage with current events in new ways.

2. Specifically, I subscribe to EbonyJanice’s conceptualization of fourth-wave womanism, described in her book, All the Black Girls Are Activists: A Fourth Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance, as “identify[ing] rest, ease, play, pleasure, and dreaming, where Black women are concerned, as the central tools we are using for our justice work” (p. xviii).

3. Here, I’m referring to ontological inquiry. Fatemah Moghaddam writes about the relation between ontological/phenomenological pedagogy and the purposes of education in her article, “Re-envisioning Decolonizing Pedagogies: Beyond Knowing, Delving into Being as an Access to Possible Decolonial Futures,” Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education; Gloria Dall’Alba explores the topic in relation to how we develop professionals in her article, “Learning Professional Ways of Being: Ambiguities of Becoming,” Educational Philosophy and Theory.

4. See the press releases with statements from NEA President Becky Pringle and AFT President Randi Weingarten.

5. Be sure to check out previous posts of The Future of Our Schools Collective where member Lois Weiner takes on why we should think of capitalism as a social system and member Erin Dyke discusses cultures of solidarity.

6. In Part One of The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice, Lois Weiner provides practical reading for how to improve teachers unions.

7. I write about this in the article, “(Re)Forming Unions for Social Justice: A Critical Autoethnographic Inquiry into Racism, Democracy, and Teacher Leadership,” Critical Education (Special Issue: Contemporary Educator Movements: Transforming Unions, Schools, and Society in North America). This is one of three articles that comprise my dissertation, Becoming BlackWomanTeacher: An Autoethnographic Illumination of Teacher Leadership Development for Critical Democratic Public Education in Newark, NJ.

8. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is particularly instructive through her work in the Archaeology of Self and Racial Literacy Development models.

9. Shout out to my friend and colleague Lauren Wells for putting me on to Dr. Resmaa’s work. Learn more at his personal-professional website (resmaa.com), Cultural Somatics Institute, and Black Octopus Society.

10. Fire with Fire’s series on relationship-based organizing deserves a second footnote in as many posts.

11. Special thank you to Erin Dyke for not only giving me feedback on a draft of this post but also for sharing another somatic practice resource, “Procedure for Having to Behold,” described by the authors as “a procedure to try when you witness fresh evidence of an atrocity or injustice.”