Ahtziry Tinajero

I started thinking about abolition during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. I would hear activists say things like “defund the police,” and that is when I got curious about what it means to live in a world without police å to reinvest those funds into BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] communities.

Abolition as a framework for social justice was implied when I took a Spanish class called “Capitalism and the Commons” during my junior year of college. We learned about different collectives across Spain working to create their ways of living communally outside a capitalist system. It was my first time hearing that the solution to the problems caused by this oppressive system is to abolish it altogether because you cannot reform a system designed to enforce white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism. Instead, the approach is to develop local, community-based solutions that prioritize marginalized peoples’ well-being without relying on the institutions that harm them. 

I had heard about “abolitionist education” from Professor Chikkatur, but I never fully understood what an abolitionist education looked like in practice until I took my Senior Seminar class this year. Our first in-class conversations revolved around the school-to-prison pipeline and how we can use this concept to understand how carcerality is enforced through technology implementation. Through our discussions of discipline and surveillance, I realized how my own educational experiences were shaped by carceral logic. I had normalized equating school safety with constant police presence, passing through metal detectors, and backpack checks. 

Now, alongside my class, I am working on challenging this internalized view in ways that help me envision a future where school safety means no suspensions, students can trust adults and express themselves without fear of punishment, and the community is involved in educating their children. Additionally, learning about ethnic studies has helped me see the value of creating a curriculum that empowers BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ youth to fight systemic inequality by teaching them their history and culture across different disciplines. 

Having been involved in public scholarship and community-led work, I am always interested in learning about the efforts of grassroots organizations that make knowledge accessible to the public. Listening to the One Million Experiments podcast episode on Queenie’s Crew for our Senior Seminar class made me want to explore more ways we can talk about abolition with elementary school students. Likewise, reading about organizations like Black Girl Free that use art instead of state-provided social services for healing inspired me to pursue the intersections of art and abolition for my final project. Furthermore, this project allowed me to approach what I know about abolition—understood as dismantling oppressive systems using our community’s resources and imaginations to support each other—through an artistic lens in ways that honor and recognize the community work that is being done to make abolition education accessible.