Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

Recommended by Todne Thomas, Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School; Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Savannah Shange’s “Progressive Dystopia” is a great ethnographic study that brings together anti-Blackness and critical race and ethnic studies theories. It explores race, abolition, criminalization, and policing in the context of education. The role of race scholars, or any scholar, is to point out that what might appear to be a photograph is really the tip of an iceberg, that there are actually deep-seated structural practices, contexts, histories that might not be visible to some, but that are still present in that moment. “Progressive Dystopia” speaks to our time in a way that is so useful because it points to the body of the iceberg. 

Shange is not only an amazing storyteller, her work forces us to think about the carceral state beyond just prisons to show that also happens in school systems with Black youth. It’s not just when Black bodies walk down the street that these carceral exchanges happen; they also happen in something as mundane and everyday as our schools. This is not about just Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, or Tony McDade, but it’s about the carceral and policing that Black people weather in many other institutional experiences before we even step out of our houses and walk down the pavement. It’s an accumulated set of experiences of being policed and criminalized because you’re Black.