San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized
displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just
over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few
remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of
offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color.
While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and
Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest
suspension rates for Black students. In
Progressive Dystopia
Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's
marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of
multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and
six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the
school fails its students and the community because it operates within a
space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social
laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds,
Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the
needed path toward Black freedom.