Progressive Dystopia

Reviewed by: Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco by Savannah Shange Annegret Staiger Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 232 pp. In the time of a growing Black Lives Matter movement, Robeson Justice Academy, a school based on multiracial solidarity and justice, uses a photo of a crowd of brown students holding up protest banners under the heading "Our Lives Matter" as its representation to the public. With that scene, Shange sets the stage for what is to come: an analysis of a small independent school in San Francisco and an unapologetic critique of how liberal progressive policies went wrong. While Robeson was "regarded as a 'win' for progressive left-wing reformers" (2) she argues, it often failed its students, especially its Black students. Set in the urban context of San Francisco, a city regarded by many as the epitome of a progressive community that spearheaded the rights of sexual minorities and a "sanctuary city" that protects immigrants from the state, Shange shows us that it is also a city that—in a process of relentless gentrification—forced out most of its Black and many of its Latino inhabitants. Contrasting the school's carefully crafted public image of multiracial solidarity with its high record of penalizing and expelling Black students, Shange asks, "[w]ho loses when 'we' win?" (3). Shange's book is radically different from other school ethnographies. She does not provide an overview of the state of the nation in regards to racial inequality. There are no statistics on failing schools, re-segregated school districts, comparative drop-out rates, or the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead, Shange operates in a different discursive universe. By liberally using a repertoire of expressions ranging from Black English Vernacular ("Frisco"), hip-hop culture, and social media hashtags (#whitetears) in her [End Page 1607] descriptions as well as analysis, she uses ethnography to familiarize the reader with the linguistic and conceptual territory of the Black experience in San Francisco and beyond. She does not "translate" the universe of her subjects into a discursive universe likely more familiar to her readers. Instead, Shange's writing is a practice of solidarity with her research subjects: the Black, Latinx, and Polynesian students and its school staff, teachers, and administrators. Shange has a clear goal for her book: By examining a series of successful progressive reforms, and their cost to Black communities, I critique "winning" as the dominant logic of social justice work. I ask "Who loses when 'we' win?" not so much to expand the "we" of winning to an ever more inclusive list of deserving subjects, but to ask what becomes impossible when we engage in contest as the primary mode of Black politics. (3) The concept of abolition is central to her project. Whereas revolution and reconstruction aim to correct the state, abolition "wants to quit playing and race the stadium of settler-slaver society for good" (3). Seen through this lens, desegregation would be a reconstructionist project, aiming to bring the state to equitably apply the benefits of citizenship to all of its citizens, while abolitionist anthropology considers the notion of a liberal state a troubling, if not futile, notion. Instead of operating on the notion of the liberal state as inherently correctible, Shange charts a notion of the state as hinging on statecraft, i.e. as a machinery for establishing spaces for power. To make such spaces and their machinations work is the task she has set for herself in this book. Abolitionist anthropology here means "antiblackness theory combined with a critical anthropology of the state" (7). Following Faye Harrison's intervention for Decolonizing Anthropology (1991) by exploring the intellectual traditions of the newly decolonized countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Shange applies this line of inquiry to the United States, a society where Blacks allegedly gained emancipation but no sovereignty. Using abolitionist anthropology as a theory but also as a method and a standpoint, Shange writes: Abolition is not a synonym for resistance: it encompasses the ways in which Black people and our accomplices work within, against, and [End Page 1608] beyond the state in the service

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