Progressive dystopia

Written by Savannah Shange, this book is an ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a progressive school in San Francisco serving Black and Brown students. Shange examines how a school built on social justice commitments can still reproduce anti-Blackness, with Black students facing harsher discipline. Her account also shows that some of the school's progressive victories came at the expense of Black residents of the city.

Shange spent seven years working at the school, and that experience shapes the book's perspective. She writes across several registers, including Black English, neighborhood speech, scholarly prose and ethnographic description, to show the tensions between coalition-building, anti-Black racism and the power of the state.

Throughout, she places events at the school within the long afterlives of slavery, using them to argue that the problems she observed are rooted in history rather than in individual intentions.