After reading the chapters from Shange’s work, one theme that stood out to me was her argument for abolition over other strategies of achieving social change. Specifically, Shange focused on Black education, and how modern structures need to be abolished and started anew rather than remedied or modified. Shange draws interesting contrasts between words that, in casual language, are seen as synonyms to emphasize her choice of “abolition” as a defining word for her proposition. Shange argues that “revolution” aims to win control of existing structures and resources, whereas abolition needs new structures altogether. Similarly, “reconstruction” aims to apply the “rhetoric of citizenship” equitably across racial and socioeconomic lines, whereas abolition sees that “the universalizing rhetoric of the liberal state is itself the problem.” Reflecting on these contrasts, the title of the ethnography strikes me as quite fitting to Shange’s argument. Progressive Dystopia refers to a radical reconstruction of modern ideas and structures to a more forward-thinking approach. As Shange asserts, abolition starts when the structures of the modern world begin to fall apart. In order to achieve a future of equity in her explored field of minority education, the modern education system needs to be flipped on its head, revamped, and started anew, an idea which Shange explores through her study of Robeson.