Eve L. Ewing
Appearances
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
The United States, as you know, and as your listeners know, had a social, political and economic reality that for many generations was reliant on slavery and the enslavement of African people stolen from the continent and then raised here as property.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And at the same time, the land in which we walk, move, live and breathe and where you and I are speaking right now is land stolen from indigenous peoples. And so what that requires is the idea that disappearance for Native people, for Native children, is normal. The idea that it was their destiny to no longer be here.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And we see that taught in schools today, often through omission, the ways in which Native stories are not mentioned, are not talked about, but also the ways in which the idea of Native people is relegated to a distant past.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And so many of our children learn in schools things that the Native Americans, quote unquote, did in the past, as though there were not Native people living and breathing and moving around with us today. And then in terms of Black people, part of what the nation required of Black people, especially after emancipation, was this continued subservient role.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Because if you could no longer extract labor from Black people for free, from our children, from our bodies for free, then we had to keep Black people in this kind of perpetually economic and socially subservient position. And so we see that in everything from the way tracking works in schools,
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
to the unspoken assumption that Black children are not as smart, which we also see reflected in representation in things like gifted and talented programs.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Even things like the conversation we're having right now around quote-unquote DEI hires and the way DEI in education has really become kind of a euphemism to mean just the presence of people of color more generally, and especially Black people, that is based on a kind of unspoken assumption that Black people do not deserve to be in a place on their own merits.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
So those are some of the ways in which we see these legacies moving into the present.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
So Thomas Jefferson laid down these two ideas. One is the idea that Black people were not capable of sophisticated thought. And this is something he wrote very explicitly in Notes on the State of Virginia, which is not as famous as the Declaration of Independence, but incredibly influential in terms of text that he wrote over the course of his life.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And he wrote, among the Blacks, there is misery for sure, but no poetry. He believed that Black people were constitutionally unable to do forms of cognition beyond sort of mimesis and copying and very emotional outbursts, things like that. This is something he said in his own words, which I think is important to understand today.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And in his time later on as a statesman of the United States, he also put forth an idea called the Doctrine of Discovery. And this was the idea that basically legitimized the theft of native land by European powers. Now, we know that even in Jefferson's time, the idea that European powers would just seize land from each other without war, without some sort of critical resistance.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
didn't make any sense. But the way that they viewed the United States and the land that had been stewarded by Native peoples since time immemorial was that it was empty land. It was barren land, right? It was ready for the taking.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And many listeners might be familiar with the idea of Manifest Destiny, which was something that Jefferson oversaw with the Louisiana Purchase and the expansion of the western border of the United States. And so in order to justify that, in order to say this is empty land, God wanted us to have it. There was this necessity of talking about the disappearance of Native people as destiny. Right.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And a reframing of this land as empty land when, in fact, it certainly was not.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
The first that I write about is the idea of intellectual inferiority, the idea that Black people and Native people are inherently less intelligent. And we see this playing out, again, in spoken and unspoken ways.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
There is a troubling amount of survey data that has suggested that even in the contemporary era, there are many people who believe that Black people are inherently less intelligent genetically. and therefore that educational interventions are not likely to be effective. The second of these pillars is the idea of discipline and punishment.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
The idea that children, we expect them to go to school and explore and learn and discover their own lives as autonomous beings, But that for Black children and Native children, that the most important thing is that they learn self-control and that they be controlled through surveillance and through a very strict corporal discipline.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And we know, of course, that much of that history goes back even to the terrible legacy of boarding schools where Native children were kidnapped and held as a means of controlling them, but also as a means of controlling their parents and their families themselves. and disincentivizing resistance to the U.S. military expansion into native territories.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And the third is the idea of economic subjugation, that idea that in a capitalist society, as somebody once said in one of my teacher education classes, somebody's got to mow the lawn and that there's sort of a permanent underclass that is racially stratified and that's very hard for people to escape.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And we see that with things like the wealth gap and again, things that happen in school to differentiate people's learning experiences.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Well, the history of standardized testing was really birthed by people, men in particular, who were, again, very explicit that they did not believe that Black people and Native people could possibly be intelligent, could possibly be capable.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And so we see an incredible amount of cultural bias in the way that these tests were shaped in the past, but also into the present, as many scholars and observers have documented. But I think it's really important for us to face the facts that the people who are the architects of these systems, they were not shy about their beliefs, yet for some reason we've been shy about confronting them.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And one of the originators of standardized testing, Carl Brigham, later on in his life, he actually said that it was a fallacy, that his own research had been wrong, and that it was foolish for him to think that there was such a thing as a static IQ that could be assessed in an impartial way through this testing. And he said, I really hope that nobody believes that now.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Well, of course, not only do people believe it, but we've built entire regimes of incentives and supports and withholding of supports from schools based around that idea.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
These ways of approaching young people, they don't just have impact on Black and Native children themselves. They have impact on all of us and children of all racial backgrounds and all cultural backgrounds that are sharing space with them in school. So it means that Black and Native children grow up with this idea that it is normal for them to be surveilled. It's normal for them to be compliant.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And that if they can't do that, if they can't comply with the law, that they should fairly face violent retribution. And at the same time, we see from those observers of children that come from many other backgrounds, the way that they are watching that violence take place. They're watching that strict punishment. Sometimes corporal punishment.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
They're watching those extreme suspensions and expulsions and they grow up and that shapes the way they believe that we should respond when people are interacting with the police. And we've talked a lot in the last several years about the ways that black people are, of course, disproportionately impacted by contact with the criminal legal system and often impacted in tragic and lethal ways.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
But we haven't spoken as much as a culture around how the same is true for Native people. And again, it's that undertone of disappearance that this isn't even a conversation that we're having. But Native people are, as you mentioned, disproportionately represented both in interactions with the police, but also in incarceration.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Well, schools have always served the purpose of reinforcing the needs of the state in the United States. And so our young people are being educated, but the question is always educated for what and by whom. And so the central argument that I would make here is that as the United States required the normalization of indigenous genocide, indigenous land theft,
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And the same is true of Native youth who are also more likely to be incarcerated in federal facilities than that don't have as many juvenile services and where they can be subject to things that are inappropriate for any human being, but certainly developmentally inappropriate, such as solitary confinement.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
This is a term that Erica Miners developed to talk about the ways that, you know, when we think about things like enslavement, when we think about things like war on Native peoples, we often have a very masculine image of what that violence looks like. We imagine armies of men out in the fields fighting with people. We imagine cruel slave masters as, you know, men whipping and beating people.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
But it's important to point out that at the time One of the ways that sexism and patriarchy impacted women was that white women were held to be subservient to their husbands. To men, they were not equal partners. But at the same time, they were still given the ability to enact these forms of violence against those that were socially lower than them.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And so in the case of slavery, that meant sometimes women slaveholders who were very violent and enacted their own forms of punishment and retribution were against enslaved people.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And in terms of the education field, that means that sometimes there are white women who were sent out to be teachers with the express purpose of saying, we're going to defeat barbarism, that Native people and Black people are savages, and that they need us to teach them Christianity. Without us, they're going to descend into sin.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And so the idea here is that what calls itself charity, what calls itself benevolence can actually be a form of extreme cultural erasure that, again, serves the purpose of a state that wanted people's land, that wanted people's bodies. I think it's important to remember that your racial background or your gender background is in no way determinative of the kind of educator you become.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
They're amazing educators and teachers that love children and uplift them and support them from all backgrounds.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
But really what this history is teaching us is what does it look like to celebrate and support young people where they come from, to celebrate and support the communities that love them and nurture them, and to not feel like that's something that we have to beat out of them or replace with something else that we see as being culturally superior.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
I think that this is a time when there are people in power who want us to turn away from ugly history, from difficult history, and in some cases, act like it never happened. This book is filled with direct quotations, archival documents, and resources that show people saying really awful and challenging things in their own words. It's not my interpretation or something that I made up.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
And the reason that there are people in power who don't want us to confront these histories is because they understand that when we do that, it's the first step to all of us working together to be able to frame a future that is more just, that is more liberatory, that's transformative, and where all young people have the opportunity to thrive and celebrate one another and be celebrated.
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SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
That's a very dangerous idea right now. And nevertheless, it's an idea whose time is omnipresent as far as I'm concerned. So what I hope is that people will take an opportunity with this book to have tough conversations, but then to also have conversations about building forward and the ways that we work together to shape the education that we know our young people deserve.
The Excerpt
SPECIAL | Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
and the enslavement of Black people, that it has constructed a system of schooling that normalizes those things by telling us that Black children and Native children are not full children, are not full humans deserving of love and care in the same way as other humans are.