Are schools providing the best education possible for all their students? This episode's guest argues that the U.S. school system is where children are first introduced to racial hierarchies and that these normalized beliefs solidify in many institutions like healthcare, employment, policing and more. Sociologist and author Eve L. Ewing joins The Excerpt to discuss her new book “Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism.” It is out on bookshelves now.Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [email protected] Transcript available hereAlso available at art19.com/shows/5-ThingsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of schools in America?
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,
Chapter 2: How does the education system reinforce racial hierarchies?
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.
You point to two, and I think this is what you were referring to, original sins that our education system refuses to address. How do American schools today deal with each of these issues?
Chapter 3: What are the original sins of the American education system?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
So those are some of the ways in which we see these legacies moving into the present.
Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, is ennobled in U.S. history books. You present two key interventions he pushed forward that you write, quote, laid the groundwork for anti-Black and anti-Native ways of viewing the world, both inside schools and beyond their corridors, unquote. What are they and have they persisted in curricula today?
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Chapter 4: How does Thomas Jefferson's legacy affect education today?
You write that there are three pillars of racism introduced in schools. Tell me about them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And we see that with things like the wealth gap and again, things that happen in school to differentiate people's learning experiences.
You delve into the history of standardized testing. How do you believe it connects to this concept of racial intellectual inferiority?
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.
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Chapter 5: What are the three pillars of racism introduced in schools?
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.
Let's talk about the policing and sentencing disparities that exist for Black and Native people. How do you believe the foundation of unequal constructs laid out in school shows up in the criminal justice system?
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.
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.
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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Chapter 6: How do schools discipline Black and Native children?
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.
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.
You talk about demographics in the teaching staffs of schools and introduce a term other scholars call the white lady bountiful. Can you expound on that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're amazing educators and teachers that love children and uplift them and support them from all backgrounds.
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