Original Sins — and What to Do About Them 

Rethinking Schools Executive Director Cierra Kaler-Jones interviewed Eve L. Ewing, author of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism and Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. In Original Sins, Ewing details how within the fabric of schooling in the United States lies the perpetuation of racial hierarchies, which prepares young people for unequal treatment for the rest of their lives.

Cierra Kaler-Jones: What are the two original sins you outline in the book? 

Eve L. Ewing: When I say original sins, I’m referring to the institution of chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples that was also coupled with land theft. I see both of those things as being historically at the foundation of what comes to be the republic of the United States. Those are not things that happen in a discrete time, but rather things that continue to shape the present. And so it’s important to understand the rippling after-effects of those institutions. And not even “after-effects” in the sense of settler colonialism, because that theft is an ongoing process. 

CKJ: Can you talk about the three pillars of American racism in schooling institutions that you name in the book? 

ELE: There are many more than three, but I structured my argument around three that I think are important. One is what I call the gospel of intellectual inferiority, the idea that Black people and Native people are inherently less intelligent and less intellectually capable. The second is discipline and punishment, the idea that our bodies require different levels of control and surveillance, often in very harsh ways — and that it’s for the good of everybody that our bodies are controlled that way. The third is economic subjugation, the idea that Black and Native people should be relegated to the bottom of capitalist hierarchy, and that is seen as our proper place within American society.

CKJ: We at Rethinking Schools and Zinn Education Project try to support teachers in teaching outside the textbooks and push back against whitewashed corporate textbooks. What are some examples of how textbooks tell inaccurate stories that perpetuate racism? How do those examples relate to your first pillar of racism in schools? 

ELE: One of the things that was most interesting for me in writing the book was coming to understand the historical legacy. There are a lot of textbooks that I quote that are from the Reconstruction era that have very specific messages for Black people about how important it is to be subservient, to never be angry at your former masters, to never take vengeance against them, even if they assault you or your family. While Black people sought self-determination through schools, white people saw schooling as a “civilizing” instrument of social control through those same schools. A majority of the teachers were white Northerners, and the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society said that their ideal teaching candidate was that “she” should be able to see the spirit and mission of Jesus in her pupils and have motives of religion and patriotism. 

One of the ways current textbooks perpetuate racism is through the relegation of Native people to a perpetual past. They’re often completely omitted from the conversation, and when there’s any discussion of them in curricula, it often is the idea of “the Native Americans” in past tense. Textbooks also depict Native people as enacting violence against settlers, without conversation about why they might be enacting violence. Textbooks write it as an initial act of violence, and so part of the purpose of this perspective in textbooks is to introduce young people at an early age to the idea that it is normal and fine for us to live on stolen land, and that all the Native people are gone, and so it can be tragic that they disappeared, but it’s over and done with. That kind of relegation of Native people to a perpetually tragic old story is a form of racism because it normalizes the continuation of settler colonialism into the present.

CKJ: Yes. It makes me think of the painting by John Gast, “American Progress.” That’s in a lot of textbooks. The portrait portrays a white angelic figure spreading light floating over the land. The angel is pulling electricity poles, and holding a book, meant to represent knowledge and enlightenment. The Native people are being pushed out of the light into darkness. 

ELE: I think that was in my high school history textbooks. 

CKJ: Mine, too. Whenever I do workshops with teachers or students on dominant and counter narratives, I have them analyze that painting. I ask questions like “What do you notice in the painting?” They often say, “There’s darkness surrounding the Native people,” “There’s a white angel in the center of the painting.” We talk about how images in textbooks tell stories. This particular image perpetuates the dominant narrative that Native people are “in the dark” and the colonizers were “bringing light.” The dichotomy between light and dark is attached to good and bad — another example of anti-Blackness. 

You write about coming of age as an educator during what you call the achievement gap frenzy. You talk about intellectual inferiority, and how it gets perpetuated through standardized testing. Can you expand on this? 

ELE: One of the ways that the gospel of intellectual inferiority happens is the unspoken assumption that people of color can never possibly be qualified and can never possibly be more qualified than a white person for any job for any reason. There are bizarre myths, like that of Native people automatically getting into college, that it’s paid for them. There are false ideas about affirmative action and what it really is. 

Standardized tests offer a very narrow conception of human possibility. For example, a researcher at the Santa Fe Indian School conducted a study exploring the ways that tribal members in the Keresan Pueblo community defined what it meant to be “gifted.” For local leaders, an individual having “gifts” meant gifts to serve others, which is different from the individualized Western notion of genius. When I was a middle school teacher, I tried to design my lessons and classroom environment using inquiry-based, collaborative, lab-oriented lessons because that’s what research-based best practices for science instruction are. But come standardized test time, there were no collaborative activities or lab components. Instead, they were asked to do rote memorization of facts, like the difference between a pinnate leaf and a palmate leaf. Students’ ability to recall random facts like this during test time had high stakes, when in their everyday lives, they could look up the fact. 

Standardized tests were created by overtly racist people for overtly racist purposes, including the idea that society needs to sort out who is capable, and who is “feeble-minded,” so that we can make sure that we don’t waste too many educational resources. There’s a very specific idea during the Progressive Era that eugenics is part of the way we use science to seek progress. The question becomes for us in the present — what do we do with that knowledge? 

CKJ: One of the things that I love most about the book is the way you write, which makes all of these topics so accessible. You weave personal anecdotes with historical examples. One of the stories that stuck out to me was your experience as an 8th-grade teacher when you found out the school you taught at had a field trip to the Cook County Jail. Can you share that story and how it exemplifies the second pillar of racism? 

ELE: Oftentimes, people talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. When we say the school-to-prison pipeline, the metaphor of a pipeline suggests that there is a school over here, and there’s a prison over there, and that there are certain students that are going to be shuttled between them. That is true for some students. There are many young people who begin their entanglement with the criminal legal system while they’re in school. But for many other young people, they might never get arrested in school. They might never get suspended or expelled or interact with a police officer, but they nevertheless experience a form of schooling that is heavily inflected by the logic of prisons. The logic of policing, the logic of carcerality, which, to put it simply, is the logic of punishment. It’s the tendency we have in our schools, and frankly, a tendency we have in our broader society, to turn to punishment first when there are often easier or more effective and less harmful ways of addressing an issue. For example, when teaching 8th grade, I found out partway through the year that there was a scheduled field trip for students to go to the Cook County Jail. I taught at a predominantly Black school. 

As teachers, our job is to teach. We do things because they have an implied pedagogical purpose, and they are supposed to be meaningful learning experiences for young people. What is the underlying logic that undergirds a proposal that you’re going to take students to a jail? There’s an assumption that this is something that they need, and that this is going to be an effective deterrent, which in turn is based on the assumption that they’re all potential criminals. I wrote about this in my last book on schools, Ghosts in the Schoolyard — that there’s a certain image when you say that you teach in an all-Black school on the South Side of Chicago. They make policy decisions based on those stereotypes. Nothing about my students or their lives, their personalities, or their behaviors made me feel like they were destined for this life of criminality. So what is it? What is it about them that makes somebody think that taking them to a jail is an educationally valuable experience? For me, that is inextricably bound up with their Blackness. What are the assumptions about Black children that are being marshaled in that kind of decision?

CKJ: Could you talk about what you offered them instead of that field trip?

ELE: There was a documentary that had just come out about youth poetry slam, and it was playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in downtown Chicago. So, I opened an invitation for anybody who wanted to come to the film center instead, whether they were in my class or not. I didn’t feel the same ability to articulate a politic as I do now, but I just knew that something was wrong. I wanted to make sure that I provided an alternative. Educators might be encountering similar issues. There are times when we might have to send an angry email or have a terse conversation with someone or tell people how we feel during a staff meeting. But I also think it’s important to think about how we can offer alternatives. It’s very easy for people to do the wrong thing, even if they have good intentions. This is not just about individual people’s biases or beliefs. It’s also about a set of structures. It’s about a set of cultural practices that extend beyond the walls of our schools.

CKJ: I appreciate you offering an alternative as an act of resistance. It’s also an act of care to say students deserve better, and students can choose not to engage. The way you talk about carcerality resonates with me. I remember a particular instance where I was teaching yoga in a few schools in Washington, D.C. They were predominantly Black schools. One school had lines taped on the floor close to the sides of the halls. Students could only walk on the lines or they’d be reprimanded. It made me realize how insidiously schools police students’ bodies and movements in ways that mimic prisons. 

ELE: Yes, why is that seen as normal? It’s not. 

CKJ: I appreciate how the book not only critiques structures and systems that perpetuate racism but also incorporates ways to think about future-building and new structures. I love this question that you ask in the book: “Rather than asking how we can change schools, students, or teachers, how might we see the transformation of schools as part of the broader work of transforming society?” What can this transformation look like in education? 

ELE: One of the things I’ve advocated for is expanding what we mean when we talk about accountability. So much of the conversation about schools and education reform is about how teachers, students, parents, or principals are doing something wrong and we need to fix them. If they can’t get their act together, we need to punish them and track them and defund them. Education reform has placed the blame on individuals rather than seeing schools as part of the ecological fabric of our broader society. 

We have to ask questions like “What are all of us doing to make sure that kids don’t show up at school hungry — that kids don’t have insecure housing situations?” “What are all of us doing to make sure that kids don’t have parents dealing with a substance abuse or a mental health challenge?” “How are all of us saying that we are collectively accountable for young people, instead of just punishing an individual teacher when the kid who showed up to school and didn’t have anything to eat that morning doesn’t do well enough on a test?” That really gets to the notion of what we mean when we say public schools. The idea of a public means that we’re entering into a social contract, not just on the part of the people who have a right to participate in the institution, but a social contract that is supposed to be reciprocal. The social contract is supposed to be mutual where we’re also saying that this is all of our responsibility. 

What we’re seeing right now in terms of the assault on public schools is partially about this idea that everybody’s responsibility in this country is to claw their way to the top. We’re taught to fight to get whatever we can as individuals. When we think about what we want as a society, that is a really sad way of envisioning the kind of world we want. When it comes to young people, it’s especially depraved. Blaming a young person for not being able to fight their way to the top is sick, and we see this in school spaces, but we see this in the way we treat undocumented youth, unaccompanied youth, and young people in the juvenile justice system and criminal legal system. Those of us that believe that a more expansive and loving way of being is possible have to be unrelenting in showing that and talking about that all the time.

CKJ: That makes me think about what you discuss in the book about care. What are some models of education work that are grounded in care? How do you define care? What does care look like in schools?

ELE: To me the definition of care is centering what the living being in front of you needs to be OK in this moment. And being willing to put that first. So many of us instinctively enact this in our everyday lives, when we see somebody that’s having a hard time. We ask, “Do you need a second? Do you need a tissue? Have you had anything to eat? Do you need to take five?” The problem is that we are thrust into these systems that give us the strongest possible incentives to not do that. 

We see this not just in education, but, for example, in health care, in situations where people who are in hospitals are getting clocked and timed and tracked for how many patients they can see in a certain period of time, and it causes them to not provide people with empathy because they are told, through metrics and external pressure, that they can’t. We see this in schools where, under the auspices of the idea of a “no excuses” ideology, or having “high standards,” people talk to and treat children in ways that they would be horrified if anybody talked to or spoke to a child that they cared about in a different setting. It’s become normalized because that’s what the institution is demanding of people.

It’s really important, especially for people in positions of power, in schools and positions of leadership to normalize that it is OK, and in fact, necessary and required to prioritize care. As long as we are in charge of children, we are going to begin with love, and we’re going to begin with care. Everything else has to come after that, and I think that is, in some places, a countercultural act. However, everywhere I go, I meet educators who put care at the center of their practice. So the question is, how are we collectively uplifting those folks, celebrating them and making sure that they’re empowered to spread that type of work wherever they go?

CKJ: That’s beautiful. Thank you. In the book you also discuss how, while racism and settler colonialism continue, so does the resistance. What are some of the examples of this resistance?

ELE: I think one of the most important forms of resistance that we can enact is continuing to do our jobs in the best way that we know how. A lot of what fascism and authoritarianism is relying on us to do is this idea of preemptive compliance, preemptive acquiescence, preemptive obedience. There are so many people that I’ve spoken to recently who no government agent is sending them an email or knocking at their door. But they are doing the work already of thinking, “What can I change about my practice to make sure that it’s inoffensive and non-threatening to these folks?” I understand that impulse because people are trying to survive. You have to ask, “What kind of world do you want to live in? And do you want to play the role of transforming your precious work, your time, your ideology, your space into something acceptable to the people that you don’t respect? It’s like laying down your weapons at the door before anybody even shows up. Teachers are brilliant. Teachers are qualified, teachers are thoughtful, teachers are caring, and there are so many teachers who have invested years in shaping and refining curricular choices that are preparing young people to be the best critical thinkers and the best participants in a just society as possible. A powerful and crucial form of resistance right now is continuing to teach what we need to and that also gives other people permission to do the same.

CKJ: My last question is about how you end the book — with braiding and weaving. What do the concepts of braiding and weaving mean? How can they help us better understand history and the schools we’re building for the future? 

ELE: I love the metaphor of braiding, not only because it is an important cultural practice for many, although certainly not all Black and Indigenous peoples. It is also a reflection of care and a reflection of intimacy, and a reflection of starting with something small that I think is really at the basis of what I’m trying to advocate for.

We don’t know all the answers, we’re not perfect. We don’t have all the pieces put together, but we know that what we have is not working for us, and we know that what we have is not serving us, and is not designed to serve us. How do we start with something small and tender — something like telling each other stories about our grandparents, cooking meals together, reading books together, being in conversation, and taking walks together. Those are the things that allow us to build those relationships of trust that also model the kind of education that I, at least, dream of — educational spaces where people feel safe to be learners in ways that are nurturing and celebratory. That’s what the metaphor of braiding and weaving means to me.

CKJ: Thank you so much. I appreciate your words and wisdom.