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ORIGINAL SINS

Eve L. Ewing

The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

American public schools have been called "the great equalizer." The thought being that if all children could just get an education, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But ORIGINAL SINS, makes it clear that the opposite is true: the educational system has played an instrumental role in creating racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

Multiple Fellowship and Award-winning author, including the MacDowell Fellow and Gordan Laing Award, Eve L Ewing demonstrates in this tour de force, ORIGINAL SINS, that American schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Schools were not an afterthought for the "founding fathers"; they were envisioned by Thomas Jefferson to fortify the country's racial hierarchy. And while those dynamics are less overt now than they were in centuries past, Ewing shows that they persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. Ewing argues that the most insidious aspects of the system are under the radar: standardized testing, tracking, school discipline, and access to resources. American public schools have been called "the great equalizer." The thought being that if all children could just get an education, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But ORIGINAL SINS, makes it clear that the opposite is true: the educational system has played an instrumental role in creating racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. Ewing makes the case that there should be a profound re-evaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago where she is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. I recommend taking a look at the attached Q&A where Ewing's awards and accolades are listed. In addition to her many published books, Eve's poems and essays have been published in many venues, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Poetry Magazine. Eve is the author of the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, adapted into a hit play by Steppenwolf Theater, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and the novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is also the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, produced by Manual Cinema, and co-wrote the short story "Timebox" with Janelle Monáe as part of the short story collection The Memory Librarian. She also cowrote the young adult graphic novel Change the Game with Colin Kaepernick, illustrated by Orlando Caicedo. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series, and is currently writing Black Panther.

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Book Published 2025-02-11 by One World

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Poet, sociologist, and cultural organizer Ewing again turns her incisive, scholarly eye to education, racism, and American society. In this skillfully presented, searing critique, Ewing reveals the role that institutions of formal education have played in creating and reinforcing racial hierarchies in the U.S.. Ewing's prose style is intellectual yet accessible, and she cites a wealth of historical and contemporary sources. A brightly intelligent, uncompromising, timely, and deeply clarifying investigation.

Original Sins is a meticulously written invitation to gather alongside Ewing as she excavates the historical record to reveal how schools are instrumental in upholding racial hierarchy and diminishing the futures of Black and Indigenous communities. Re-imagining schools through a communal practice of braiding, Ewing invites readers to consider the power of education towards liberationschools as collective sites where we can dream and grow our knowledge towards building new worlds based on ethical relationships of care. Original Sins is a brilliant must read for educators and all those concerned with Black and Indigenous futures.

Carter G. Woodson, one of the 20th century's greatest historians, asserted that lynching starts in the school room. Eve L. Ewing, one of the 21st century's greatest intellectuals, proves that racism, colonialism, and carcerality started in the schoolroom to enact these oppressive systems. By reckoning with the violent, dehumanizing history of Black and Indigenous schooling, Ewing finds in the resistance of students, renegade teachers, and traditions older than the colony a path toward a life-affirming, loving, caring education. But it will require dismantling racial capitalism, decolonizing our world and our minds, and burying America's original sins once and for all.

Eve L. Ewing is not only a remarkable writer, she is also a singular educator. And in Original Sins, she provides the reader with one of the most powerful and illuminating lessons they may ever receive. In outlining the histories of Black and Native education she makes clearin ways that feel at once engaging, unflinching, and revelatoryhow our country's schools have intentionally configured the contemporary landscape of inequality. Exhaustively researched and exquisitely written, Original Sins is breathtaking.

Original Sins will transform the way you see this country, dismantling what you thought you knew about race and schooling in America, and opening your eyes to realities that have been denied or avoided for too long. With a clear, unflinching voice, Ewing shares an unforgettable origin story, one that challenges us to ask new questions about our own educational experience and our children's, starting with the pledge of allegiance first thing in the morning. You will come away from this book with a new capacity to imagine a different way to learn, grounded in the truth about our past and present and the potential of our future.

Why is the American school system neglecting so many of its students? In this damning investigation, the award-winning author and activist posits that it may be because schools were designed to do just that. Through examining the writings of the founding fathers, the history of Indigenous boarding schools, and the current educational gaps, Ewing uncovers how our school systems were set up not just to ignore Black and Indigenous students, but to actively sabotage them. Though the argument of this book is bleak, it illuminates a path for a more just future that is nothing short of dazzling.

Eve L. Ewing's Original Sins is the book I longed for as a graduate student in Educational Studies; one that narrates the history of schooling as an extension of settler statecraft and racial hierarchy. In telling this story, Ewing takes readers on a journey through the works and words of leading Black and Indigenous scholars, cataloging the blatant and insidious ways that the nation's 'original sins' Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery structure both schooling and knowledge. She then reshapes this history into a provocation; a summons to collective struggle and imagining where dreams, memories, and ethics of care are woven together as the building blocks of a new vision of 'schools for us.' The world is clearly at a crossroads, between futures of more violence or more decolonial and abolitionist love. Futures of more freedom will need 'schools for us' that refuse the carceral logics of miseducation and embrace Ewing's vision of relationality, care, and repair.

Eve L. Ewing lays the bare the core project of dispossession and race-making in American education and statecraft. This book's careful attention to the distinct but shared trajectories of Black and Indigenous education forms the center of this project and is an extraordinary contribution to political history, studies in education and shared futures. This book is a must-read.

Calling for an interruption and not a repetition of the unforgivable harms done in the creation of the United States, Eve L. Ewing's Original Sins is a commitment to being true about the past in order to truly have a future. Fiercely hopeful, attending to the 'deep and furious power' of the shared histories between Black and Indigenous communities, Ewing uncovers the makings of other forms of relation that we want for our children and our children's children. This is a book you will read, and then want everyone in your life to read; a book to be read in community.

The American education system for centuries developed on two parallel tracks, according to this brilliant history from sociologist and poet Ewing. One track, Ewing writes, was for white and European immigrant children, and on it great strides in education theory were made that emphasized how cooperation through play made for engaged citizens.. Meanwhile, the other track, for Indigenous and Black children, aimed to "annihilate" their cultural identity and train them as "subservient laborers," according to Ewing. She brings to light plenty of harrowing evidence to this effect, not just as a broad strokes theory but in the minutiae of teacher-training manuals and educators' writings.. A troubling and eye-opening examination of the foundational role educators played in developing America's racial hierarchy.