ORIGINAL SINS

The idea of self-betterment through education has been a part of America's alleged meritocracy since forever, but here, Ewing lays out here how it's also always been a lie. For Black and Native students, it's been a way to erase culture and 'civilize.' It's also been a way to send these students through a pipeline to menial labor and perpetuate white superiority. It's high time. we reevaluate who schools are for and how they function.

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.

Eve L. Ewing examines how the education system is designed to hurt Black and Indigenous students Read more...

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.

What is education for, or, better yet, who is it for?... Ewing traces how education has become tied to conceptions of the American Dream, and how that dream, and the foundation of the country itself, is built on 'two cornerstones': 'the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the institution of chattel slavery that held African people in bondage'. Ewing then demonstrates. how that racialized dynamic exists still. She skillfully connects the normalization of standardized testing, academic tracking, under-resourcing, and various disciplinary policies and their unequal application to eugenics, race science, and policies of disenfranchisement with the intention of limiting the possibilities and potentials for Black and Indigenous students. Ewing makes a convincing argument through her analysis and unparalleled storytelling that unless education in the United States is radically reconsidered, schools will simply continue to maintain the legacy of inequality at the core of the nation.

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.

Your school is next The Musk-Trump administration is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. We talked to scholar Eve L. Ewing about the long battle over schooling as a tool for control or for liberation Read more...

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.

The word 'multi-hyphenate' gets thrown around a lot these days and is often used by the most annoying of people to describe an agglomeration of hobbies. But Ewing is the rare person who proves the usefulness of the label and how work in one area can augment work in another. As an educator, an organizer, an academic, an artist, and a writer, Ewing often returns to a few key preoccupations education, girlhood, race, science fiction and I can't wait to crack open her latest, which again meditates on the intersection of education and race.

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.

The clearest, most comprehensive answer to 'how did all this happen?' I've read.

Even as public schools seem under constant attack from the moral panic brigade, which seeks to ban any mention of queer people, slavery, Jim Crow, Indigenous genocide. (it's a long list) Ewing suggests that the American education system is already doing what it was designed to do: maintain this country's foundational white supremacist structures. Only with a radical rethinking of these systems can America move beyond its racist origins.

Chicago's polymath poet, comic book writer, and sociologist returns with a fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality. From the Founding Fathers to today's classrooms, Ewing's brilliant research and analysis of our two-track school systems, written in her signature bracing prose, is a must-read for every American parent and educator.