I’ll start with a confession. When faced with a choice between reading a professional book (professional = an education-adjacent text) vs. a novel or memoir, I’ll opt for the latter. It was true even before I retired, but I had to keep that impulse in check then to remain current. Make no mistake, there are many books in the field that have left a deep impression on me. They were central in making me the teacher that I was, but looking back, those books tended to reflect a deep respect for the beauty of language and a willingness to center the author’s own experiences. They were written with unconcealed passion, especially love or anger.
I have two dear friends, both retired academics, who with encouragement from me and Rosellen are trying to shake the academic dust from their writing. They’re both well-read, so they can call on a reservoir of rich language which has been dormant in their professional work, but which constrains them in their new task of narrating their personal stories. I should add that they have both published multiple professional works which have been real contributions to the field, but if they came across my desk now, they would sit closer to the basement of my book tower than to the roof. In my retirement, books like theirs have a hard time gaining traction with me because I have no outlet for their contents – neither in my teacher education work nor in my past K-12 classrooms.
For Eve Ewing I make an exception. Like the writers who influenced my work early on, she can write. Among her many gifts, she is a published poet and playwright, with comic book credentials as well. She writes with passion about things she really cares about, as I learned from reading her Ghosts in the Schoolyard, her requiem for the fifty schools that then-mayor Rahm Emanuel closed in one blow in 2012, devastating the decades-old communities that orbited around those schools, that – you won’t be surprised to know – served predominantly Black populations.
So, when a friend asked me recently if I had read her more recent book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, I admitted that I hadn’t and promised that it would jump the line of waiting novels because I knew I was in for an experience. Let’s start with the title. If we strip away the wordy subtitle, we’re left with a brief but brilliant summary of the entire book – the original sins of slavery of Black people –and the displacement and subjugation of Native people are at the core of America’s ascentfrom its very onset.
By reviewing the early American fascination with eugenics (a fascination which Isabel Wilkerson contends the Nazis adopted from us) and the rise of the intelligence testing movement around WWI, Ewing shows how racism was baked once and for all into Americans’ perceptions of Black and Native peoples. Of course, the “inferiority” of those races had already been the justification for the enslavement of Blacks and the wholesale theft of Native land.
Ewing never forgets her role as an educator, so her primary focus throughout is on the central role schools have played in shaping and reinforcing racism and promoting the role of capitalism as the source of the prosperity of American society – for all but the two minorities. She contends that American racism is built on three pillars – the inferiority of Blacks and Natives, the central role of punishment and discipline in maintaining the existing order, and the economic subjugation of those already on the bottom.
It’s immediately obvious how those three pillars manifest themselves in the context of schools. Inferiority translates into low expectations for students of color, the imposition of punishment and discipline to keep the minorities in line as they are directed to programs that lead to either dead end, low paying jobs or prison. Ewing contrasts this to her student experience in a Chicago selective admissions school and later to the University of Chicago where she experienced freedom to speak and to inquire as she and her classmates were being prepared for leadership and prosperity.
In the heyday of the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago, we asked Professor Adam Green, a prominent Black historian at the University, to place the work they were preparing for in a historical context. He proposed that every program like ours should offer a course in the history of Black education. It was important for novice teachers, especially socially conscious young people like ours who thought they were acting out of idealism, to be aware of the damage others had inflicted on Black students, often with the best of intentions. Schools were vehicles for reinforcing racism and capitalism rather than the means for advancement and liberation of the oppressed.
His message was a gut punch for me, as is Eve Ewing’s book because I am as guilty of the same blind spot as my students, believing that just being in the classroom was a sufficient commitment to activism. It is important work if it’s coupled with activist work to transform the larger society in which schools are embedded. Too often I was satisfied by small changes, like the ones Ewing describes – an engaging way to teach a novel, a different way to organize the physical space of my classroom, none of which changed the social context in which we were operating.
The book ends on a visionary note, a possibility that our concept of school needs to be stripped away from our current views of buildings and classrooms and replaced with structures and forms not yet imagined. I wanted to end with a few lines from one of the book’s closing paragraphs. It contains all of Ewing’s passion as a writer and teacher:
Any teacher, any policymaker, any person in power who doesn’t regard kids with love, doesn’t deserve to be near them. Love is the baseline. It’s not extra, and it’s not optional, and it’s not something you learn from a professional development session or diversity workshop. Love is fundamental.
Full Stop.
