Eve L. Ewing is a self-proclaimed “school person,” a declaration she makes often in discussing her new book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism. But schools do not exist in isolation. The sociologist, poet, and University of Chicago professor contends that the American education system has been deeply shaped by systemic prejudice and has historically favored white students and belittled their Black and Indigenous peers. In her book, she challenges readers to confront this uncomfortable truth so they can reimagine what schools could be.

You have described this book as subject matter you’d felt was missing from the curriculum. Why was it so important for you to write it?

Growing up in Chicago Public Schools, I became very aware of race at a young age. You don’t have to try very hard as a kid to notice how things feel unfair or illogical — and how often those feelings fall along racial lines. When I was becoming a teacher, I learned more about the history of schooling in the United States and read documents about the education of Indigenous and formerly enslaved people. What shocked me was the explicitness of it — to see people say very expressly in print things like “If we want to make war against Native people, it’s actually less expensive to take their kids and wage war in the classroom.” But then you also have W.E.B. Du Bois basically saying that Black people invented the idea of universal public education in the South during Reconstruction. So you have these two things in tandem: schools being integral to the freedom dream of a people, and schools used very intentionally as a source of harm and social control. Every year, I’d cobble together readings for my students to explore these ideas, and I kept wondering, Where’s the book that ties this all together? Eventually, I realized I needed to write it myself.

You’ve written and spoken a lot about how schools are important places of nurturing and community building. But in this book, you make a strong case that the broader education system has done irrecoverable damage, too. One example is how in the mid-19th century, Boston ruled to uphold segregated public schools due to the “mental and moral” differences between races. How do you reconcile these two realities?

Even after writing this book, which is page after page of damning evidence about the harm schools have caused, I still consider myself a “school person.” I believe in the promise of schools because, alongside the stories of harm and control, there are also stories of incredible creativity, love, and care. Schools can be sites of celebration and community strength building. I come out at the end really asking, How do we reimagine what these spaces could be?

The book argues that there is a kind of smog in the historical record that has obscured the mistreatment of Black and Native people in schools. For example, you cite John William De Forest, a 19th-century soldier and writer, who celebrated Black education but also wrote that Black children “could not compare” with white ones. Why is it important to correct that record now?

These questions are always urgent. Schools are not bystanders in the project of racial capitalism and genocide in the United States; they have been laboratories where those ideas were honed, normalized, and perfected. Correcting the record isn’t just about understanding the past. It’s important to have those facts to understand what it is that we’re actually fighting. For me, this book is about providing a firm evidentiary basis for those who are committed to justice and want to think more critically about how schools perpetuate harm and what social transformation might look like.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen an intense political battle emerge over how American history is taught. Original Sins dives into some uncomfortable territory, like how government leaders sought to “civilize” Native children and saw schools as a means to assimilate them. How are you preparing for the inevitable backlash?

The nature of my work has, for better or worse, already hardened me to bad-faith attacks. I think about what Toni Morrison taught us: The function of that kind of reaction is distraction. Every moment I spend fighting those battles is a moment I’m not writing, connecting with others, or doing the work that sustains me. I love real critique and discussion from people who read the book and have a shared desire to love and celebrate children. That’s a discussion I welcome and I’m excited about. Everything else I can’t really be bothered with.

In the introduction, you note that the book is not intended to be a how-to guide for fixing schools. Rather, you hope that it starts a broader conversation. But I am curious, what does a “good school” look like to you?

One issue is that we’ve become good at fiddling around the edges without tackling the root questions: What is a school? What are schools for? For me, a good school is a place that serves as a home for imagination, joy, and growth — intellectual, ethical, and philosophical — in a way that nourishes not only students but the broader community. It could be schooling that is integrated with the natural environment or one where there are people of all different ages. It could be a place where the line between who’s a teacher and who’s a learner is a lot blurrier. It would look different for different communities.

What do you want educators, or anyone invested in how we educate kids, to take from this book?

I want people to develop a sense of curiosity about the spaces they’re building together and to make those points of connection for themselves — and to question the habits we have picked up as an institution that we don’t even think about. How do we see connections between those practices and histories? Where can we be more imaginative in doing things differently? This isn’t about a step-by-step toolkit; it’s about asking deep, open-ended questions and fostering collective work toward justice and joy. What excites me is knowing that educators and community members are always doing that kind of reinvention work.

“But No Poetry”

Original Sins opens with Ewing discussing how a founding father’s flawed vision helped silently shape the function of schooling along racial lines.

How does it feel to be a problem?

W.E.B. Du Bois famously posed this haunting question in 1903, in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk. I think of it often, especially whenever I encounter one particular line from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia: “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.”

It’s stinging in its candor. It strikes me every time, sending me spinning through my own vignettes of the Black poets who set a course for my thriving. In eighth grade, my class took a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., my first time traveling without my family. We visited Monticello. No one brought up the poetry line. I would go through elementary school, high school, college, and my first master’s degree, and no one would ever bring it up. Parts of Jefferson’s legacy were omnipresent in my experience of schooling, and other parts were completely absent.