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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

Ewing’s text joins a conversation surrounding education that has been ongoing for decades. The primary discourse centers on systemic racism, whether specifically in America’s school systems or more broadly in society. As Ewing argues in Original Sins, the US has created a system where expectations for Black and Indigenous children are low, with control and docility as its primary goals. 

In 1969, the United States released its first Nation’s Report Card, which identified what would become known as an achievement gap between white and non-white students. As Ewing explains: “[T]his is presumed to be the central problem of the education system in our country, conveniently quantifiable and plainly visible: The Minorites Are Doing Badly. How badly, and how do we know? Very badly, we are told, and we know because of test scores” (97-98). Since then, scholars have researched this gap in a variety of ways, examining both modern and historical sources to attempt to address the failing education system. In Original Sins, Ewing engages with these texts, historical data, and prevailing theories—while also adding her own insights and ideas to the discourse on race and education.

Ewing enters the conversation with an allusion to historian Carter Woodson’s text The Mis-Education of the Negro, published in 1933. Woodson was given the nickname “The Father of Black History,” as one of the first scholars to study Black history and the African Diaspora. His text explores Black schools in the 1930s, highlighting the ways that they failed to properly educate Black students. He examines the schools’ structure, the racism of their curriculum, and the perceived intellectual inferiority of Black students. Ewing builds on many of Woodson’s ideas, using his text as a foundation for the theme of Understanding History to Address Current Social Issues. Her research reaffirms the lack of progress that has been made in Black education in nearly a century.

In Between the World and Me (2015), written as a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates uses his own wisdom as a form of education. Recognizing the institutionalized racism that dominates society, especially in education, Coates conveys the importance of Blackness to his son, as well as the difficulties he will face. As Coates explains, “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance” (Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. One World, 2025). Coates conveys the importance of knowing and understanding Black history to his son, urging him to remember who he is in the face of white supremacy. This idea mirrors Ewing’s similar emphasis.

In 2010, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow ignited the conversation surrounding mass incarceration. Her text explores the way that society prepares Black men for prison, just as Ewing discusses the idea of “carceral logic” (153) in Original Sins.

In her 2018 work So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo directly addresses systemic racism as a primary obstacle to Black achievement. She examines how systems of power like the police force, government, and schools, work to steal autonomy from Black people and propagate racism. In particular, she discusses the school-to-prison pipeline, highlighting the role of zero-tolerance policies, police in schools, and tracking that sets low expectations for Black students. Similarly, Ewing’s work explores the school-to-prison nexus. She discusses the structure of schools historically and in the present day, pointing to their prison-like, militaristic style as detrimental to the proper education of Black and Native students. 

In 2022, scholars Cornel Pewewardy, Anna Lees, and Robin Zape-Tah-Hol-Ah Minthorn published Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education: The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model. Central to their study is the historical erasure of Indigenous identity and culture within schools. To replace this, they offer educators the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM), which emphasizes the importance of being critically aware of—and pushing back against—the continued impact of settler colonialism on curriculum, school structures, and the collective conscious of educators and, by extension, students. Similarly, Ewing explores both conscious and unconscious ways that schools perpetuate the inferiority of Indigenous epistemologies. Both texts explore the history of settler colonialism, identifying the need to respect, celebrate, and teach Indigenous cultures to be truly inclusive of Indigenous students.

These texts propose ways to fix a broken education system, calling for the need to “make schools for us—schools that are loving and nourishing, schools that celebrate our languages and cultural histories and intergenerational bonds, schools that teach stewardship and care of the land and of one another” (263).