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

The American Dream is the myth that any citizen of the United States—regardless of race, religion, gender, or socioeconomic status—can attain success and wealth, primarily through hard work. Ewing argues that the American Dream’s insistence on individual rather than communal effort promotes the values of a capitalist society. In reality, hard work does not provide “equal access to a good life” in the US (4); for instance, the broken education system prevents Black and Indigenous students from achieving success regardless of the amount of effort they exercise.

Carceral logic (from the Latin carcer, which means “prison”) refers to Black and Indigenous schools’ prison-like environments. Because of the perception that Black and Indigenous students are unruly and uncivilized, schools have historically used carceral logic to restrict their movement, teach them to follow commands, and structure their lives in a regimented militaristic way. Ewing argues that carceral logic is detrimental to Black and Indigenous education because it is rooted in assumptions of their intellectual inferiority. Carceral logic is closely tied to the school-prison nexus.

Also known as the General Allotment Act, the 1887 Dawes Act divvied up Indigenous land by allotting parcels of it to Indigenous heads of household. The goals was to promote private property ownership—a white cultural ideal—while breaking up tribal communities. For Ewing, the Dawes Act is representative of Indigenous erasure and infantilization by dismantling longstanding land stewardship cultural practices.

Thomas Jefferson advanced this theory in 1792 to appropriate land coveted by the newly formed United States from its Indigenous inhabitants. Jefferson argued that, because Indigenous people did not have European understanding of land ownership, the US had full legal rights over the land it had “discovered.” Moreover, he argued “that European intervention—no matter how violent—was for the good of the Natives to save them from their own barbarism” (28).

Ewing coins this term to explain how race is defined in the United States: “The Race Machine starts with complicated inputs: human beings, in our infinite diversity and complexity [and] takes all of that cumbersome infinity and turns it into something much simpler” (6). The mechanized process groups people into categories of “Black” and “white,” shifting them between these constructs as new groups (such as southern European immigrants, for example) are assimilated into the racial hierarchy.

At the turn of the 20th century, American sociologist Edward A. Ross used this term to convey the idea that intermarriage between white and non-white people was damaging the superiority of the white race. Ewing cites President Theodore Roosevelt as also particularly invested in this form of eugenics—he worried that immigrants would dilute the purity of “white” Americans.

Scholar Cedric J. Robinson coined this term to describe the political and social system of the United States: “[C]apitalism, as we know it, does not exist without racialized systems of harm, extraction, and exploitation” (231). Racial capitalism holds that capitalism benefiting white citizens could not exist without racialized structures—such as enslavement, and the genocide, subjugation, and repression of races perceived as inferior—supporting it.

Also referred to as a “pipeline,” the school-to-prison nexus is the idea that schools use harsh, harmful policies that have the unintended effect of preparing students for and funneling them toward prison. Ewing discusses the use of police in schools, metal detectors, suspension, uniforms, and corporal punishment as key components of this. The perception of Black students as inherently disobedient is a major factor in these policies, emphasizing punishment to keep them in line—rather than respect and love.