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

Ewing argues that this country’s capitalist system relies on the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples for the success of the white upper class. A key tool of that racial oppression is education, which has internalized negative bias about Black and Indigenous students, and educates them accordingly.

Preconceptions about Black students, which lead to a focus on behavior, stem from post-slavery history. Formerly enslaved people were viewed as violent, unruly, and ignorant; early education systems were designed to address this by conditioning Black students to serve as a labor class rather than teaching them to be capitalist leaders. Nineteenth-century Black schools emphasized the importance of docility—especially toward their former enslavers. For example, one of the first Black textbooks, The Freedman’s Third Reader (1866), stresses the placidity of even noted General Toussaint L’Ouverture, a leader of the 1791 Haitian Revolution; he is described as “sedate in manner, and exceedingly patient, being possessed of an evenness of temper which scarcely anything seemed capable of disturbing” (65). 

Today, this trend continues, as Black students are still perceived to be in need of external control—an idea that leads to what scholars have termed the prison-pipeline nexus. Under the assumption that they will one day end up in prison, institutions like the KIPP charter school system curtail Black students’ bodily autonomy by enforcing that they walk in line, sit attentively at their desks, and ask permission to complete all tasks. Threats like school police officers and even corporal punishment reinforce these rules. In these ways, contemporary education of Black children perpetuates their historical role in the racial hierarchy. Instead of internalizing the message that they are destined to be thinkers and leaders—messages inculcated in white students—Black students are shown in myriad ways that they will either end up in prison or working as laborers.

Forced assimilation and the destruction of culture were the primary goals of 19th-century schools for Indigenous students in the United States. Boarding schools established by General Richard Henry Pratt relied on a punishing methodology: cutting students’ hair, forcing them to dress like white people, and punishing them for speaking their native languages instead of English—all techniques that would supposedly civilize Indigenous children. His institutions became a model nationally: “[T[he figure of the American teacher is the figure of civilization, tasked with casting out the barbarism reflected in the child’s language practices, modes of dress, and general selfhood” (93). Today, Ewing argues, schools continue to erase and dismiss Indigenous culture, epistemology, and languages—if not through Pratt’s coercive abuses, then through the demand that Indigenous students fit into white systems of knowledge—or be left behind.