Eve Ewing Quotes

Those who move with courage make the path for those who live in fear.

If he don't ever buy you nothing and I mean nothing - I don't mean your birthstone, I don't mean groceries, even - I mean if he don't buy you an ice-cream cone, I mean if he don't buy you time when you had none, I mean if he don't buy your fantastic tales, calls them nonsense, then he's gotta go.

I think that maybe if we can guard ourselves and each other, if we can keep from losing our minds alone in quiet rooms and can at least lose them side by side, we may live through the year.

How many iambs to be a real human girl? Which turn of phrase evidence a righteous heart? If I know of Ovid, may I keep my children?

Afrofuturism is the premise that Black people exist in the future.

We came here head to toe and now we are millions and now we demand to sit upright

love is like a comic book. it’s fragile and the best we can do is protect it in whatever clumsy ways we can: plastic and cardboard, dark rooms and boxes. in this way, something never meant to last might find its way to another decade, another home, an attic, a basement, intact. love is paper.

Ever since black people came to this country we have needed a Moses. There has always been so much water that needs parting. It seems like all black children, from the time we are born, come into the world in the midst of a rushing current that threatens to swallow us whole if we don't heed the many, many warnings we are told to heed. We come into the world as alchemists of the water, bending it, willing it to bear us safe passage and cleanse us along the way, to teach us to move with joy and purpose and to never, ever stop flowing forward into something grand waiting at the other end of the delta. We're a people forever in exodus. Before Moses there was Abraham, and ever since black people came to this country we have needed an Abraham. We have always been sending each other away -- for our own good, don't you know it -- and calling each other back, finding kinship where a well springs from tears. We are masters of the art of sacrifice; no one is more skilled at laying their greatest beloveds on the altar and feeling certainty even as we feel sorrow. And when we see the ram, we know how to act fast, and prosper, even as the stone knife warms in our hands.

Then she picked up her toolbox and walked heavily out of the apartment, closing the front door behind her.

One metaphor we can use to understand these two ideas is riding a horse. Many people believe racism is like a skilled equestrian’s choosing, through decisions and commands, to go faster or slower, to jump a fence or avoid an obstacle, to follow a certain route or not. However, thinking structurally, we can understand that racism is more like a merry-go-round. You may be going up, down, and around, and you might feel as if you’re riding

No matter how much we think we know someone, we can never read their mind.

His work asks not, as much criticism does, what is happening here, but rather, what does this work mean? What is it doing in the world?

I mean it when I say hallelujah. I don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the holy son of God, or that he died so that mankind could be saved from our sins, or that he was resurrected as our messiah. But I believe in messiahs. I believe in miracles and hexes, curses and omens, I believe that you should never put your purse on the floor or split a pole, and when I’m feeling aimless I can fall for a little bit of ill-informed astrology. I don’t step on cracks. I believe in an infinite, mysterious universe, and I believe that that universe is mostly dark matter, and that one day the sun will implode. And I don’t expect that I’ll be alive to see it, but if I am, I will look up at that star I have known and loved more than any other star, and I will say “oh, lord Jesus,” and I will be talking about Black Jesus. When I say hallelujah, I mean it. I really mean it.

I pulled the song up and we sang it together, and for the moment that was our highway.

As told in the history we learn in schools and on television and in the news, the work of social transformation often sidelines narratives of care or omits them altogether. The world is changed, we are told, when the loudest people talk the most and fight the hardest and come up with the best ideas. And that, indeed, can be important work. But care work --asking basic questions like, *Has everyone been fed? Do people have a safe place to sleep? Is there safe and reliable childcare? Are we attending to everyone's health?* --not only provides the necessary conditions for all the other stuff to happen; it is *also* a form of stitching together microcosms of a more just and loving world. Eve Ewing Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery…. If this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinction in society.” Mann believed that the institution of schooling was the single most effective way to solve all of society’s ills, stating that “without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the common school, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization” and that it would stand against “intemperance, avarice, war, slavery, bigotry, the woes of want and the wickedness of waste.”[2]

And I’m willing to bet that if, right this moment, you put down this book and ask someone—whether your mom or your roommate or the person who delivers your mail—what they believe is the key to the American Dream, to the promise of equal access to a good life, odds are good that education would be somewhere at the center of their equation. But beneath the shining castle of that American Dream lie two cornerstones that irrevocably shaped the social fabric of this nation: the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the institution of chattel slavery that held African people in bondage. We cannot truly understand the United States of the present without understanding these two original sins of the past and their structural afterlives, which lie at the basis of what we even understand race to be or to mean.[3] And the schoolhouse, that most venerable and beloved image of American aspiration, hasn’t rested angelically on the sidelines, uninvolved with the construction of racial hierarchy. Rather, it has played a central role in furthering the work begun by slavery and settler colonialism.

At this point in the book, we know that the United States relies upon what I have referred to as the Race Machine to operationalize an obsession with sorting humans into racialized categories and maintaining the arbitrary boundaries of those categories. We also know that Thomas Jefferson and many of his contemporaries, influential shapers of the American democratic project, believed in the subhuman savagery of Black and Native individuals and that they consequently built a social framework that established Black, Native, and White peoples as fundamentally different kinds of creatures. So you might assume that if schools hold up a mirror to society and if, as Graham argues, that mirror shifts over time, the mirror would also vary based on the different desires the country has for Black people and Native people. And you’d be right.

In her book The History of White People, historian Nell Irvin Painter recounts the twisting, turning path by which a group of culturally disparate peoples have come to be viewed as a coherent collective body.

In the nineteenth century, for instance, Irish Catholic people were not yet White. The state of New York kept laws on the books until 1821 denying Catholic people citizenship eligibility unless they would renounce allegiance to the Pope.[

For White students, schools have been intended to provide unified leadership for a unified nation. For Black students, schools have been aimed at establishing a class of subservient laborers. And for Native students, schools have been designed to normalize that vision which Jefferson painted as inevitable: total disappearance.

For early observers of the United States, such as Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, “White” meant “English.”[2] In the many decades since then, the criteria for who gets to be White have been expanded in fits and starts, and in each instance only after great reluctance and the irrefutable onslaught of new immigrant groups. “A notion of freedom lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness,” writes Painter, and we can mark changing notions of Whiteness over time by the freedoms permitted or denied to the many subgroups that we now take for granted as “White.”[3]

After the Civil War, things would change. Between 1880 and 1920, a new wave of over twenty million immigrants would arrive in the United States, the majority of them from eastern and southern Europe.[7] Suddenly, in the face of these newcomers—bringing with them new physical appearances, faith practices, languages, and foods—German and Irish immigrants and their children became the “old” immigrants, in a process that Painter refers to as a “great enlargement of American whiteness.”[8] They were no longer a foreign scourge; they got promoted to being White.

calling—“making good American citizens”—was understood to have a moral element; the newcomers were understood to be not only poor but also immoral, subject to the whims of ignorance and vice. Through the ministry of their children, they could become good, but only through early intervention. Otherwise the children would remain, as they were characterized by social reformer Mary Mann (wife of Horace Mann), “little savages” and “pests of the street,” dragging society into chaos.[78]

movement. In his book Education Through Play, Curtis explained why play was serious business: “Play is always, I fancy, the most effective teacher of that kind of good comradeship that makes for political and social success.”[82] As Curtis saw it, play was essential to teaching individuals the kind of self-sacrifice required for a functional republic, and such play required designated space: A person who thinks only of himself and his own welfare is a bad citizen. A person who always conceives of himself as a member of a larger whole to which his loyalty is due is a good citizen…. But the boy who is playing a game on a vacant lot does not acquire this spirit, for the reason that the scrub team has no permanent organization, no captain, and no future.[83]

when I say “racism is a technology,” I mean that racism is something invented by humans that creates a hierarchical pattern that is then applied or enacted systematically in various contexts. Those patterns are not static; they are ever shifting, historically and geographically contingent. Categories are made, challenged, erased, and remade. Generally, those with the most power in a given society consciously and unconsciously build the walls of racial hierarchy in the places that suit them best in their time. In response, folks at the grass roots also shift and shape racial identity through reflection and resistance.

the Europeans who traveled across the globe to engage in violent conquest created a “new world” in another sense: they constructed a new social order, and new types of creatures. The subhuman categories of the “Negro” and the “Indian” were invented through the entangled processes of colonial terror and enslavement.

race is not something inherent to human beings or our bodies. Moses did not come down from the mountain and hand us our census categories. The boundaries of race are as arbitrary and malleable as the other borders and invented myths that define our lives.[10]

As a White man, Carl had his life scrupulously documented, while Adeline’s life is largely an archival mystery. Tiffany Lethabo King writes that “what the archives of slavery and Indigenous genocide and removal have in common is that they are almost impossible to retrieve.”[

In an 1896 issue of The Atlantic, Walker sounded the alarm about the newcomers in an article titled “Restriction of Immigration,” in which he argued that “the immigrant of today is so widely different from that which existed regarding the immigrant of thirty or fifty years ago.” These new immigrants, Walker argued, were of inherently inferior stock, unfit for participation in American life. “The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm,” he warned. “These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time.” If the United States wanted to help Europe, Walker argued, the nation could do so by serving as a shining example of economic success and self-sufficiency—not by “allowing its city slums and its vast stagnant reservoirs of degraded peasantry to be drained off upon our soil.”[9]

Building power through collective struggle means that when we band together in groups of people who share many things in common—not everything, but many things—and we decide we want to work toward something, the very process of doing that is the practice of making the world we want to live in. In building the relationships we need to topple an unjust world, we are also strengthening the muscles we need to care for one another; we are stitching together microcosms of the world that will replace the one we have.

Given the constraints and foundations of state-sanctioned violence as ‘schooling,’ ” Stovall asks, “can education happen in the institution commonly known as ‘school’?”[29] Stovall acknowledges that this critical question is a challenging one (not least because it leaves us to ask, “What do we call the places where education happens if we are abolishing ‘school’?”),[30] but that doesn’t make it any less imperative. He is pushing us to both “build and resist” in a manner that is both “imminent and in perpetuity.”[31] Stovall is inviting us to understand abolition not as a destination or as an act of destruction, but as a set of experiments—as a type of creative and rebellious play. This requires a commitment not only to imagining an otherwise but to enacting that otherwise in every way imaginable, relentlessly, collectively, and in the spirit of pleasure and resilience. In this way, we stand to not only take power; we are able to make power.[

World-ending and world-making can occur, are occurring, have always occurred, simultaneously. Given that racial and ecological violence are interwoven and inextricable from one another, more now than ever, Black and Indigenous communities—who are globally positioned as “first to die” within the climate crisis—are also on the front lines of world-making practices that threaten to overthrow the current (death-making) order of things. Put otherwise, our communities, quite literally the post-apocalyptic survivors of world-endings already, are best positioned to imagine what this may be.[41]

In his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator and critical theorist Paulo Freire critiqued what he called the “banking model” of education, in which the teacher is the sole keeper of knowledge. “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”[45] Freire’s idea has long influenced educators precisely because the metaphor works so well, on multiple levels. It’s not only that the concept of “banking” helps us understand the unidirectional passivity of this mode of learning. It’s also that banking is bound up with so much else: capitalism, needless and heedless accumulation, the theft of land and bodies.

Today, Native people experience poverty at rates higher than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States.[34] They also have the highest unemployment rate, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported in its monthly job analysis only since January 2022.[35] At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Native unemployment was a towering 28.6 percent—exceeding the national unemployment rate during the Great Depression.[36] Lower rates of educational attainment, higher rates of disability, and greater residential distance from available jobs could all contribute.

When it was legal, slavery bolstered the economy even in states where it was not permitted. Financing the slave trade, selling the goods and services that supported it, insuring enslaved human “property,” and hosting auctions were big business. Northern banks extended the lines of credit that slavers needed to purchase human beings and agricultural equipment. New England businessmen helped Southern rural planters negotiate the cotton market, serving as brokers and paid advisers.[1] New York Life, now the nation’s third-largest insurer and a Fortune 500 company, sold hundreds of policies covering the value of enslaved people so slavers could recoup their worth in case they died doing hazardous work in mills, mines, or factories. In 1847, such policies accounted for a third of their business.[2] Aetna and US Life (now a subsidiary of AIG) did brisk business as well. Before becoming one of the nation’s most influential investment banks (and ultimately collapsing in 2008), Lehman Brothers began as an Alabama cotton brokerage. The fortunes of J. P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, Charles Lewis Tiffany (the jeweler), and Archibald Gracie III (of the family of Gracie Mansion, now the official residence of the mayor of New York City) all had ties to the booming cotton trade.[3]

The wealth accumulation that allows many White families to have a pathway to prosperity and a cushion against disaster—the same wealth that blurs the effects of educational attainment on economic outcomes—is itself inextricable from the legacies of chattel slavery and settler colonialism.

In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant College Act, offering up parcels of land to states that they could sell for the purposes of creating and funding universities. From the University of Maine to the University of California system, from Louisiana State University to North Dakota State University, fifty-two new institutions mushroomed into existence across the country.[42] These new universities were meant to churn out a new generation of “educated bureaucrats” to usher the country into an era of modernity, overseeing railroad expansion, agricultural innovation, manufacturing, and trade.[43] Economic analysis has suggested that the Morrill Act was transformative for the nation, creating a massive surge in human capital, leading to increases in university enrollment and GDP per capita, and allowing the United States to rise into the position of global superpower.[44] But the land parceled out for the sake of U.S. economic ascendancy was Indigenous land. Almost eleven million acres of land from nearly 250 Native tribes and communities enabled the universities to garner over $22 million—equivalent to almost $500 million in our time.[45] And those universities have used that money to become bastions of economic opportunity for generation after generation of college students—the vast majority of them White. Despite the fact that these land grant institutions came into being only through the theft of Indigenous land, Native students make up less than half a percentage point of the enrollment at the Morrill Act universities; these schools also have lower graduation rates among Native students than non-Morrill universities.[46]

The University of Minnesota emerged from one of the most violent and most profitable of these land cessions.[47] The land transfer occurred just months after a group of Dakota warriors, led by Taoyateduta (Little Crow), mounted a war effort against the European settlers whose numbers had increased from 6,000 to 180,000 over the course of a decade and who had driven the Dakota to starvation after failing to deliver food and supplies promised in exchange for land.[48] When they were defeated, Governor Alexander Ramsey called for the genocide of the Dakota, saying that they should be “exterminated” and that if any should “escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond our borders.”[49] It was amid this fervor that thirty-eight Dakota men were publicly hanged on the day after Christmas in 1862, in what remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.[50] Thirty-two days later, the state legislature approved the transfer of 120,000 acres of land to the university.[51] No university without land theft; no land theft without violence.

Of the many 1862 land grant institutions, Cornell University was able to leverage the sale of the stolen land for the highest return. By 1935, sales of Indigenous land had netted the institution a total of $5.7 million.[52] The class of 2021 at Cornell had 3,375 incoming students. Eleven of them—less than a third of a percentage point—were Native. In this sense, the Morrill Act created a form of direct wealth transfer: a bitter alchemy in which violent land seizure turned into institutional wealth for universities, which turned into individual and family wealth for generations of White students.

Just as the project of empire required fundamentally unintelligent beings, wild savages in need of discipline, so too did it require beings permanently positioned on the bottom rungs of the economic hierarchy. And educational institutions, once again, have played a vital role in reinforcing this narrative and the structures beneath it.

But poor Black people and poor Native people are not poor by accident. Our peoples have been poor because the United States needed us to be poor—needed to steal from us, needed to make that stealing morally permissible by belittling and dehumanizing us, needed to normalize and naturalize that poverty as a built-in fixture.

In reality, colonization in California was a regime wrought by brutal violence, torture, sexual exploitation, environmental devastation, and biological warfare against Native peoples. But textbooks tell a different story, referencing “California Indian rebellion and revolt” more than three times as often as they describe violence enacted by Spanish colonizers. Conversely, Spanish colonizers are represented as victims of violence more than three times as often as Native people.[60]

In another study, researchers found that fourth- and fifth-grade social studies teachers used language that made Native resistance seem like a routine inconvenience to be quelled, rather than a valid response to the project of colonization. One teacher asked students to pretend they were English colonists planning their new society. “There must be adequate protection for the inhabitants from attack by hostile savages,” she told the class, “but you will also have to oversee friendly trade with the natives to ensure their proper treatment. We want the Indians to help us and not be our enemies.”[64] Compare this to, say, how the American Revolution is discussed in class. When Patrick Henry or the Sons of Liberty resist their colonizers, they are heroes. When Indigenous people do it, they are hostile savages.

These moments reveal what Tigua and Chicana feminist scholar Dolores Calderon calls “settler grammars in curriculum.”[65] These are the narrative terms of engagement that we often take for granted, the structures that govern our language—generally without our even noticing it. Suddenly, you find yourself in a world where asking fourth graders to role-play people implicated in violent mass murder seems like a fun way to engage in project-based learning.

Native observers have long critiqued the persistent invisibility of Native people, histories, and perspectives in the mass media, perpetuating the myth of the vanishing Indian. The project Reclaiming Native Truth puts it plainly: “Native peoples are invisible to most Americans.”[61] Schools play a huge part in perpetuating this disappearance. One report found that 87 percent of state history standards do not mention Native history after 1900. (Perhaps you’ve experienced this in your own schooling—the association of anything and everything Native people “did” with the past tense.) Twenty-seven states make no mention of a single Native person in their K-12 curriculum.[62]

The problem is, in the United States, wealth inequality is a feature, not a bug. At its foundations, there is no American capitalism without slavery and settler colonialism. The accrual of wealth through capitalism was never meant for Black and Native people’s participation, any more than cattle can “participate” in the work of a slaughterhouse. Rather, at the origins of the United States, capitalism held roles for Black and Native people that were purely extractive: Taking bodies. Taking babies. Taking land. While cheerleaders striving for an “inclusive” capitalist system can herald individual successes, we have to judge a system by its averages, not by its exceptions—those who happen to stand out as great athletes, artists, or entrepreneurs.

In 2021, The Washington Post reported that after the NFL agreed in a class action settlement to pay out millions of dollars to former players diagnosed with dementia and other cognitive challenges stemming from football-induced brain damage, the firm the league hired to manage settlement payouts attempted to pay Black players less money based on the use of “racial normative adjustments.” They assessed the impact of brain damage using a lower baseline, reflecting the presumed inferiority of these players’ normal brain function. In dollars and cents, Black brains were worth less.[17]

I think Gould is correct—pundits turn to the gospel of intellectual inferiority because it is more soothing to believe that people experiencing the cruel end of an unequal society are simply living out their ill-fated lot in life. But I think there is another reason for the staying power of these ideas (always presented as though they are new, creative, innovative, and cutting-edge, despite being more or less a restatement of the last cycle). The reason is that they sell. These ideas bring acclaim to their proselytizers because they give voice to something that feels deliciously taboo for many Americans, something roiling just beneath the surface of polite discourse even if most people would never say it aloud. And that which is taboo, desired but unspoken, makes money. Put simply, claiming that White people might just inherently be smarter turns out to be a great way to sell books.

Civilization. Helping. Benevolence. The gift of another, better way of life. These ideas feel painfully resonant for many contemporary teachers because, while Pratt’s bluntness may feel like a historic relic, the basic premise of his beliefs is easily recognizable in schools today—the idea that students of color come from a degraded and inferior home culture, and the way we save them, the way we help them succeed, is by bringing them as far away from that home culture as possible. Acting as the proverbial White Lady Bountiful (whether or not the individual is either White or a Lady), the 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.

Brigham believed that “American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.”[42] Indeed, Brigham initially saw his SAT as a crucial tool in proving what he saw as inherent facts of biology. But within a few years, that began to change.

Despite ongoing claims of objectivity, scholars have since documented the many ways that the modern SAT continues to be shaped by the biases of the human beings who create the test. For example, analysts William C. Kidder and Jay Rosner found a troubling pattern in their research on over 100,000 test takers who completed the SAT in the late 1990s: when the test’s annual “experimental” questions—a selection of items included each year on a trial basis, to be analyzed and potentially included in future iterations of the test—resulted in Black students doing better than White students, the questions were thrown out. The logic, guided by the unquestioned gospel of intellectual inferiority, was that if Black students performed better on an item, the question must be inherently flawed. Questions White students did better on, however, were included without hesitation. Kidder and Rosner call this “covert racial gerrymandering in favor of Whites.”[44]

[My school] feels like a prison, to tell you the truth. ’Cuz you have to stay in the classroom, use the bathroom when they tell us, eat lunch when they tell us, it’s like a jail…. That’s why kids act bad. They feel like they trapped in here.[20] Dewayne’s observation echoes a point made by Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which you’ll remember from chapter 4. Through practices like those Dewayne describes, the human being becomes less a spirit animated by agency and more a “body as object and target of power,” a thing to be “manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys [and] responds.”[21] In his everyday interactions in the building, Dewayne is reminded that his body is not his own. Necessary human functions like eating and using the bathroom can only be conducted with the approval and surveillance of those in a position of authority. Through these efforts, students are transformed into what Foucault calls “docile bodies”—bodies that can be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” in ways that are endorsed by those in power. This process requires “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result”—think of students completing meaningless busywork where the quality of the outcome is of no consequence, only the fact that they are sitting still and doing it—“and is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”[22]

The problem is not that Black and Native children perform poorly on tests, such that we have to get them to do as well as White children. Nor is the problem only that the tests are unfair, or that the consequences attached to them too dire. The problem is that the regime of standardized testing that has become so central to our system of public education, and more fundamentally the assumptions about intelligence that undergird that regime, are offshoots of a philosophy of knowledge that was explicitly eugenicist, that categorically excluded the possibility that such a thing as Black or Native intelligence could possibly exist, and that promulgates itself through the delegitimization and destruction of any other forms of epistemology. To make matters worse, the gospel of intellectual inferiority provides justification for the violent control and discipline of Black and Native children. Because you can’t truly teach a sub-intelligent creature, can you? Faced with such a beastly thing, there is only ever control. More on that next.

you think about it, our easy reliance on carceral logics in schools is especially sad. After all, shouldn’t schools—allegedly places dedicated to learning, nurturing, and understanding child development—be the first place where it occurs to us to address problems through care, compassion, and gentle inquiry rather than through punishment and containment? To the contrary, Black and Native people have been criminalized—labeled “dangerous people”—in schooling spaces throughout history. Like a perpetual motion machine, this allows carceral logics to sustain themselves: school becomes the place where they are routinized and made acceptable beyond questioning at an early age, impressing upon both children and the adults charged with caring for them that this is the only way things can possibly work. That normalization is cast upon the rest of our society, which in turn fails to condemn everyday acts of punishment and disposal enacted against children because these acts are seen as inevitable necessities.