Original Sins - The Mis education of Black and Native Children and the Construction

Informationen zum Autor Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: Electric Arches, 1919, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and Maya and the Robot . She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks and has written several projects for Marvel Comics. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues. Klappentext "Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country's racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history."-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 Jefferson’s Ghost 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. Before we dive into the three pillars of racism that I described in the introduction, I want to spend some time thinking about Jefferson as a titanic figure in American culture and the impact of his legacy on how we think about racial hierarchy in the United States; we’ll then talk about how this vision has shaped the purposes of schooling along racial lines. There’s nothing coincidental about how Jefferson does and does not show up in schools and in curricula, or the fact that roughly half of U.S. states have schools named “Thomas Jefferson” (seventy-one total, more than schools named “Abraham Lincoln”). Jefferson’s beliefs about Black and Native people, and the ways he enacted those beliefs as a leader of singular magnitude, laid a cornerstone for the edifice of American racial hierarchy and the contours of American schooling in a distinct way. In the era of Jefferson, Black and Native peoples on Turtle Island posed a mighty problem for the shapers of the new republic. They were an existential threat. And in his writings, Jefferson aimed to tackle that threat through rhetorical moves that would frame the nation and its schools for years to come. Those who celebrate Jefferson have struggled to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable ideas that he put forth into the world: On the one hand, he is viewed as the esteemed father of the Declaration of Independence, the champion of the Bill of Rights and the liberties we hold dear. On the other hand, he held enslaved people as property, and his ideas and policies were crucial in establishing the dogma of Black and Native inferiority. For many people in the United States, faced with the contradiction of Jefferson as a paragon of rational thought who also believed in the inhumanity of Black and Native peoples, Jefferson the erudite intellectual has seemingly won out. ...

Product details

• Authors: Eve L Ewing, Eve L. Ewing
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.02.2025
• EAN: 9780593243701
• ISBN: 978-0-593-24370-1
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 241 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Education > General, dictionaries