Latest news with #EveL.Ewing
Axios
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Cleveland's Inkubator writing conference returns with fiery call to action
One of the country's largest free writing conferences returns to Cleveland this September with more events, more writers, and a theme doubling as a call to action: "Burn Bright." State of play: Literary Cleveland 's 11th annual Inkubator Writing Conference begins online Sept. 8-10 and continues in person Sept. 11-13 at the downtown Cleveland Public Library. It will coincide with the start of Cleveland Book Fest. The big picture: The theme, drawn from Cleveland native Celeste Ng's novel "Our Missing Hearts," is a response to a climate of rising censorship and authoritarianism. Literary Cleveland says writers are called to "burn bright" by defending democracy, free expression, and storytelling. By the numbers: The 2025 schedule includes 46 programs totaling 75 hours of free workshops, panels, and literary events. More than 3,000 people attended last year. Zoom in: The virtual conference opens with panels featuring acclaimed authors, including: Nonfiction writer Eve L. Ewing and National Book Award winner Imani Perry. Poet Franny Choi and Lambda Literary Award winner Danez Smith. Celeste Ng will deliver the keynote address Sept. 13 about literature's role in times of crisis. At CPL, attendees can hone their craft in workshops on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and genre writing; explore careers in the literary arts; and drop by special events, including a Friday night mixer and open mic. Zoom out: Inkubator kicks off this year's expanded Cleveland Book Fest, which includes the region's other major literary events: the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (Sept. 19-20) and the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (Sept. 26-27).
USA Today
27-03-2025
- General
- USA Today
Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids?
Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids? | The Excerpt On a special episode (first released on March 26, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Are schools providing the best education possible for all their students? This episode's guest argues that the U.S. school system is where children are first introduced to racial hierarchies and that these normalized beliefs solidify in many institutions like healthcare, employment, policing and more. Sociologist and author Eve L. Ewing joins The Excerpt to discuss her new book 'Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism.' It is out on bookshelves now. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@ Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, March 26th, 2025. And this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Are American Schools providing a fair and balanced education to our children? Our guest today argues that the U.S. school system is where children are first introduced to racial hierarchies, and that these normalized beliefs solidify many institutions like healthcare, employment, policing, and more. Sociologist and author Eve L. Ewing's new book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children, and the Construction of American Racism is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Eve. Eve L. Ewing: Thanks for having me. Dana Taylor: You start Original Sins sharing your argument on the purpose of schools, which you say, isn't only to educate. Tell me about that. Is education in America fair and balanced for all kids? Sociologist and author Eve L. Ewing joins The Excerpt to discuss her new book 'Original Sins." Eve L. Ewing: Well, schools have always served the purpose of reinforcing the needs of the state in the United States. And so our young people are being educated, but the question is always educated for what and by whom? And so the central argument that I would make here, is that as the United States required the normalization of indigenous genocide, indigenous land theft, and the enslavement of Black people, that it has constructed a system of schooling that normalizes those things by telling us that Black children and Native children are not full children, are not full humans deserving of love and care in the same way as other humans are. Dana Taylor: You point to two, and I think this is what you were referring to, original sins that our education system refuses to address. How do American schools today deal with each of these issues? Eve L. Ewing: The United States, as you know, and as your listeners know, had a social, political and economic reality that for many generations was reliant on slavery and the enslavement of African people stolen from the continent and then raised here as property. And at the same time, the land in which we walk, move, live, and breathe and where you and I are speaking right now, is land stolen from indigenous peoples. And so what that requires is the idea that disappearance for Native people, for Native children is normal. The idea that it was their destiny to no longer be here. And we see that taught in schools today, often through omission. The ways in which Native stories are not mentioned, are not talked about, but also the ways in which the idea of Native people is relegated to a distant past. And so many of our children learn in schools things that the Native Americans "did" in the past as though there were not Native people living and breathing and moving around with us today. And then in terms of Black people, part of what the nation required of Black people, especially after emancipation, was this continued subservient role. Because if you could no longer extract labor from Black people for free, from our children, from our bodies for free, then we had to keep Black people in this perpetually economic and socially subservient position. And so we see that in everything from the way tracking works in schools, to the unspoken assumption that Black children are not as smart, which we also see reflected in representation in things like Gifted and Talented programs. Even things like the conversation we're having right now around "DEI hires" and the way DEI in education has really become a euphemism to mean just the presence of people of color more generally, and especially Black people, that is based on a unspoken assumption that Black people do not deserve to be in a place on their own merits. So those are some of the ways in which we see these legacies moving into the present. Dana Taylor: Thomas Jefferson, a founding father is ennobled in U.S. history books. You present two key interventions he pushed forward that you write "laid the groundwork for anti-Black and anti-Native ways of viewing the world, both inside schools and beyond their corridors." what are they and have they persisted in curricula today? Eve L. Ewing: So Thomas Jefferson laid down these two ideas. One, is the idea that Black people were not capable of sophisticated thought, and this is something he wrote very explicitly in Notes on the State of Virginia, which is not as famous as the Declaration of Independence, but incredibly influential in terms of texts that he wrote over the course of his life. And he wrote, "Among the Blacks there is misery for sure, but no poetry." He believed that Black people were constitutionally unable to do forms of cognition beyond mimesis and copying and very emotional outbursts, things like that. This is something he said in his own words, which I think is important to understand. And in his time later on, as a statesman of the United States, he also put forth an idea called the Doctrine of Discovery. And this was the idea that basically legitimize the theft of Native land by European powers. Now, we know that even in Jefferson's time, the idea that European powers would just seize land from each other without war, without some sort of critical resistance didn't make any sense. But the way that they viewed the United States and the land that had been stewarded by Native people since time immemorial was that it was empty land. It was barren land, right? It was ready for the taking. And many listeners might be familiar with the idea of manifest destiny, which was something that Jefferson oversaw with the Louisiana purchase and the expansion of the western border of the United States. And so in order to justify that, in order to say, "This is empty land, God wanted us to have it," there was this necessity of talking about the disappearance of native people as destiny and a reframing of this land as empty land, when in fact it certainly was not. Dana Taylor: You write that there are three pillars of racism introduced in schools. Tell me about them. Eve L. Ewing: The first that I write about, is the idea of intellectual inferiority. The idea that Black people and Native people are inherently less intelligent. And we see this playing out again, in spoken and unspoken ways. There is a troubling amount of survey data that has suggested that even in the contemporary era, there are many people who believe that Black people are inherently less intelligent genetically, and therefore that educational interventions are not likely to be effective. The second of these pillars, is the idea of discipline and punishment. The idea that children, we expect them to go to school and explore and learn and discover their own lives as autonomous beings, but that for Black children and Native children, that the most important thing is that they learn self-control and that they be controlled through surveillance and through a very strict corporal discipline. And we know of course, that much of that history goes back even to the terrible legacy of boarding schools where Native children were kidnapped and held as a means of controlling them, but also as a means of controlling their parents and their families and disincentivizing resistance to the U.S. military expansion into native territories. And the third is the idea of economic subjugation. That idea that in a capitalist society, as somebody once said, in one of my teacher education classes, "Somebody's got to mow the lawn." And that there's a permanent underclass that is racially stratified, and that's very hard for people to escape. We see that with things like the wealth gap, and again, things that happen in school to differentiate people's learning experiences. Dana Taylor: You delve into the history of standardized testing. How do you believe it connects to this concept of racial intellectual inferiority? Eve L. Ewing: Well, the history of standardized testing was really birthed by people, men in particular, who were again, very explicit that they did not believe that Black people and Native people could possibly be intelligent, could possibly be capable. And so we see an incredible amount of cultural bias in the way that these tests were shaped in the past, but also into the present, as many scholars and observers have documented. But I think it's really important for us to face the facts that the people who were the architects of these systems, they were not shy about their beliefs, yet for some reason we've been shy about confronting them. And one of the originators of standardized testing, Carl Brigham, later on in his life he actually said that it was a fallacy, that his own research had been wrong, and that it was foolish for him to think that there was such a thing as a static IQ that could be assessed in an impartial way through this testing. And he said, "I really hope that nobody believes that now." Well, of course, not only do people believe it, but we've built entire regimes of incentives and supports and withholding of supports from schools based around that idea. Dana Taylor: Let's talk about the policing and sentencing disparities that exist for Black and Native people. How do you believe the foundation of unequal constructs laid out in school shows up in the criminal justice system? Eve L. Ewing: These ways of approaching young people, they don't just have impact on Black and Native children themselves. They have impact on all of us and children of all racial backgrounds and all cultural backgrounds that are sharing space with them in school. So it means that Black and Native children grow up with this idea that it is normal for them to be surveilled. It's normal for them to be compliant. And that if they can't do that, if they can't comply with the law, that they should fairly face violent retribution. And at the same time, we see from those observers of children that come from many other backgrounds, the way that they are watching that violence take place, they're watching that strict punishment, sometimes corporal punishment. They're watching those extreme suspensions and expulsions and they grow up and that shapes the way they believe that we should respond when people are interacting with the police. And we've talked a lot in the last several years about the ways that Black people are of course, disproportionately impacted by contact with the criminal legal system and often impacted in tragic and lethal ways. But we haven't spoken as much as a culture around how the same is true for Native people. And again, it's that undertone of disappearance, that this isn't even a conversation that we're having, but Native people are, as you mentioned, disproportionately represented both in interactions with the police but also in incarceration. And the same is true of Native youth, who are also more likely to be incarcerated in federal facilities that don't have as many juvenile services and where they can be subject to things that are inappropriate for any human being, but certainly developmentally inappropriate, such as solitary confinement. Dana Taylor: You talk about demographics in the teaching staffs of schools and introduce a term other scholars call, "The white Lady bountiful." Can you expound on that? Eve L. Ewing: This is a term that Erica Miners developed to talk about the ways that when we think about things like enslavement, when we think about things like war on Native peoples, we often have a very masculine image of what that violence looks like. We imagine armies of men out in the fields fighting with people. We imagine cruel slave masters as men whipping and beating people. But it's important to point out that at the time, one of the ways that sexism and patriarchy impacted women was that white women were held to be subservient to their husbands, to men. They were not equal partners. But at the same time, they were still given the ability to enact these forms of violence against those that were socially lower than them. And so in the case of slavery, that meant sometimes women slaveholders who were very violent and enacted their own forms of punishment and retribution against enslaved people. And in terms of the education field, that means that sometimes there are white women who were sent out to be teachers with the express purpose of saying, "We 're going to defeat barbarism, that Native people and Black people are savages, and that they need us to teach them Christianity. Without us, they're going to descend into sin." And so the idea here is that what calls itself charity, what calls itself benevolence, can actually be a form of extreme cultural erasure that again, serves the purpose of a state that wanted people's land, that wanted people's bodies. I think it's important to remember that your racial background or your gender background is in no way determinative of the kind of educator you become. There are amazing educators and teachers that love children and uplift them and support them from all backgrounds. But really what this history is teaching us, is what does it look like to celebrate and support young people where they come from? To celebrate and support the communities that love them and nurture them? And to not feel like that's something that we have to beat out of them or replace with something else that we see as being culturally superior? Dana Taylor: Eve, what do you hope to achieve in writing this book? What do you want your readers to walk away from this book understanding? Eve L. Ewing: I think that this is a time when there are people in power who want us to turn away from ugly history, from difficult history, and in some cases, act like it never happened. This book is filled with direct quotations, archival documents and resources that show people saying really awful and challenging things in their own words. It's not my interpretation or something that I've made up. And the reason that there are people in power who don't want us to confront these histories, is because they understand that when we do that, it's the first step to all of us working together to be able to frame a future that is more just, that is more libratory, that's transformative, and where all young people have the opportunity to thrive and celebrate one another and be celebrated. That's a very dangerous idea right now. And nevertheless, it's an idea whose time is omnipresent, as far as I'm concerned. So what I hope is that people will take an opportunity with this book to have tough conversations, but then to also have conversations about building forward and the ways that we work together to shape the education that we know our young people deserve. Dana Taylor: Eve's new book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children, and the Construction of American Racism is out now. Eve, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt. Eve L. Ewing: Thanks, Dana. Dana Taylor: Thanks to our senior producers Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
Arab News
13-03-2025
- General
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Original Sins' by Eve L. Ewing
Eve L. Ewing's 'Original Sins' shows how US schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to 'civilize' Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. By demonstrating that its in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality, Ewing makes the case for a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom.
