S11E12: Schools and Race: Eve Ewing on the Construction of American Racism

S11E12 - Schools and Race: Eve Ewing on the Construction of American Racism

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is Schools and Race: Eve Ewing on the Construction of American Racism.

Dr. Val: Okay, I think it's important for us to be the first ones to congratulate Dr. Eve Ewing on her future MacArthur Genius Award.

Andrew: Yes. I don't believe she has received it yet, but if they know what they're doing over there at the MacArthur Foundation, she has got to be next on the list because she is absolutely a genius.

Dr. Val: And we have the honor and pleasure of speaking with her about her new book, and many other things.

Andrew: She has a new book out, it's called Original Sins: the Miseducation of Black and Native Children, and the Construction of American Racism. And it is her most recent full length book. But she also, I believe even in the time since it has come out, has published yet another Marvel comic because–

Dr. Val: Nice!

Andrew: –she does everything. She writes comics for Marvel. She is a sociology professor. She writes books of poetry. She can do it all.

Dr. Val: And I, I think that's a really important thing to name, because in her latest text, you not only see and feel the poet, but also the imagery really stands out. And so, you're left with an intellectual and emotional impact that I think is really powerful.

Andrew: Her writing is incredible. I've been a huge fan of hers for a long time. Ghost in the Schoolyard was an Integrated School Book Club pick many years ago. Which is another very powerful examination of a bunch of school closures that happened in Chicago. Found her writing there to be so compelling and full of imagery, makes her work so easy to read and to get lost in. But also, I think that is part of what makes her so compelling to speak with.

Dr. Val: As listeners will hear, I left with a little bit of a White supremacy headache during this conversation, because her writing also is such a clear truth telling that you can't help but leave impacted by the words (and by the realities) that we all live with.

Andrew: Yes. The, kind of, thesis of her book, Original Sins, is that you can't understand race in America without also understanding education and the role that education has played in creating race and racism. And the ways that that both impacted the creation of schooling, but then the ways that schooling has reinforced those ideas.

Dr. Val: Yeah. I don't know that we've had this before on the podcast, but we also had Dr. Ewing read us a section of her book, which totally took us to another place. I'm pretty sure you were about to cry.

Andrew: Uh. There, there, there may have been some tears shed. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful passage that she read for us, and, uh, definitely made me think that we should do that more often.

Dr. Val: Yeah, for sure.

Andrew: Yes, it was lovely to hear her read a section in her voice.

Dr. Val: Yeah. Okay. So we do not want to keep you from this genius any further.

Andrew: Alright, let's take a listen to Dr. Eve Ewing.

[THEME MUSIC]

Dr. Eve Ewing: Hi. I am so happy to chat with you. My name is Eve Ewing and I am a writer and a professor.

Andrew: I was wondering how you would handle that.

Dr. Eve Ewing: I write lots of stuff. I profess, you know, less stuff, but, uh, those are, those are my two, my two deals.

Andrew: You write lots of stuff.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yes.

Andrew: Poetry, you write comics for Marvel, you're a sociology professor. You've written a number of books. It covers a wide range of topics, a wide range of styles. It seems, in the stuff that I've tried to, to read up on in the work of yours that I've been following for a long time, there are some themes that show up.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: One of them, it seems to me is, like, communicating through time.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah!

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Andrew: That, like, you Ghost in the School Yard, you have this, like, real deep history of schools that were closed in Chicago. And not just the schools, but you know, who was there, who they were named after, these, kind of, deep stories. You've got, I know you had a radio show where you were doing, like, Studs Terkel interviews.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah.

Andrew: It was, like, literally in conversation with interviews from the past.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah. I always said when I was working on that project, everybody has a podcast, but I'm the only person who co-hosts a podcast with a person that's not alive. [Andrew laughs]

Who I referred to as my co-host, or sometimes my co-ghost.

Andrew: Oh! I love that.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Since Studs and I were hosting the podcast together. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. And then Original Sins, your new book, this really deep kind of historical dive, trying to understand our country through how schooling has been used to maintain racial hierarchy.

Why? Where does that come from? This desire to be in conversation through time.

Dr. Eve Ewing: You know, I really appreciate that thread. Um, I think that because some writers really identify themselves through a genre, and I, I don't. Um, I think that can be puzzling to people, but all of my work is in a conversation in my own head. Um, so I'm, I'm really grateful for you being able to find that kind of coherent thread. That, that means a lot to me.

So I'm an, I'm an Afro-futurist. That means different things to different people. For me, it means that I am interested in relationships with ancestors that we've had and the ancestors that we will be. Um, and so thinking about time often in not a very linear way, but in kind of a cyclical or circular way, the way that time turns in on itself, and, you know, is more kind of like a, a swirling pool of water.

Uh, which all sounds very “woo woo” and mystical, but a lot of what it comes down to is I also, I'm a nerd. I like the library. I like archives, and I think that when you read an archival document, or when you engage with somebody's voice through text in this way, you are actually talking to a person through time. So when you read a book that somebody wrote or a letter that somebody wrote a hundred or 200 years ago, that person is talking to you in your head, you know, from the past.

And when you write something, that's what you're leaving. You're leaving a way for people to talk to you, from the future. But yeah, like I said, I mean, a lot of it is really just that I like to go to the library, so I found a job that lets me do that.

Andrew: Right. That's beautiful. I think that the, the, the conversation piece of it, this other piece that seems to keep coming up is that you're constantly putting yourself in the shoes of the people who you are in conversation with. Thinking about what it is that they are feeling in those moments. How they're conceiving of themselves. Whether they are 200 years ago, today, thinking about people in the future. Where, where does that come from?

Is that just the fact that you feel like you're in conversation with these people, and so then you are curious about them?

Dr. Eve Ewing: You know, I think I'm nosy. Um, and I think I'm curious about people in general. I'm one of those folks that if, if you're sitting at dinner with me, you're talking to me and halfway through I'm like, “Can you believe she said that?” And you're like, “Who?” And I'm like, “Those people at the next table! Haven't we both been..?”

[Val and Andrew laugh].

You haven't been listening. Are you crazy? You're really missing out because her sister has not paid rent for three months.

Dr. Val: Oh my gosh!

Dr. Eve Ewing: It’s about to be, it's about to be ugly. I, you know, I'm trying not to choose sides, but people are like, “No.”

[Val and Andrew continue to chuckle]

So, you know, I'm, I'm one of those people, so I'm, I'm really nosy. I'm curious about things. I work in the tradition of, of Black feminism as well. And a lot of what that means is, like, rooting my work in care, work and thinking about love, thinking about empathy.

Sometimes people see those as, as concepts that are maybe, like, not wholly intellectual or that the heart is somehow at odds with the head. And for me, I think that, uh, it's a really important form of knowledge to be able to understand things emotionally. So that's, that's some of where that comes from.

Um, I sometimes encapsulate this through a quotation from Gwendolyn Brooks, who's a, a poet who's so important to me in my life. And her most famous poem is called “We Real Cool,” or alternately, "The Pool Players/ Seven at the Golden Shovel." And it's a really short poem that is, um, she tells a story of, uh, being out in the middle of the day and walking by a pool hall in her community, and the door was open and she could see seven kids shooting pool.

And she said, “Instead of asking myself, ‘Why aren't they in school?’ I asked myself, I wonder how they feel about themselves”. And I think that that question, um, it's not everything, but it can animate, uh, a set of concerns and a set of revelations that otherwise might not be obvious.

Andrew: Let's take a listen to Ms. Brooks reading that poem.

Gwendolyn Brooks: The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Dr. Val: When you were talking about the letters from the past, I just can't help but go to my grandfather, um, whose letters that's, I just wanted his voice in some way. I was thinking about how much it means to me to be in conversation with him.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Wait, tell me more. Do you have his letters?

Dr. Val: I do have some of his letters. When I was doing my dissertation work, of which you are cited, thank you so much for that.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Hey, thank you.

Dr. Val: Yeah, yeah. No, thank

Dr. Eve Ewing: The check is in the mail.

[Laughter]

Dr. Val: Thank you. Um, at one point in the process I was like, I just wanna talk about my grandfather.

And didn't know what that meant for me, but I, I desired to be close to him in some way. And so, my dissertation was on professional learning for educator activists, and what they need to support their efforts.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Mmm.

Dr. Val: And he would not have identified himself as an educator activist –

Dr. Eve Ewing: Sure.

Dr. Val: –at the time. Right? That wasn't language, but he embodied all of that. And so, I have many of his correspondence from people that demonstrated the work that he was doing, and I was just,

Dr. Eve Ewing: How phenomenal is that?

Dr. Val: Yeah. Yeah. So…

Dr. Eve Ewing: Thank you for sharing that with me.

Dr. Val: No, thank you for asking! Thank you for asking.

Andrew: Hmm. The, the latest output. Maybe not. I feel like I get a notification that you have something else published like every, every two weeks or something. But, the latest full book, I believe, is “Original Sins: the Miseducation of Black and Native Children, and the Construction of American Racism.”

It feels like one of the kind of central arguments is that schooling and race are intertwined. And to understand both the history of schooling, you have to understand the history of race. But also to understand the present and maybe possible futures of schooling, you have to understand our current context of race.

You, you write in that, "the schoolhouse, the 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."

Help us understand that link between schooling and race in America. And maybe to start, you can help us understand why you use schooling as opposed to just education broadly.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Oh, you're so, you guys have done the research! Okay, so I'll start by clarifying that (and this is by no means, a unique insight), but, um, something that many scholars talk about and that I think is important to begin with is the difference between schooling and education.

And so, schooling is an institutional process. It is sometimes related to teaching and learning and sometimes not so much. But it's a process that takes place in this, kind of, designated space, right? In the school.

And education is an endeavor that all people in all cultures have done since the beginning of time. And that sometimes looks like, you know, sitting in a classroom and learning things from a teacher. But education can also happen, uh, on your own, right? It can also happen outdoors, taking a walk. It sounds like it happened when Val was having those conversations with her grandfather through his letters.

And so, education is magical and miraculous and beautiful. And sometimes school supports education and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it inhibits education.

We can think of schools as, um, a repository for ideological work. And what I mean by that is that schools are a place where young people, um, from a very young age are subject to a set of ideas. Um, and some of those are ideas about, you know, how to read and write. But some of those are the things that the society in which they find themselves and the people who have enough power to shape what's happening in that school, it's the ideas that they want those young people to be exposed to. Right?

We live in a country where the origins of the republic, the origins of the government, the origins of what we now know of as the United States rests on the foundation of these two original sins, to which I refer in the title. The original sins of Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery, and the attendant ongoing violences that upheld and supported both of those institutions.

And so, if you live in a country where, on the one hand, um, your founding words and the most important credo is supposed to be that all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that we're the land of the free and the home of the brave. And then you turn around and the very same people that are supposed to represent those values also murdered Native people, also displaced them from their lands, also held enslaved people, um, how do we reconcile that? Right?

And the answer comes not only from, but partially from schooling, that schooling becomes a place where we receive a set of creation myths, a set of stories, a set of narratives that tell us that, “Hey, this is all fine! It's okay.”

And the book is really about the ways that schools do that. Um, the, the narratives, the creation myths, the stories about what the United States is. And specifically what Black people are, what Native people are, that we receive in schools.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: The clarity just broke my heart. Like, I'm already teetering on the edge right now since November. And one thing that I highlighted that, I think connects to where we are to now, on page 42: “How is democracy supposed to work and what role were schools to play in preparing White people to participate in and maintain that democracy?”

And given where I feel we are right now, in terms of not maintaining a democracy, can you just speak a little bit about those historical connections and, and what you're seeing now?

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah, well, it's kind of funny because the book is, like, kind of audacious in the sense that I'm making big claims. And I spent a lot of time writing it, trying to say, man, I really need to marshal as much evidence as I possibly can to make it clear how I support these claims. Right?

And the passage that you just read highlights this fact that part of my argument is that schools have prepared and continue to prepare White kids for participation in citizenry. Active participation in, in civic life. And that that fullness of that participation is not accessible to Black and Native people.

And that's the kind of thing where I'm like, man, I hope, you know, are people gonna read this and just be like, “She's making this up!” And now we find ourselves in this position where people are actively having a conversation about birthright citizenship.Right? And that conversation is certainly partially about undocumented folks and migrants, but it's also about Black people who got our citizenship through constitutional amendment, right? Which is now subject to, kind of, reinterpretation. And it's also about Native folks who also weren't citizens, um, until the beginning of the 20th century, in the 1920s. And on their own land!

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Eve Ewing: If you think about the audacity of that. Like, the obnoxiousness of saying that you get to define the terms of citizenship even mattering or being important, on a land that you stole.

Um, but setting that aside! You know,

Andrew: That’s a big thing to set aside.

[Laughter]

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah, right. Setting that aside for the time being. We could talk about that for another hour, right? But, but, it's grimly ironic. It would be funny if it weren't so deeply unfunny that I had these concerns, like, oh, you know, is this gonna be too big of a claim? And now, you know, within the, the weeks of the book being out people are openly having this conversation, at the highest halls of power, right? Like, uh, “Well, maybe these Native people, maybe these Black people, maybe they're not citizens after all.”

And another one of these things that it's like stranger than fiction. You, you couldn't make this up if you tried. There have been reports in the southwest of Diné people (of Navajo people) being detained, uh, by border patrol, and asking to prove their citizenship, right? It's so egregiously morally disgusting, but in the most, like, creative and obnoxious ways, that it's, it's really, it's really jarring.

So, yeah, I think, um, uh, I wish that there weren't so many connections. I wish that, I don't know. I wish it were different, but yeah, there, there are a lot of them.

Andrew: You talk about the history of education. This, like, you know, Horace Mann ideal of education as the flywheel and the machinery of, of society that, like, it's preparing future citizens. That that was really the goal for White kids and that there was a separate goal for Black kids and a separate goal for Native kids.

Can you talk us through those, kind of, three different types of schooling?

Dr. Eve Ewing: You know, when I was a, becoming a teacher and I took history of education courses, I really got this story (that received narrative) that school is to make good citizens, right? And school is to teach everybody how to have a coherent democratic society and how to participate in it.

And, then there'd be a little sidebar, or a little footnote, or a little paragraph or a little special week on the syllabus where it was like, “Well, not for everybody,” right?

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Like, “terms and conditions may apply.”

[Laughter]

But that's the main story, right? “Schools are for participation in the great equalizer, and there are some notable exceptions, but let's all move on.” And I really feel strongly that that's backwards. That I think that you actually can't understand schooling, uh, without understanding the history of what it has meant for Black and Native people. And the way that schooling has played a part in this broader American project, which is not just about democracy and participation, but it's also about racial hierarchy and settler colonialism.

And that, that's actually like the main story, that's not the marginal story. And that telling the story for me isn't a matter of representation or inclusion or people seeing themselves, but actually of historical accuracy.

And so, to put a finer point on it, um, White kids, basically, schooling has historically served exactly that function. This idea of learning how to be a member of a good society. And I wanna say that that hasn't entirely been benign for White children either, right? And that part of the history that I talk about is the ways that young people from immigrant populations that were seen as threatening, that were seen as not fully White, that were seen as degenerate as bringing down the White race. Um, race suicide is a, is a phrase that, uh, Teddy Roosevelt used. He said, you know, we're gonna be committing race suicide if we let too many of these people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe in.

So, you know, the idea was that those kids were to become as assimilated and as American as possible, through that great melting pot. And that that would happen through things like learning the pledge of allegiance, through things like learning how to eat bland food in the lunchroom, through things like playing games on the playground during recess.

And, umm, that's, that's a sad story in some ways. There's an Italian American writer that I quote in the book who said, you know, for us learning to be American was about learning to hate our parents, right? Learning to be ashamed of our parents. And so that's part of that story.

And then at the same time though, in order for people to look around and say, we continue to have a society on land that was stolen by forced violence and genocide from Native people, and to feel fine about it, that requires people to make up a set of stories about Native people that are not true. Stories like “They're all gone” and “it's sad, it's a tragedy. But you know, that was just the fate. That was just the destiny of this country.”

You know, the history of young people being kidnapped from their communities. Being stolen away, being abused, being forced to speak English, right? Um, but we also see that in the contemporary moment with things like the way Native people are talked about or more often not talked about in our curriculum. Right?

I've spoken to adults and even children who, who say, “I didn't know that there were any Native people anymore,” right? “I thought that they were all gone.”

You shouldn't be surprised that people get that idea if they go to school. And everything is about, “the Indians lived this way, the Indians ate this food. The Indians built these types of houses,” And it's all, all past tense, all relegated to this, um, kind of romanticized, mythical past, right?

Instead of saying like, no, there are native people now, alive, here, resistant, resilient. And also, this is still their land! It's still stolen land, right? That hasn't, that has not changed.

And so, that narrative of disappearance for Native people really become the purpose of schooling for them. The idea that, you know, schooling is to really, further and institutionalize this project of disappearance.

And for Black people, schooling has really been a tool of creating subservience, right? And part of that is because if you think about it, the longue durée of, of enslavement, the longue durée of chattel slavery as an institution in the United States, gave people an economic incentive to make as many enslaved people as possible, right? Often through horrific tactics, through sexual assault, right? Through literally breeding people like they were animals, counting them, trading and selling them.

And so, then you find yourself in a moment where after the Emancipation Proclamation, there are huge communities where the majority of Black people live. And so, what do you do when you are a White person who was formerly a member of the planter class, and you look around and there are all these Black people, perhaps more of them than there are of you, and they now allegedly have some sort of rights. And you look, not too far away to Haiti and you see, um, what can happen when, you know, when Black people realize that they have these rights. And that they realize that you actually have no power over them, and you don't feel too good about it!

And so, school becomes a way to tell Black people that they're nothing. That they are subservient, that the best thing that they can do in their lives is to be obedient, um, to work, work, work, work, work as much as possible.

Because that's another thing. You still need them to work for you in order to keep your economy going, but now they're not enslaved anymore. So how are you gonna do that? Right? And so that's how we see, you know, the debt peonage and the sharecropping, and the, the convict labor, and all these things that we see in the afterlives of slavery and reconstruction.

But Carter G. Woodson said “lynching begins in the classroom,” because it's the first place that people start to learn that Black life is not valuable. And, you see, again, the necessity of that if you have decided that you're not gonna face up to the uglier reality, um, which is that the country is built on the legacy of slavery.

Dr. Val: Oh my gosh.

Andrew: Leadership for White people, erasure for Native people, and subjugation for Black people.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Exactly.

Andrew: How’s your White supremacy headache, Val?

Dr. Val: I get one. [Eve chuckles] So speaking of the disappearance, something else that I pulled out: “School exclusion is fundamentally a strategy of disappearance.”

Dr. Eve Ewing: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Val: And you wrote about being a, a middle school teacher. I, too was a middle school teacher.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Ah, the best people!

Dr. Val: The BEST people. And I felt convicted reading this, this section for for good reason. Um, in my past practice, I remember early on, you know, and this was just modeled behavior, you know.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Of course.

Dr. Val: I would send somebody outta the class, and then I felt really good about myself when I created a, a section in my classroom that was just like a little check in. And I was like, “Hey, just go check in.” So I didn't have to send someone out of the class. But I, I, and I felt good about that, even though it, it still was exclusion.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Well, and I just wanna say, there are times when we say to people, these are the norms and boundaries of this community, and if you're not able to be accountable to those norms and boundaries, you need to step out. Right? Until you feel ready to do so.

Dr. Val: I appreciate you!

[Val and Andrew laugh]

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't speak to what was happening. You know, I don't, I wasn't there.

Dr. Val: Yeah. No, I appreciate that though, because.

Dr. Eve Ewing: My principal was like, my principal was like, “Y'all better not send these kids out the classroom. You send 'em down to the office to do what? She said, “If you send 'em out, I'm gonna send 'em right back.

[Laughter]

Dr. Val: Exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Dr. Eve Ewing: And then you're gonna feel, you're gonna feel silly when they're at the door. Like, knock, knock.

[Laughter]

Hello? Um, so, and I mean that, I mean that not just in classrooms, I mean that in communities in general, right?

Dr. Val: Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Eve Ewing: And friendships. And, and so, I think accountability is important and we, we have to teach young people accountability.

That's different from this kind of disappearance strategy that I'm talking about where I'm, I'm drawing a little bit from work from Angela Davis, right? Where she talks about the ways that prisons disappear people. Iit's a lot easier to lock people away and punish them than it is to actually face those things.

And really, the broader issue is that notion of punishment. That we live in a society that oftentimes turns to punishing people, um, as our first line of defense, as our first reaction.

Dr. Val: The first one. The first one.

Dr. Eve Ewing: The very first thing we do.Um, instead of sometimes thinking like, what, what could we do instead?

And that's not just a school's problem. That's an American problem. We are a carceral culture, right? We are a culture that turns to punishment first, even when it, like, doesn't make any sense, right?

And so, for example, if you have a young person that you know that they need to be in school, right? That they need more support, that they need more mentorship, that they need more accountability, that they need to be in relationship with adults who care about them, suspending them and expelling them is not great, right?

Dr. Val: No, it doesn't make sense.

Dr. Eve Ewing: It doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'm so glad that people have started to have more conversations about suspension and expulsion in schools in the last two decades. And that more and more schools are turning to restorative justice and peace circles and things like that.

But those things actually don't work, and they're not sufficient if you don't think more broadly about the culture of your school, and the culture of your community. Are we doing this knee jerk reaction to just punishing people without actually asking, you know, “Why did this young person do this thing?” And, what do we actually want? Like, what do we actually want to be the outcome, and how do we get there? And more often than not, um, just suspending somebody for a couple days is not the way to do that.

Andrew: Right. Removing kids from the classroom. Sort of the, the broad bucket of like discipline and punishment is one of these, kind of, tools that you talk about that reinforces the ways in which we have schooling for Black kids that is about subjugation and Native kids about erasure.

You also talk about intellectual inferiority and economic subjugation. Can you put a little more meat on the bones of, the kind of assumed intellectual inferiority of Black and Native kids.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah. So this is basically the idea that we are inherently less smart and that White people are inherently more smart. And I think that this assumption goes unchallenged in ways that really have seeped into the fabric of lots of people's thinking. Even people of color, even people who actually want great things for Black people, for Native people, there's this assumption that we are intellectually inferior.

And in a very pernicious way, we see that we see that playing out now with the DEI debate, right? Where what is being referred to as DEI is actually, very thin cover for, the idea that any Black person who is in a position, cannot possibly have earned that position, right? That any Native person who's in a position cannot possibly have earned that position.

As a Black person moving through higher education spaces, this is something that people will say to your face. And it's wow! Because it's like, you know, good and well that I'm better at this thing than you.

[Laughter]

Dr. Val: You know it.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Right? Like, um, we, you know, one obnoxious example being the Abigail Fisher case a few years ago, right? And, and her protestation about not being admitted into the University of Texas. And she actually didn't meet the cutoff to be admitted, right? But there's just a kind of unchecked assumption like, well, such and such type of person is stealing my spot, right?

Andrew: “Obviously, if things were ‘fair,’ I would be above any not White person, and so if I am not, then I must be the victim.”

Dr. Eve Ewing: You just put it so perfectly, I'm gonna be quoting you hereafter.

[Laughter]

That's exactly right. If things were fair, the default is that I would be on the top. And if I'm not on the top, something is wrong.

And we see this, you know, playing out in various temper tantrums happening in our political scene right now. But the, it's also been baked structurally into some of the ways that schools function. And so, one example is that, um, if you have people in your family who have taken the SAT, you might know that every year there are these “norming questions” that are thrown into the SAT. And they're basically like beta testing questions, right?

Like they put in a couple of testers to see how do people do on them.

Andrew: They don't count on your score, but they use 'em to see, “Okay, is this a good question in the future or not?”

Dr. Eve Ewing: Exactly. And what makes it a good question is partially that you wanna a normal distribution curve, right? So everybody shouldn't get it right. Everybody shouldn't get it wrong, right? And there should be lots of people kind of in between.

And so, one of the things that some legal scholars reported on several years ago is that they went back through some of the past years of SAT norming questions, and they found that if there were questions where White students by random happenstance did better, then the question would be kept. And if there were questions where by random happenstance Black students as a group did better, they would be thrown out. And the idea was just that if Black kids did better on the question, the question must be broken, right?

I've been so fortunate to tour all around talking about this book with lots of different people. And an interviewer asked me about that over the weekend at an event, and, you know, I, I shared with them what I just shared with you and everybody audibly, gasped. But then I said, “Okay, a lot of you,” there are a lot of teachers in the audience. I said, “If you were looking over your test score data and you saw that there was a question,” yeah.

You see where I'm going with this?

Dr. Val: Mmm.

[Andrew laughs]

Dr. Eve Ewing: You see, it's about to get uncomfortable [singing]! If you looked over, you know, a, a practice test that you did, and you saw that there were a, a bunch of questions where all the White kids in your school did better, you probably wouldn't think twice about it. And if you saw that there were a bunch of questions where all the Black kids did better, you would be like, let's discuss.

Right? Maybe. You can, I mean, you might, you,

Dr. Val: Check yourself. Check. Yeah. Go to, go to check and think about it.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Right, before you wreck yourself, as the proverb says.

[Laughter]

And so. You know?

Andrew: Was that Proverbs?

Dr. Val: Yep.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yes. Is an African American proverb.

So, those are just a couple of examples and it's something that gets to me a lot even with thinking about words like IQ. Words like “gifted.” You know, I'm basically insufferable and annoying to talk to because I find myself in a lot of conversations with people who are, you know, really thoughtful people who are really critical of a lot of these histories. But really often just without thinking, people will say things like, “Oh, you know, so-and-so has a really high IQ.” Okay, well what does that mean? Right? “This person is really gifted,” even when people say that to me, “You're so gifted.” I say, I, I, you know, what do you mean by that? You know, what do you mean when you say I'm smart?

I think it's fine to talk about people being intelligent, but the question is, how have we made space or not made space for the many, many, many ways in which that can look, the many ways in which brilliance and creativity can look. And how is it that in schools we often have a very narrow view of that, that, um, punishes kids for not performing in a certain kind of way.

So, anyway, I'm going on a characteristic tangent, but, um, obviously I care a lot about that.

Andrew: Obviously

Dr. Val: No, thank you.

Andrew: Talk to us about the economic subjugation bucket. We've heard about discipline and punishment. I wanna have a whole separate entire episode about testing and, and all of that, because that really gets into this intellectual inferiority bucket. But talk, talk about the, uh, economic subjugation bucket.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Sure. I think that this was one of the more interesting chapters for me to write. You know, as many scholars in education have written for a long time (not just in the US but around the globe) one of the functions of education has historically been to create these tracks, right? In a capitalist society, um, that tell some types of kids, you are destined to be a low wage worker and other types of kids you are destined to be of the leadership class of this country.

And those tracks can look a lot of different ways. Like, if you were a Black kid and you showed up at your high school counselor's office and said, “I wanna go to college,” they'd say “the wood shop is over there.” Right? And sometimes it's tracks where those young people don't even see each other.

And so, there are young people that go to very elite schools where they are told explicitly, you know, “You are the leaders, you are the future leaders of this country.”Um, many of them might be descended from some of the past leaders of this country, right? Um, we see that in things like legacy admissions as well.

So, tracking can look very obvious, right? Or it can look less obvious. But something that fascinated me was, I got to reading these textbooks that were from, the, uh, early days of emancipation that were written for freed people.

And if you think about it again, right? This is a country where, not just in the South, the country has come to rely on having this steady labor force of Black people, right? Working for free.

And that's not something that just benefits, you know, say a cotton plantation in the South. 'cause who do they sell the cotton to? They sell it to the textile mill in the north, right? That textile mill employs however many people, right? And then that feeds into that economy of that town.

So what happens if the person who was running the cotton plantation now has to pay Black people? And what happens to the price of cotton? And what are the ripple effects of that? Right? Imagine that for all these different commodities.

And so the end of slavery isn't just about the South, it's about the entirety of the United States, the social, political, and economic system. And so historian Eric Foner says, basically, I'm paraphrasing here, but he says, the, the problem with free Black labor becomes the problem, like, the definitive problem of the 20th century. Because how are you gonna get these Black people to still labor for you for as cheaply as possible?

Enter schools once again, right? And so a lot of these textbooks had these really fascinating and very clear, not subtle messages where they would say to Black people, “The most important thing is that you work as much as possible. You should go back and work for your old masters. And even if they are unkind to you, even if they abuse your children, even if they assault your wives, it's really important that you forgive them and that you continue working for them. And if you don't, the enslaved people that are in the other parts of the world, in the Spanish colonies, and in Brazil, the the governments there are gonna look at you and they're gonna say, you know, ‘look how awful those Black people in the US are. And they're never gonna free your cousins. They're never gonna free your brethren because you didn't work hard enough.’ And so you have to, you know, keep your cabin clean and, you know, accumulate as much money as you can.”

And another thing that I found really fascinating was this focus on capitalist accumulation, right? Nowadays we have this culture where people are starting to question their relationship to work. They're starting to talk about wellness and things like that. Well, Indigenous people, since time immemorial on the lands and waters of, of this country, grew what they needed to grow to trade a little bit, right? Hunted what they needed to hunt. Drew the water that they needed to drink, and learned these kinds of sustainable ways of, of feeding themselves that were not about, “I need to get as much as possible, as much as possible, as much as possible.”

And so, the same issue with, with Black people after slavery, that there were literally White commentators that complained about things where they said, you know, “Some of these former slaves, all they wanna do is just grow enough food to feed their families and just like have a house to be warm in and to be comfortable.”

[Val chuckles]

“And then after that, they just wanna rest or have leisure. They don't wanna just keep working.”

And so, “We have to teach them that it is a Christian good, it is a moral good, it is a moral necessity to accumulate as much as possible.” Because if people aren't drawn to do that, then you actually have very little power over them. Right? You need them to come be in this exploitative labor relationship with you.

There's a gentleman named Merrill Edward Gates, who was at one point, um, the chair of, um, one of the government entities that oversaw quote, unquote Indian Affairs. And he later on became a university leader at some elite universities in the United States. But there's this quote that he has that I use in the beginning, in one of the chapters where he says, “Get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers. Trousers with pockets in them. Pockets that ache to be filled with dollars,” right? Because again, how do you get people's land? How do you have leverage over them if they don't want to be part of your system?

And several years ago there was a writer in The Atlantic who wrote an essay about this, as it pertains to one of my favorite fruits: watermelon. And so, watermelon is number one, incredibly delicious. Number two, incredibly easy and cheap to grow. And it's really good for you. It's really nutritious. It is really hydrating, it has a lot of minerals. And so there were Black people that grew watermelon as a subsistence crop, um, after they were freed.

But, Black people growing watermelons as a subsistence crop, disincentivized them from wanting to go do, you know, exploitative sharecropping and tenant farming. And so, that is where this negative stereotype about Black people eating watermelon comes from. Where people started drawing really ugly caricatures, right? And the watermelon comes to represent laziness, indolence, right? Not wanting to work.

Those kinds of things really fascinated me because I think I, when I started working on the book, I thought I would be writing a lot about, you know, Black kids and Native kids not being in AP classes, and things like that. And all that is really important, but it actually is much deeper than that. And it's actually about teaching our folks from early on, “You need to participate in this capitalist system, but only in the ways that we allow you to so that we can extract as much as possible from you.”

I'll give you one more very troubling and telling example. The young people that were stolen away from their families and forced to attend boarding schools from Native communities. They were forbidden from practicing their faith practices. Their hair was cut. They, you know, couldn't speak their own language. They were beaten. They were mistreated.

And that had a lot to do with this issue of disappearance through assimilation, but it also served an economic purpose, because many of those schools had what they called outing programs. And what outing programs were, is that they would send the children to be day laborers.

So they would send them to work on farms. They would send the girls to be domestics in White people's homes. And, um, there were some schools where eventually the White woman said, “Well, you know, I really need her here Monday through Friday.” Right? “And so, she can come back to the school on the weekends.”

And so, now are you a student or are you a maid? Right?

Andrew: An unpaid maid.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Exactly. Subject to the whims of, you know, some random, awful person who doesn't know you.

And I actually found a newspaper article. There was a, a boarding school for Native children that was supposed to be open in a particular location. And agricultural leaders of the area lobbied successfully for it to be built closer to where their orchards were, so that it would be more convenient for the kids to come and work in the orchards. And they actually said in print, in the paper, you know, “This is gonna be a great source of cheap labor for us.”

And so, it goes very, very deep into the purpose of schools themselves and not just what you learn when you get there.

Dr. Val: Thank you.

Andrew: In the end, you come to these sort of like three tools of love and justice and flourishing, as kind of a, a way to think about, you know, a better path forward.

Talk to us about love and justice and flourishing.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Hmm. I forgot about that till you asked.

[Eve Laughs]

I am an advocate for sometimes restoring elements to these conversations that might seem to people to be, like, fuzzy or nebulous. Um, things like love, right? But I actually think it's really necessary. Because when I sit back, you know, I, the book is very long and it took me a long time to write, and it has a lot of sources and it has a lot of details and this, that, and the other. But if you had to distill it all down to a simple fact, it really has to do with people being tasked to care with our children who do not love them, and who seem constitutionally unable to love them, in a system that does not love them. And not only does not love them, has positioned itself in such a way that its own survival and its own continuance is contingent upon not loving them. Because if you love them, you're gonna start treating them differently in ways that undermine the intentions of the country in which you find yourself. You know?

And so, if that is what is missing, then I think that that's actually a pretty good place to start.

I was in a museum today, there's an exhibit in Chicago right now, um, called Project a Black Planet. And it's about Pan-Africanism and Pan-African art. And I went in the middle of the day. So if you go to the museum on a Monday at 11:00 AM who's there is a bunch of kids. Right?

I was really happy because. It was a huge exhibit full of Black art from all across the diaspora and, um, from all different time periods and it was really fantastic.

And I was watching this, this group of almost all Black children, maybe like, you know, fourth and fifth grade. And they had their little worksheets that they had to complete and they were all running around. And I was watching two different chaperone groups and there was one chaperone group where, man, this one child cannot catch a break. Every time he moved, it was, “Don't touch that. Stop.” You know? “Step over here, step back. What are you doing?” And at one point I watched this adult physically grab his elbow and try to pull him away. And she's like, why are you standing so close? Why are you looking so close? And it really broke my heart. It really broke my heart.

And, I watched another chaperone having just kind of open discussion with the kids, right? And this is same school, probably same classroom, same demographic of kids, right? And, um, I've been a, I've been a chaperone, I've run a field trip. I know that it's not easy, and I know that there are those young folks that are, you know, like all people or there are always some folks that are gonna be, you know, habitual line steppers. But, it was really interesting to me to see, just as a thought experiment, you know, if I were to ask this person (and I'm not this insufferable), so I didn't, but if I knew this person and she trusted me and I were to ask her, you know, “Do you love this child? And what does it look like to treat him with love in this moment?” Right? What does love look like to you? Is that the way you would talk to your child? Is that the way you would want someone to talk to your child? Is that the way you talk to your niece or your nephew? And maybe! Hey, you know what, love looks lots of different ways for lots of different people.

But, um, it was tough. It was really tough. And I think that, I think that love, like, really, really thinking hard about it, really being, intensely reflective about it can take us into a very fruitful intellectual place. To really think, like, what are we actually trying to do here? Right?

And, so I think that's one place where I hope people begin is to start asking those critical questions in different moments.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: For sure. So, I wanna read, read you a little bit.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Okay.

Andrew: This very powerful thing that you wrote in, in the last chapter, that “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 towards 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 ones we have.”

Dr. Eve Ewing: That sounds good!

[Laughter]

Andrew: It’s so, it's so good. It's so good. To kind of turn your themes back on you a little bit, this conversation, the book is in, is in conversation with so many people from the past. It's a gift, I think, to welcome us into those conversations.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Thank you.

Andrew: Talk a little bit about the conversations that you want to be having with those generations in the future, through this work, through your other work. What does that look like?

Dr. Eve Ewing: That's actually very much how we think about it. So part of what I didn't anticipate would be so, so, so important in this moment, because I couldn't have predicted when the book would come out. I knew it would come out February 11th. [Eve laughs] I didn't know, you know, I didn't know when–

Andrew: What the world would look like.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Yeah, when in the arc of history it would come out.

Dr. Val: Ohh, gosh.

Dr. Eve Ewing: And so, one of the things that I'm really grateful for is I think that as I was writing the book, I was thinking so much about the past. And I think that I find myself, as I'm talking about the book, and it begins its life in the world, thinking so intensely about the present and the future.

And for me, a big part of that is understanding that part of what we must do right now is be prepared to really unsettle our notions of what is a teacher, what is learning, and what processes of teaching and learning can look like, and whose responsibility they are.

I think that we are in a moment where collective political education, spiritual education, community education is really, really important, and that the state institutions that we've relied upon, that have not been reliable for many people for quite some time, right? But that, but that some folks have relied upon to be vectors of truth are failing us right now. And, we absolutely need to fight really, really hard to not simply relinquish them. We can't just cede that territory.

And at the same time, we can't wait to win that fight to keep teaching the things that we need young people to know.

I will give you an example. So in 1971, Faith Ringgold made this, uh, piece called The United States of Attica, referring to the Attica Uprising. And it's a map of the United States in the Pan-African flag colors and on it is, is like handwritten all of these different moments of injustice in US history and times when the United States has been a fundamentally unjust and oppressive country.

And in the same museum visit that I'm mentioning to you, I walked up and I started, I started looking at it, and I reached into my bag to get something. I pulled out this pen by accident, and the guard rushed over to me and she's a middle-aged Black woman. And I thought she was gonna be like, “No pens in the gallery.” And I was really ready to say, “I'm sorry.”

And she said, “It's so important that you write this down. You should write this down. This is important.” She said, “Just look at this map. Look at everything that it covers.” And she started just talking with me about how powerful that she felt this piece of art was. And she said, “We need to make sure that all of our kids see this,” right? “We need to make sure that our Black kids see this and that they understand this history, because they are not teaching this to us in schools. And I'm gonna make sure that you know, my daughter and her boyfriend and their kids that they come to this.”

And it was a really remarkable moment for me because it was clear that, you know, I don't think this woman would've said that she was a teacher. She wasn't the museum educator. She was the, she was the gallery guard. Right? But she had a vision of what, using this piece of art, right? By this incredible artist, Faith Ringgold, what it would look like to use that to engage in an inter-generational education. And she said in the moment, the things that we're talking about that are vital to us, they're not gonna be taught in schools. Right? And so, what do we do? And she's right, right? What do we do about that?

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Eve Ewing: And, those kinds of moments, whether they are spontaneous like that. Or whether they are organized, like reading groups, like moments of political education, those are really powerful to me. And the thing is, is that they have been crucial to the histories of marginalized people since the beginning of this country, right? And since prior to this country.

Frederick Douglass was not gonna learn how to read and write in a school. Right?

Dr. Val: No.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Harriet Tubman. Think about in order to do what she did, think about what kind of knowledge Harriet Tubman had to have. Like, think about, like, the knowledge of like way finding, the terrain,

Dr. Val: Yep.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Geography, psychology, right? How to get people to do, like, think about all the things she had to learn. Where does she learn those things?

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Not in a PhD program.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Not in a PhD program! Right? Not in a school. Native kids who still speak their, their Indigenous languages today, right? Where are they learning those things? Where are they learning their faith practices? Where are they learning their creation stories and the histories of their people?

It's really important in this moment for us to be as courageous as possible about that. And that is going to take us into the future, right? It's gonna sustain us in the present and it's gonna take us into the future. So, that was a, that was, that's my, that's my manifesto [Eve chuckles] for the moment.

Andrew: That’s good. That vision of a new version of education you tie up in the end of the book with this metaphor of braiding. I feel like there's sort of a braiding theme throughout the book. You have these three types of education that exist. These three forms of tools to achieve the goals of, of, you know, how we want to educate. These three tools of hope that you weave together in, in the book here.

Dr. Val: Well done there, sir!

Dr. Eve Ewing: Okay, Andrew! Wow!

[Val laughs]

Andrew: But you, you talk about this idea of teaching and learning through braiding. Help us understand the braiding metaphor and then if you would be so kind to read your piece on braiding.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Sure. I appreciate that. Well, you know, I'm a poet and I think that metaphors are important. And I think metaphors are important, not only because they make things, like, sound pretty, and because they engage the imagination, but because in so doing, that they help us remember things. And and that metaphors are a good place to begin a conversation because other people are always gonna take it further than you were able to as the writer.

And so, I landed on this metaphor of braiding, um, because of this piece of art that I talk about in the beginning of the passage that I'm happy to read. And I found it so powerful because of what we just talked about a minute ago regarding love, and the ways that braiding as a practice, to me, feels so bound up, pun-fully intended, so bound up with love.

And so, I think that's kind of where, where braiding came from. And the more I thought about it, the more it landed. So, maybe I'll read a little bit if that's cool.

Dr. Val: That would be great.

Andrew: We would be honored.

Dr. Eve Ewing: In June, 2020, I saw a piece of art by Sarah Ayaqi Whalen-Lunn (Iñupiaq) that I've thought about ever since. It's a drawing of two women, one Black and one Indigenous, standing back to back. Their chins are slightly lifted and they gaze off into the distance, surrounded by thinly outlined leaves and climbing flowers reminiscent of Whelan Lund's work as a skin stitch practitioner.

Each of them wears their hair in braids, and as their hair meets in the space between their backs, it is braided together. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” her love letter to botany, motherhood, and Indigenous ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer opens by describing the titular process, twisting and plating sweet grass, which is a sacred medicine.

She writes, “The sweetest way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing, watching each other's hands. One holding steady while the other shifts the slim bundles over one another. Each in its turn. Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you. Linked by sweet grass, the holder as vital as the braider.”

So yes, if I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see as James Baldwin says. But also, if I love you, I wanna take a walk with you. I wanna bake your favorite thing. I wanna tell you about a really good movie I just saw. I want to see and celebrate all the ways you shine. The special gifts and talents that make you who you are. I wanna see you jump and hug a tree and tap your toes. I want you to thrive. To prosper in your health and in the pursuit of your great joys. That's what love is. That's what braiding teaches us. And any teacher, any policy maker, any person in power who doesn't regard kids with love, doesn't deserve to be near them.

Love is the baseline. It's not extra and it's not optional, and it's not something you learn from a professional development session or diversity workshop. Love is fundamental.

I'm seven years old. My mother sends me to Miss Agnes to braid my hair. She scolds me in her Belizean accent, working her fingers through the knots in my head. In our kitchen, I watch as my mother flicks a lighter and singes the ends of her own braids, and I feel that I'm witnessing something secret and holy. In another woman's kitchen, my brother and I drink Kool-Aid and play with her son as she braids my mother's hair.

Braiding calls us in close. When we are grown and my brother's heart is hurting, I take down his braids and wash his hair in the sink so that it can be done up again. And it's like seeing the back of my own neck for the first time.

Braiding ushers in the impossible. My friends and I enter a new place and feel frightened, and we hold hands, braiding our fingers together. I'm on the other side of the world from the lands where I was born and poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu greets me with a smile and a basket she has woven, braiding flax into a vessel I will later use to hold a small altar after my grandmother becomes an ancestor.

A friend has had a baby and the world is small and sick, and she's having a hard time of it, and I think good thoughts for her and for her new daughter as I braid the puffy dough into a chocolate babka, something sweet among bitter days. My beloved looks over my scalp with a rat tail comb in a squint, pulling the strands of the plates freeze slowly, so as not to hurt me or snag my edges.

My mother, now all gray, comes to my house with something good for me to eat, and has brought the spray bottle to sit between my knees.

Dr. Val: Are you crying? You're totally crying!

Andrew: No.

Dr. Val: No you are! You are!

Andrew: It's just, it's beautiful.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Thank you.

Dr. Val: Yeah,

Andrew: Thank you.

I can't thank you enough. I'm so grateful for your work, I've been a huge fan for a long time. For all the work that you do for taking the time to be in this beautiful conversation with us. I really, really appreciate it.

Dr. Eve Ewing: Well, I've done a lot of interviews and I've gotten to do a lot of interviews for this book, and I think this is the best one.

Dr. Val: Yay!

Dr. Eve Ewing: You are so thoughtful and it's such an act of generosity to have read so closely and have come with such kind and thoughtful questions.

Dr. Val: So grateful. Thank you so, so much!

Dr. Eve Ewing: I, I like making people cry, also. [Val and Eve laugh]

Dr. Val: You nailed that. You nailed that. No, no, that was beautiful. That was beautiful.

[THEME MUSIC]

Andrew: So, Val, what'd you think?

Dr. Val: So much obviously, and I, I think I wanna start with schooling as a place of common myths, specifically around erasure.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Certainly my schooling erased many people from the narrative. And until recently, I don't know that I thought it was intentional. You know, as a child, you just think that stories aren't there to be told or that your teachers would tell them.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Right? And so, the idea that there's an intentional erasure of the narratives, and the people, is something that I think we, we really need to be honest about grappling with, because many of these themes, and ideas, and places, and names, you don't learn until you're an adult and you have to seek them out.

Andrew: It speaks to that idea of, you know, schooling as separate from education, that schooling is, is what happens in these places, that, as she says, people who have enough power shape what's happening in the school and the ideas that they want young people exposed to.

And I, yeah, I agree, there's so much that I have learned long after finishing going to school, that feels so relevant, both to the actual history of this country, but also to understanding the current state of affairs in this country, that I was never exposed to. And I think the way that schooling works is you are told that these are the things that are important. And things that are not taught in school are things that aren't important. And that speaks to that idea of erasure, that that comes up throughout her book.

Dr. Val: Right. And I love the way that she made the connections to how we are physically removing or erasing the Black and Brown and Indigenous bodies in our schools as well, right? And so it's not just curriculum based, but also we want to remove students that we don't know how to control, or might not fit into the mold from the place of learning.

I wanna laugh to keep from crying, because it it doesn't make any sense. Because we are intertwined, whether we like it or not. And so, if we give a shout out to her old title, like the ghosts aren't going anywhere. Like, the ghosts are here.

Andrew: Yep.

Dr. Val: And until we reconcile what we are doing in these places, that should be places of learning for all children, we're gonna be haunted.

Andrew: Mmm. And what do we do with those, what do we do with those ghosts? And I think certainly her book is a good place to start in terms of actually looking at them, and being in conversation with them. And I love this, theme that comes throughout her work is, is conversations through time and,

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: You know, actually being in conversation with those ghosts and, and hearing their stories and then looking at those people who were impacted and thinking, you know, what, what do they think about themselves in that moment?

Dr. Val: I'm so glad you brought up the point about being in conversation with the past and I think about the role we play. So we're in, we're in conversation with each other right now. We believe there's listeners out there who are in some ways in conversation with us, right? And so, we hear from people all the time that they, they do value, what we're saying and the conversations that we're having, and they're continuing these conversations at home.

But until this moment, until our conversation with her, I never thought about how our conversations will fit when we look in the past.

Andrew: Mmm. That’s scary

Dr. Val: That, that, isn't that terrifying!? [Val chuckles]

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: But there's always a belief that there weren't voices of opposition or, or, or people who weren't standing up. Depending on who wins, right? You just, you don't necessarily hear those voices. And the idea that people might find us 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, to check out what people were actually saying, that's humbling, in a lot of ways. And I, I hope what we're saying stands up. You know? I believe it will.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean it's, yeah, that's, it's terrifying because in some ways, if I agree with everything I, I said last week, then I'm not growing. Right? I think certainly going back and listening to past episodes of the podcast, I'm like, yeah. I don't know that I necessarily would say that in the same way right now.I'm not sure that I necessarily feel the same way about that. And I think we’ve–

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Andrew: –always tried to lean into growth, that there is always room to learn more, to know better, and to do better, as we always say. But I also hope that people far in the future would find value in some of these conversations and, in kind of planting a flag as this is, this is where we are right now and we're not afraid to be somewhere right now, even if we may be somewhere different down the road.

Dr. Val: And hopefully what they, they see down the road is that we also value love and connection and belonging.

I was really struck by schools is preparing young people to be active participants in democracy, and how it seems that we have failed in that effort. And so it made me question like what type of governing structure do, do schools prepare our young people to engage in?

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Val: It would be authoritarian. It would be loss of rights, it would be, like, restriction, like…

Andrew: Control and discipline.

Dr. Val: Like, that is the governing structure that we are preparing our young people to be in, more often than not.

Andrew: What that makes me think of actually is the Heather McGhee interview where she was talking about how her mom had poured into her, for her whole life, that she was worthy of anything she wanted, that she could go out and get anything she wanted.

And she never really understood what that meant until she got to her almost all White–

Dr. Val: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Andrew: –private boarding school where she saw the White kids walking through the world like they owned the place. And that was kind of her first actual in-person example of what this idea that her mom had fought so hard to instill in her, because she had not gotten it from any, anywhere else.

And so I do think that this, this idea that school has been set up in sort of, in three different ways that Dr. Ewing talks about, to prepare White kids for quote, unquote leadership class, to be good citizens. To, you know, subjugate Black kids, and to erase Native kids.

You know, Black people have refused to be subjugated, and Native people have refused to be erased. And because our school system has been set up to do those things, like, to me, that's why our democracy is struggling.

You know, I don't think we can have a democracy without public education.

Dr. Val: No, I don’t think we can either.

Andrew: I don't think that we can have a multiracial democracy without multiracial education. And yet, the ways that that is, you know, not achieving those goals, I think is because we haven't looked at these original sins that Dr. Ewing talks about.

She lands on this idea of, kind of, love and justice that sometimes feels squishy. But, even stopping and asking that question, what does it look like to love a student in this moment? Or as she said when she was, reading from her book, “Any teacher, any policymaker, any person in power who doesn't regard kids with love, doesn't deserve to be near them.”

Dr. Val: Hmm. We don't talk about love a lot on this show. I don't know that we've ever really dug into it as characteristic of the future that we believe in.

Andrew: That's interesting. Yeah, I don't think we have explicitly and, and, and yet, it seems so obvious. Like, of course, that's what we are trying to think about as a world that is based on love. Yeah, that's interesting.

Dr. Val: Right? I think for me, it's hard to imagine, as a former classroom teacher and still as an identified educator, it's hard for me to imagine not loving students to their highest potential.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Val: But that has to be one of the features of the future that we're trying to create. And we have to find language to talk about it in a way that people understand that it's not those really tasty, I'm, I enjoy those crunchy Valentine heart things like.

[Andrew chuckles]

I’m a stereotypical holiday candy person. Give me the candy corn and gimme those crunchy Valentine heart things.

Andrew: Valentine’s Day hearts. Yep.

Dr. Val: Absolutely. That's a part of the humanity that we should tap into more often, because everybody wants that. Everybody needs that.

Andrew: Yeah. One of the other things I really appreciated about Dr. Ewing is her willingness to put love on the same level as all the research she did, as the facts, as the sociology, that love and kind of an embodied love. Which is why, you know, I think the, the braiding section got me choked up is like, it's about love. It's about this idea of connection. .

Dr. Val: One thing that she demonstrated throughout the conversation is her genuine curiosity and wonder in the world. And I don't think you can love someone if you're not curious about them, and if you don't wonder about them.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Those things go hand in hand. And what can we do as a society, as caregivers in schools that increase that sense of just wonder so that we can love?

Andrew: Yeah, she said part of what we must do right now is be prepared to really unsettle our notions of what is a teacher, what is learning, and what processes of teaching and learning can look like, and whose responsibility they are.

If we think about the attacks on public education right now, if we think about the challenges to democracy right now, it sounds kind of “frou-frou” to say, “Well, like, let's come back to love.” But I do think that there is something powerful in the idea of, of what is a community based on love look like? What does learning based on love look like? What do conversations based in love look like? How do we build a society? There is no shortage of animosity. There's no shortage of division. How do we lean into curiosity that can get us to love and, and what does it look like to build education through the systems that we have right now that does that in a meaningful way?

Dr. Val: I left that conversation being incredibly grateful to be in communication with Dr. Ewing in a face-to-face conversation and through her books. I am grateful that we have someone like that in the world grappling with these things and sharing those ideas publicly with us.

Andrew: And willing to come and be in conversation with us, which is–

Dr. Val: For sure.

Andrew: –one of those things I just like, can't really believe!

Dr. Val: Like, how are we so cool?

Andrew: It's pretty awesome.

Dr. Val: This is an episode that I, I, I think you should have multiple listens. Like, it was layer on layer on layer on layer. So combining that with the book, um, such a rich and deep learning experience. I hope people listen, share it, talk about it. Because again, this is not just a conversation that stays between me and you, Andrew, and our guests, but a conversation that we want to ripple out.

Andrew: Both geographically now and also through time. So,

Dr. Val: That's right.

Andrew: Yes. It was a lovely conversation. The book is incredible, definitely worth picking up. There'll be a link in the show notes to our bookshop.org site where you can support local bookstores and also send a portion of the proceeds back to Integrated Schools. We'd be grateful for your support there.

Dr. Val: That's right. You can also support us by going to integratedschools.org and clicking on the big red donate button. I actually used that button the other day. It's so easy! You can, like, do it from your phone. Boop, donate.! Good things start to happen. Yep.

Andrew: Absolutely. You can also support us by joining our patreon, patreon.com/integratedschools.

If you are listening on Apple Podcasts right now, you can join IS+. This conversation that we just played for you is actually an edited down version of it. The conversation was so great and went quite long. So, we have the unedited version of the conversation that you can take a lesson to if you join IS+ on Apple Podcasts.

Dr. Val: That's right, and we want you to continue to be in conversation with us. You can do that very easily by leaving us a voice memo at speakpipe.com/integratedschools. That's S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-E.com/integrated schools.

Andrew: Let us know what you thought of the conversation. Let us know where you are finding love. What is possible, what is required for us to create an education system and more broadly a society that has a little more love in it, because I think we need it.

Dr. Val: That's right.

Andrew: Well, Val, this, as always, is a gift to me. I love being in conversation with you as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time.