Veronica

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

“For White students, schools have been intended to provide unified leadership for a unified nation. For Black students, schools have been aimed at establishing a class of subservient laborers. And for Native students, schools have been designed to normalize that vision which Jefferson painted as inevitable: total disappearance.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“Building power through collective struggle means that when we band together in groups of people who share many things in common—not everything, but many things—and we decide we want to work toward something, the very process of doing that is the practice of making the world we want to live in. In building the relationships we need to topple an unjust world, we are also strengthening the muscles we need to care for one another; we are stitching together microcosms of the world that will replace the one we have.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

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