review: Original Sins

title: Original Sins: The (Mis)Education of Black and Native Children and the Constrctuion of American Racism
author: Eve L. Ewing
date: One World Press; 2025
adult; nonfiction; history

“Eve L. Ewing is a writer and scholar who uses multi-genre storytelling, tools of sociological inquiry, archives, and community-grounded epistemologies to interrogate racialized histories and imagine emancipatory possibilities. A former public school teacher, she is particularly interested in the role of schools as social institutions and in the ways that schools can construct, normalize, and reinforce forms of social inequality, the ways that educational inequities reflect social cruelties beyond the walls of the school building, as well as, conversely, the still-lingering possibility that educational spaces can be sites of joy and liberation.

Ewing is the author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism is her most recent publication.” (source)

“This book is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s an invitation into a conversation, a tool for you to mark up and lend out and disagree with and share and highlight and bend out of shape, especially if you are a Black person, a Native person, an educator, a caregiver, a student, a person who has always felt like this school thing just feels a little off, or all of the above.” (p. 13)

Ewing invites us into a personal and collective story of education in the United States as it relates to Black and Indigenous children. I liked that Ewing wrote about her own experiences as an educator, as someone who didn’t have the historical knowledge that she does now. In doing so, she reminds readers to start where we are as she invites us into a conversation about the ways education has perpetuated inequity in this country. I don’t think the timing for such a book could be better, because with the dismantling of the US Department of Education, it opens us to the possibility of building a better framework for teaching all of our children. We can’t fix something that’s broken unless we know how it’s broken, unless we take the time to learn its history. I think this is a necessary book for librarians, parents and educators, for those invested in literacy to read.

While Ewing’s writing style is accessible and engaging, I found myself taking breaks to reflect on bits of information while simultaneously wanting to pass the book along so that I could talk with someone about the bits of information I was digesting. I admit that parts were bitter and heartbreaking. The truth of US history can be like that. Ewing writes to inform about an unpleasant past. The book concludes by re-emphasizing the importance of education and suggesting what we might consider in moving forward.

Eve L. Ewing is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.

Thanks to the Zinn Education Project for providing me with a copy of this book.

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