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Please welcome.

Eve Ewing.

Welcome to the show.

This is so cool to have you here.

Shy Town, is that what you shouted?

Yeah, that is what you shouted.

Oh, nice, okay. You roll with a posse. This is nice.

It's a Chicago thing.

It's a Chicago thing?

They just shout this everywhere you go.

All the time, walking down the street all the time.

Okay, that could be very cool and then very distracting at other times.

Let's get into a story that is painful and yet all too familiar.

And funny enough, not just unique to America, but the story speaks about racism in schools

that are being closed on Chicago's south side.

It seems like a problem that many politicians would claim is just a financial issue. You are a teacher, you are somebody who's worked in this institution. What is the problem itself? Well, the problem is that in America, we have two different standards for what kinds of education we want to offer young people. So if you have money money or if you have access to private school or if

you live in an affluent suburb, you get access to a certain type of education. And if you are

poor and you're a person of color, especially if you're black, you get access to a different

type of education. And so when policymakers are making decisions about kids in those types of schools,

the kinds of schools I write about that people call failing schools, terrible schools, there's a different set of standards. And when you look at those different set of standards, how do they affect the kids? Because when I was reading through the book, there were instances and stories that really go back further in time than you would ever think the problem begins. You'd think, okay, let's just talk about the school. But you argue that you can't just look at the school, you have to look at everything that led up to the school. Why? Well, this is America where we know that our country is founded on a history of institutional racism and chattel slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and so on and so forth. And it may seem strange to bring those things up those things up when you're talking about a set of school closures that happened in 2013. But basically the argument I'm trying to make in the book is that in order for us to understand the way schools operate now, we have to understand that history. And it's not that, it's not that long ago. And so I wrote a book that's about 2013, but it begins in 1916 by talking about the Great Migration and how black people came to Chicago. And I think that that's something that's not just about Chicago, that's about the country we live in and that in most places, if you look at the history of how the city or the town got to be the way it is, there's racism in the mix. Spoiler alert, just because America. Let me ask you this. A lot of people shut down in America as soon as you bring up racism or race, as soon as you say that, people are like, oh, no, here we are again with racism. To those who argue that this is less about racism and more just about money, they say, well, Eve, it's not about black or white. It's about rich or poor.

How do you respond to that? Well, that's simply not true. And that's the first thing I would say.

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