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Hello and welcome to the excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, March 26, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Our 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 in many institutions like health care, employment, policing, and more.

Sociologists and author Eve L. Ewing's new book, Original Sins,

the miseducation of Black and Native children, and the construction of American racism

is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining us on the excerpt, Eve.

Thanks for having me. You start Original Sins sharing your argument on the purpose of schools,

which you say isn't only to educate.

Tell me about that.

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.

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? 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,

...