[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the Innovative Schools podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Andrew White Dad from Denver.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Anna White Mom from Phoenix.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is Eve viewing revisited.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are here with a bonus episode over the summer.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hard at work on season twelve, but thought we'd drop into your feeds and revisit an episode from last season with the incredible Eve viewing because it is our book club pick and book club is coming up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for chatting with me today.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to plug book club really quick.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're really excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are reading e-viewings original sins.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dates of book club are the end of September.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're really excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's four sessions we love for folks to come.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a really special book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just finished reading it, which is why I begged Andrew to come on so that we could revisit the podcast episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: and maybe get some of you excited to come and discuss with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, for any listeners who have not come to Book Club before and tell us about how Book Club works and why they should come and check it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So a little bit of history, Book Club was one of our first programs at Integrated Schools.
[SPEAKER_01]: It actually predates the podcast, believe it or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is from an era where we actually had to explain what this thing called Zoom was.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we had a description on the website that was like, you're going to see little pictures of other people from all over the country and you're going to be able to see their videos.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've been doing book club now for many, many years and it's a wonderful place where folks from across the country can log on and we usually have three to four sessions.
[SPEAKER_01]: We read about three to four books a year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is no obligation that you finish the book, although reading it is obviously recommended.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's wonderful, fruitful discussion, and we try to always unleash session with action items or follow up so that we can go from discussion into advocacy out in the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we've got a facilitator in each session and just lovely conversations.
[SPEAKER_02]: We get people from all over who are interested in school integration work, who are interested in having conversations about these books.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a space for everyone to contribute and to be heard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just this like lovely kind of brave space to have conversations about topics that we don't always get a chance to chat about.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have attended a book club in the past, you know that it's a great time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you haven't, now is the chance because this is really a spectacular book with an incredible author, Dr. Eve Ewing, who does it all in addition to original sins, the book that she just recently wrote.
[SPEAKER_02]: Her first work that I came across was Ghosts in the School Yard, which was a study of a bunch of schools in Chicago that were closed all at once.
[SPEAKER_02]: just really took a deep look at the history of those schools and the impact that it had on the community.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's a sociology professor but also she's a poet and she writes Marvel comics because she can do just about anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's created I think three X men characters and she wrote on the black Panther movie and she's just a really incredible voice and has a beautiful perspective on the world and the moment we're in and kind of the history that led us to this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I had the opportunity to actually meet Dr. Ewing in Phoenix when she was here recently, doing a reading at our local Bilingual Bookstore, which was super amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the byline of the book is the Miss Education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think if you've been following integrated schools for a while, the theme of how systemic racism hurts community, hurts society, hurts us all, it's not a new idea to most of our listeners and followers and community members.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one, she's an incredibly gifted writer, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the way she weaves in history,
[SPEAKER_01]: And her analysis is you just want to keep reading and reading.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would also say the unique perspective that she brings, which was hard for me to sit with, was schools were designed this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Public school was designed.
[SPEAKER_01]: to create a bifurcated system, to erase people's identity, to oppress marginalized groups and people of color.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with one of the examples she gives in the book, which is all about the Pledge of Allegiance, I had no idea that the Pledge of Allegiance was actually written for public schools in order to indoctrinate
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance says like this is to make people more like white and English accent and divorce them from their heritage and their culture.
[SPEAKER_02]: She highlights many of the flaws with our education system and the historical roots of those flaws, but without saying so we should abandon it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But with saying, you know, the only way that we actually get to something better is by embracing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The only way we get to something better is by demanding more of this system.
[SPEAKER_02]: We know that it was designed in order to replicate racial hierarchy, it could be designed to undo that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we have to make that choice if we want it to be something different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we can love something like public schools, but if we love it, we must be critical of its dirty origins.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the ways that those ensure that it continues to struggle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Until we face its origin story, we can't actually transform it into something better.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also want to give a shout out when I got the book, I bought it and I got it signed, which is really cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bought it at my local bookstore, which I highly recommend to all of you do, or head to bookshop.org.
[SPEAKER_01]: The link will be in the show notes, so you can buy it and a portion of your purchase goes to support our work here at Integrated Schools.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so we're gonna play the conversation that Val and I had with Dr. Ewing and then the original reflections that Val and I had after that conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: We did have Dr. Ewing read to us a little bit from her book.
[SPEAKER_02]: It may have made me a little bit emotional when I read it the first time it made me a little emotional when she read it to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: It made me a little emotional when I went back and revisited it just a couple of days ago before recording this with Ewing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it is really a beautiful piece of writing and just really lovely conversation that we had.
[SPEAKER_02]: with Dr. Ewing and a stick around after that to hear Val and I original reflections about the conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna, thank you for coming on and everybody go and sign up for a book club.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can't wait to see you all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much, Andrew.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alright, let's take a listen.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hi, I'm so happy to chat with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: My name is Eve viewing and I am a writer and a professor.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was wondering how you would handle that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I write lots of stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: I profess, you know, less stuff, but those are those are my two, my two deals.
[SPEAKER_02]: You write lots of stuff, poetry, you write comics for Marvel, your sociology professor, you've written a number of books.
[SPEAKER_02]: It covers a wide range of topics, a wide range of styles.
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems in the stuff that I've tried to read up on and the work of yours that I've been following for a long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are some themes that show up.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of them it seems to me is like communicating through time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ghosts 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got, I know you had a radio show where you were doing like studs, turkle interviews was like literally in conversation with interviews from the past.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I referred to as my co-host or sometimes my co-host.
[SPEAKER_03]: Since does where we're hosting the podcast together, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then original Sims, 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
[SPEAKER_02]: Where does that come from?
[SPEAKER_02]: This desire to be in conversation through time?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I really appreciate that thread.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that because some writers really identify themselves through a genre and I don't, I think that can be puzzling to people but all of my work is in a conversation in my own head.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm really grateful for you being able to find that kind of coherent thread.
[SPEAKER_03]: That means a lot to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm an out for a futurist.
[SPEAKER_03]: That means different things to different people.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, it means that I am interested in relationships with ancestors that we've had and the ancestors that we will be.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, thinking about time often, I'm not a very linear way, but in a cyclical or circular way.
[SPEAKER_03]: the way that time turns in on itself and you know it's more kind of like a swirling pool of water which all sounds very woo woo 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 in archival document or when you engage with somebody's voice
[SPEAKER_03]: through text in this way.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are actually talking to a person through time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you read a book that somebody wrote or a letter that somebody wrote a hundred or two hundred years ago, the person is talking to you in your head, you know, from the past.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you write something, that's what you're leaving.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're leaving away for people to talk to you from the future.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, like I said, I mean, a lot of it is really just that I like to go to the library.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I found a job that lets me do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that 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 two hundred years ago today, thinking about people in the future.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where does that come from?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that the fact that you feel like you're in conversation with these people?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so then you are curious about them?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think I'm nosy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think I'm curious about people in general.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm one of those folks that if you're sitting at dinner with me, you're talking to me in half way through.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, can you believe she said that?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're like, who?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, those people at the next table, have we both been?
[SPEAKER_03]: You haven't been listening for a long time.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're really missing out because her sister has not paid rent for three months.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really about to be spoused to be ugly.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm trying not to two sides, but you're like, no.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I'm one of those people, so I'm really nosy, I'm curious about things.
[SPEAKER_03]: I work in the tradition of black feminism as well and a lot of what that means is like reading my work in care work and thinking about love, thinking about empathy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes people see those as concepts that are maybe like not wholly intellectual or that the heart is somehow at odds with the head.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for me, I think that it's a really important form of knowledge to be able to understand things emotionally.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's some of where that comes from.
[SPEAKER_03]: I sometimes encapsulate this through a quotation from Gwendolyn Brooks who's 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 player seven at the Golden Shuffle.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's a really short poem that is she tells a story of being out in the middle of the day and walking by a pool hall in her community.
[SPEAKER_03]: and the door was open and she could see seven kids shooting pool.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she said, instead of asking myself, why aren't they in school?
[SPEAKER_03]: I ask myself, I wonder how they feel about themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that that question, it's not everything, but it can animate a set of concerns and a set of revelations that otherwise might not be obvious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's take a listen to Miss Brooks reading that poem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pool of players, seven at the goals and shovel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait, real, cool, wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go, we, we're like, we, strike, strike, we, sing, sing, we, then, Jim, we, just, Jim, we, die soon.
[SPEAKER_05]: When you were talking about the literature in the past, I just can't help but go to my grandfather.
[SPEAKER_05]: Who's letters?
[SPEAKER_05]: That's, I just wanted his voice in some way.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was thinking about how much it means to me to be in conversation with him.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wait, tell me more.
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you have his letters?
[SPEAKER_05]: I do have some of his letters when I was doing my dissertation work of which you are cited.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: At one point in the process, I was like, I just want to talk about my grandfather and I didn't know what that meant for me, but I desired to be close to him in some way.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so my dissertation was on professional learning for educator activists and what they need to support their efforts.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he would not have identified himself as an educator active figure.
[SPEAKER_05]: Sure, I'm right.
[SPEAKER_05]: That wasn't language, but he invited all of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I have many of his correspondence from people that demonstrated the work that he was doing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And how phenomenal is that?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for sharing that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for asking.
[SPEAKER_02]: The latest output, maybe not.
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel like I get a notification that you have something else published every two weeks or something, but the latest full book, I believe, is a real sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: The myth education of black and native children and the construction of American racism in 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: You write in that the schoolhouse, the most venerable and beloved image of American aspiration, hasn't rested and jellically on the sidelines, uninvolved with the construction of racial hierarchy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Rather, it has played a central role in furthering the work begun by slavery and set of our colonialism.
[SPEAKER_02]: help us understand that link between schooling and race in America.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe to start, you can help us understand why you use schooling as opposed to just education broadly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you're so, you guys have done the research.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll start by clarifying that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is by knowing the unique insight, but something that many scholars talk about that I think is important to begin with is
[SPEAKER_03]: The difference between schooling and education and so schooling is an institutional process.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And education is an endeavor that all people in all cultures have done since the beginning of time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that sometimes looks like sitting in a classroom and learning things from a teacher, but education can also happen on your own, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It can also happen
[SPEAKER_03]: outdoors taking a walk.
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds like it happened when Val was having those conversations with her grandfather through his letters.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so education is magical and miraculous and beautiful.
[SPEAKER_03]: And sometimes school supports education and sometimes it doesn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes it inhibits education.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can think of schools as a repository for ideological work.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I mean by that is that schools are a place where young people from a very young age are subject to a set of ideas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And some of those ideas about 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: The original sins of indigenous genocide and chattel slavery and the attendant ongoing violences that upheld and supported both of those institutions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you live in a country where on the one hand you're founding words and the most important credo is supposed to be
[SPEAKER_03]: that all men are created equal and out 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 in 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
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we reconcile that, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the book is really about the ways that schools do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_05]: The clarity, just broke my heart.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, I'm already teetering on the edge right now since November.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one thing that I highlighted that I think connects to where we are to now, page forty two, how is democracy supposed to work?
[SPEAKER_05]: And what role were schools to play and preparing white people to participate in and maintain that democracy?
[SPEAKER_05]: Given where I feel we are right now in terms of not maintaining a democracy?
[SPEAKER_05]: Can you just speak a little bit about those historical connections and what you're saying now?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 spend a lot of time writing it trying to say, man, I really need to martial as much evidence as I possibly can.
[SPEAKER_03]: to make it clear how I support these claims, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And the passage that you just read highlights this fact that part of my argument is that schools have prepared and continued to prepare white kids for participation in citizenry, active participation in civic life, and that fullness of that participation is not accessible to black and native people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the kind of thing where I'm like, man, I hope, you know, our people are going to read this and just be like, she's making this up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now we find ourselves in this position where people are actively having a conversation about birthright citizenship, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that conversation is certainly partially about undocumented folks in migrants, but it's also about black people who got our citizenship through constitutional amendment, right, which is now subject to kind of reinterpretation.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's also about Native folks who also weren't citizens until the beginning of the twentieth century in the nineteen twenties.
[SPEAKER_03]: And on their own land, right, 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 the land that you stole.
[SPEAKER_03]: But setting that aside, you know, it's a big thing to set aside.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's something that sucks at the time being.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's be talking about that for another hour, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But, but scrimly ironic, it would be funny if it weren't so deeply unfunny that I had these concerns like, oh, you know, is this going to be too big of a claim?
[SPEAKER_03]: And now, you know, within the weeks of the book being out, people are openly having this conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: at the highest halls of power, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, well, maybe these native people, maybe these black people, maybe they're not citizens after all.
[SPEAKER_03]: And another, one of these things that's like, stranger than fiction, you, you can make this up if you tried.
[SPEAKER_03]: There've been reports in the Southwest of Dene people of Navajo people being detained by Border Patrol and asking to prove their citizenship, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 i wish that there weren't so many connections i wish that i don't know i wish it were different but the other there are a lot of them
[SPEAKER_02]: You talk about the history of education, this like, you know, horseman ideal of education as the flywheel and the machinery 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you talk us through those kind of three different types of schooling?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I was 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: And school is to teach everybody how to have a coherent democratic society and how to participate in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there'd be a little sidebar, a little footnote, or a little paragraph, or a little special week on the syllabus, where I was like, well, not for everybody, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, in terms and conditions may apply.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's the main story, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Schools are for participation and the great equalizer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there are some notable exceptions, but let's all move on.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I really feel strongly that that's backwards, that I think that you actually can't understand schooling without understanding the history of what it has meant for black and native people.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that telling the story for me isn't a matter of representation or inclusion or people seeing themselves, but actually of historical accuracy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so to put a finer point on it, white kids basically schooling has historically served exactly that function, this idea of
[SPEAKER_03]: learning how to be a member of a good society.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I want to say that that hasn't entirely been benign for white children either, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Race suicide is a phrase that Teddy Roosevelt used.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, you know, we're going to be committing race suicide if we let too many of these people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe in
[SPEAKER_03]: So you know the idea was that those kids were to become as assimilated and as American as possible through that great melting pot.
[SPEAKER_03]: and that that would happen through things like learning the pledge of allegiance through things like learning how to eat bland food in the lunch room through things like playing games on the playground during recess and you know that's that's a sad story in some ways there's a 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
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's part of that story.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 forest 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Stories like they're all gone.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's sad, it's a tragedy, but you know, that was just the fate, that was just the destiny of this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, there's the history of boarding schools, the history of young people being kidnapped from their communities, being stolen away, being abused, being forced to speak English, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: spoken to adults and even children who say, I didn't know that there were any Native people anymore, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought that they were all gone.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's all past tense, all relegated to this kind of romanticized mythical past, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Instead of saying like, no, there are Native people now alive here, resistant, resilient, and also this is still their land.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's still still in the end, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That hasn't changed.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that narrative of disappearance for native people really becomes the purpose of schooling for them.
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea that schooling is to really further and institutionalize this project of disappearance.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for black people, schooling has really been a tool of creating subservience.
[SPEAKER_03]: And part of that is because if you think about it, the long deray of enslavement, the long deray of travel slavery as an institution,
[SPEAKER_03]: in the United States, gave people an economic incentive to make as many enslaved people as possible, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Often through horrific tactics, through sexual assault, right, through literally breeding people like their animals, counting them trading and selling them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so then you find yourself in a moment where after the emancipation proclamation,
[SPEAKER_03]: their huge communities where the majority of black people live.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what do you do when you are a white person who is formerly a member of the planter class and you look around and they're all these black people, perhaps more of them than there are of you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they now allegedly have some sort of rights and you look not too far away to Haiti and you see what can happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so school becomes a way to tell black people that they are nothing, that they are subservient, that the best thing that they can do in their lives is to be obedient.
[SPEAKER_03]: to work, work, work, work is much as possible because that's another thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's still need them to work for you in order to keep your economy going, but now they're not enslaved anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: So how are you going to do that, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's how we see, you know, the debt-pionage and the share-cropping and the convict labor and all these things that we see in the after-lives of slavery and reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Carter G. Woodson said lynching begins in the classroom because it was the first place that people start to learn that black life is not valuable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you see again the necessity of that if you have decided that you're not going to face up to the uglier reality, which is that the country is built on the legacy of slavery.
[SPEAKER_02]: Leader ship for white people, erasure for native people and subjugation for black people.
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: How's your white supremacy had it found?
[SPEAKER_05]: I get one.
[SPEAKER_05]: So speaking of the disappearance, something else that I pulled out, school exclusion is fundamentally a strategy of disappearance.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you wrote about being a middle school teacher.
[SPEAKER_05]: I too was a middle school teacher.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, the best people.
[SPEAKER_05]: The best people.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I felt convicted reading this section for good reason.
[SPEAKER_05]: And my past practice I remember early on, you know, and this was just modeled behavior, you know, of course.
[SPEAKER_05]: I would send somebody out of the class and then I felt really good about myself when I created a section in my classroom that was just like a
[SPEAKER_05]: little check and I was like, hey, let's go check in.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so I didn't have to send someone out of the class, but right, I, and I felt good about that even though it still was exclusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and I just want to say there are times when we say to people, these are the norms and boundaries of this community.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I can't speak to what was happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I don't I wasn't there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, I was like my personal was like y'all better not send these kids up.
[SPEAKER_03]: You said it out of the office to do what we said he said I'm gonna send them right back exactly and then you're gonna feel you're gonna feel silly when they're at the door like not
[SPEAKER_03]: So, and I mean that, not just in classrooms, I mean that in communities in general, in friendships and so I think accountability is important and we have to teach young people accountability.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's different from this kind of disappearance strategy that I'm talking about where I'm drawing a little bit from work from Angela Davis, right, where she talks about the ways that prisons disappear people.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot easier to lock people away and punish them than it is actually face those things.
[SPEAKER_03]: And really, the broader issue is that notion of punishment, that we live in a society that oftentimes turns to punishing people as our first line of defense, as our first reaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: The very first thing we do, instead of sometimes thinking like what could we do instead?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's not just a school's problem, that's an American problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are a carceral culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are a culture that turns to punishment first, even when it doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't make a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: are we doing this knee-jerk reaction to just punishing people without actually asking, you know, why did this young person do this thing?
[SPEAKER_03]: And what do we actually want?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what do we actually want to be the outcome?
[SPEAKER_03]: And how do we get there?
[SPEAKER_03]: And more often than not, just suspending somebody for a couple days is not the way to do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: removing kids from the classroom, sort of 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 that's a racer.
[SPEAKER_02]: You also talk about intellectual inferiority and economic subjugation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you put a little more meat on the bones of assumed intellectual inferiority of black kids?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so this is basically the idea that we are inherently less smart and that white people are inherently more smart.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a assumption that we are intellectually inferior.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in a very pernicious way, we see that playing out now with the DEI debate, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: The any native person who's in a position cannot possibly have earned that position.
[SPEAKER_03]: As a black person moving through higher education spaces, this is something that people will say to your face.
[SPEAKER_03]: And as well, because it's like, you know, good and well that I'm better at this thing than you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, one obnoxious example being the Abigail Fisher case a few years ago, right, and her protestation about not being admitted to the University of Texas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she actually didn't meet the cut off to be admitted, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's just a kind of unchecked assumption, like, well, such and such type of person is stealing my spot, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, if things were fair, I would be above any not white person.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if I am not, then I must be the victim.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've just put it so perfectly.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to be quoting you here after.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's exactly right.
[SPEAKER_03]: If things were fair, the default is that I would be on the top.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if I'm not on the top, something is wrong.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we see this playing out in various temper tantrums happening in our political scene right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's also been baked structurally into some of the ways that schools function.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so one example is that 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they're basically like beta testing questions, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like they put in a couple of testers to see how do people do on them?
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't count on your score, but they use them to see, okay, is this a good question in the future or not?
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what makes it a good question is partially that you want to kind of a normal distribution curve, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So everybody shouldn't get it right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody shouldn't get it wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And there should be lots of people kind of in between.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they found that if there were questions where white students by random happenstance did better, then the question would be kept.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if there were questions where by random happenstance black students as a group did better, they would be thrown out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the idea was just, if Black kids did better on the question, the question must be broken, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been so fortunate to tour all around talking about this book with lots of different people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the interviewer asked me about that over the weekend at NaVen, and, you know, I shared with them when I just shared with you, and everybody audibly gasped.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then I said, okay, a lot of you, there are a lot of teachers in the audience.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you were looking over your test score data, and you saw that there was a question, yeah, you see where I'm going?
[SPEAKER_03]: If you looked over a practice test that you did, and you saw that there were a bunch of questions where all the white kids in your school did better, you probably wouldn't think twice about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe, you can, I mean, you might take it yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Before you record yourself as the proverb says, you know, another example of this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, this is an African American proverb.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm basically insufferable in annoying to talk to because I find myself in a lot of conversations with people who are 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, well, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: right?
[SPEAKER_03]: This person is really gifted.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even people say that to me, you're so gifted.
[SPEAKER_03]: I say what do you mean by that?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know what do you mean when you say I'm smart?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And how is it that in schools we often have a very narrow view of that that punishes kids for not performing in a certain kind of way.
[SPEAKER_03]: So anyway, I'm going on a characteristic tangent, but obviously I care a lot about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Talk to us about the economic subjugation bucket.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've heard about discipline and punishment.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, I want to have a whole separate entire episode about testing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of that, because that really gets into this intellectual inferiority bucket.
[SPEAKER_02]: But talk about the economic subjugation bucket.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure, this was one of the more interesting chapters for me to write, you know, as many scholars and education have written for a long time, not just in the US, but around the globe.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the functions of education has historically been to create these tracks, right, in a capitalist society.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 counselors office and said I want to go to college they'd say the witch hop is over there
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And sometimes it's tracks where those young people don't even see each other.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Many of them might be descended from some of the past leaders of this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: We see that in things like legacy admissions as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: So tracking can look very obvious, right, or it can look less obvious.
[SPEAKER_03]: But something that fascinated me was I got to reading these textbooks that were from the early days of emancipation that were written for freed people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you think about it again, this is a country where not just in the south.
[SPEAKER_03]: The country has come to rely on having this steady labor force of black people, working for free.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's not something that just benefits, say, a cotton plantation in the South, because who do they sell the cotton to?
[SPEAKER_03]: They sell to the textile mill in the North, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that textile mill employs however many people, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And then that feeds into that economy of that town.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so historian Eric Foner says basically I'm paraphrasing here, but he says the problem with free black labor becomes the definitive problem of the twentieth century because how are you going to get these black people to still labor for you for as cheaply as possible?
[SPEAKER_03]: Enter schools once again, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you don't, the enslaved people that are in the other parts of the world and the Spanish colonies and in Brazil, the governments there are going to look at you and they're going to say, you know, look how awful those black people in the US are and they're never going to free your cousins.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're never going to free your brethren because you didn't work hard enough.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you have to keep your cabin clean and accumulate as much money as you can.
[SPEAKER_03]: And another thing that I found really fascinating was this focus on capitalistic accumulation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nowadays, we have this culture where people are starting to question their relationship to work.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're starting to talk about wellness and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, indigenous people, but since time immemorial on the lands and waters of this country,
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 feeding themselves that we're not about I need to get as much as possible as much as possible as much as possible.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the same issue 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 want to do is just grow enough food to feed their families and just have like a house to be warm and to be comfortable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then after that, they just want to rest or have leisure.
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't want to just keep working.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we have to teach them that it is a Christian good, it is a moral good, it is a moral necessity.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: You need them to come be in this exploitative labor relationship with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a gentleman named Merrill Edward Gates who was at one point the chair of one of the government entities that oversaw, quote unquote Indian affairs.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he later on became a university leader at some elite universities in the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's this quote that he has that I use in the beginning of 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because again, how do you get people's land?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you have leverage over them if they don't want to be part of your system?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so watermelon is, number one, incredibly delicious.
[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, incredibly easy and cheap to grow.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's really good for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really nutritious.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is really hydrating.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has a lot of minerals.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there were black people that grew watermelon as a subsistence crop after they were freed.
[SPEAKER_03]: But black people growing watermelon as a subsistence crop disincentivized them for wanting to go do
[SPEAKER_03]: exploitative sharecropping and tenant farming, that is where this negative stereotype about black people leading watermelon comes from, where people started drawing really ugly caricatures, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And the watermelon comes to represent laziness, indolence, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Not wanting to work.
[SPEAKER_03]: those kinds of things really fascinated me because I think when I started working on the book I thought I would be writing a lot about blackheads 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 capital system but only in the ways that we allow you to so that we can extract as much as possible for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll give you one more very troubling and telling example.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 couldn't speak their own language, they were beaten, they were mistreated.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they would send them to work on farms.
[SPEAKER_03]: They would send the girls to be domestic.
[SPEAKER_03]: in white people's homes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there were some schools where eventually the white women said, well, you know, I really need her here Monday through Friday, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so she can come back to the school on the weekends.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so now are you a student or are you a maid, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: An unpaid maid.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're subject to the whims of, you know, some random awful person who doesn't know you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I actually found a newspaper article that there was a boarding school for Native children that was supposed to be open in a particular location.
[SPEAKER_03]: And agricultural leaders of the area lobbied successfully 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they actually said in print in the paper, you know, this is going to be a great source of cheap labor for us.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it goes very, very deep into the purpose of schools themselves and not just what you learn when you get there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the end, you come to these three tools of love and justice and flourishing as kind of a way to think about a better path forward, talk to us about love and justice and flourishing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, I forgot about that until you got it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am an advocate for sometimes restoring elements to these conversations that might seem to people to be like fuzzy or nebulous things like love, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But I actually think it's really necessary because when I sit back, you know, 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 it's that and the other.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 going to start treating them differently in ways
[SPEAKER_03]: that undermine the intentions of the country in which you find yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if that is what is missing, then I think that that's actually a pretty good place to start.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was in a museum today.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's an exhibit in Chicago right now called Project A Black Planet.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's about a pan-Africanism pan-African art.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I went in the middle of the day.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you go to the museum on a Monday at eleven a.m.
[SPEAKER_03]: Who's there is a bunch of kids, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I was really happy because it was a huge exhibit full of black art from all across the diaspora and from all different time periods.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was really fantastic.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was watching this group of almost all black children, and maybe like, you know, fourth and fifth grade.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they had their little work sheets that they had to complete and they were all running around.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was watching two different Shaperone groups.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was one Shaperone group where, man, this one tile cannot catch a break.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every time he moved, it was, don't touch that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Stop, you know, step over here, step back.
[SPEAKER_03]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: And at one point I watched this adult, you know, physically grab his elbow and try to pull him away.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she's like, why are you standing so close?
[SPEAKER_03]: Why are you looking so close?
[SPEAKER_03]: And it really broke my heart.
[SPEAKER_03]: It really broke my heart.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I watched another Shaperone having just kind of open discussion with the kids, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is same school, probably same classroom, same demographic of kids.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've been a Shaperone, I've run a field trip.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know that it's not easy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I know that there are those young folks that are, you know, like all people, they're always some folks that are going to
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if I knew this person and she trusted me and I were to ask her, you know, do you love this child?
[SPEAKER_03]: And what does it look like to treat him with love in this moment?
[SPEAKER_03]: What does love look like to you?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the way you would talk to your child?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the way you would want someone to talk to your child?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the way you talk to your niece or your nephew?
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe, hey, you know what?
[SPEAKER_03]: Love looks lots of different ways for lots of different people.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it was tough.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was really tough.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that I think that love, like really, really thinking hard about it, really
[SPEAKER_03]: 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's one place where I hope people begin as sister asking those critical questions in different moments.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to read you a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: This very powerful thing that you wrote 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: In building the relationships we need to topple an unjust world, we are also strengthening the muscles we need to care for one another.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are stitching together microcosms of the world that will replace the ones we have.
[SPEAKER_03]: That sounds good.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so good.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so good to kind of turn your themes back on you a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: This conversation, the book is in is in conversation with so many people from the past.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like gift.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think to welcome us into those conversations.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that look like?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's actually very much how we think about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: I knew it would come out February, eleven.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know, you know, I didn't know when in the world would look like.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, one in the arc of history would come out.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 in the future.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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
[SPEAKER_03]: processes of teaching and learning can look like and whose responsibility they are.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that we are in a moment where collective political education, spiritual education, community education is really, really important.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that the state institutions that we've relied upon that have not been reliable for many people for quite some time, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But that some folks have relied upon to be vectors of truth are failing us right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We absolutely need to fight really, really hard to not simply relinquish them.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't just see that territory.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will give you an example.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in nineteen seventy-one faith wringled made this piece called the United States of Attica, referring to the Attica uprising.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a map of the United States in the Pan-African flag colors.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Anna 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in the same museum visit that I mentioned to you, I walked up and I started looking at and I reached into my bag to get something.
[SPEAKER_03]: I pulled out this pen by accident.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the guard rushed over to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she's a middle aged black woman.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought she was going to be like, no pens in the gallery.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was really ready to say, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she said, it's so important that you write this down.
[SPEAKER_03]: You should write this down.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is important.
[SPEAKER_03]: She said, just look at this map.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look at everything that it covers.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she started just talking with me about how powerful that she felt this piece of art was.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she said, we need to make sure that all of our kids see this, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to make sure that, you know, my daughter, her boyfriend and your kids that they come to this.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was a really remarkable moment for me because it was clear that, you know, I don't think this woman would have said that she was a teacher.
[SPEAKER_03]: She wasn't the museum educator.
[SPEAKER_03]: She was the gallery guard, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But she had a vision of what using this piece of art by this incredible artist Faith Ringold, what it would look like to use that to engage in an intergenerational education.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she said, in the moment, the things that we're talking about that are vital to us, they're not going to be taught in schools, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what do we do?
[SPEAKER_03]: And she's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: What do we do about that?
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the thing is, is that
[SPEAKER_03]: They have been crucial to the histories of marginalized people since the beginning of this country, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And since prior to this country, Frederick Douglas was not going to learn how to read and write in a school, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Harriet Tubman.
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about in order to do what she did, think about what kind of knowledge Harriet Tubman had to have.
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about the knowledge of way finding the terrain, geography, psychology, how to get people to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about all the things she had to learn.
[SPEAKER_03]: Where does she learn those things?
[SPEAKER_03]: Not in the PhD program, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Not in the school, you know, native kids who still speak their indigenous languages today, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where are they learning those things?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where are they learning their faith practices?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where are they learning their creation stories and the histories of their people?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really important in this moment for us to be as courageous as possible about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is going to take us into the future, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to sustain us in the present and it's going to take us into the future.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's my, that's my, that's my manifesto.
[SPEAKER_02]: That vision of a new version of education, you tie up in the end of the book with this metaphor of braiding.
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel like there's sort of a braiding theme throughout the book.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have these three types of education that exist, these three forms of tools to achieve the goals of, you know, how we want to educate these three tools of hope that you weave together in the book here.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, some mayors.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, answer it now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you talk about this idea of teaching and learning through braiding.
[SPEAKER_02]: Help us understand the braiding metaphor, and then if you would be so kind to read your piece on braiding.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure, I appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you know, I'm a poet, and I think that metaphors are important, and I think metaphors are important.
[SPEAKER_03]: not only because they make things like sound pretty, then because they engage the imagination, but because in so doing that they help us remember things and that metaphors are a good place to begin a conversation because other people are always going to take it further than you were able to as the writer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I landed on this metaphor of braiding because of this piece of art that I talk about in the beginning of the passage that I'm happy to read.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I found it so powerful because of what we just talked about a minute ago regarding love.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the ways that braiding as a practice to me feels so bound up fully intended, so bound up with love.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that's kind of where we're braiding came from and the more I thought about it, the more it landed.
[SPEAKER_03]: So maybe I'll read it a little bit if that's cool.
[SPEAKER_03]: In June, in June, twenty-twenty, I saw a piece of art by Sarah Iyaki Willen-Lun and UPAC that I thought about ever since.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a drawing of two women, one black and one indigenous standing back to back.
[SPEAKER_03]: Their chins are slightly lifted and they gaze off into the distance, surrounded by thinly outlined leaves and climbing flowers, reminiscent of Willen-Lun's work as a skin-stitch practitioner.
[SPEAKER_03]: Each of them wears their hair and braids, and as their hair meets in the space between their backs, it is braided together.
[SPEAKER_03]: In braiding sweet grass, her love letter to botany, motherhood, and indigenous ecology, robin wall-camera, opens by describing the titular process, twisting and plating sweet grass, which is a sacred medicine.
[SPEAKER_03]: She writes, the sweetest way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other.
[SPEAKER_03]: All the while leaning in head to head, chatting and laughing, watching each other's hands.
[SPEAKER_03]: One holding steady while the other shifts the slim bundles over one another.
[SPEAKER_03]: Each in its turn.
[SPEAKER_03]: Linked by sweet grass, there is reciprocity between you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Linked by sweet grass, the holder, as vital, as the braider.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yes, if I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see as James Baldwin says.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, if I love you, I want to take a walk with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to bake your favorite thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to tell you about a really good movie I just saw.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to see and celebrate all the ways you shine.
[SPEAKER_03]: The special gifts and talents that make you who you are.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to see you jump and hug a tree and tap your toes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want you to thrive to prosper in your health and in the pursuit of your great joys.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what love is.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what braiding teaches us.
[SPEAKER_03]: and any teacher, any policy maker, any person in power who doesn't regard kids with love doesn't deserve to be near them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Love is the baseline.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not extra and it's not optional and it's not something you learn from a professional development session or diversity workshop.
[SPEAKER_03]: Love is fundamental.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm seven years old.
[SPEAKER_03]: My mother sends me the misagnes to braid my hair.
[SPEAKER_03]: She scolds me in her bellesian accent, working her fingers through the knots in my head.
[SPEAKER_03]: In our kitchen, I watch as my mother flicks a lighter in synges the ends of her own braids, and I feel that I am witnessing something secret and holy.
[SPEAKER_03]: In another woman's kitchen, my brother and I drink cool aid and play with her son as she braids my mother's hair.
[SPEAKER_03]: Braiding calls us in close.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's like seeing the back of my own neck for the first time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Braiding usher's in the impossible.
[SPEAKER_03]: My friends and I enter a new place and feel frightened, and we hold hands, braiding our fingers together.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm in the other side of the world from the lands where I was born, and poet Anne Marie Tayhu greets me with a smile and a basket she has woven, braiding flags into a vessel.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will later use to hold a small altar after my grandmother becomes an ancestor.
[SPEAKER_03]: A friend has had a baby, and the world is small and sick, and she's having a hard time of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think good thoughts for her and for her new daughter as I braid the puffy dough into a chocolate bobca, something sweet among bitter days.
[SPEAKER_03]: My beloved looks over my scalp with a rat tail comb in a squint, pulling the strands of the plates free slowly, so as not to hurt me or snag my edges.
[SPEAKER_03]: My mother, now all gray, comes to my house with something good for me to eat, and has brought the spray bottles to sit between my knees.
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you crying?
[SPEAKER_03]: You're totally gray.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's crying.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just it's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't thank you enough.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm so grateful for your work.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been a huge fan for a long time for all the work that you do for taking the time being this beautiful conversation with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: I really appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I've done a lot of interviews and I've gotten to do a lot of interviews with this book and I think this is the best one.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're so thoughtful and it's such an active generosity to have read so closely and have come with such kind and thoughtful questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so so much.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I like making people cry also.
[SPEAKER_05]: You nailed that.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no, that was beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: So though, what do you think?
[SPEAKER_05]: So much, obviously, and I think I want to start with schooling as a place of common myths, specifically around a racer.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Certainly, my schooling erased many people from the narrative.
[SPEAKER_05]: And until recently, I don't know that I thought it was intentional.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, as a child, you just think that stories aren't there to be told or they your teachers would tell them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the idea that there's an intentional erasure of the narratives and the people with something that I think 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: It speaks to that idea of schooling as separate from education, that schooling 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so much that I have learned long after finishing going to school.
[SPEAKER_02]: That feels so relevant both to the actual history of this country.
[SPEAKER_02]: But also to understanding the current state of affairs in this country that I was never exposed to.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that speaks to that idea of a ratio that that comes up throughout her book.
[SPEAKER_05]: 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?
[SPEAKER_05]: 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.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want to laugh to keep from crying because it doesn't make any sense because we are in trying whether we like it or not.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so if we give a shout out to her old title, like the ghost aren't going anywhere, like the ghosts are here.
[SPEAKER_05]: And until we reconcile what we are doing in these places that should be places of learning for all children, we're going to be haunted.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what do we do with those, what do we do with those ghosts?
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I love this theme that comes throughout her work is conversations through time and actually being in conversation with those ghosts and hearing their stories and then looking at those people who were impacted and thinking, what do they think about themselves in that moment?
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm so glad you brought up the point about being in conversation with the past and I think about the role we play.
[SPEAKER_05]: So we're in conversation with each other right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: We believe there's listeners out there who are in some ways in conversation with us, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: And so we hear from people all the time that they do value what we're saying and the conversations that we're having and their continuing these conversations at home.
[SPEAKER_05]: But until this moment, until our conversation with her, I never thought about how our conversations will fit when we look in the past.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's scary.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that isn't that terrifying.
[SPEAKER_05]: But there's always a belief that there weren't voices of opposition or people who weren't standing up.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, depending on who wins, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: You just, you don't necessarily hear those voices.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the idea that people might find us ten, twenty, thirty, forty years from now to check out what people were actually saying.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's humbling in a lot of ways.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I hope what we're saying stands up.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I believe it will.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think, certainly going back and listening to past episodes, the podcast, like, yeah, I don't know that I necessarily would say that in the same way right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure that I can necessarily feel the same way about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've always tried to lean into that there is always room to learn more, to know better, and to do better, as we always say.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I also hope that people far in the future would find value in some of these conversations and kind of planting a flag.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_05]: And hopefully what they see down the road is that we also value love and connection and belonging.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was really struck by schools as preparing young people to be active participants in democracy and how it seems that we have failed in that effort.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it made me question like what type of governing structure just the schools prepare our young people to engage in.
[SPEAKER_05]: It would be authoritarian.
[SPEAKER_05]: It would be loss of rights.
[SPEAKER_05]: It would be like restrict like control and discipline.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like that is the governing structure that we are preparing our young people to be in more often than not.
[SPEAKER_02]: What that makes me think of actually is the Heather McGee interview where she was talking about how her mom had poured into her for her whole life.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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 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
[SPEAKER_02]: what this idea that her mom had fought so hard to instill in her because she had not gotten it from anywhere else.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I do think that this idea that school has been set up 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: And because our school system has been set up to do those things, like to me, that's why our democracy is struggling.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think we can have a democracy without public education.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that we can have a multiracial democracy without multiracial education.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet the way that that is not achieving those goals, I think is because we haven't looked at these original sins that Dr. Ewing talks about.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or as she said, when she was reading from her book, any teacher, any policy maker, any person in power who doesn't regard kids with love doesn't deserve to be near them.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't talk about love a lot on the show.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know that we've ever really dug into it as characteristic of the future that we believe in.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't think we have explicitly, and yet it seems so obvious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, that's what we are trying to think about as a world that is based on love.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think for me, it's hard to imagine as a former classroom teacher, and it's still as an identified educator.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's hard for me to imagine not loving students.
[SPEAKER_05]: to their highest potential.
[SPEAKER_05]: But that has to be one of the features of the future that we're trying to create.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we have to find language to talk about in a way that people understand that it's not those really tasty.
[SPEAKER_05]: I enjoy those crunchy Valentineheart things.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, I'm a stereotypical holiday candy person.
[SPEAKER_05]: Give me the candy corn and give me those crunchy Valentineheart things.
[SPEAKER_05]: They are absolutely.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's a part of the humanity that we should tap into more often.
[SPEAKER_05]: because everybody wants that, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Everybody needs that.
[SPEAKER_02]: 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, just 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.
[SPEAKER_05]: One thing that she demonstrated throughout the conversation and it's her genuine curiosity and wonder in the world.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I don't think you can love someone if you're not curious about them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you don't wonder about them, yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think those things go hand in hand.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what can we do as a society as caregivers and schools that increase that sense of just wonder so that we can love?
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: If we think about the attacks on public education right now, we think about the challenges to democracy right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sounds kind of fru-fru to say, well, like, let's come back to love.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that there is something powerful in the idea of what does a community based on love look like?
[SPEAKER_02]: What does learning based on love look like?
[SPEAKER_02]: What does conversations based in love look like?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we build a society there is?
[SPEAKER_02]: no shortage of animosity, there's no shortage of division.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we lean into curiosity that can get us to love?
[SPEAKER_02]: And what does it look like to build education through the systems that we have right now that does that in a meaningful way?
[SPEAKER_05]: I love that conversation being incredibly grateful to be in communication with Dr. Ewing and a face-to-face conversation and through her books.
[SPEAKER_05]: I am grateful that we have someone like that in the world grappling with these things and sharing those ideas publicly with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: and willing to come and be in conversation with us, which is so interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: For
[SPEAKER_02]: at both geographically now and also three times.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it was a lovely conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: The book is incredible.
[SPEAKER_02]: Definitely worth picking up.
[SPEAKER_02]: They'll be linked 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'd be grateful for your support there.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can also support us by going to integrated schools dot org and clicking on the big red donate button.
[SPEAKER_05]: I actually use that button another day.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so easy.
[SPEAKER_05]: You don't like do it from your phone.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, donate.
[SPEAKER_05]: Good things are to heaven.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also support us by joining our Patreon, patreon.com slash integrated schools.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you are listening on Apple podcasts right now,
[SPEAKER_02]: You can join IS Plus.
[SPEAKER_02]: This conversation that we just played for you is actually an edited down version of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The conversation was so great and went quite long.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have the unedited version of the conversation that you can take a lesson to if you join IS Plus on Apple Podcast.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's right, and we want you to continue to be in conversation with us.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can do that very easily by leaving us a voice memo at speakpipe.com slash integrated schools.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's SPEAKPIP.com slash integrated schools.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let us know what you thought of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let us know where you are finding love.
[SPEAKER_02]: What is possible?
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Val, this, as always, is a gift to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love being in conversation with you as I try to know better than do better.
[SPEAKER_05]: Until next time.