Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and physical abuse.

When Ewing first starting teaching, the US education system was focused on the “achievement gap” between higher- and lower-performing students. To close that gap, teaching centered high-stakes testing; the collected data would be used to facilitate student and teacher tracking.

Testing data tended to show that children of color were performing significantly worse than white students. However, Ewing argues that the gap was primarily used to confirm the “unspoken assumption” that “Black people and Native people are inherently less intelligent or intellectually capable than White people” (98)—an entrenched idea that is rarely questioned.

Research has corroborated the existence of this assumption about Indigenous and Black capability. For example, in 1986, a study in Alaska showed that teachers in majority-white schools were significantly more likely to agree that their students were at or above the national average than teachers in majority-Indigenous schools. Ewing emphasizes a salient difference: Teachers of even poorly performing white students believed their students could achieve the national average, while teachers of Indigenous students largely believed that theirs couldn’t. Additionally, in a 1984 survey of 1,000 education experts, 45% believed that differences between the IQs of Black and white students were partially due to genetics.