The Original Sins Tour with Eve L. Ewing - Detroit

We are so excited to host Eve L. Ewing for her now book Original Sins: The (Mis) education of Black and Native children and the Construction of American Racisim on Sunday February 16th at 6pm. We had to honor of being the bookseller for her visit to Detroit for the book Ghosts in the Schoolyard at James and Grace Boggs Center. This book is a must read for Educators and a eye opening read for the community members. We are delighted to call on education, parents, community members and history buffs to join this event.

This event is in partnership with the Wayne State University College of Education. The event will take place at the McGregor Memorial Conference Center.

About the event:

You can join the event on Sunday February 16th, we have book tickets in this link. If you purchase the book in store or online after February 11th and let us know you wish attend the event, we will make you get a ticket.

Wayne State Univeristy education staff and students you may purchase your ticket with a onecard discount with a promo code. The department will have the code.

The event location will mostly change to an offsite venue. The doors will open at 5:30pm. There will be a conversation about the book, time for question & answer followed by a book signing.

Why don’t our schools work? Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: what if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America's classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain our inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
“When I teach courses on education policy and race, I always begin on the first day of class by asking my students a simple question: What is the purpose of schools?”

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Schools were not an afterthought for the "founding fathers"; they were envisioned by Thomas Jefferson to fortify the country's racial hierarchy. And while those dynamics are less overt now than they were in centuries past, Ewing shows that they persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. Ewing argues that the most insidious aspects of the system are under the radar: standardized testing, tracking, school discipline, and access to resources.

About the Author

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning 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. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series, and is currently writing Black Panther. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

“Eve L. Ewing, one of the twenty-first century’s greatest intellectuals, proves that racism, colonialism, and carcerality started in the school. By reckoning with the violent, dehumanizing history of Black and Indigenous schooling, Ewing finds in the resistance of students and renegade teachers a path toward a life-affirming education.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
“Original Sins is a commitment to being true about the past in order to truly have a future. Fiercely hopeful, this is a book you will read, and then want everyone in your life to read—a book to be read in community.”—Eve Tuck, co-editor of Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education

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