NE: When systems don’t work or don’t produce a desired outcome, we believe they’re broken, but your argument is that our educational system is doing what it was designed to do.
EE: To use a contemporary colloquialism, it’s a feature, not a bug.
NE: Could you explain or just outline some of those designs, and how you put this book together to shape that argument?
EE: I started working in classrooms in 2005, and I became a full-time public school teacher in 2008. At that time, and something that continues into the present, is this idea of the achievement gap. And the suggestion, as you point out, is that these systems are broken, they’re not working, and if we just tweak them around the edges, or if we just make a correction here or there, it’s something that we can fix. One of the designs that I highlight is the way in which residential schools—boarding schools for Native young people in the United States—reflect a larger project of schooling for Native youth that was explicitly, intentionally, and transparently designed to play a role in genocidal eradication and land theft.
There are really specific, very transparent times when people like the US Secretary of the Interior and other government officials have said, “We can use schools to fight this war more effectively than we can fight it with guns and soldiers.” And so that’s one historical example. And then another example in the history of Black American education, specifically the schools opened up for freed slaves after Emancipation, which are some of the first universal public schooling efforts that we see not only in the South but in the United States—this effort to provide mass education during Reconstruction.
When one looks at the content of the textbooks that were produced—by and large by publishing companies in the North for dissemination and reproduction in the South—you can glean a specific intention not just to teach newly freed people how to read or how to do math, but to give them explicit moralist narratives that tell them, “Whatever you do, never strike the person who formerly enslaved you. Never treat them with hostility or vengeance; never be angry against them.” This idea really gets pushed to an absurd extreme: There’s one text that I cite where they say, “If the people who formerly enslaved you mistreat you or don’t respect your citizenship, tell them, ‘I have rights.’ And if they don’t listen to you, write your congressperson and let them know that you’re being disrespected.” The idea here is that literally any response is more legitimate and more desirable than the idea that formerly enslaved Black people should be resentful or violent, right?