
Original Sins
The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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Eve L. Ewing
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By:
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Eve L. Ewing
About this listen
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. 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 the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
“This book will transform the way you see this country.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.
In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.
By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.
*Includes a downloadable PDF containing a bibliography, notes, and images described in the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Critic reviews
“This stark critique of America’s schools anchors our current educational system in eighteenth-century ideas about race and intelligence. Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia through Jim Crow to present-day policies on housing, zoning, and standardized testing, Ewing argues that this system was always intended to operate differently for different people.”—The New Yorker
“Ewing invites readers to consider the power of education toward liberation—schools as collective sites where we can dream and grow our knowledge to building new worlds based on ethical relationships of care.”—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of As We Have Always Done
“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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Story
In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces listeners to two social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.
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A passionate, knowledgeable, and fair parable on the topic of housing and ownership that resulted in work of literary art.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-03-25
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Pseudoscience
- An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them
- By: Lydia Kang MD, Nate Pedersen
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.
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Same old stories…waste of time to read.
- By Kelly on 05-20-25
By: Lydia Kang MD, and others
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Ghosts in the Schoolyard
- Racism and School Closings in Chicago’s South Side
- By: Eve L. Ewing
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.
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Great Reviewer
- By Great Reviewer on 05-07-20
By: Eve L. Ewing
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Strike
- Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire
- By: Sarah E. Bond
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize.
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Disappointing
- By Theresa Porter on 03-07-25
By: Sarah E. Bond
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In Open Contempt
- Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
- By: Irvin Weathersby Jr.
- Narrated by: Irvin Weathersby Jr.
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
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Extraordinary
- By Adera Causey on 01-10-25
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Talk to Me
- Lessons from a Family Forged by History
- By: Rich Benjamin
- Narrated by: Rich Benjamin
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.
By: Rich Benjamin
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Viral Justice
- How We Grow the World We Want
- By: Ruha Benjamin
- Narrated by: Ruha Benjamin
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.
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Fantastic book!
- By Avie Kearney on 05-21-23
By: Ruha Benjamin
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President McKinley
- Architect of the American Century
- By: Robert W. Merry
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Republican President William McKinley transformed America during his two terms as president. Although he does not register large in either public memory or in historians' rankings, in this revealing account, Robert W. Merry offers "a fresh twist on the old tale . . . a valuable education on where America has been and, possibly, where it is going" (The National Review).
By: Robert W. Merry
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The Devil You Know
- A Black Power Manifesto
- By: Charles M. Blow
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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From journalist and New York Times best-selling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy.
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A radical plan for Black liberation
- By Elizabeth on 01-27-21
By: Charles M. Blow
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Last Seen
- The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
- By: Judith Giesberg
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again. As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Judith Giesberg draws on the archive that she founded to compile these stories in a narrative form for the first time.
By: Judith Giesberg
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Pretty
- A Memoir
- By: KB Brookins
- Narrated by: KB Brookins
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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By a prize-winning young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race, Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
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Love
- By Brie on 02-11-25
By: KB Brookins
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Land Power
- Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies
- By: Michael Albertus
- Narrated by: Braden Wright
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.
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Great stories of what countries are doing that we never hear about. This is led by working with the people. Excellent…..
- By Hal on 02-24-25
By: Michael Albertus
Required reading.
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Jaw dropper
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A must read for educators and everyone!
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