Eve L. Ewing on Education, History, and Writing ‘Black Panther’

Your Fellows project will be a book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, in which you examine how the American school system has been instrumental in solidifying racial oppression. What was the impetus for writing this book now?

This book is based on teaching I’ve been doing for about eight years. I begin all of my classes on race, schools, and education policy by talking about the particular histories of Black and Indigenous peoples and the ways schools have represented, paradoxically, both tremendous freedom and liberation as well as tremendous harm and violence. I tell my students that you can’t really understand schools in this country without understanding that first. Eventually I got tired of pulling together disparate sources and texts to have that conversation and thought I might try to write a book that brings these intertwined histories together in a way that I hope will speak to educators, students, parents and families, and anybody who cares about schools.

You recently started writing a new run of the Black Panther comic for Marvel. What does it mean for you to take over this character, and what do you think is unique that you bring to the telling of T’Challa’s story?

It’s a tremendous honor for me and I’m so humbled to have been asked. Comics is a funny arena because a lot of people who read my other work still don’t find it to be a respectable or serious form of literary effort, or just kind of don’t get it, but for folks in this world it’s a huge deal and it’s in many ways the largest spotlight I’ve ever had on my work in terms of its salience for popular culture. The comics industry, especially in terms of the Big Two (DC and Marvel) and superhero comics, still has a long ways to go in terms of having creators at the helm who represent the diversity of our world, and so it’s also a space where there’s a lot of racism and misogyny. So amidst all that, I’m just trying to keep my head down and tell the most interesting and engaging stories I can about a beloved icon. “Unique” is a tough bar for a character who’s been around for 60 years, but I’m striving to just do the best job I can.

Along with your work as an author, artist, and educator, you are also a cultural organizer in the Chicago area. How does community organizing influence your written work?

Social transformation is a team effort, and I come from a tradition of thought–Black feminist thought, and the particular organizing landscape of Chicago–that is about the maxim of “get in where you fit in.” I am always trying to pay attention to who is doing what, who is building networks of care and shoring up new relationships and fighting new battles or old battles in new ways, and asking myself if there is a small way I can show up to help build something good and sustainable. As a writer, that can mean using the power of narrative to shift the conversation around something–which I tried to do with Ghosts in the Schoolyard, with my piece in Vanity Fair about police unions, or with this new podcast Guaranteed which is about people receiving direct cash transfers. But as a person, a community member, and as a neighbor, it sometimes just means showing up, moving chairs around, serving food, making a donation, stuff like that. I try to keep those really basic forms of care at the center of my practice.

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