American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAAH STONE BOOK AWARD

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as “the great equalizer” to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.

Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become highly politicized, placing its true colors on full display—a battleground where clashes over free speech and book bans abound, and where the suppression of knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have taken center stage. Political forces are waging a war on academic freedom, raising serious questions. What gets taught, how, by whom, and who gets to decide? Yet, how might our perception of this reality shift when we recognize such battles as expressions of a relationship between race, power, and schooling as old as the country itself?

Access and equity in public education have long been discussed and attempts to address the educational debts owed to historically oppressed groups have taken the form of modern innovations and promises of future improvement. Yet the past plays an equally significant role in structuring our present reality—and in the case of our education system, there is a dark, unexamined history that continues to influence how schools forge our world.

Harvard University professor Jarvis R. Givens, an expert in the fields of American Educational History and African American Studies, draws on his own personal experiences and academic expertise to unveil how the political-economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education as an inequitable system premised on white possession and white benefit. In doing so, he clarifies that present conflicts are not merely culture wars, but indeed structural in nature. American Grammar is a revised origin story that exposes this legacy of racial domination in schooling, demonstrating how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never all-together separate experiences, but indeed relational, all part of an emergent national educational landscape. Givens reveals how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students; how funds from the US War Department developed native boarding schools; and how classroom lessons socialized students into an American identity grounded in antiblackness and anti-Nativeness, whereby the substance of schooling mirrored the very structure of US education.

In unraveling this past, Givens provides more honest language for those working to imagine and build a truly more egalitarian future for all learners and communities, and especially those most vulnerable among us.