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watch saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span two. >> a look at the history of how education in the u.s. was set up for black and native children and what it means for students today. this is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their most recent work. about your latest book, which i must say feels like it has pronounced salience and relevance. amid all the shifts we're seeing right now in education. i'm an education journalist. i've been covering this beat for about a dozen years, a little over that. and been following your work for pretty much just as long.

thank you. yeah. and i read your latest book over the last few weeks and this has been a time, as i'm sure you've been thinking about that that's been marked by just massive debates over the purpose, the role of education. these debate have informed a lot of the questions i'll be asking you today. though, of course, you'd probably argue that the sentiments that are being normalized right now or that are making a lot of headlines have sort of always been baked into the fabric of how we do school in this country. right. so i'm eager to hear you kind of reflect on on what this moment means against the backdrop of your book. i want to start with the origin story of this book. what what inspired you to write original sense and how does the work connect to your past research, your past writings? yes. well, i've been you and i have a similar timeline.

i've been teaching courses on race and education in one form or another in a lot of different settings. for about a decade. and i, for a long time when i was trained to be a teacher, the way i learned the history of education was very much focused without ever saying so, almost exclusively on white students. and so we would read, oh, schools did this during this time, and this was their purpose. and then there would be a little footnote or a paragraph or a special week on the syllabus where we said, oh, well, that doesn't apply to students of color, but that was mentioned and kind of like at the margins. and as i got to understand more about this history and the history of schooling, i came to really believe that you don't understand in the history of schools in the united states without understanding the history of how they have acted on the lives of black people and native people in particular, and that these stories are not the footnote. they're not the appendix. but it's actually a central part of the story, not only of schools, but of this country.

and so as i started to frame my teaching that way and really wanting to make sure that my students understood this history, i was perpetually searching for a text that would synthesize it in a way that worked for me as an educator. and i couldn't find it. and so taking the advice of toni morrison, i wrote the book that i wanted to read. so that's the origin story of the book in terms of how it connects to my previous research. you know, i have long been interested in the ways that history shapes the present moment in which we find ourselves. and i see part of my job as a professor as making that history legible and accessible to people who don't have the time to, you know, go on a deep dive into the library archives. and so this book is really an extension of that work. and my hope is that even though it covers a lot of ground, it does so in a way that people will find accessible and easy to read. i think you achieve just that. i mean, every line in the book has something packed into it, something that i took away. and so i left with boundless new

knowledge and really appreciate how you wove together the history and the analysis and the lived experience. i want to get into the premise of the book, right? so in original sense, you argue that schools have long been framed as as the great equalizer. but but in reality, they've, in fact, been sort of machines that have prepared situated oppression, that have perpetuate these ideas of white superiority, that have been designed to, quote unquote, civilize native students. could you elaborate on how these institutions were embedded into the educational system from from its beginnings? sure. well, as as you mentioned at the top of our conversation, the question of what schools are for is always a contested question. but the connective tissue across the history of the united states is that people in positions of power have been able to shape the ways that schools serve the

needs of the state, the needs of dominant u.s. city. and so, as we understand, even though it's a tough time to talk about this history, the fact of the matter is, is that the united states, as we've come to understand it, the country that we know and live in and move around in today was founded on these two institutions of the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of stolen african peoples who were then rendered as property here in the united states. those are the two original sins upon which this country is founded. that's not my opinion. that is a historical fact. and so the question becomes, if you are a country that proclaims that all men are created equal, if you are founding documents and most popularized ideologies say that everyone deserves a fair shake in this country and at the same time you are social and economic and political systems rely on this theft, this ongoing theft, this ongoing dehumanization. what you need is an architecture of ideas that tells you that that dehumanization is okay in

order to reconcile that contradiction. and so that's the purpose that school has served. we walk and talk and move and live and work on stolen land, stolen by force and violence from native people and we live in a society that was built on the backs of enslaved african people. and so how does that become okay? how do we how do we live with that? and the answer is school. school has been a very effective way of teaching us and normalizing this idea that black and native children are not human. sometimes in overt ways and sometimes in subtle ways. why the focus on black and native youth and not other students of color? sure. well, what i hope is that students of color and people from all backgrounds will read this book and also make those connections right. and say, oh, i understand how this technique that was honed in this community has also been used in this community. right. we see the ways that the criminal ization of black and native people has been extended to think about the

criminalization of undocumented people for many other racial and ethnic backgrounds across the united states. we see the way that these architectures of surveillance have been used against muslim communities of many different backgrounds. right. some of which are black, some of which are middle eastern, north african, palestinian and so these are tools that the state develops that schools develop, that are then honed and used in other directions. but the focus on black and native youth is because there's a very particular role that black people and indigenous people play in terms of the the history of these united states. right. and there are you know, the united states continues to be an imperialist country. and people from all over the world end up here sometimes by choice, sometimes pursuing the american dream, but also sometimes displaced by other forms of global colonialism and imperialist violence. but that being said, this specific position of land theft, bodily theft and these forms of extreme violence are playing a particular role as the foundation upon which the nation is built. and so i think that it's worth

taking some time to pay attention to that. and that's what this book tries to do right? right. so wanting to delve into the driving thesis of the book a little further, you break down the ways in which this sort of hierarchical sorting, this oppression occurs into three. there are three main ways this happens right? describe what are those three means? and how how do they happen? sure. so i call these pillars. these are pillars of things that happen in schooling spaces that uphold racial hierarchy and of course, there are many more than three, but there are three that i focus on. the first is the idea of intellectual inferiority and what i call the gospel of intellectual inferiority, which is the idea that very often goes on. question unremarked upon that black people and native people are inherent, less intelligent, inherently less intellectual, capable, and that works as a thread through many of our assumptions and conversations about education.

the second is the notion of discipline and punishment. the idea that black bodies and native bodies require a very specific type of control, forceful control for our own good and for the good of the republic. and the third is the idea of economics subjugate and the idea of participate as a permanently subservient member of an economic underclass in order to keep the machine of capitalism going. and so those are three ideas that i argue are honed in schools, perpetuated, maintained and normalized. i'd love to follow up on some of those pillars in a bit, but before we do, i'd love to just hear more about your your lived experiences, both as a student of color and as a teacher of color. there were two anecdotes in the book that among many that that really stuck out to me. one was your experiences when you were a teacher at a school in which it was habitual for the school to send kids on a field trip to a prison.

right. and there was an objective to to that that field trip. and i'd love to hear more about that. and then there was one it was a it was a brief anecdote. but you talk about your own experiences as a fifth grader who during your unit on the, quote unquote, explorers. you engaged in, you had to do this activity. and that seemed to really stick with you as a fifth grader. so whether it's those anecdotes or others, could you sort of expand on on some of your lived experiences and how they've informed your thinking for this book? absolutely. so i'll start with the first one. so when i was an eighth grade teacher at a school that was virtually all black students, we had a handful of other students of color as well. the i found out towards the end of the year that that there was a regularly scheduled field trip to the cook county jail and that the whole eighth grade class would be going and that this was, you know, that this was good for them. and even though i was, you know, much younger and maybe had less

experience articulating some of my political ideas, i really didn't understand just from a common sense perspective of why would we take our kids to jail. right. and this is what i mean when i say that assumption about discipline and punishment. there's an unspoken assumption that that they need this as deterrence, that they need to be scared. right. and the implication is that our students are criminals in waiting criminals and developing it. right. because if you just think logically, what is your job as a teacher in leading a schooling space, especially at that tender age, this really special age of middle school that i love so much because it's this really pivotal moment of developing yourself and figuring out who you are, figuring out your place in the world. what message do we send kids when we say, well, we're going to take you to jail? and so what i did was i developed an optional alternative field trip. and i said, we're going to go see this documentary about youth poetry. slam we're going to go downtown. and anybody who wants to go to that can come with me instead.

and even if you're not in my class and i will never forget the moment of those of my students that went on the jail field trip coming back into my classroom at the end of the day, and the word despair is the one that comes to mind. and i just thought, you know, how have we abdicated our responsibility in this moment to treat these children as children and to love them and nourish them accordingly? so that was a very memorable moment. the second one that you mentioned is my life as a student, very young student, and, you know, at the beginning of our unit on explorers, right, which we can unpack that itself in a moment, the our teacher had us do this activity where she hit eminem's around the room and we were all supposed to go around and look for the eminem's right. and the idea is to get us excited that we're like explorers. we're like people that are heading off to search for spices and gold. and, you know, this is a fairly ridiculous example, but i'm sure many who are listening to this conversation might be able to think of the ways in which you have been asked to take the

position. we ask young children to take the position, the storytelling position, the perspective, taking of these colonial, violent actors. right. and we're asking them to kind of engage in the process of putting themselves in the role of these men as the hero. and that's what i mean when i say that there's a kind of a normalized narrative of native disappearance and the disappearance of indigenous peoples that this very violent story of genocide that is at the foundation of our country when we talk about it to young people at all, because oftentimes we don't talk about it. but it is either through this perspective of how the native americans lived. right. so perpetuating native people to this everlasting past. hence the idea that they're all gone, they disappeared and that was part of the fate of this country manifest destiny of this country or and or asking young people to put themselves in the position of the colonizers themselves. even in the cases where some of

those people were incredibly violent, awful people. and so from a very young age and these seemingly benign, innocent and very casual ways, we're asking young people to internalize the normalization of this narrative that is a narrative of murder and displacement. and in some ways, it feels like there have been a lot of strides with regards to curriculum and lesson plans, a lot more awareness about the euro centric tendencies of it. but it also on the flip side, it feels like a lot of those racial hierarchical dynamics and those biases persist in curriculum. and i want to get your thoughts on on some examples of of how those biases persist in curriculum. and as a follow up, i'd love to also get your thoughts on how you think the current dynamics around curriculum and the efforts to reverse any progress

on on making curriculum more inclusive. how that might sort of reduce any of the strides that that we may have thought were occurring? sure. well, to the first question, one of the things that i like to point to that i talk about very briefly in the book is some work by a colleague of mine named harper keenan, who's a scholar of social studies and one of the things that he did in his research and that i think is just an amazing example of this kind of critical analysis. is he compared in the curriculum of social studies curriculum in the state of california? how often in acts of violence of native people against colonizers were discussed? and then how often acts of violence of colonizers against native people were discussed and then compared those to the actual historical record. and what he found is that in textbooks, it is far more likely, far more common for young people to learn about acts of violence, of native people

attacking settlers, even though in the actual historical record, those things happened less often. right. and so, again, it's one of the ways in which we are telling the story of this country to young people and we are normalizing these things at a time when they're very vulnerable, when they don't necessarily have the opportunity to seek outside sources. right. they're trusting adults to give them a directive version of the truth and the version of the truth that we give them serves a specific narrative that native people are violent and their repression was inevitable and necessary in order to have a civilized, modern country. so that's that's one kind of curricular example. there's another example i'll talk about that is historical. and you know, when i started this book, one of the things i was very interested in writing about was the education of freed people after emancipation. and you know that was as w.e.b. dubois writes, one of the great expansions of schooling in the south. there are many ways in which the efforts of black people to

educate themselves in one another in the reconstruction era led to this massive expansion of of universal schooling that benefited everybody. but what i found fascinating in studying this period was the actual the textbooks that black people were presented with at that time. and so there's a there is a series of textbooks that were presented to free people that taught them things like reading and math and things like that, but also had these parables, these stories and something that i found fascinating was it was mentioned over and over in these books. it was very important to black people never, ever, ever take vengeance against people who formerly enslaved you. there's one textbook writer who said, you know, even if your former enslavers sexually assault you, you should write a letter to your congress person and say, hey, i have rights now, even if they beat your children or attack your children, never take vengeance upon them. these textbooks talked about heroes like toussaint louverture and referred to him who, you know, a leader in the haitian uprising and revolution and

referred to how gentle and docile he was. they wrote about john brown, who led a violent insurrection against slavery at harpers ferry, and wrote about how peaceful he was like, jesus. and so this this trend of, you know, skewing textbooks and telling a very specific narrative of history in order to give people a message about themselves that keeps them controlled, but keeps them subservient, that has long, historic ties in terms of how that impacts the moment in which we find ourselves. the second part of your question, i think we see a very clear thread there where as you said, we have made strides in the last several years in educators, community members, young people, parents demand curricula that represent the world in which we live, which is a diverse world. right. diversity is not something that people made up. it is the world that we live in. we live in a world where young people are disabled and queer and trans and muslim and black. right. and that is part of reality. and those young people deserve

to see themselves and their stories uplifted and celebrated in the classroom. but because that is implicitly seen as threatening to the current state project, to the current political moment in which we find ourselves, we see these outrageous efforts to suppress those stories. and it's fascinating that the mere mention of black people existing of native people existing, of trans people existing is seen as so threatening and so insurrectionist that it has to be silenced at all costs. i think that tells us everything we need to know. what in your view, does it mean to truly decolonize education, not just in a metaphorical sense, but in a in a true sort of literal and figurative sense? yes. well, i draw heavily on the work of eve talk and kwang yang, who are two scholars who, as you point out, call on us to say, don't be too easy with the metaphor of decolonization. it's become very trendy to say, you know, in a decolonize our minds and decolonize our classrooms and and in fact, as

they point out, colonization is a totalizing project that has shaped everything about the united states as it currently exists in ways that took a long time, that were incredibly violent, and that seep into every aspect of the world in which we live. and so if we're going to talk about decolonization, it needs to be similarly transferred, normative. and the way that i think that begins to happen is really through hard collective community work. i think that there are so many amazing educators, people of color, people that are not people of color who've been working together for many years to say, how do we completely transform what we think education is right? and that means completely transform. so, for example, do we need to be in a classroom all the time or how are we teaching young people to have a relationship with the national, with the natural world, with the lands and waters around us? how are we using that as teachers? right. do we need to have grades that are very strictly broken down by

age, or are there opportunities for young people to have intra general intergenerational relationships? how are we calling on our elders and on our youngest teachers right, in order to teach their wisdom to the classroom? how are we using the community as a resource? and so i think that that kind of willingness to try everything to be open and to ask ourselves at our at the basis of everything, what world do we actually want our young people to live in? and how are we preparing them for that world? that's the beginning of how we use education as a really transformative tool and not one that really inscribes colonial violence. is part of your chapter? i believe it was a chapter on on tracking and the biased intellectual standards we used tosureids. aptitude and you point out a comparison pueblo notion of what it means to be gifted in contrast to the western notion. right, which is one that sort of

framed around individual achievement and in in the kara's and pueblo perspective, it means to be giving from the heart. that's what gifted it means. it it's your gifted if you are applying your gifts in the service of others. and again, that's juxtapose to to this western ideal of of individual accomplishments. and you use that example to challenge what sources of knowledge we we use to consider valid barometers for measuring kids intellect. and i find that example so powerful and it's really stuck with me. could you could you expand on that? sure. you know, i think that the notion of giftedness is a really complicated one, because the idea of gifted and talented education has often become a way of basically re inscribe ing racial segregation in schools without using explicit racial criteria. right. and so we know that blacks,

students and native students are far less likely to be referred into these programs. and we can act as though these the selection criteria are not biased. but we also know that when they have teachers that see them, that support them, that understand them, that listen to them and pay attention to them, they're more likely to then be referred into these programs. and i think more broadly, i'm interested in the conversation you're bringing up here. is, you know, in our culture, there is often a fetishization of a certain image of genius. right? and we have lots of stories of genius is most often men, most often white men who were you know, they did these incredible things and they had these amazing capabilities. and sometimes they were really, really awful to the people around them. right. they mistreated people. they were abusive to their partners or to their children. and they were, you know, very unkind. and we nevertheless celebrate them. we see this in movies, biographical movies. we see them in people's memoirs

and biographies as well. and i think that that is a very fascinating notion that we take for granted, as though it is somehow culturally neutral and it simply isn't. so i give that example partially to invite us to think about this idea that genius intelligence capable. these are not culturally unbiased ideas. and that there are many different examples from around the globe, from the past, from the present that encourage us to think about, you know, what does it really mean to be an intelligent person? and can we say that you're truly gifted if you're only using that for yourself and if you're mean to everybody, all the time. earlier in my career as a researcher, i had the opportunity to visit a school, a public school that was run by the year of tribal nation in northern california. and one of the things that the school did was that they established standards for their school and they used the state standards because they wanted their students to be able to pass state tests.

and they also used the standards from the local community college because they wanted their students to be able to thrive there. but they also developed community standards. and so, for example, they sat down as a community and said, what are the things that are really important to us? they said, it's important for young people to be able to speak our language. it's important for them to know our heritage and our traditions. it's important for them to be kind to elders. and so this was a school where you would actually be assessed on how have you interacted with your elders recently, right? how have you interacted with our heritage, with our culture. and, you know, that is that's one solution where that school said we want these state standards to live side by side with things that we value. but i think the broader point here is it's really an open question for all of us to ask what are the things that feel important to us? and again, how are we preparing learners of all ages to engage with those things that reflect our values and not somebody else's values? yeah, i, i'm originally from hawaii and i appreciate the

hawaii anecdotes and leaders you feature in the book. and i'll never forget early on in my career as an education reporter and i started reporting on education in hawaii, i visited this school called navajo colonial pew. and it's a hawaiian immersion school on the big island, hawaii. numbers mean they teach and learn exclusively in hawaiian. and this is it's an official language in hawaii, but it's one that in the seventies was on the brink of extinction because of the legacy of assimilation and oppression and colonization. and that that defined hawaii for. four generations. and this the school, it it it got a zero on the state accountability test like its students all got a zero and that was because they were dumb it was because they boycotted it because the state accountability test was only offered in english. mm hmm. and i thought, you know, first of all, it was i thought it was

such a powerful form of resistance. but it really struck me, especially when i was reading your book and i was reminded of that example, that even schools that are striving to be schools for us, as you would call them, are still confined by systems that are not for us. right. and so so to put a finer point on that, you know, you talk about culturally responsive or relevant education. and so this embrace of different epistemology is as the antidote to the eugenicists. standards for measuring intellect and are doing school. tell us about sort of the opportunities there and the obstacles as well. certainly. well, i appreciate that. that amazing story. and, you know, one of the reasons why i think that i and many others have have written about some of the incredible work in hawaii is because so much of that work has been

inspirational. and i think that that's important because sometimes when we look around and say this system isn't working, what can we do? we're missing opportunities to look at real examples of things that people are doing right now. so i appreciate you sharing that story. and at the same time, as you point out, there are structural risks. there are structural barriers. i think that the moment in which we find ourselves politically is perversely very instructive, because if you look at, you know, polling data, if you talk to people in your own community, it is unlike, leigh, that you see the kind of virulent, deeply oppressive resistance to any kind of mention of, you know, people of color or history that are challenging to the dominant united states narrative that the rapid change and threats that we're seeing happen at a national level in our schools have really come from a relative small number of people. this is not like a mass movement

that, you know, issued a very clear mandate either at a state level or a federal level. this is a moment where a relatively small number of people has been very effective in organizing and agitating to bring their minoritarian vision of what schools can be into the public sphere. and they are going to use whatever tools they can by hook or break by hook or by crook to universalize their vision. and the reason that's perversely instructive is because it means that they are willing to take some risks and put their neck out right. in order to say we're going to be uncompromising on the vision of schools that we want to see. and so my question is, how are they different from anybody else? right. they're not smarter than us. they're not more organized than us. and so i really i think that, you know, the story of the students and teachers and families that you just shared, they were so courageous. and i think it's it's crucial at this moment. not only that, individual teachers and students and schools act with courage, but that all of us step up and

support them and say, how is this all of our responsibility? how are we showing up for them? how are we protecting them against the risks that they're taking in this moment? and how are we willing to divest ourselves from those kinds of assumptions about what a good school is? and so, you know, those that kind of incredibly low score, the score of the zero, right. what are the implications of that for that school? there are funding implications. so how are we showing up to make sure that we're fundraising and providing the things that those children need? if they miss out on that funding? right. there are quality implications of people looking at the school and saying this school is bad and i'm not going to send my kids there. how are we showing up to spread a different narrative? right. and so it's it's really incumbent upon all of us to say, if we believe in such a thing as public schools, that means we have public responsibility. and for too long, the idea of accountability in education hasn't included all of us. right? how are we as a collective accountable for things that happen inside and outside of

schools? and so i think that that has to be part of the resistance of this moment. and it's going to take a lot of local attention and care at times when we really need it. i want to bring in a quote from your book here. for one, it's just so beautifully written, but it also illustrates what schools that you describe as truly for us could look like. and the quote is, we can make educational spaces that are not for the white supremacist settler state. we can make schools for us, schools that are loving and nourishing, schools that celebrate our languages and cultural histories and intergenerational bonds. schools that teach stewardship and care of land and of one another. and i mentioned that quote, and i imagine your answer to this will sort of be a follow up to what you just shared. but how can this educational model get off the ground, let alone thrive when states and the federal government are

implementing a growing number of policies that that restrict these ways of teaching? sure. well, i think one of the important answer comes in the distinction in between schools and education. and so federal policies control what happens in schools. right. in public schools. but number one, one thing that's interesting is that, you know, i find it ironic at the beginning of this presidential at the very, very beginning of the presidential administration, people ask me a lot about the dismantling of the doe. and what i said is the doe is not going to be dismantled. it's going to be expanded in the most violent and intrusive ways possible. and we see that happening already this week, where the federal government, you know, that proclaims to want to have parents choose what they want for their own kids. communities choose what they want for their own families. instead of saying, if you're going to have a lunar new year celebration at your school, if you're going to have a hispanic, hispanic heritage month celebration, if you're going to talk about black history, we're going to take your federal funds away. and the fact of that is that

there is only so much surveillance. right. we look at something like the prohibition era, right. there's only so much direct surveillance that the federal government is able to do. it is very hard for, you know, even in this administration for them to send police and military to every single, you know, secondary raid of chinese history, you know, celebration and shut it down. right. what? they're counting on us doing is complying on our own. right. preemptively, and they're counting on us turning on one another. and so i think it's really important that we commit ourselves to not doing that. and also, at the same time, the examples that we are looking for of you know, how do we do this, how do we do this, have already existed in the past, right? i am a black person who gets to make my living through reading and writing. i feed myself and pay my bills through reading and writing. right? i am a few generations away from ancestors for whom that was against the law.

right. and they were living in social, economic and political society, in which the idea that they can read and write was considered to be a scientific impossibility at best. and an act of fugitive and criminal at worst. right. and so nevertheless, they, you know, enslaved people taught themselves and taught each other to read all the time. they had school all the time. right. in a condition that was far more oppressive than, you know, what any of us are facing right now. and so it's important. and the students that you talked about write in the history of hawaiian resistance and indigenous resistance in this country, there have always been people that have always been teaching under increase in difficult circumstances and so the question for me is not how are we going to do this? the question for me is how are we willing to learn from the people who've been doing it for generations and how are we willing to expand on their efforts and to be brave enough to do so? i want to go back to the pillars

that form the crux of your thesis and specifically, i guess this would apply to both the punishment and discipline pillar as well as the economic subjugation. one, it seems that those those dynamics can really have a vicious cycle in the perceptions of schooling held by students of color, and particularly in this case, black, a native youth. so how how does that process work? and how have you seen it happen? where kids are treated in such a way and then start to assimilate and embody those perceptions? and and in turn, really, that really colors their their relationship with school and can have these long term effects on on their their education outcomes and beyond. certainly, you know, i mean,

when people ask me, when did you become interested in educational inequality, i say, you know, fifth grade, fourth grade. right. because at a very young age, i liked school. i enjoyed school. and i also was able to look around and see the ways that many of my classmates and especially my black and brown classmates, especially boys who were subjected to different of gendered punishment, the ways in which they were mistreated and treated differently. and you see that vicious cycle because why as a young person or a person of any age, would you want to seriously engage in a process that makes you feel dehumanized, that makes you feel small, that makes you feel little and unimportant. i think that part of why the history that people currently don't want us to study or talk about is so painful is because it's not ancient history, right? a lot of these things happened very, very recently. and i find myself thinking in particular of, you know, the story of so many native young

people that were taken away from their families and sent to these boarding schools, residential schools, where they were often forbidden, speaking their native language, forbidden from practicing their own faith practices. beaten. assaulted. right. mistreat did and the thing that is really upsetting is when you realize that that wasn't just about acts of harm against those children. but there are ways that the state that, you know, benefited directly from that exploitation. so, for example, i write about a school where it was originally supposed to opened in one location, but there was going to be an orchard nearby and the local farmers and agricultural workers wanted to have a cheap or free source of labor. they wanted the young people, these children, to be able to work for them in the fields. and so they relocated the school in order to have a cheap source of labor and they had native children taken of school, not learning, reading, not learning math, not learning any of the benevolent things that, you know, the folks who founded these schools like to brag about

and instead had them, you know, picking fruit from trees for, you know, basically no pay and exploiting them in that way. and so why if you knew that history, if that was your parent or your grandparent. right. why would you see this as place that is trustworthy? and i think that we have to earn that trust by we i mean educators. i mean people that are policy makers in schools. it is logical for young people to not trust these places, to not be engaged in in these places where they're made to feel less than. and so the question is, how do we make ourselves worthy of that project? how do we build schools that are worthy of how magical and beautiful and brilliant young people are? and i see that as a challenge, not for them, right? not for those kids, but for the adults that are supposed to take care of them. and i think, again, it's not only that it can be done, it's that it is being done by amazing educators all the time. but we have to uplift those folks.

we have to learn from them and we have to celebrate them and give them the resources that they need to be great, right? how much of a lever are teachers of color in that equation? and, you know, i'm sure you've followed the statistics. i mean, the the demographic breakdown of the teaching force has remained pretty static, predominantly white for years and decades. yes. and, you know, i want to make clear your racial identity or your gender identity or where you're from is not determinative of the kind of educator you can be. and so there are amazing, incredibly radical, brilliant, loving, caring, white educators that are out there right now dismantling the most harmful parts of school systems. and because of the kind of internalization that you just talked about, there are educators of color who themselves were brought up in very harmful and counterpart active educational settings that reinforce, drive those things in our communities. and sometimes they do it because

they think this is what kids need to survive. right. i need to teach them this kind of harshness. i need to prepare them for a world that is not going love them or treat them well. and so i think that that's important. that being said, there is a huge body of research that does suggest that, you know, teachers of color can play a really important role in teach treating kids differently, making sure they have advanced academic opportunities, making sure that they're not subject to unfairness offline. and part of that is because we, in a segregated and racist society. and so, you know i personally think it is incredibly unfair for teachers who if they are white teachers who have been raised in all white communities, have gone to all schools, have gone to all white colleges, have all white friends and family that we bring them into classrooms and give them our most youngest kids who most need them to love them and care for them. and say, hey, it's time for you to figure out your biases right now. right? it's time you to take this

training, take this class and learn how to overcome these awful messages about people of color that you've been subjected to your entire life. i feel like that's a tall order. at the same time as you're learning how to care for children. and so how do we transform the work of what it means to be an educator? how do we make spaces for people that love our kids and who maybe have barriers to entry, maybe have trouble accessing teaching licensure? maybe you're not able to take out the massive amounts of debt that they need to incur to get advanced degrees and get teacher licensure who are not paid enough right to get licensed. we underpay teachers, which means that when we have also a wealth gap in our country, we are disincentivizing people actually need to make a good living for themselves and for their families from entering the workforce. and how do we see the work itself as being transformative community work? right. and really reframe what the profession is all together so that there are a lot of people that would be wonderful, brilliant teachers, and we need to make it easier for them to enter the profession and for

those that are there regardless of their race or racial background, regardless of that, regardless of their gender background, we can't see it as extra or optional. or if you get around to it, for them to be prepared to work in diverse communities and to serve the students that are in front of them. it can't just be one class. it can't be, you know, something extra. it needs to be as mandatory and as required and as fundamental as their ability to do reading and math. i want to segway into the issue of data limitations. and you talk about i mean, you cite scholars who who lament specifically the the lack of data for for native and native populations and how this invisibility really translates into to a sense that they don't matter and that that they're that that that it doesn't it's not worth it to invest in in programs to to elevate their

outcomes. it seems now is reading that again against the backdrop of everything happening right now. and one of the the phenomena we're hearing about right now is that all kinds of demographic data, even for for groups for which we've historically had pretty robust statistical information, are being scrubbed right. and just there's where we're we're really losing access to a lot of that that data that allowed us to give us insight into how different demographic groups are faring. what are the consequences of that? and i'd love for you to reflect on that. you know, again, with the context that that you write about in the book, about the the the void of native data. yes. so i, you know, yesterday i taught a class i teach a college class on race in schools. and i wanted to