One World Books
The distribution of wealth in our country is deeply unequal, and institutions of higher education not only fail to remedy that inequality, they also have a hand in legitimizing it. But far before young people reach college age, they receive messages about capitalist hierarchy and their place in it. Schools are the place where we learn the ropes—we establish the rules for how our democracy is to function. For Black and Native children, schools are also a place where their ordained role within a capitalist society—sources of extraction—is taught, reinforced, and ultimately normalized.
I remember one of my teacher preparation classes, sitting in a hot classroom as we talked about racism and the history of tracking in public schools—generation after generation of Black, Native, and Latine students summarily prevented from pursuing college aspirations, relegated to inflexible “tracks” where they learned skills to prepare them for low-wage vocations or were counseled not to finish high school at all, regardless of their individual interests or abilities. Across the room from me, someone else in my program screwed up his face, silently announcing to the room that he was going to say something uncomfortable but necessary. “Look,” he said, “at the end of the day, somebody’s got to mow the lawn.” His implication, of course, was that it’s not just somebody who has to mow the lawn, but a very specific type of somebody, and that’s just the way the world is, always has been, and always should be. (Never mind the fact that mowing the lawn, like all labor, deserves fair compensation and respect.)
Despite many years of scholarly critique aimed at countering old-school tracking, Black and Native students still disproportionately receive educational direction intended to prepare them for low-wage jobs in an economically stratified society. At the secondary level, they are less likely to be in college preparatory tracks than white students, and more likely to be in vocational tracks. Past studies have shown Native students to be the least likely among students of all racial groups to be enrolled in math and foreign language classes, and Black students are least likely to be in science classes. Native students are less likely than students from any other racial or ethnic group to be eligible for an Advanced Placement math course, an opportunity that has positive effects on math achievement and the likelihood of enrolling in college but is available to you only if your high school offers the advanced math prerequisites, such as Algebra II.
Direct economic remedies that address the harms of the past—such as reparations, land repatriation, or affirmative action—are virulently resisted by the majority of white Americans. Even initiatives that are marked as forward-looking or intended to further racial equity can end up reinforcing socioeconomic stratification. For instance, some worry that attempts to welcome more diverse cadres of students into the broad, creative, problem-solving world of computer science are being transformed into a simplistic overemphasis on coding, leading to what a former National Science Foundation computer science education program director has referred to as “technical ghettos,” where Black students trained in introductory-level coding academies are prepared for lower-paying IT help desk jobs while their white counterparts move into innovation-based startups.
These persistent trends reflect what scholar Cedric J. Robinson termed “racial capitalism”—the idea that capitalism, as we know it, does not exist without racialized systems of harm, extraction, and exploitation. Racial capitalism, in Robinson’s formulation, is not a type of capitalism; rather, it represents the assertion that capitalism is inherently racialized. The rise of modern capitalism rests upon colonization and enslavement, dispossession, subjugation, and conquest—from Ireland to Turtle Island, from Vietnam to Algeria. The architectures of violence that have driven the tides of wealth for centuries have necessitated systems of racial order, labeling Those People as savages who deserve what they get, whose destruction is warranted if it facilitates the flow of gold or oil or sugarcane. Capitalism rests on violence; violence rests on racial hierarchies that dehumanize the “Other.” Schools, as purveyors of social ideology, handily stand in as the place where these ideas can be built, normalized, and reinforced.
Scholars have long argued that schools prepare students differently for their perceived place as workers or leaders in a capitalist social order. Although highly structured, explicit forms of tracking have fallen somewhat out of favor, more recent research has detailed the subtler ways in which schools continue to reinforce the idea that some students are destined for a life of leadership and professional-class success, while others are destined for the lowest rung of the capitalist ladder in a process some scholars have called “de facto tracking.”
Some teachers will read this critique with alarm and guilt. Is teaching students in clusters, based on their learning needs, always bad? Not necessarily. Having students work in small groups tailored to specific instructional goals, and moving them between those groups as they master precise skills, has been shown to be effective. But the goals have to be specific and the groups have to be flexible. In practice, this might look like pulling aside one group of students to work on phonemic awareness one day and a different group to work on word decoding another day—not vaguely assigning a broad swath of students to the “low reading group” where they are destined to remain all year.
Despite claims that tracking is the best way to ensure positive outcomes for all students by “going at their pace” or eventually allowing students who are behind to catch up to their peers, research has shown that tracking does not benefit overall student achievement; gains for “high achievers” are canceled out by losses for “low achievers,” and at the high school level the two groups of students grow further and further apart as they go along. Teachers of higher-tracked courses tend to use more challenging curricula, to have more experience and better reputations, and to use more engaging instructional strategies like open discussion and in-depth feedback. In one study, researchers using a national analysis of racially diverse schools found that even when controlling for factors such as students’ first-year grades and parents’ level of education, Black students were underrepresented in advanced sophomore math classes, limiting their access to other advanced coursework that can, in some cases, count for postsecondary credit and would consequently make them competitive college applicants.
So how do we explain these differences? For one thing, teacher expectations may play a role. One national analysis of 752 schools found that Black students were significantly more likely to be expected to seek higher education beyond high school when they had a Black teacher compared to a non-Black teacher. In another study, 126 white teachers were asked to provide feedback on an essay supposedly written by a middle or high school student, but actually crafted by researchers and sown with obvious grammatical errors. Teachers in the study gave overly positive ratings when they thought the student writers were Black, suggesting they had lower expectations on average for these students to be successful or reach high standards—although notably, this finding only held when teachers were in schools with low levels of support, suggesting that an effective school environment could serve to counteract some of this bias.
In another study, 152 high school counselors evaluated randomly assigned transcripts, created by researchers and labeled as belonging to either “Deja Jackson,” “DeAndre Washington,” “Hannah Douglas,” or “Jake Connor.” Even when their transcripts were identical to those of their peers, the “Deja Jackson” transcripts were least likely to be recommended for AP Calculus and “Deja” was rated by the counselors as being the least prepared for the course. In another study in which math teachers were similarly given randomly labeled student work to review, they showed no bias in assessing whether the work was actually correct, but when asked to rate the students’ mathematical ability, they rated Black students—particularly girls—as being less talented. As Gloria Ladson-Billings has written, in the United States the study of mathematics is “a feared and revered subject” and many believe it “signals advanced thinking reserved only for the intelligentsia.”
The entrenchment of these assumptions means that many people uncritically view not only the quality of an individual, but also the quality of a school or district, through a racialized lens. And it doesn’t help that school quality truly does benefit from the presence of wealth. “Good” schools are tautologically understood to be white schools, and schools perceived as good raise property value—establishing a tax base that, in turn, provides greater resources to those schools. Meanwhile, the legacy of policies such as the GI Bill and the influence of wealth inheritance provide white families with a leg up in accessing those good schools and good houses in the first instance. As Ira Katznelson documented in When Affirmative Action Was White, the GI Bill was all but useless in supporting homeownership for Black veterans facing redlining, segregation, and other discriminatory roadblocks to securing a mortgage. And the GI Bill has also failed to help Native families en masse. Native people have the highest per capita military enlistment numbers of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. But banks won’t finance GI Bill–supported home loans for purchases made on tribal lands, excluding countless possible Native beneficiaries. As Katznelson points out, “missed chances at homeownership obviously compound over time.” But as many Americans are unaware of the role these policies and practices play in white wealth accumulation, such riches are interpreted merely as more evidence that white people have things because they are smarter, plan better, and work harder.
Excerpted from the book Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing. From One World Books. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission.