Harvard University professor Dr. Jarvis R. Givens—a leading scholar of American educational history and African American Studies—joins us for a student reception and conversation on the interconnected history of schooling in the United States.
Drawing on personal experience and academic expertise, Dr. Givens examines how the political and economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous peoples helped shape American education as an inequitable system structured around white possession and white benefit. He offers a clear lens for understanding present-day conflicts not as mere “culture wars,” but as structural in nature.
Dr. Givens’s work on American Grammar, a revised origin story that shows how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never separate, but deeply relational—formed together within an emergent national educational landscape.