Author Event! Jarvis R. Givens' "American Grammar"

Join us on January 31st at 4pm as we host Prof. Jarvis R. Givens who will be in conversation with Prof. Mahasan Chaney to discuss his latest release, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase in-store!

About the book:

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.

About the author:

Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of Education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University, and he specializes in 19th and 20th century African American history and theories of race, power, and schooling. Professor Givens is the author of three books, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation, published by Harper in 2025, School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, published by Beacon Press in 2023, and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by Harvard University Press in 2021. He is also completing a fourth book entitled I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month which will be released by Harper in February 2026.

About the moderator:

Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley in 2019 and was later a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) and the Watson Institute at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on education policy, and the history of education and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, the politics of school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of federal education reform.