Opinion | Critical Race Theory, Comic Books and the Power of Public Schools

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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I’m always fascinated by people able to do great work across very different mediums. Eve Ewing is a signal example of this. She’s a sociologist at the University of Chicago, where her work focuses on the intersection of race, and education, and democracy. She wrote this great book a couple of years back, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” which is about the closing of some Chicago Public Schools.

But it was also about the role that schools play in communities, and the way people do and don’t get listened to, and the disconnect between public officials and those they serve, and the translation problems in the language the two sides use. It’s a fantastic and very unusual way of looking at a question like this.

But she also writes poetry, and produces visual art, and writes Marvel comic books — particularly “Ironheart,” which is a series I like. She hosted the short-lived podcast “Bughouse Square,” which I was an unusual fan of because it’s built on the archives of my favorite interviewer of all time, Studs Terkel. She’s working on a TV production. She’s releasing a children’s book, “Maya and the Robot,” next week. There’s just a lot going on here for one mind to keep straight.

Connecting a lot of Ewing’s work is this commitment to looking for knowledge in places and in people where it often goes ignored. As she describes it, that’s something she got from critical race theory, which we talk about here. But we also talk about the role schools play in low-income communities. What makes a great school and how do we measure it? What is really happening in this growing debate over critical race theory, and whether it’s a debate actually over who we listen to?

How to balance emotional quantitative data, how she feels about Tony Stark — in my view, the most neoliberal of all superheroes — the cultural role of superheroes, the genius of Studs Terkel — there is a lot in this. We almost called this just the eclectic mind of Eve Ewing. But it’s a really fun conversation. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Send me your guest suggestions, book suggestions, whatever. Please rate us on whatever podcast app you’re listening in. Or send the episode, or some other episode, to someone you think would enjoy it.

Eve Ewing, welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Let me start here. How would you describe what you do for a living?

Well, what I would say, I usually tell people that I’m a writer and a professor. Those are kind of, like, the short version. The for-a-living part is what makes it interesting. It makes it much easier to answer that question. But, yeah, those are the things I do as jobs for money and health care. [LAUGHS]

But it’s expansive. I mean, the number of mediums you work in is, I think, a little hard to map. So you do comic books. You do sociology — like, actual academic sociology work — you write books, and poetry, and visual art, and the Studs Terkel podcast.

Yeah. We’re doing some TV — doing some TV stuff.

Doing some TV. You’ve got a young adult novel coming out. I guess the question I actually ask is, how did one lead to the other? Like how do you see the trajectory being able to expand into so many spaces?

Yeah. You know, I think that most of us, if we allow ourselves to, could and can explore different ways of storytelling, and different ways of connecting with people, and asking questions. I think that I’m just a little bit foolish and silly enough to not care that much about the social boundaries that tell us we can’t or shouldn’t do those things. And part of where I get that foolishness from is historical antecedent because there are so many scholars and writers that I admire — particularly in the Black intellectual tradition — for whom that was just taken for granted.

And so I always give, as the most obvious example, W. E. B. Du Bois, who — sociologists claim him, historians claim him, anthropologists claim him. Every field of social science, short of the economists, claim him. He also wrote fiction and also was an organizer. People like Lorraine Hansberry. People like Zora Neale Hurston. More recent historical examples, people like Derrick Bell or Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. All of these are folks that I really look up to and have tried to learn from. And all of them, one of the things that they have in common is that they kind of seized whatever outlets they possibly can to ask the questions that seem urgent to them in the moment.

Are those cross-pollinations visible for you? Like, can you describe the way writing poetry changes or helps you write comic books? Or the way that the academic sociology work intersects with the Studs Terkel podcast?

Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that question. Often, people ask me a different formulation of that question, which is like, how do you switch your brain from one thing to the next? And I don’t have a good answer because to me it’s kind of like, how do you eat cereal from a bowl one day and then eat ice cream from a bowl the next day? And it’s the same bowl! I’m like, well, you just do it. But I think the question you’re asking —

That’s really deep.

[LAUGHS] Thanks. Yeah. I’ve given it a lot of thought because it’s the question people ask me most that I’m the least equipped to answer. But I like your version a lot better. The way I’ve come to describe it more recently is that I see a lot of my work in the social sciences — essay writing work, nonfiction prose, things like that — as asking how and why the world is the way it is and how it came to be this way. And I see my work in fiction, and television, and comic books, and poetry as asking, how could the world be otherwise?

So that’s kind of what I’ve come to see as the uniting thread. And then there are a lot of themes and questions that are pretty much the same in all of my work. You know, Black girlhood, Afrofuturism, the city kind of coming of age — those types of things. Obviously race, inequality — I’m always asking sort of the same questions over and over. But I’ve also been really grateful to learn from each of these forms. And I think one of the kind of cross-pollinations that has become most meaningful, perhaps because it’s surprising to some people, is being a poet and then coming to write comics.

And the thing is is that, something that poetry and comics share is the intense requirement for parsimony and economy of language. People who are novelists would say this. That when you move from writing very long-form fiction to writing comics, one of the things that people struggle with, is you don’t have a lot of space. Right? And that your job as a comic book writer is to use a very spare amount of space in a really efficient way, and also to be a collaborator with somebody else who’s doing the visual part of the storytelling. Right?

And so I learned a lot in comics writing from writing poetry. And I think I kind of write everything that I write like a poet. You know, I think my nonfiction writing is inflected with poetry. So, yeah. And I think, honestly, one of the other big things is that the kind of community that I came up in as a poet is very related to a strong performance tradition, as well as a strong kind of community engagement tradition.

And so I think that one of the biggest things that being a poet taught me first is how to talk to people about writing and how to be a writer in space with other people, as well as how to do a lot of things yourself — a lot of the kind of grimy parts of being an author that many people don’t think about. I’m really good at setting up chairs, I’m really good at setting up microphones — that type of thing. I can pretty much do all that myself.

One of the cool experiences of getting to do the show is that I tend to read a lot of somebody’s work all at once. And so when I was reading — or rereading, actually, in this case — “Ironheart,” the Marvel comic, I saw a lot of your sociology in there on this read. Because I just read “Ghosts in the Schoolyard.” So there’s a moment pretty early on where Riri is looking for information on a friend who is kidnapped. And she’s looking online, and looking in the news media, and she can’t find anything — like, there’s nothing there.

And then, it’s a family member who knows something because she talked to another mother in the community who’s able to give a crucial clue. And she says, I should have gone to you first — gone to the source. And that certainly is very much connected to the broader work you do in sociology, which, as I read it, is very much about trying to take seriously knowledge and information that is coming from sectors of society, or parts of society, that are often dismissed. So can you talk a bit about that? About where you look for truth and for information?

Yes. Oh, well, first of all, thank you for making that connection because I feel very seen and affirmed by that. I think that you’re right. The discipline of sociology — specifically for me, as a Chicagoan, and as somebody who was born and raised and grew up here in Chicago — the discipline of sociology, on the one hand, has the profound power to illuminate that which otherwise might remain invisible about the way that we interact with each other as people. I’m attracted to the field because of the ways in which it makes plain the kind of magical invisible ties that bind us as a society, this thing called the society.

But at the same time, like so much of the social sciences, but I think sociology in particular, has also this legacy of deeply pathologizing harmful, dehumanizing, voyeuristic writing traditions. And people who make fame and fortune from basically endlessly describing the same deeply objectifying visions of communities that they themselves are not really a part of in a meaningful way. And so I think, for me, this question of, how do you come to understand, make sense of, listen to, take seriously the observations and the reflections that come from people’s lived experiences, I try really hard to make that the center of my work.

And I think that comes from a couple of places. One, I think it comes from my personal experience as a Black person who grew up in Chicago in the ‘90s and coming from family circumstances that, on paper, could be kind of, like, a check box of at-risk, traumatizing situations. And when I think about my family, when I think about my life, when I think about what my experiences were like growing up, I don’t see myself through those lenses. I don’t see myself through those kinds of labels. I see myself as a person who came from a community with lots of people who loved me.

But I remember what it was like to hear people use words to describe you that you would not use to describe yourself, and to feel bad, and to feel small. And so one of the kind of guiding rules of my work is, I try to never talk about people in a way that I wouldn’t talk about them to their face. You know? I just try to be accountable, as much as possible, to actually being in engaged conversation with folks about their own lives. And I think two other things that are important to note in that is I see that very much as part of a Black feminist scholarly tradition, as well as very much part of a critical race theory tradition.

For those who are interested in what critical race theory actually is, that’s a foundational tenet of critical race theory — the idea that people’s lived experiences, and specifically the lived experiences of people who by virtue of age, race, disability, class, are often marginalized from the center of our storytelling, that those experiences matter and that they are vital forms of evidence in understanding social phenomena. So I think that a Black feminist tradition and critical race theory tradition both inform me there.

And the last thing I’ll mention is that one of the guiding lights of my work as a writer has always been the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who’s just an incredibly important figure to me and somebody I look up to a lot. Her most famous poem is called “The Pool Players / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” And most people know it by its first line — which is, “We real cool.” And it’s a very famous, very widely anthologized poem. And the poem is very short.

And it’s from the perspective of, as the title suggests, a group of seven young people that she encountered while walking in her neighborhood on the south side of Chicago in the middle of the day, and they’re shooting pool at a pool hall. And she looks through the open door of this pool hall and sees these kids who are supposed to be in school. And she says, instead of asking myself, why aren’t they in school, I asked myself, I wonder how they feel about themselves.

And I think that, in a way, I’m trying to ask both of those questions at once. But I think that oftentimes we pay a lot of attention to the first type of question and, much to our own detriment, ignore the second type of question. So yeah, thank you for seeing that in my work. It’s a very important thread to me.

So there are a bunch of places I want to go from here. I didn’t expect to do this, but I went out and I ordered a Gwendolyn Brooks anthology after reading your book.

Oh, you did? Wow.

I was so struck by some of those poems. Would you mind reading, “We Real Cool?”

Sure. I’m to read it, but the way each poet inflects work in their own way is different. So I’m going to read it the way I read it, and I really recommend that when people are done with this episode, that they go look up Gwendolyn Brooks and hear the way she reads it.

“We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks. “The Pool Players / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon.

The line, actually, that always struck me in that was thin gin.

Mm-hmm.

I somehow so love that. It’s so weirdly evocative. But something you wrote about it, and that you said in your introduction of it, is the way it takes their perspective as, like, the heroes of the story. Right? Not, like, a bunch of truant kids. But they’re mythic. And that there is information in that for why they would do what they do, why this life would be worth it to them. And that’s the poem that opens up “Ghosts in the Schoolyard.” And I want to know the connection between the poem and the book for you

Yeah. So “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” when I started writing the book, I knew I wanted to write about the school closures that took place in Chicago in 2013. And, initially, the topic was so massive, and there was so much I wanted to think about and talk about, and I initially wanted to write about at least two different communities in Chicago and the way that they had been impacted by school closures.

And one of my mentors gave me some of the most practical advice that I’ve ever gotten. And he was like, if you’re trying to graduate — this is part of my dissertation at Harvard — and he said, if you’re trying to graduate, do one — [LAUGHS] pick one neighborhood. And I really appreciated that because I think that sometimes people don’t talk about the ways that pragmatic concerns like money, and travel, and how much time it takes to do research are legitimate forces that drive some of your decisions in writing.

So I decided that I wanted to specifically write about Bronzeville. And Bronzeville, for those who don’t know, is a really historically important community in Chicago. And specifically, it has ties to the great migration, as well as kind of some of the most important cultural forces that have emerged over the city’s history, including people like Gwendolyn Brooks, but also Richard Wright and Nat King Cole, and so many others. And so part of it is that it felt natural for me to begin the book with this person who, one of her first collections of poetry is called “A Street in Bronzeville,” and to kind of pay homage to her in that way.

But I think it’s also because in trying to write this book, it was an interesting choice because I knew that I wanted to try to speak to two audiences. Number one, I really wanted to speak to people like myself because I was a teacher in a school that was closed. I had been a teacher and, after I was gone, the school closed. But people like myself who were personally impacted and hurt by this policy decision, people in the education world who wanted to understand more.

And I also wanted it to be a valuable book for organizers and educators on the ground. Because I thought a lot about how when you’re engaged in kind of what appears to some people to be kind of like a wonky policy issue that actually deeply affects you personally, it can be very challenging to try to break that down to otherwise interested audiences. Really, what I wanted was to think about how to make a book that you could just hand somebody and it would explain a whole bunch of stuff really efficiently, really quickly.

And at the same time, I am an untenured faculty member at a university, and I would like to be a tenured faculty member at a university. And so there’s also, within academia, all these performances of what it looks like to be smart, and what it looks like to show that you’ve read everything, and what it looks like to show that you are an innovative contributor to the public good and public knowledge.

For some people in the scholarly world, to be obscure and opaque is the coin of the realm. And the way you prove to people that you’re smart and that you know things is by making your work is inaccessible to as many people as possible. And that’s just counter to everything that I believe as a writer, as a person. And I also started my career as a middle school teacher. And when you’re a middle school teacher, you have to be able to explain anything to a 12-year-old on demand. That’s really hard. And if you don’t know it, you also have to have the humility to say, I don’t know this. I need to go understand it better.

But it really instilled in me the idea that only when you can clearly explain something to pretty much anybody can you really say that you understand it. When I was teaching in Stateville Correctional Center, which is a maximum security prison in downstate Illinois — and this is not just me being self-indulgent, it was an Ed policy class, so it’s not just like, hey, you have to read my stuff because I said so. [LAUGHS] But I had them read the uncorrected Microsoft Word document version of the first chapter, and asked them what they thought about it.

And for me, it was really important that the people who have been most harmed by the things that I’m writing about, the people who have the most to gain or to lose by public perception and the shifts in public perception on these issues, that the book be accessible to them and that they feel like it belongs to them. And before it came out, I thought to myself, you know, I’ve tried to write a book that people can get. And a lot of my colleagues might think that I’m not very smart because this is the kind of book that I chose to write. But the book has been well received by my academic colleagues as well. But I was really ready to take that L because it just isn’t worth it to me to write something that people can’t get.

That’s such an interesting meta story for the book though, because it’s also what the book is about. Right? The book is about failures of language and communication — and in particular, the failure of policymakers and politicians in Chicago to either listen or to be able to hear what is being said to them by the communities they’re supposed to serve. And I mean, you have this amazing third chapter in the book, which is a discourse analysis of the school closure meetings, or the school closure hearings. And you talk about the way they’re sort of sequenced and the aesthetics, almost, of a trial.

But you also, I think, show in a really striking way how the language of technocratic expertise — of, like, if that, then this — of, well, we have a parameter, and the school fell out of the parameter. And because the school fell out of the parameter, then, obviously, the conclusion is how that is disempowering people who have not been trained to speak in that way.

But at the same time, also in the other direction, how if you are trained to speak and think that way, you might miss information coming in a package you have been taught or have taught yourself not to recognize as valid. In my worlds, I think there’s a tendency to really not be able to hear things that come wrapped in emotion, that are wrapped in upset, that are wrapped in protest.

So I’d love for you to talk about not just the meta level of the performance of being smart, but also what is lost when you’ve gotten yourself wrapped up in a discourse of intelligence that begins to exclude possible other sources of knowledge and information who have not done the work to get into your particular dialect?

That’s such a great point. One thing I want to point out as a side note before I answer your question is that part of what was painful about those hearings was that there were also teachers protesting the closures who had, because we live in the era of accountability since the passage of No Child Left Behind, teachers who very much have been trained to speak in this kind of technocratic language.

And who are saying, even based on the metrics that you have put forth, if we want to do the data analysis, if we want to do — we had schools be closed with the justification of them being one or two percentage points away from a neighboring school, both of which were below state standards on a particular year.

And no serious statistician, no serious econometrician, nobody who actually understands the analysis of quantitative data would say oh yeah, it’s really meaningful to make this decision based on the fact that this school had 67 percent proficiency, and this school had 68.1 percent proficiency in this random year with this random cohort of students.

So even on that face, it didn’t fly. But to your broader question, honestly, Ezra, I feel like this disconnect really in some ways is at the root of so much cultural conflict within which we found ourselves in the last seven years or so. And whether that’s what people obliquely refer to as cancel culture, whether that’s conversations about race in schools, whether that’s conversations about gender, about gender violence, about transphobia, there is a way of thinking that dictates that what it means to be intelligent is inextricable from the veneer of objectivity.

And that the way you show that you were objective on an issue is by not having an emotional attachment to that issue. And I think that that is a problem for two reasons.

One is that I simply don’t take it for granted as a priori fact that our emotional lives are not also a valid source of human understanding. This is something that also is fundamental to both Black feminism and critical race theory. The idea that the way we feel about something can actually give us a source of information that is valuable and worth looking at. That doesn’t mean that I believe in a world where we as individuals or the policies that we make for ourselves collectively and for others should be completely subject to the whims of emotion. Absolutely not. But I think it’s really disingenuous to pretend as though our emotional lives are not a valid source of information that all of us use to govern ourselves in the way we feel all the time.

All of us use emotional data to think about the kinds of relationships we want to be in, the kinds of jobs we want to do, the kinds of parents, or sisters, or siblings, or children that we want to be to the people we love. And in our personal lives, we recognize that emotions are a valid source of data. But when it comes to the emotions of others, we quickly cast that out the window and act as though only our feelings are worthwhile.

The second issue with it, even if you disagree with me philosophically about the first thing I just said, the second part is, I think, pretty hard to dispute. And that is that the things that we are talking about diferentially affect people who are in different social positions in the world. I remember being in college as an undergraduate, and I went to the University of Chicago as an undergrad. And I’m a professor there now, and the culture at the university, in so many ways, we are trained to show deference to this culture of objectivity.

And I remember getting in an argument with a group of colleagues about Don Imus, and for those who don’t remember, at the time, Don Imus was this radio personality who said some very racist and sexist things, specifically about a group of Black women. And I got in this argument with some classmates about it, and I was getting really upset. And they were saying that he shouldn’t have been taken off the air, and it was an overreaction, and First Amendment. And I was with them keeping pace on a fully intellectual level to a certain point, and then after a while, I was like, I’m just upset. This just hurts my feelings.

And I paused and took account of the situation and realized that I was arguing with three white men. And I think that when people hear that, the next defensive response is to say oh, so that means because they’re white men, they’re opinion doesn’t matter or should just be cast out? No. Absolutely not. But the fact of the matter is only one of us in that situation is a person who has had that type of language deployed against us. Who lives in an actual situation where that impacts my family, my life, my livelihood, the kind of job I can get, the kind of classes I get let into, the material impacts of my present, past, and future.

It’s just absurd at a certain point to pretend that we are entering that debate in the same way, and it makes the entire auspices of something like a quote unquote debate suspect to me because the premise of a debate is supposed to be that we are going entirely based on clear evidentiary standards. And if we are not including people’s real life or death experiences as part of that evidence, I find it really intellectually disingenuous.

And I also find that it allows, in particular, people who have identities that afford them comparative social power the ability to maintain the facade that those identities don’t count, or that those identities are not also identities. And so we’ve seen, for example, in the last few years, the ways in which people’s whiteness and their attachment to whiteness certainly drives their attachment to certain policy proposals, certain political positions.

And yet, we have a tendency as a society to only racialize those conversations, to only add gender to those conversations when those voices are coming from marginalized people.

So I forgot what the question was, but those are my thoughts.

That’s such a great line right there. I forgot what the question was, but those are my thoughts. I feel like that’s like a lot of life. [LAUGHTER]

This is a really deep tangle for me because — I ran “Wonkblog” at The Washington Post. I’m a very, very skilled the aesthetics of rationality kind of arguer. And I also agree with everything you just said, which is to say in particular that a tremendous amount of information is encoded in emotion. When people are really upset about something, that is a signal you should be curious about, particularly if you don’t understand why they’d be upset about it.

I think about this all the time in the representation and culture debate, which you’re very much part of as a Marvel author. So if I rewind that one 10 years ago, particularly on behalf of white people who have cultural power, oh, this is ridiculous. Why is everybody making such a big deal over how many Black comic book figures there are?

And by the way, you don’t have to rewind. That’s very much a position people take right now today all the time.

It is, except that, to me, as soon as that began to change, the same people who are saying this is a stupid thing to be upset about got unbelievably upset about it.

When it began to be that, oh now, we’re going to change this meaningless thing, and Star Wars is going to be a more multiracial cast. And you’re going to have key comic book figures changing gender and changing race, then it turned out that this whole space that was derided as something you could only care about if you’re an immature child who still read comic books as an adult was incredibly culturally meaningful to people. And the same folks were now furious.

And by the way, their emotion had information too. That was a signal as well, and I think it’s a really potent blind spot for a lot of the people who are in professions, academia, journalism et cetera, that have developed an aesthetic of rationality and an aesthetic of objectivity. It’s fine sometimes to calm down your language to make sure more people can hear you, but if you then begin to not be able to hear other people, then you’ve just created a blind spot. You’re not apprehending the world more fully. You’re apprehending it more narrowly.

I think that’s exactly right, and to me, part of it is how do we expand what we think about when we think about something like rationality? And how do we expand our notion of rationality or logic to also include what we might call emotional data?

And again, if you go into the grocery store, and you see two identical cereals. One is the store brand, and one is — I don’t want to give anybody free advertising. I’ll say Honey Nut Cheerios! [LAUGHS]

One is Honey Nut Cheerios, and one is the store brand. And you know that they’re exactly the same. They’re exactly the same cereal, and part of why people make the decisions that they make in that moment is because they saw a commercial that made them feel good. Or they had memories about eating Honey Nut Cheerios as a kid, or they have a class consciousness where they have memories about being mocked for eating the store brand cereal when they were a kid. And so now they’re only going to buy the brand name.

Those two are sources of information that all of us use to govern our decision making, and if we pretend as though those are not at play when people do the things that they do, we’re just missing part of the debate. And I think that that is — the persistent desire to explain the ascendancy of the last president without in any way talking about things like white supremacy or the attachment that many white people have to the unquestioned assumption that America is a white country. That white people should always be disproportionately in power in America. That that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always should be. To pretend as though that was not at play is how we got into some of these almost self-satirical economic anxiety arguments that ignored — that then even become contrary in the face of actual data about who these voters are and what their socioeconomic status is.

And so to a certain extent, we can get to an extreme point where our discomfort with talking about the role that emotions play, the very real role that emotions play in the way people perceive and experience public policy, drives us to turn away from the other sources of data that we supposedly are supposed to believe. Because it makes us so uncomfortable, and that becomes an extreme position.

I want to keep this on schools because schools is where you really get at the heart of this. Your book is motivated by watching communities rally — in up to pretty extreme ways of hunger strikes and getting arrested — to save schools that the city says are failing. And it’s motivated by the mystery of, if these schools are so terrible, if they’re failing, then why do these communities care so much about them?

You said to open up the other side of this argument, too, which is people worry if you say well, emotion is full of data. And you’ve got to take all that seriously, but everybody’s got emotions. The old line about opinions, too. They’re like something else. Everybody’s got one.

And people want data to settle arguments. They want to be able say well, we measured it, and however everybody feels, this is the facts. Facts don’t care about your feelings, as the line goes. So for you, I guess one way to ask the question is, do you think it is possible for a school to be failing and for people to still be committed to it? Is there such a thing as a failing school? Or does that misunderstand what schools are doing in communities?

That’s a great question, and there are a few things I want to say.

First of all, I attended Chicago public schools my entire life. I was a Chicago public school teacher. Before the pandemic, I liked to be in schools, visit all types of schools in all types of cities, schools that are very prestigious, and elite, and have a lot of resources, and schools that are really struggling. And I think it’s important [not] to say that schools that other people deem failing are somehow perfect and idyllic places.

At the school where I taught, which was ultimately closed, I think it was a beautiful, incredible place full of colleagues that worked really hard, full of incredible children and families. And also, we once had to let our art teacher go, so that we could have algebra because it was like well, we don’t have money for art and algebra. And it’s really important that these kids have algebra.

And at one point, my principal found somebody who taught algebra and Mandarin, and she was like OK, this is great because he’ll teach algebra part of the time to some of the kids. And then he’ll teach Mandarin part of the time to the younger kids, and it was like we we’re just trying to rob Peter to pay Paul every day of the week.

The material constraints that forced teachers to work absurd hours, all those things — I just don’t want to romanticize those things. There are schools that are very, very much struggling in all types of ways.

At the same time, there are two things I think that are important to think about. The first thing is I think it’s important for us to define what we mean when we say a school is good or that a school is bad, and I think that we have a tendency, as a society, to use these terms as shorthand really quickly without ever interrogating what we mean by good or bad. Where we got that information from, and whose standards we’re using.

And so, there are some incredible studies in a book that I recommend on this topic. It’s called “Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools,” which is edited by Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette. And it’s an edited volume of academic work that’s all about how people choose schools.

We know from some research that middle class and affluent parents, if you ask them about schools in their area, and which schools they choose, and why, they have more information about schools that are further from where they live but that share their class status than they do about schools that may be closer to them that have a higher enrollment of lower income children.

But when you interview parents, including middle class and affluent parents who are incredibly educated, they say things like well, I heard it was good. And so and so told me at such and such party, this and that playground that it was good.

And the authors of some of these studies, they ask parents, did you go online? Did you look at the data? What are the graduation rates? And I recall in this book there’s a quotation from one parent who says, as you’re asking me this, I’m actually really embarrassed because I realize that, as a person who in all other arenas of my life does this intense data analysis, to figure out what tacos I’m going to order for dinner, that I didn’t do any of that type of analysis when it came to figuring out the school that was best for my kid.

I asked the people who look like me, who make the money that I make, who work at the places where I work, and that’s how I made the decision. And I think that for many parents, a school that other people deem to be good or bad might not be good or bad for your kid. And I experienced this in conversations a lot with parents who send their kids to elite private schools, and then find out that those schools, for example, are not legally required to offer services for students with disabilities. And say well, my kid has dyslexia. Now the school can do nothing for me. I didn’t know that that was a thing.

And so I would really like people to think more critically about what we mean when we say a school is good or a school is bad. And for us to just maybe be a little bit more expansive in the type of information that we use to make that assessment.

That being said, I think there’s a much bigger point, which is that oftentimes when I travel around the country in the pre-pandemic times and talk to people about schools, and school success, and school failure, and what those things mean, there’s always somebody in the audience who raises their hand and says well, I grew up in such and such town. And we didn’t care about any of these things. We just went to the local school down the block.

And for the vast majority of Americans who don’t live in places like D.C., or Boston, or Chicago, or New York, the places that take up a disproportionate amount of our headlines in the way we do education reporting, for most people, that’s what they do. They live in a place, and they go to the school that they’re zoned to go to.

What is obscured in that conversation is that people opt into access to those school districts through other means. Like the ability to buy property in an affluent district. We hear all the time oh, my parents moved here for the schools. We moved here for the schools. We used to live in this place, but we moved. The schools, they were so good. We moved here for the schools.

When they say that, they’re engaging in a form of school choice that we don’t always talk about. We talk about school choices meaning you live in New York, or you live in Chicago, and you have to fill out this form. And then sacrifice your firstborn child and rise at dawn to draw a pentagram in the sand or something in order to get into the school that you wanted.

And that at the end of the day, the only reason that any of this is so high stakes? It really doesn’t have to be. It’s only so high stakes because we haven’t committed to a baseline, to fighting like hell to ensure that every kid anywhere in the country, despite their circumstances, can go to any public school and get a great basic education.

And so I wrote an op ed in The New York Times a couple of months ago that made a lot of people really mad on both sides of an issue, in which I said, can we stop arguing about charter schools? And charter schools are one of the most polarizing and divisive issues in public education, and I’m happy to say, if we want to have a polar division, I am not a pro-charter school person. I’m pretty much on record as being quite critical of charter schools in a lot of places and for a lot of reasons.

But I think that our obsessive debate, at this point, has started to obscure a more fundamental truth, which is that the reasons charter schools feel like this life-or-death matter is because we have failed to provide the basics, generally. And it doesn’t have to be that way. It wouldn’t be that way if we made a basic commitment to ensuring that all of our schools are providing the things that students need.

One of the things that was really hard about being an eighth grade teacher is that the high school admissions process in Chicago is extremely high stakes and extremely stressful, and I remember talking to parents who, their kids were C-average kids. Just like knucklehead 13-year-old, 14-year-old kids. Maybe that’ll change. Maybe they don’t like this teacher. Maybe they don’t like the subject. We know from adulthood that so many people that grow into being an incredible, life-changing people don’t do well in seventh or eighth grade. It shouldn’t be that serous.

And not only that, by the way, but when those people come out on the other side, and they’re massively successful, we idolize them. And say that they’re so great and can you believe they used to get straight F’s and dropped out of school?

I’m one of these people, and whenever I do anybody else’s podcast, the first question is oh, I read you got a 2.2 average in high school. How interesting. Tell me more about that. It’s like a whole triumph narrative people want to give me. It makes me curious and interesting.

And it turns out that maybe that actually wasn’t that predictive of a lot of things about you, or your creativity, or your ability to ask certain types of questions. And that they could be measuring any number of other things.

And so I remember talking to parents and having parents come in and say, Miss E, I’m really scared that if he doesn’t get into this school, he’s going to have to go to that school. And if he goes to that school, you see the news. You see the numbers. You see the statistics.

And for these parents, they literally felt like it was a life-or-death question. And to get into high schools, people are looking at your seventh- grade grades. So depending on your birthday, you might be 12, and it’s like the decisions that you make when you’re 12, these parents are literally afraid my kid is going to die. My kid is going to die because they got a C in reading when they were 12.

That is ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t be that way, and part of how I think I got so obsessed with schools is because I knew that I was not a better person or a more deserving person. I went to a public high school that was a multimillion-dollar investment that you had to have really high test scores to get into.

And people that I knew, people in my family, people who are my friends who went to schools where they didn’t have foreign language options, where they didn’t feel physically safe, where the bathroom wasn’t clean or well maintenanced. That I wasn’t a better person than those people, and so why should it be within the same city that we should have such radically different experiences?

I think that if we just focused on that, this question of oh, schools are failing, that that would be so much less a question of market-based competition and how we duke it out. And more a question of basic resource provision, and that’s where I’d really like us to go as a society.

So I really like that op-ed, and I thought it was a very fair take on the charter school debate, but I also felt it was a place where I needed four more paragraphs or something. Because you say in the op-ed

Talk to your colleagues, Ezra, because they’re very stingy with their word counts. [LAUGHTER]

They are strict about that. They’re strict about it with me, too. But you say that we need to replace some of these debates with simply the assertion that every kid needs a great school, and you say quickly like what that isn’t. Which debates that isn’t.

But to you, unbounded by political or budgetary constraint, what is it? Is that just funding schools adequately? What is a great school in the Eve Ewing utopia?

The funny thing is we know what great schools look like because we give them to rich people all the time. That all of those school districts around the country — the high school that I went to, we had seven different languages. We had an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We had an incredible gymnasium. We had a theater. We had a diverse set of teachers that were incredible, and thoughtful, and engaging.

And all across the country, there are schools like that. Some of them, like the school I attended, are public schools that are free to attend, but that we have made available only to such a small sliver of students. And within public school districts, within the school choice paradigm, we have come to use those schools as rewards.

Oh, you were really good at social studies when you were 12? Congrats. You get to go to a school where the teachers are nice to you, you have an eight minute passing period instead of four, you can go to the bathroom, and the bathroom is clean. And so I think to me, if we want to look at what would a great school look like, we can start with the schools that we are providing in affluent public school districts around the country.

And we can think about things like languages, things like nurturing educators that are highly qualified, and those things are not a mystery. I also think that our society’s propensity to have extreme levels of contempt for the poor, a desire to punish poor people for being poor, a desire to punish poor children …

All this absurd conversation about kids who have school lunch debt. Kids who can’t pay for their school lunch, and so they don’t get lunch because they are six and didn’t have their act together to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Those things are reflective of a broader cultural resistance to basic resource provision, and I think that that’s something we have to overcome.

And so, in addition to providing those basics that name your local affluent suburban school district wherever you grew up, the things that those kids get for free — and the free is with an asterisk because their parents paid for it with their property taxes and being able to move into that municipality — in addition to all those things, we also need to provide the compensatory things that have been denied to children in a society that is so deeply economically stratified.

So we also need to make sure that kids have food. We also need to make sure that kids have health care, perhaps, in school. That they have trauma support. That they have counselors and social workers. And part of the issue with schools that are struggling is also that for many families that have been denied basic resources by our society, the school is the only public institution that is still making some attempt to catch them or at least catch their kid.

And so, if you’re a teacher, and you have a kid who comes in, and they don’t have shoes, or their shoes are falling off their feet because their parent lost their job. Or if they’re really stressed and upset because they saw something traumatic at home, or because they were late because they don’t have good public transportation. All of those things are ostensibly non-educational policy issues that become education issues because the rest of our society hates providing resources to poor people.

And so I think about that a lot. On the one hand, I do think that we know the basic things we need to do to make our schools welcoming, and celebratory, and nurturing places. But on the other hand, I think we should cut schools a little slack for things that the rest of our society could also just be doing to elevate the bottom line.

And I think that that was clearer than ever at the beginning of the pandemic when they were saying, shut down the schools, and all the schools people were like wait, how are we going to feed kids?

When did our public school system become the front line for food scarcity and hunger in our country? And should we maybe stop and interrogate why that is? And if there are other things that we could be doing to make sure that kids don’t come to school hungry?

This is always a tension in this debate because I was thinking about this when you were saying that we have a template for what grade schools look like, which is just go look at a school in a wealthy suburban area. I used to work at The American Prospect, which is a very labor- left magazine, and it’s done a lot of work on schooling over the years. And the argument you’d always hear there is that we are using schools to try to solve problems they cannot solve. The best educational policy is anti-poverty policy. You want schools to be better? Make the expanded child tax credit permanent right now. Do it tomorrow.

And that there’s this tension because one of the differences — sometimes it’s funding, but you often will see pretty high levels of funding in schools that are struggling because they are having to deal with so much more. So something you said caught my ear on that, which is compensatory.

I think we have a tendency where resources follow success. Either the community success because it’s coming out of property taxes, or the kids’ success because we’re giving the resources to the schools that are teaching the kids who did the best on testing, or showed that they have tremendous STEM aptitude, or whatever it is.

But that you might almost want to think about reversing that, or at least having another version of it too, which is compensatory. Which is schools that are in tougher neighborhoods that do have a lot more security concerns. You talk about a school in the book where 30 percent of the children are homeless. That school might just need much, much, much more, and equality is not equality when you’re dealing with such different student bodies.

And so I wonder how you think about that idea of compensatory funding within the grade schools framework? Because a grade school just is going to have to be something different in that suburban area where there’s very little crime, and none of the kids are unhoused, than in some of the schools you talk about in the book.

I think it’s a both and. I think that you’re right, and this tension is probably also revealed in the way that I talk about this. Where on the one hand, I’m a schools person. I love schools. I think schools are amazing places, and I also think if you have this big gathering place in this institution that touches lots of kids that it’s just a logical place to be the dispensary of certain types of resources.

And so I think that in some cases, having wraparound services, having first contact services housed in schools, either literally or institutionally, makes a lot of sense. And at the same time, schools, and teachers, and principals catch a lot of flack for things that, you’re exactly right, are really policy failures in other arenas.

A lot of this is very gendered. It’s very historical and very gendered in the fact that teaching is a caring profession, that the vast majority of teachers are women, and that there’s a way in which it is very much frowned upon — and this has changed recently as there’s been incredible teacher organizing. But historically, it’s been very much frowned upon for people to admit that teaching is a highly politicized profession.

And so what that means is that there are really important political fights that teachers should and could, in my opinion, be at the forefront of being in solidarity with other types of workers. And we see this here in Chicago with the Chicago Teachers Union, for example, coming out and saying, we’re going to be on strike. And one of our striking demands is that we have better housing resources in Chicago. And people saying well, how can you talk about that? That’s not a teaching issue. It’s not an education issue, and them saying that, it absolutely is an education issue. What type of society do we want to have? And what role can schools play in that? And in what ways does it become unfair to expect schools to shoulder that burden entirely?

And also, a lot of this comes from the market- based model of schools that has become prevalent in the last two decades. And so what I mean by that is when we configure schools — and this is not invented by No Child Left Behind, but most famously accelerated and amplified by No Child Left Behind — the idea that the way we fix schools is that we have them compete against each other in a marketplace, and that the ones that are bad will just die, and the ones that are good will thrive, like it’s apps in the app store or something — like that is so, in my opinion, morally sick and depraved.

But also just, as it turns out, pretty ineffective because schools involve children. So if you know children, you know that schools are not built to pivot quickly to respond to market forces. And so, as long as we continue to have this idea that schools have to compete against each other and the best ones will win out, we’re going to continue to see the same issues.

One of the things you’re doing in the book is you are really listening to the communities that are protesting the school closures with the idea that what, say, at that point Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the administration are seeing as the markers of school success are missing a lot of what these schools are actually doing in the community.

And so even within the competition framework you’re talking about there, we’re not always seeing all the ways in which schools are competing. Test scores are not the only thing these schools are doing when you have 30 percent of your kids unhoused.

So the book is part of this effort that we talked about earlier, and that you tagged on critical race theory, to listen to voices that don’t always get listened to. And then I went, and I was watching a critical race theory explainer you did on Instagram. I think a lot of the things that critical race theory is part of and thinks about we are not really arguing about in the public debate.

But the one that we are is the idea that other voices and forms of knowing and other communities should be taken seriously. And their historical experience is treated as valid knowledge that policy should be built off of, and power should be changed because of. And so I’d like hear you talk a bit about that, because it’s easy to hear that as simply a way of doing inquiry into a question, but you’re attaching it to this much broader debate that I don’t think people usually think of it as. But changing who gets listened to really does change policy and really does change power.

So how is that part of critical race theory? And how do you see the way that that fight is playing out?

Sure. I want to clarify that, in my opinion as someone who has followed this debate publicly with much consternation, I find that roughly 80 to 95 percent of what people are debating in public right now has virtually nothing to do with critical race theory in my personal opinion.

I think that’s just true. it’s just like a true fact.

It is. Yeah. I’m being roughshod with my percentages here, but for those who might be interested, I’ll just do a real quick, short background.

So critical race theory is a theoretical construct and a way of doing research and inquiry that is now widely used in many fields, but that originates in critical legal studies. And people like Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and many others, that they developed as a framework because they, as legal scholars, became frustrated with the way that they were trained to think about and analyze the law and the impacts of the law always presumed the objective neutrality of the American legal system.

And that it provided very few ways to understand the fact that there are things like racism, discrimination and bias that are baked into the foundations of American society. And that it becomes very cumbersome to have to prove that over and over in a way that is counterproductive.

And so critical race theory offers us a framework to depart from that presupposition rather than reframing it. I think here of the comedian W. Kamau Bell, who has this skit where he talks about how annoying it is when somebody is like, how do you know it was racism? And you’re like oh, this thing happened to me, and it was so racist.

And he’s like, how do you know it was racism? And he’s like, what if I asked you every time you told me you had a pizza how’d you know it was pizza? And you’re like well, you know I’ve had pizza a lot. I know it smells a certain way, and it tastes a certain way. And how do you know how it wasn’t focaccia? How do you know it wasn’t a flatbread? I just know what pizza is.

And so, when you live as a person of color, as a person who has experienced — I got called the n-word for the first time when I was six. So there are so many ways in which racism and I are old, old buddies. To be asked to prove it over and over, it makes you feel like you’re living in an alternate reality.

And so these scholars gave us this profound gift, outlining for us some basic understandings about the way our country has always worked and allowing that to be a point of departure for deeper analysis. And so for me, and I think for many graduate students, for many scholars, the first time I encountered CRT — and I was assigned these articles to read at the graduate level, not at the fourth grade. Not at the master’s level. Not for either of my two first master’s degrees, but at the doctoral level was the first time I encountered critical race theory.

But when I first encountered critical race theory, it was like a light opening up in the sky because it confirmed so many things that I always understood intuitively. And that every person of color in the academy that I knew also understood, but that was so often not given language.

And so some of my closest friends in academia — I had a close friend who’s Japanese-American who went to graduate school with me. And her entire family was interned during World War Two. They were incarcerated.

I think about what it means to ask a person like that to prove that America has not always fundamentally been a good and just place, and that the legal system does not work equally for everybody. And for me, for classmates like that, to see it written by these esteemed, incredibly brilliant scholars, that the things our parents lived through, the things our grandparents lived through, the things that we lived through are a valid source of knowing? There are no words that I can give to how meaningful that was.

And I think that part of why, for some scholars, this attack has been so surprising and so hurtful in a weird way is because it’s in the academy, which is still, by and large so incredibly elitist, racially, class-wise, gender-wise in many subdisciplines. That it’s one school of thought that gives us language for saying the things my grandma told me count. That those things are real.

And for me, and for many scholars, those things are the only reason we ever went into this field anyway. I came into this work because I had deep levels of inquiry, and also deep levels of pain and hurt, and a desire to understand a world that inflicted pain and hurt on people that I love and care about. And to understand the patterns, to understand the why, to understand the how do we fix it questions. And to have them be illuminated.

And I think that for so many of us, critical race theory has offered that. But also that I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have those questions about lived experience.

This is why, though, I appreciate the account of this that you give, and let me see if I can say this in a way that’s not going to make people too mad.

Let’s do it, Ezra. All is already lost. [LAUGHTER]

To make them all mad?

I’ve read a lot of the explainers in the past couple weeks, and I’m an explainer journalist. That’s my background. Of what critical race theory really is. And critical race theory is often very technical. It’s a very specific, very built-out academic theory and way of apprehending the world.

And as you said at the beginning of this, it’s also not what is being argued about politically. The right has created a symbolic container that they’re calling critical race theory, and the people who have come up with this have very much said it explicitly. Other things weren’t working. You don’t want to say your argument’s social justice because who’s against social justice? Because you’re arguing against anti-racism because you don’t want to be a racist. They found critical race theory, which sounds elitist, sounds scary to people, at least to some people and went with that.

But so then you get into this like countermove, which is well, no. If you really read the essential readings in critical race theory, what you will come to learn about the structure of the legal system in America is —

Right, six months later, when you’re done with all the reading… [LAUGHTER]

Yeah, exactly. And then you’ve proved something they weren’t even arguing about really, which is that they’re wrong about what critical race theory is. And this goes back to I think to our whole conversation, but what you said. The first time I listened to your explainer, I was like wait, that’s — that doesn’t get it. And I was like no, you’re exactly right that — to W. Kamau Bell’s thing.

At some point, you have to decide who you’re going to believe if you have two people arguing over whether or not it’s focaccia, flatbread or pizza. And critical race theory says, and some of your work says, listen to the people who have been on the sharp, pointy edge of the stick of racism.

And a lot of more traditional theories say no, you have to keep reproving. We should assume always it’s colorblind.

Or, sorry, or even worse, those people know the least because they are so biased. Their head is not clear.

And that’s what you’re doing in a lot of your work, but also in this argument — I do think this is the real argument over critical race theory — which is simply, who should be believed? And there’s a sense that people on the right have, I think it is a true sense, that the question of who should be believed in their account of America is changing.

That’s the fight over the 1619 Project. That’s the fight over a lot of this stuff, and it’s small versions of the fight, too. The fights over schools in Chicago also have a sense of who should be believed. And critical race theory, it seems to me, and a lot of just American politics in general, is about who do we believe? Whose knowledge and experience do we count as valid?

I think that that sums it up so, so well, and that’s so true. And for me, one of the issues is that there’s a way in which we get hung up at that level, where we’re never allowed to proceed past that level of, who is a credible informer? And who is not?

And so therefore, we never even get to the evidentiary level. And so when I say something like America, the United States as we know it, has a deep and entrenched history as a racist nation state, I’m not just saying that because I felt like it, or I saw it on a sticker. That is something that I came to believe through my own, number one, experiences in the world, but also, as I came to learn about forms of racism that did not affect me in my communities, personally, but that I saw their basic impact across the trajectory of what we come to take for granted.

So when you learn about something like Japanese incarceration, when you learn about the genocide of indigenous peoples, you start to ask a lot of questions about the premise of the society in which we live. And I think that you’re right that some of this is a question of whose country is it? And who is believable? And who is a credible informer?

But also that it’s deeply painful for people to admit that it may be that the things they cherish and the things they hold dear about our society are unavoidably inflected with hurt and pain. And I think that there’s a way in which, in our personal lives, in our political lives, we just become stronger, healthier, happier people when we are able to account for the flaws of those whom we love.

And to paraphrase him badly, Baldwin said, I critique America because I love America. And I think that all of us, in our relationships, in ourselves, have things that we recognize as imperfect, and we learn how to account for, be honest about, and reckon with those flaws and, where necessary, make repair.

And certainly, the furor around the 1619 Project, which I was very honored to participate in, is also just really stunning and odd because some of what is being debated are just objective facts. That certain things happened in certain years to certain people, and we can never really get to that point if we’re always shadowboxing with, critical race theory teaches white kids to be sad and to hate themselves.

And it’s just such a masterful and disturbing intentional misuse, and misreading, and misrepresentation.

Two things caught my ear. One is the point you made about after not being able to get past the debate over the debate. You just get mired in this, like, can we even have the conversation?

But then in the way truth is constructed, and this strikes me as maybe a bridge to the other side of your work. We’ve really been talking here about “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” and sociology, and the work you do on the way things are or trying to describe some texture of the way things are.

And then you have this other side, which is the way they aren’t but maybe ought to be. You gave it an “is / ought” distinction earlier, I think. And that’s true in your comics, your poetry, a lot of it is Afrofuturism You did a great conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and you talked about igniting imagination.

So can you tell me about that side of it? The side of it where, at the beginning of your book of poetry, you say everything in here is absolutely true? And of course, a lot in there is speculative fiction and alternative reality. So how do you think about that relationship with the truth of what could be?

What a great question. I love talking about Afrofuturism. So I think that there is a couple of things. One, I am very privileged in that I came of age, and continue to constantly come of age, and learn, and grow in a community with some really incredible political organizers. Chicago is a city that has a lot of those, and I’ve been really honored to learn from those folks for many years.

And one of the things that I learned over and over is that you cannot have any type of political movement that only offers a rebuttal to what is, without ever looking forward to what could be. And I’ve heard you in some of your other conversations about — abolition is one of the places where I think this is especially important.

How do we have political futures that we can configure that are not only about negation, but that are about construction and dreaming? And I think of how dreaming, and imagination, and possibility are very much key words for the work I want to do. Partially because I think that it is a political necessity that otherwise, when the moment comes, and you find yourself having won whatever fights you wanted to win, that you are not prepared to build the world that you want. To quote Gwendolyn Brooks again, there’s a poem in which she says, “Live not for the battles won. Live in the along.” And I think that along the way, when we try to embody the politics of possibility, and to live into what we imagine as being possible, and what we want for the future, we’re practicing. We’re putting into place the habits, the relationships and the things that we need to ultimately live the world that we want.

And so one of the things I like to clarify about the way I think about Afrofuturism, and this is not true for everybody, I think about it only in some regards as being about the future per se. I think part of what Afrofuturism does is that it invites us to think about cyclical and non-linear understandings of time, and growth, and human progress, and non-human progress such that part of what I’m trying to do in imagining forward is actually looking backwards — to evoke the Sankofa image — in order to see what lessons and legacies have been left for us by the people who worked and struggled so hard to try to make better lives for their children and grandchildren.

It would be a malfeasance on my part to only spend all this time telling people about what’s wrong, without ever creating space to imagine what else could be.

Can you talk a bit about Ironheart, the character? Who is she? What does she represent for you?

Sure. I’ve gotten to write several projects for Marvel Comics, partially under the tutelage and encouragement of Ta-Nehisi, who you just mentioned. And many other really great writers and editors who supported me a lot and brought me into that fold.

So I’ve gotten to write several projects, but Ironheart is the one that is most closely affiliated with me, and that most people think about first. And Ironheart is a character. She’s a 15-year-old Black girl from Chicago. She was created by a writer named Brian Michael Bendis, and when you write comics, you, for the most part, inherit stories that people have already started.

And some of those stories got started like 80 years ago, which is part of what’s really challenging and really fun. I got to write a Spider-Man miniseries, and writing a character like Peter Parker that is one of the most recognizable, iconic figures ever created in popular culture is really special.

So with Riri, similarly, I inherited her biography. And the biography that I inherited was she’s 15, she’s Black, she’s from Chicago. She’s a super genius. She goes to MIT as a teen. Finishes high school early, goes to MIT. She reverse engineers the Iron Man suit created by Tony Stark and is able to make this bootleg Iron Man armor on her own, in her dorm room at MIT. And that catches the attention of Tony Stark, who becomes her mentor.

And the other part of her biography that I inherited was that her father was killed when she was very young or not yet born, like an infant. And then her stepfather who raised her was also killed in front of her when she was younger, and her best friend was — her best friend slash only friend because she’s kind of misanthropic — were both killed in front of her.

So those were — the main things that came with the character were tremendous, incredibly traumatic, life- transforming violence, and this idea of the Black girl genius wunderkind character.

And so I wrote 12 issues of the Ironheart solo series for Marvel, and it was truly an incomparable experience because to be able to take the trappings of that character and ask questions about her, and to ask those questions publicly in front of tens of thousands of readers, and to build her in that way was just so special.

Let me ask you about Ironheart and Tony Stark because I’m interested in that continuity. So I’m an old comics geek from my whole life.

Cool.

And I like my Iron Man comics fine, but he is like the most — and I don’t really mean this that pejoratively. I just mean it descriptively. Truly the most neoliberal of the superheroes. Right?

Yes, yes, yes. As comes out in Civil War.

He’s just an insanely rich guy who — there’s not even the fig leaf that he was in a gamma explosion that you weren’t in, or is from an alien world that you’re not from. He’s just smarter and richer than you are.

He just has won the competition for being the best at everything.

And he comes from inherited wealth, like his father.

Comes from inherited wealth, but is still the best at everything. And is, even though he’s part of teams, very independent, abrasive, struggles with alcoholism. He’s an interesting character. I don’t want to take anything away, and I love the Iron Man movies.

But then you move to Ironheart, and it’s much more rooted in a community, in a place. There’s no place of Tony Stark. The whole world, all of the galaxies, eventually become his domain. And I’m curious how you think about that continuity and the similarities and differences?

Because in some way, Ironheart is, in certain ways, a reboot of Tony Stark. Reverse engineers, super genius.

Right. She made her debut before the solo title in the “Invincible Iron Man” title, and the headline was Black girl Iron Man.

Yeah, exactly. I’d just be curious to hear how you reflect on what you tried to do differently with her. You have a couple of these characters now. Ms. Marvel — this is confusing for non-comic book people, but there’s multiple Ms. Marvels. But like the younger one.

Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, yes.

Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, is also very rooted in a community, is not a galaxy-hopping superhero in the same way.

There’s something interesting about the way that next generation of heroes is being envisioned as part of communities and parts of places. And so I’d just love to hear how you think that’s changing.

So for people who don’t care about comics, I’m about to go all the way there. So if you just came for wonky policy talk, you can just hit the 30 seconds forward. And I won’t be offended.

That being said, so this newer crop of characters, which include people like Riri, people like Miles Morales, who is, confusingly enough, also Spider-Man, but who is younger. Black Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn. People like Kamala Khan, who is a Pakistani-American teenage girl Muslim nerd from Jersey City.

And through a pleasant surprise, I’ve gotten an opportunity to write all of these characters, both in “Ironheart” and then in another series called “Champions.” Champions are a teen superhero group. And I think that what’s so great about them …

First of all, I love them in a really deep and weird way in that all of them are incredibly real to me. They’re very real people, and I love them all individually and as a group. But so one of the things that’s so special about them, as you said, is this connection and rootedness. And I think that one of the challenges we face with superhero storytelling is that in the world of superheroes, the stakes always have to be incredibly, incredibly high.

In comics, anything can happen. People come back from the dead. People are cloned. It was all a dream. Oh, it was a god that did it. It was aliens. The level of stakes in the storytelling is always so obscene and off the charts. Look at something like the last Avengers films, where there’s a dude who’s trying to snap his fingers and end half of society. And he’s going around multiple galaxies and worlds and doing this. The stakes are just real high compared to most types of fiction storytelling.

And so what that means is that in a world where comics has mostly had a lot of the same stuff for a really long time, it’s been really cool to see these characters that are so rooted in their communities. And that also allow us to still have the ridiculous sense of stakes, but really to tie comics back to adolescence.

So this teen superhero group, the Champions, part of why they form is because these teen heroes, they grow up idolizing the adult heroes. And then when they themselves become superheroes, they get really disillusioned because they’re like, these people are so busy fighting each other and fighting people on other planets that they’re not doing the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man stuff anymore. They’re not looking out for the little guy on the block and supporting communities.

And so those teens, they form their own group that is going to be more dedicated to really helping people in need that are right around them. And it’s just been so, so fun to write all of them, and I feel an unhealthy, weird attachment to them as though they were real. And I feel really proud of them. I feel proud of each of them and all that they’ve done.

I did this interview a couple of months ago with Ted Chiang, the science fiction writer, and he had this interesting critique of superheroes where he said that the problem for him with them is that in almost all cases — not literally all, but the exceptions tend to be like niche books — they are for the status quo. They’re always trying to put things back the way they were, more or less.

And there are a lot of reasons for that. The episodic storytelling, it would be really hard if you upended the entire government, and then it’s like all the rest of the comics are about how do you structure representational input into the new society? But do you think there’s something to that? Because I do think there is a real tension between a comics industry that, in its politics, is becoming somewhat more obviously progressive. But then the structure of these books, which makes it often hard to — you can write an injustice from the status quo. The heroes never truly transform the status quo. There’s all this amazing power, and mostly it’s to stop supervillains from wrecking everything. It’s not like everybody has Iron Man’s tech now.

This is part of why this issue of who gets to write these stories is so important, because Ta-Nehisi’s Captain America is real different. I think that part of it is if you are a person who has mostly benefited from the status quo, perhaps you are less likely to write stories that transform that status quo. If you haven’t given a lot of thought to how society doesn’t work for most people, you might not be so inclined to tell stories from that perspective. And I think that our narratives are a little bit narrower as a result.

And then at the same time, the heroes themselves, part of what we love about them is that they are mostly human. They are mostly flawed beings.

Some of my favorite forms of storytelling are when superheroes start to ask those basic fundamental questions about, wait, am I doing the right thing? What should I be doing? How should I be doing it? What’s right and what is wrong?

And I think that for me, one of the biggest questions I had to confront right away when I knew that I was going to write “Ironheart” was thinking about policing. So I don’t believe in police. I consider myself an abolitionist, and so many comics that I grew up reading and so many stories end by the hero binding the bad guy up and turning them over — here you are, officer. Here you are, chief.

And I think that there are some certainly really important moments. I grew up really always intrigued by Commissioner Gordon, who’s the central figure in the Batman world. And Commissioner Gordon is basically the only good apple in an incredibly corrupt and flawed police force, and he has to work with this vigilante outside of the realm of legal policing.

But it’s funny that there aren’t more serious critiques of policing that emerge from the superhero world, even though all these superheroes, what they do is really illegal vigilantism. In a lot of comics, there’s this tension where the cops don’t really like Spider-Man, or they don’t really like Batman. But they just put up with them because they’re useful sometimes.

And I think that for me, I had to think a lot about how I’m just never going to have a scene where Riri catches a quote- unquote “bad guy” and turns them over to the police. And that’s not only because that’s my personal politics, but, to go to this question about how who we are inflects the way we tell stories, it didn’t seem realistic to me that a 15-year-old Black girl from the South side, who almost certainly has seen policing work in her community in ways that are harmful, who has seen people who she knows to be good, be victimized by the police. It just didn’t make sense to me that she would just inherently trust them. So I had to think about what to do about that.

But that was part of what makes the work fun is that these are interesting philosophical questions to turn over.

In the time I have left with you, I want to ask you about one of your other projects, which is you’ve done a radio show, a podcast that pulls out of the Studs Terkel archives and then adds on interviews that you do on top of it. I’m a Studs Terkel superfan.

I was like, why do you keep asking me all this Studs stuff? I’m so impressed because most people know nothing about this podcast.

I have every Studs Terkel book ever written. I have the graphic novel of “Working.”

Amazing.

The work I do is not like the work he does, but I love the work he does.

So first, can you just say who Studs Terkel is? And I’m just curious about that project. How did you get into it? What are you trying to achieve in it? Just tell me about your relationship to Studs.

So for those who want to look it up, it’s a podcast that we only did five episodes of. It’s called “Bughouse Square with Eve Ewing.” So for those who don’t know, Studs Terkel was an iconic, inimitable, oral historian, journalist, man about town, writer, and what he is most well-known for is that he was really — I’m going to be superlative and just say one of the greatest interviewers ever to live.

Part of what made him such a great interviewer is that he would literally talk to anybody, and he took them so seriously. He’s known for things like “Working,” where he just interviewed lots of people about their jobs and what do you think about your job? And it gives you so many insights into the fabric of life, and he interviewed regular people sitting at a bar, and interviewed Cesar Chavez, and put the same level of effort and seriousness into each of those conversations.

So for the longest time, Studs’s show was on a radio station here called WFMT, which is our public classical radio station here in Chicago. And they have all these archives of his. They have all these archives of his shows, and they were in the process of sorting the archives, working with archivists to tag the interviews, and creating this huge public repository, which you can find online if you Google “Studs Terkel archives.” Coordinating and organizing all of these incredible conversations that he’d had over the course of decades.

And they wanted to think about ways of activating this archive, and when you’d say archive to most members of the public, it doesn’t necessarily inspire imagination for a lot of people if they don’t really know what it means. Or they think of an archive as always being like a dusty place in a library.

And I was really excited because I’m very passionate about thinking about how to activate archives. “Ghosts in the Schoolyard” relies on a lot of archival material that I was extremely fortunate to find. My third book, “1919,” is a book that is entirely in conversation with archives, and I love Studs.

I grew up always hearing about him, and hearing him on the radio, and my mom and my granddad always talked about how great he was. And when I was a teacher, I taught an oral history unit to my students, and had them listen to Studs Terkel interviews. And it was so powerful to me that this guy, who was a white guy who lived very long life, that 11- and 12-year-old Black kids on the South side in the 21st century could listen to his interviews and just be captivated. Because he was just that good.

And so the conceit we came up with for the podcast is that I like to think of Studs as my co-host, and I used to joke that everybody has a podcast. But not everybody has a co-host who’s a ghost, or a co-ghost, as I like to say.

And so Studs and I did this project together from beyond the grave, in which every episode we would feature excerpts from an interview that he did with James Baldwin, or Lorraine Hansberry, or just other really incredible writers and thinkers. I would reflect on the excerpts and talk about what we should draw from them in the present, and then I would interview somebody whose work was in conversation with that other person’s work in the present.

So for example, for the Lorraine Hansberry episode, I interviewed Imani Perry, who had just published her incredible book “Looking for Lorraine.” And so it was just really fun, and really hard, and really cool. It’s currently defunct just because the people who were shepherds of the project at the radio station all just left at the same time, and then I also got really busy.

So we’ll see. Maybe we’ll bring it back in the future. It’s certainly an honor and a surprise that you even know about it, but it was a lot of fun. And I feel very grateful to Studs.

And when we first started recording, we were recording in a third party studio elsewhere in Chicago because it was convenient, and somebody was letting us use it. And a couple of times, the recording got totally ruined. I interviewed the amazing novelist Min Jin Lee, and my whole end was destroyed. We had her end on the phone, and we had to reconstruct it by trying to hear my voice coming through her recording of her talking to me on the phone. It was a mess.

And so eventually, the producers were like, we should just go back to WFMT. And so we ended up recording the rest of the podcast in Studs’s studio. And in the corner of the studio was this coat rack because he was old fashioned. He always wore a hat, and so he would come in, and hang up his coat, and hang up his hat. And I would look at, and I was like, OK. I get it. You wanted us to just come back to the studios. It’s not like — sorry. My bad.

So I felt like he brought us back, and after that, no more eating tape.

More of a poltergeist scenario.

So I listened to that podcast long ago. This is not part of my prep for this interview. I just love Studs Terkel, and I was super fascinated with that when it came out.

But in that show, in the couple episodes you did, those are his interviews with famous people. But it also struck me then when I was doing prep for our conversation that there was more of a connection in the work, which is what made his work distinctive. I don’t go back and read Studs Terkel’s interviews with famous people. I go back, and I read his interviews with just people who fought in World War Two.

An elevator operator.

Exactly, the elevator operators.

And to what you do of trying to listen to people, and take them as seriously as the folks who have a lot more power than them, and take their knowledge seriously, that struck me as a real continuity there.

And so I guess before I ask our books question, I’ll ask this question, which is, what have you learned about interviewing from Studs Terkel?

What a great question. The number one thing that people should know about him is that compared to most interviewers, certainly present company excluded, he just read everything. And most people who do interview shows, and podcasts, and stuff like that today, they just don’t do that. And it’s real obvious when you’re the person being interviewed, you definitely haven’t read it.

And it’s fine. Things are long. There’s so much. We’re in the golden age of TV. I get that you didn’t have time to read a whole book, but with Studs the depth of his study and knowledge was so clear. And so when I interview somebody, I try to really do my homework.

At the same time, something else I really love about his interviews is that he’s not shy about his admiration. And when he’s a fan of somebody, the magic that he feels in their work creeps into the conversation. I love his conversation with Lorraine Hansberry because it’s so clear to me that he’s just absolutely in love with her. And not in a weird creepy way, but he just absolutely is fully cognizant of who she is in this time in this moment without the benefit of historical hindsight. He just knows this person is really important.

And I think that allowing love and admiration to creep into an interview is OK and great, and that that’s not unprofessional. You don’t want to be weird about it, but I think that allowing your love of somebody’s work to illuminate the line of questioning is really powerful.

And the last thing is that he was humble in the things that he didn’t know and wasn’t sure about, and just comfortable in himself in the way he had these conversations. So he could throw out a thesis, and then the person could disagree, and he’d be like, oh yeah, OK. Sure. I see it your way now.

And it wasn’t this performance of, I need to show that I’m the foremost expert on everything you do, and to school you, and show everybody how smart I am. But it’s just two people talking at a bar, or at a dinner party, or walking home after a late movie and just having a great conversation. And I think that combination of comfort and humility is so powerful. He was awesome.

I think that’s a great note to end on. So finally, what are three books you’ve loved and admired that you would recommend to the audience?

Yes. I’m going to recommend three recent books for me. One is “Chlorine Sky” by Mahogany Browne. It’s a young adult book written in verse about a Black girl coming of age and having that experience of when you’re young, and somebody’s supposed to be your friend, and they’re not that nice to you. And it’s also a lot about basketball, and sports, and California, and being shy.

And so if you are a YA reader or have a YA reader in your life, I really recommend “Chlorine Sky” by Mahogany Browne.

Second book I want to recommend is “Halfway Home” by Reuben Miller. It’s an incredible book about the ways in which, after people have allegedly returned home from being incarcerated, that the shadow of incarceration relegates them to a completely different class status and subcitizen status for the rest of their lives because of really unnecessary structures that we have. And Reuben, who’s a colleague of mine and a dear friend, also inflects this story with his own personal experiences of being impacted by the mass incarceration epidemic system in our country in many different ways. And it’s really great storytelling and a great book.

And the last book I’ll recommend is a novel by Ling Ma called “Severance.” It’s so excellent. It would not have been a great beginning of the pandemic book to read, but if you’re like —

Which is when I read it.

Sorry for you. But for those who don’t know, it’s a novel. I would characterize it as a sci-fi novel. It is about a virus that sweeps the world, and when people are stricken in this pandemic, they repetitively do the same motion over and over until they die.

So they become a type of zombie, but instead of a zombie that runs around and eats brains, it’s a zombie that just keeps setting the dinner table over and over and over until you waste away into nothing.

And so that’s a fantastic premise, but the book is really about our relationship to work. And it’s also like a little bit of an aging millennial novel, and so if you like zombie things, and you’re not too scared of the pandemic anymore, or if you want to re-evaluate your relationship to labor and capitalism, or if you’re an aging millennial, you should read that book.

Eve Ewing, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. The joy is all mine.

Thank you to Eve Ewing. I’m going to do a couple of very quick Studs Terkel book recommendations because if you’ve never read him, you really, really should. So I always tell people to start with “Working,” one of the just great books about work ever written in America. “Working.” You can find it wherever you get your books.

I also love his book on race in mid-century America. It is called “Race.” And then his book on World War Two is amazing, too. It’s called “The Good War,” and it is worth checking out. But I would start with “Working” and then go in the direction of your interest because they are all good.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.