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Welcome to the Leading Equity Podcast

The Leading Equity Podcast focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. On this podcast, listeners can expect to hear interviews and stories from voices of equity in education today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify!

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The Leading Equity Podcast focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. On this podcast, listeners can expect to hear interviews and stories from voices of equity in education today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify!

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Dear White Teachers: You Can’t Love Your Black Students If You Don’t Know Them (Opinion)

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It isn’t enough to “love all students,” writes the University of Georgia’s Bettina L. Love.

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Then she began thinking about how to address the news with her students, who are, says Jyung, "very racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse."

We sat down recently with Jyung over Zoom to talk about how she and her colleagues at the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a public middle and high school run in partnership with NYC Outward Bound, are responding in the classroom to the escalating attacks and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities.

Sarita Khurana: Right now, Asian Americans are facing a double pandemic: It's not just coronavirus, it's also anti-Asian racism and violence. So I want to start by asking how it's been for you as an Asian American woman, bringing these difficult conversations into the classroom.

Dawoun Jyung: When the Atlanta mass shooting happened, there were two things going on in my mind. One was: I need to have conversations with my students about this. I need to bring this to my classroom. The other thing was me processing what's been going on and the fear and disbelief. And so I think as an Asian American woman, as an Asian American educator, I was wearing those two hats.

The victims in Atlanta, Georgia, are mostly women of my mom's age. And so when I heard the news, I felt fear and devastation.

But when we think about what has been going on in the past year and what Asian Americans have been experiencing, it's actually no surprise. Asian Americans have experienced a year of rising hate crime, racist rhetoric, and violence. This is not new pain; this has precedent. And this week in New York City, the devastating reports about people being attacked and beaten, pushed onto subway tracks, harassed on the streets-people who are on their way to work or on their way to church.

Khurana: You're absolutely right, this is not the first time we're seeing this; there is a much broader historical perspective here. But racism against Asian Americans has been made invisible. And people often don't see it as a hate crime.

Jyung: There is a history in our country of refusing to call it a hate crime when [violence is] done against Asian Americans. And unfortunately, in our schools, that history has also been missing in our curriculum. We have been deprived of this Asian American history, and we are depriving our students of this history that is so important, yet so invisible and forgotten.

What we are seeing is not something new. It builds on a history of violence and racism and white supremacy. And for us to really understand why mass shootings and anti-Asian hate are happening today, we have to go back to the root of it.

There are deep roots of blaming Asian Americans, scapegoating, othering, and taking away the rights of Asian Americans to participate in our government and in our democracy. And so a lot of what we are seeing and what Asian Americans are experiencing today has deep roots in the history of our country, the racist and white supremacist culture and history.

Khurana: Let's talk about what's been happening at your school. After the Atlanta shootings, how did your school respond?

Jyung: So a few colleagues and I got together and planned lessons to share with the rest of the middle and high school teachers at my school.

The first lesson ( lesson and slide deck) really focused on humanizing the Atlanta victims, raising awareness about what happened there, and giving students space to make sense of what happened. And so we shared photos of the victims: They were mothers, daughters, neighbors, sisters. So the students got to see the victims visually and connect and empathize.

We also felt it was very important to suggest to teachers that they take special care with the pronunciation of victims' names. There's a lot of [mocking] of Asian names, and so by taking special care to pronounce the victims' names, it helps humanize them.

We also wanted to make it very clear that even though law enforcement did not declare this a hate crime, we wanted to be clear that this was a racially motivated hate crime against Asian Americans.

Khurana: Can you tell me a bit more about the first lesson?

Jyung: Yes, so we set norms for having difficult conversations. We borrowed these from the courageous conversation norms: I will stay engaged, I will speak my truth, I will experience discomfort, and I will expect and accept no closure.

We showed two videos ( video 1 and video 2) for students to better understand what happened, and students were invited to respond to prompts like "What are your thoughts and feelings after watching this video?" and "What are two things you learned from this video?"

After the conversation, we asked students to share on a Google Forms survey what's on their minds, in their hearts, and what they want to know or learn more about. Their responses really showed a range of emotions. They were upset, angry, disappointed, and lots of wondering.

Khurana: What about the second lesson-what did you do there?

Jyung: In the second lesson ( lesson and slide deck), we examined the historical context of anti-Asian violence by watching a video from the San Francisco Chronicle. As students watched, we asked them to think about: What do you notice? What connections can you make-connections to your life, to things you have been learning in class, or to things you have heard in the media? And then what are some questions that you still have? And so we invited students to share out in the Zoom chat-we are still doing remote and hybrid learning-or share out loud.

Khurana: What's your hope about what these lessons can accomplish? Why is it important to be planning these, taking this on in the classroom?

Jyung: Our students are raising the difficult questions, and we are giving them the facts and the history, and we're telling them about the contributions of Asian Americans, and the treatment of Asian Americans in our country (additional lesson and slide deck). And all of this gives our students the background information they need to deal with the feelings [that come up around what's happening]. These lessons are giving students tools to navigate and make sense of the truths that are difficult to reconcile, but with the message of freedom and democracy and equity. And I think advocacy would be a natural result of these lessons. We're creating environments where students are asking really difficult questions, and I'm learning with my students as we have these conversations.

Khurana: And for you, a lot of this is falling on your shoulders. It's a lot to handle.

Jyung: I believe that as teachers, we're teaching to change the world. We're helping our young people, our next generation, to think about: Hey, where do I fit into this racism and all these things that are happening? Where am I in relation to that, and what's my place here, how do I use my voice? How do I use collective power to do something about this?

But also, creating lessons about Asian American history and identity should not fall on just Asian American teachers. I'm really excited about the opportunity to work with other educators at my school-it's a very diverse group of teachers-to really grapple with how to start these conversations with our students about the Asian American experience and history.

Khurana: For schools and teachers just getting started, what's your advice?

Jyung: As an Asian American educator, there are parts of Asian American history that I do not know about, that I did not learn growing up. But I cannot wait to become an expert before I have these conversations with students. It needs to happen now. It needs to happen as we are learning. So we're learning with our students. These stories and experiences have to be shared and enter into the conversation at our schools and in our classrooms.

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Hard Classroom Conversations About Anti-Asian Racism

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Then she began thinking about how to address the news with her students, who are, says Jyung, "very racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse." We sat down recently with Jyung over Zoom to talk about how she and her colleagues at the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a public middle and high school run in partnership with NYC Outward Bound, are responding in the classroom to the escalating attacks and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities.

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Build Your Stack: NCTE Children’s Book Award–Winning Titles for the African American Read-In - NCTE

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This post is part of Build Your Stack,® a new initiative focused on helping teachers build their book knowledge and their classroom …

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Confronting Bias With Children’sLiterature: A Preservice Teacher’sJourney to Developing a Critical Lens for Reading the Word and the WorldKatie Kelly, Lester Laminack, Evelyn Gould

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Confronting Bias With Children’sLiterature: A Preservice Teacher’sJourney to Developing a Critical Lens for Reading the Word and the WorldKatie Kelly, Lester Laminack, Evelyn Gould

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By Matt R. Kay

When, as children, we wanted something, many of us knew what kind of persuasion our parents were susceptible to. My father, for instance, indulged my habit of debating his logic - to a point, at least. Mom could be softened up for the big ask with a little humor, as long as the joke wasn't mean-spirited or disrespectful. But I learned very young that one tactic was destined to end in absolute failure: saying, "But [insert friend's name]'s parents let them do it!" This was, as the kids say, not "the move." That tack would lead to immediate and irreversible denial of whatever permission might have otherwise been offered, followed by, "We don't care what your friends' parents let them do. Our house, our rules."

That phrase has been at the top of my mind lately as we educators try to rise to all that 2020 is asking of us. The world wants us to be brave. To use our classrooms to tackle centuries-old inequities, made even more complicated by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. In the best instances, we do this work of teaching in ways that advance equity while being supported by the communities we serve.

But for many of us, the mere notion that education should destabilize racist, sexist, or homophobic power structures opens us up to accusations-from parents and community members - of "indoctrinating" our students. As I've experienced, such accusations can open up a flood of hate mail, threats, and calls to the administration for the accused teacher(s) to lose their jobs.

It is all well and good to ask teachers to be tough. But to ask us to be fearless in the face of serious pushback or threats is to deny our humanity. We have mortgages to pay, children to feed, debts to pay off. It shouldn't be easy for people in the education space to ask any individual teacher to value promoting transformative (and controversial) discussions among students over continuing their livelihood.
Publicly Expressed Support Is Powerful
This past summer, many administrators have asked me what they can best do to support their teachers in equity-conscious teaching. There are countless structural adjustments that would help - from reexamining the systems used to keep teachers accountable for lesson planning to retooling our schools' approach to grading. We can always get better at our Professional development. But the most powerful support might also be the simplest: Tell the community that when it comes to equity and justice, "Our house, our rules."

Supportive administrators must say publicly, "In this house, Black Lives Matter. In this house, all genders are equal and love is love. In this house, we value kindness, and fairness, and we use education to push this country closer to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s challenge to, 'live out the true meaning of its creed, that all men are created equal.' Let there be no confusion. This is where we stand."

Such public declarations are easy to lampoon. The cynical among us, especially in this social media age, might say, "This is all talk. Where's the action?" In some cases, cynicism is warranted, but in many others, it misses the mark. When this kind of language appears clearly in mission statements, in public speeches from superintendents, in communications the school sends home, it's that much harder for anyone connected to the school to accuse teachers of going rogue when they teach a more culturally representative text or have a tough discussion in health class.

It's powerful for a teacher to be able to justify her lessons using the school's language, to tell parents how a unit is not only topically aligned with Common Core, but also thematically aligned with the school's public equity-focused mission statement. This still requires bravery, but no longer begs for martyrdom.
Don't Blindside School Leaders
It's equally important that we teachers, once backed up by an indisputable show of public support, never blindside our administrators. We must do our best to let our bosses know when we're going to teach a unit that the community might find controversial. This "heads-up" doesn't just give administrators time to prepare to defend our pedagogy, it can also help mitigate any problems likely to arise with a unit, lesson, discussion, or project we've designed in a way that might be unnecessarily problematic. Sometimes, we teachers fall in love with our own equity-driven plans and make mistakes that administrators find, rightfully, hard to defend. We must be at our most discerning, slow to get our blood up, when receiving feedback on plans for equity-focused instruction.

And sometimes the answer will be, No, it's not OK to teach that controversial topic in the manner you propose. In such cases, we will have to rethink our plans and come back to our bosses with a sounder approach to teaching a tough topic. At some point, we have to trust their expertise, as long as we're given reasons to do so.

Finally, if as an administrator, you do not feel like you can commit to supporting your teachers in equity pedagogy, please say so. It's only fair. We need to know where the lines are, whether we will be isolated when a powerful parent complains at a school board meeting or a group of Twitter trolls convinces the media to run a story about the "indoctrination" going on in our classroom.

If we know where the lines are, we can either respect them or go teach elsewhere. But we will finally know the rules of the house-as all stakeholders should.
About the author
Matthew R. Kay (@MattRKay) teaches students English at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and is the author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom (Stenhouse, 2018).

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Our House, Our Rules: We must have teachers' backs as they teach for equity - ASCD Inservice

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By Matt R. Kay When, as children, we wanted something, many of us knew what kind of persuasion our parents were susceptible to. My father, for instance, indulged my habit of debating his logic - to a point, at least. Mom could be softened up for the big ask with a little humor, as long ...

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Introducing: Nice White Parents (Published 2020)

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A new five-part series about building a better school system, and what gets in the way. New episodes of “Nice White Parents” are available here, brought to you by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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The suggestions offered here range from simple to complex, and anyone can start to create the ripples that shift classroom and school culture.

Building Safety and Inclusion in Multicultural School Settings

1. Focus on how you might personally experience deep empathy. We all learn differently, so your empathy-building process might entail watching Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, or Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk " We Need to Talk About an Injustice." Or you could look for curricula on race and racism. Since there's no shortage of resources, try to discover first-person experiences. Take a deep breath, imagine yourself in those shoes, and withhold judgement. Share and model your inquiry and learning with students.

2. Curate your newsfeed, engage, and listen. Stay up to date with a few influencers, like Dr. Joy DeGruy or Professor Christopher Emdin, and news sources that inspire and challenge you to honestly confront difficult conversations on race and bias, from NPR's Code Switch to The Root. But limit these, so you don't get overwhelmed and shut down. Follow key hashtags like #Educolor on Twitter, to be aware of social justice and equity conversations. Spend time learning and listening to the conversation before opining on it.

3. Build your social justice vocabulary. Learn the meaning as well as application of terms like false equivalency, microaggression, Jim Crow, culturally responsive, white privilege, and allyship, among other terms. Watch out for coded language and call out prejudicial talk. As Professor Howard Stevenson says, "By practicing racial literacy, we can learn to not be so fearful and learn to problem-solve together, rather than run away from conversations about race."

4. Value stories and perspectives. Encourage your students to articulate their narratives, starting with learning the stories of individuals in their community. The Out of Eden Walk can serve as a framework for noticing the stories around us and discovering our own. Ensure that your classroom book collection and curriculum include high-quality stories that represent all the students in your class. Practice noticing who's writing the articles and stories you read. If you don't know where to begin, consult your librarian or simply search "diverse books." The Global Education Toolkit includes an appendix with 326 multicultural book titles for grades pre-K through 6.

5. Display your class values prominently. Establish ground rules for active listening in class. Take the time to reflect on values so they don't feel like a laundry list. Students can respond to prompts like: "What do you stand for? How might we demonstrate that in our classroom or daily lives?" or "What might loving-kindness (or empathy, respect, generosity) in our classroom look like? How do we get there?" If there's enough safety among students, they can share their writing in pairs.

6. When welcoming new students, learn to correctly say their name. If possible, visit families in their homes at some point in the year to deepen your relationship. The start of each school year can come with special anxiety for kids whose names are perceived as different-I know this too well. Your small effort to pronounce the name correctly, and not look perplexed while taking attendance, can offer a great relief and be incredibly welcoming.

7. Practice visible learning routines. Try See, Think, Wonder and Think, Pair, Share. Engage groups of two to three students in discussing prompts like "I see _____" (about something they're observing), "I think _____" (about what they think might be going on), and "I wonder _____" (which allows students to engage their curiosity). Or reserve time for quiet thinking before pairing and sharing ideas, which builds critical reasoning and safety among learners of different temperaments, cultures, and capacities, and illuminates diverse perspectives through group work.

8. Build global competence. As long as we keep isolating global learning from diversity work in schools, these priorities will both be minimized. We can connect these efforts through many techniques, like the Global Competence framework, and by encouraging professional collaboration across interest areas.

9. Relax and focus. Use relaxation strategies centering in mindfulness prior to conducting difficult conversations on Monday morning-these discussions require their own, set-aside time-to start the week and help unify students.

There's no shortage of techniques that can build safety and inclusion, and your willingness to try any of them sends a strong signal to your students, that their learning, engagement, and voice really matter.

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Being open to talking about race helps foster safety and unity in a multicultural classroom. Here are nine tips to help you prepare.

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive | KQED

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The dominance of white-authored texts in school curriculum makes it hard for students of color and those in underrepresented groups to connect with the stories. The #DisruptTexts movement seeks to guide educators to develop a more inclusive and relevant canon.

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To Sustain the Tough Conversations, Active Listening Must Be the Norm

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To Sustain the Tough Conversations, Active Listening Must Be the Norm

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What do you do when you attend a protest with people shouting, "Defund the police," your voice and car horn raised with them, and one of your students' parents is one of the cops handling the blockade?

On June 13, 2020, I drove my car to John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Virginia, to join in a noise demo. Drizzle tried to dampen the mood. But people with pots and pans, tambourines, megaphones and some with just their hands and voices marched on, followed by a line of cars. They quickly whipped their energy into a righteous block party. As I broke off from the protest to make my way home, an officer waved my car ahead. It was the parent of a few of my students.

On my drive home, I saw two people in my mind when I thought about the officer: the cop and the dad. A member of the system that too often shoots first and asks questions later for men who look like me, but also the giant who hoists his daughter on shoulders so high she laughs with the clouds. That smile was still somewhere underneath the rain and frown, right? In the grand scheme of things, that didn't matter. What mattered is that, just like in that intersection, so many perspectives would be coming together in school, and I would have to lead them.

I must be brave. I must speak, and neutrality feels like betrayal. Some things are not up for debate in my classroom. Black lives do matter, and we won't be debating whether that's true. Yet, I've seen this situation play out as a debate all year.

Too often, our shared discussions in society and in school include a right and wrong side, a red and blue side, no gray area for nuance. That's no classroom. Building a strong foundation of the basics, listening to one another and communicating with grace will allow our community to sustain the tough conversations when they come up for us, whether remotely or in person.

This work for classroom culture is critical and it's never too late to begin. Here are a few ways I work to ensure that students have an opportunity to really engage with one another in my classes.

Sharing as the Norm

One of my greatest fears, when I'm sharing with those close to me, is that what I say and how I feel fall into a vacuum of like-minded people. I always ask myself, "Have I shared these thoughts and feelings with others who don't look or think like me?" Truthfully, the answer more often than not is no. How can I ask my students to do something I am reluctant to do with my own peers? I have to push myself to be the example.

In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond talks about "selective vulnerability" and educators using their challenges and triumphs to encourage kids as they grow. That idea can also bleed into putting yourself, as a person, on display for your students. Set the standard for them and share. Don't expect them to share about themselves with you if you don't do the same. Coax their stories out of them by telling your own.

This begins the process of building a community of active listeners who feel safe displaying their full identities but also who receive the identities and cultural experiences of others. Receiving does not mean agreeing-it is a willingness to accept what is being shared as true and valid.

We can give students the opportunity to validate their classmates; it can be as simple as encouraging a Zoom reaction or giving students the chance to paraphrase or repeat what they heard their classmates share out. I find that asking students to repeat their peers, instead of me doing it, helps the conversation stay student-centered and holds the group accountable to the person sharing.

Listening With Intention

There are many ways we check in with kids to make sure they've grasped what has been taught. Have you ever checked in on how well students are listening to and getting to know each other? One instructional coach showed me the missing ingredient to an activity I had done in the past: to have students list the classmates they remembered and then prompt them to write what they remembered about those classmates. Take inventory of those responses! Are students hearing each other, remembering what the people around them have been sharing? Students can make it a goal to get to know the classmates who didn't come to mind immediately and set an intention to listen out for details about that peer.

Listening for details is key, and it's why I went to that noise demo in June, partly because I felt like I wasn't being heard. The people who I needed to hear me were so far away and inaccessible; I worried my message would never reach them. Those forces were right there as we chanted. They had no choice but to stop and listen.

When discussing difficult topics in the classroom, selective hearing can be a common occurrence. I've received many emails over the years after an impromptu conversation or a restorative circle because half of the message made it home through my students. Children need to be taught how to stop and listen, to truly engage with what they are hearing.

Kids can and will sit with their feelings and internalize them if they are taught how. Educators can help by encouraging students to recognize the importance of the information their classmates share. For example, I might tell students, "Your peer is sharing more than their love of French fries. They also said, 'People don't like me because they think my face is mean.' Another classmate values basketball and family, but he also shared with us that someone he loves is in jail and carries their photo around with them. Do you hear them? When they speak, do you remember all they are approaching the conversation with?"

Modeling Respectful Curiosity

It's hard sometimes to ask follow-up questions when opportunities arise. We get stuck, and we assume what someone else may think. But that's because we don't truly know all that someone brings to the conversation. We can teach kids how to move past those moments when they may feel nervous about asking a clarifying question.

The way to meaningfully interact with others while honoring cultural differences and varied experiences needs to be modeled and explicitly taught. Educators can give students specific sentence frames to ask follow-up and clarifying questions: "Could you pronounce your name/holiday/tradition again for us?" or "What was it like growing up in _______?" We can also teach them to ask a probing question without demanding information from others: "You're from ______? I don't know much about that. Could you tell me more?"

Students should also have nonverbal tools at their disposal to help them meaningfully interact without snatching the story away from the presenter. Common hand signals to show a connection, the ability to jot down a question while they are listening, even the use of the chat section in Zoom to respond are perfect. These are the skills we as teachers use all the time. We should give kids the scaffolds they need to be as inquisitive as we are!

For me, it was tough not to hide my face as I passed by that police officer, my students' parent, on my way home from the noise demo. I needed to stand by my experience. Families and their students will have the same resolve. The children of activists, police officers, pacifists and every facet of the issues society faces outside are coming into my classroom, logging onto my Zoom.

Communities are full of differences, and those differences can clash in ways that will break us if we let them. We have to prepare our students-and ourselves-to communicate, question and work our way through.

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To Sustain the Tough Conversations, Active Listening Must Be the Norm

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Leading Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom

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Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: "What Will We Say to Them Tomorrow?": Tackling Tough Conversations in the Classroom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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Philadelphia educator Matthew R. Kay's "Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom" provided practical, sustained strategies for talking about tough topics with students. In this interactive webinar, Kay demonstrates how his method can help teachers navigate conversations about current and emerging events as well.

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Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books

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Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

Most teachers look for opportunities to build a human rights culture and to counter hatred, bigotry, fear-mongering and intolerance. One way to do this, when students make a mistake, is to call them in rather than calling them out. Doing so prepares them for civic engagement by encouraging a sense of hope and possibility.

Guiding Instead of Dragging

In conversations and debates about social justice issues, insisting someone take responsibility when they say or do something hurtful-regardless of their intent-is a common way to protect vulnerable communities and individuals. It's often necessary, but not every correction allows both parties to move forward. Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating or gossip to dominate others.

In our society, call-outs have become a way of life. They are generally done publicly, either in person or online. Extreme calling out is when a person or a group expresses their disagreement cruelly, sometimes grandstanding. Fearing they may be considered politically backward if they don't prove their "wokeness" on trending social justice issues, witnesses to the conflict may pile on while bystanders silently withdraw.

Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. It's a concept created by human-rights practitioners to challenge the toxicity of call-out culture. Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it's done with love. Instead of shaming someone who's made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language.

Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better. Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.

Calling in is not for everyone or every circumstance. It's not fair, for example, to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.

Calling in is also not a useful response to those who intentionally violate standards of civil conversation. When powerful people use bigotry, fear and lies to attack others, calling out can be a valuable tool, either for the individuals they seek to oppress or for bystanders who choose to interrupt the encounter. When people knowingly use stereotypes or dehumanizing metaphors to describe human beings, their actions victimize targets and potentially set them up for violence. Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.

But, if call-ins can occur without demanding undue emotional labor or allowing space for hateful behavior, this approach offers a way forward that increases the potential for learning-particularly in activist and academic spaces. This practice works especially well when allies call one another in or when leaders, such as teachers, use it to model speaking up without losing the opportunity for learning. By teaching our students how to call one another in, we're providing them the tools and skills they need to gather up those who share their privileges, to offer patience and grace when they can, and to facilitate growth-so others won't have to.

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

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"If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you do not see." -James Baldwin

Anti-racist work in all schools is essential. It is the exercise of hope, the practice of undoing and dismantling systems of oppression, the practice of freedom and of truth-telling. Anti-racist work is the practice of healing and of restoring; it is a practice of love.

We live in a time where it is increasingly clear that Black lives are deeply undervalued and violently treated. And as the words anti-racist and equity become dangerously trendy, educators should pause and grapple with what they truly mean.

It is important that we have a shared understanding of what anti-racism in schools looks like, that we have an understanding of what it is not, and that we embrace the understanding that anti-racist work is never completely finished, nor does it always look the same. I hope, however, we may begin to think about anti-racist work in schools in ways that are holistic and practical.

Anti-racist educators believe in love.

Many educators operate from the premise that they love their students. In fact, many harmful and violent teachers operate from a place of "love." But anti-racist educators understand that love and silence are deeply contradictory. The love that underpins our practice is not the form of love often associated with passivity and inaction. For anti-racist educators, love is action. Love is sharp. Love is truth-telling. Love is fighting for what it is right. Love is doing what is right.

Anti-racist educators, particularly those who teach Black students, understand that part of the act of love is understanding what this country has intentionally done-and continues to do-to Black bodies. It is love that compels our practices.

Anti-racist educators understand that, in love, they must never be silent. Ever. Anti-racist educators understand that their positions as teachers, leaders, policymakers and social workers are positions of great privilege and power, and that they have the ability to leave this world better than they found it.

Anti-racist educators study and are committed to deepening their critical consciousness.

Anti-racist educators understand that they must be lifelong learners. They believe in the power of developing a critical consciousness, which comes from reading, from studying, from deep scholarship, from humility, from listening to and engaging with others, and from constantly examining and re-examining their own ideas, beliefs and truths.

Educators who are seeking to be anti-racist must understand the nuanced, complex, deliberate design of racism in the United States and across the diaspora. Educators in the United States who are seeking to be anti-racist have to acknowledge and recognize that this country was built upon racist principles. They must be willing to commit to a lifestyle of studying what racism looks like in all its forms.

This means that we have to know how to identify racism; how racism is carried out and built in systems and structures; how people hold, sustain, maintain and perpetuate racism; and how people of color can internalize racism.

Anti-racist educators know and continue to seek out the names of those who are never called upon and the work that is hardly ever revered. They recognize that we should study more deeply the tactics of the Black Panther Party and the Freedom Schools. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is a true leader and scholar-warrior in this regard, as her work focuses on the ways the Black Literary Societies of the early 1800s operated and creates a framework for how we should be using the power of literacy to teach and empower Black students.

Anti-racist educators believe in the intellectual power of teaching. They believe they have to honor the practice and take teaching very, very seriously because they know and understand how schools have been used either to oppress or to liberate.

Anti-racist educators move away from checklists and embrace a holistic approach.

Anti-racist education and anti-racist schooling cannot be packaged or prescribed, arranged into a checklist, rubric or formula. Anti-racist educators understand that anti-racist work begins with the self. They begin by grappling with their beliefs, mindsets, philosophies and biases about the world, education and their students. They work to become conscious of the intentional, multiple ways schools mirror society and how all aspects of school systems are designed to uphold the oppressive aims of the society in which they operate.

Anti-racist educators recognize that schools are doing exactly what they were built to do in this country: Exclude. Silence. Erase. Promote white supremacy. They recognize, therefore, that upending racism in schools will end schooling practices as we have come to know them.

To think about all of the parts of schooling, not just the classroom, anti-racist educators take a holistic approach and consider many dimensions of schooling through an anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens. These dimensions include:

The demographics of staff, particularly in schools with predominantly BIPOC students

School leadership and paths to school leadership

School governance (e.g., network and district leadership)

School curriculum

Special education

Teaching and learning practices

Definitions and measurements of academic success

Definitions and measurements of teacher success

Professional development

New-teacher training and support

The wellness of teachers, staff and students

School mission and vision statements

School, network and district policies

School culture and approaches to discipline

School infrastructure

Allocation of resources and budget

It is important we recognize this list is not exhaustive. In order to be anti- racist educators, we must be steadfast and consistent and consider all aspects of schooling.

We have to commit to continuously evolving, pushing back, studying, engaging in critical discourse with others, examining what is happening in our minds and bodies, and listening to students. Anti-racist educators understand that an anti-racist approach to schooling could very well mean an ending to schools as we know them. They understand this is how we begin to get free.

Anti-racism is healing and love in action.

The work of anti-racism in schools is incomplete without an understanding of the integral role that healing must play in the practices of freedom. Healers are people who remove harm and reduce the impact of violence, people who restore and repair.

The greatest of healers consider the whole person and seek to get to the heart of the matter. Anti-racist educators understand that all forms of oppression are connected, that it is not possible to care about racism and disregard the violence in sexism, classism, homophobia and more. The hearts of anti-racist advocates push us to be concerned for all violations of human rights.

The ways that we as educators must care for ourselves and create educational spaces that center healing our students' bodies is crucial. We must create educational spaces that tend to the harm and violence that has been enacted against BIPOC bodies and minds-specifically those of our children. Anti-racist educators recognize that this is the work of undoing, of dismantling, of liberating, of healing and of truth-telling. This is our collective work.

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What Anti-racism Really Means for Educators

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"If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you do not see." -James Baldwin Anti-racist work in all schools is essential. It is the exercise of hope, the practice of undoing and dismantling systems of oppression, the practice of freedom and of truth-telling.

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There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times

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There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times

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The following post was created by members of NCTE's Standing Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English.
The members of NCTE's Standing Committee Against Racism and Bias have felt an urgency since we each joined the committee to stand against racism and bias. We have been working on ways to encourage each member of NCTE to speak out against the systemic and individual acts of racism that disenfranchise our students in and out of the classroom.

We know that racism exists in our classrooms and in our communities. We feel that silence on these issues is complicity in the systemic racism that has marred our educational system. We see no place for neutrality and urge each member of NCTE to educate as many people as possible about the ways that systemic racism affects all of us in negative ways.

There is no apolitical classroom. English language arts teachers must examine the ways that racism has personally shaped their beliefs and must examine existing biases that feed systems of oppression. In light of the horrific events in this country that continue to unfold, and the latest terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, we would like to share resources that we hope will encourage all NCTE members to speak out against the racism and bias that have been a part of our nation's fabric since the first immigrants disembarked from European ships.

Our Action Subcommittee has been working this year on creating classroom resources for teachers to use as statements of love and support. Printable classroom posters and bookmarks for NCTE members will be available at the 2017 Annual Convention, as well as available for download after Convention. Until then, we offer this incomplete resource to help continue the daily work that is antiracism. Please share other resources in the comment box below.

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

- Elie Wiesel, Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986

Resources for Working with White Students

Raising Race Conscious Children
"A resource to support adults who are trying to talk about race with young children. The goals of these conversations are to dismantle the color-blind framework and prepare young people to work toward racial justice."

Dismantling Racism in Education
Heinemann Dedicated to Teachers Blog
Sara Ahmed, Sonja Cherry-Paul, and Cornelius Minor talk about what racism looks like and how we can begin to break up the assumptions we make about racism.

Resources for Teaching in These Times
On June 14, 2016, in response to the Orlando shootings, NCTE began collecting teaching resources from its members that continue to build in relevance given the ongoing struggles and critical conversations taking place across the country.

Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation
"Race Forward's mission is to build awareness, solutions, and leadership for racial justice by generating transformative ideas, information, and experiences." Check out their video that explains systemic racism.

This resource was contributed by Kristin Beers
Online PLC: Read Aloud as an Anti-Bigotry Tool
Suggestions for using read aloud as an anti- bigotry tool with our youngest learners. This resource provides questions to prompt conversation, as well as a list of categorized titles that support this work.

Resources for Understanding White Supremacy
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Confront Antisemitism
Resources on anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and distortion
Southern Poverty Law Center
"The SPLC is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. Using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy, the SPLC works toward the day when the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity will be a reality."

Ten Ways to Fight Hate
" Ten Ways to Fight Hate, which has been updated for 2017, sets out 10 principles for taking action, including how to respond to a hate rally that has targeted your town. It urges people not to engage white supremacists at their rallies. Instead, it offers tips for creating alternative rallies to promote peace, inclusion and justice."

Oath and Opposition: Education under the Third Reich
"The Museum has developed . . . materials . . . to help today's educators explore the pressures teachers felt under the Nazi regime, the range of decisions individuals made in the face of those pressures, and the relevance of this history now." (This rich resource includes a number of case studies you could use with your classes.)

Yad Vashem-The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
Read their working definition on anti-Semitism, which "encompasses both traditional and contemporary manifestations of antisemitism."

Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
"Founded in 1913, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is our nation's premier civil rights/human relations organization. We have a distinguished history of reminding the world just how tenuous civil rights are and we mobilize people to engage in reasonable discourse as together we find solutions to serve our diverse society." See their website's extensive Education & Resources section as well as their definition and historical explanation of anti-Semitism.

University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Lesson Plans
"Dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action."

Antisemitism and the Bystander Effect
"Students will watch testimonies from survivors of and witnesses to historical and contemporary antisemitism who describe the consequences of the bystander effect in their own lives. Students will construct a social media message for the #BeginsWithMe campaign that describes their own plan to counter bystander behavior."

100 Days to Inspire Respect
"At a time of heightened political uncertainty and polarization, middle and high school teachers are in need of easy-to-use resources that encourage their students to grapple with some of the most difficult but important topics: hate, racism, intolerance and xenophobia. '100 Days to Inspire Respect' provides educators with 100 thought-provoking resources that tackle these challenging topics and more."

The following book was recommended by Jenny Cameron Paulsen
Hitler Youth by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
"By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members."

Charlottesville-Specific Resources

The Charlottesville Syllabus
"The Charlottesville Syllabus is a resource created by the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation to be used to educate readers about the long history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. With resources selected and summaries written by UVa graduate students, this abridged version of the Syllabus is organized into six sections that offer contemporary and archival primary and secondary sources (articles, books, responses, a documentary, databases) and a list of important terms for discussing white supremacy."

" How to Talk to Your Kids about the Violence in CharlottesvilleAugust 12, 2017, Los Angeles Times article by Sonali Kohli
Mental health experts and parents discuss developmentally appropriate ways to address the issues raised over the weekend.

#CharlottesvilleCurriculum
A growing list of resources posted by educators from around the country.

"''Blood and Soil': Protesters Chant Nazi Slogan in Charlottesville"
August 12, 2017, CNN article by Meg Wagner

" Charlottesville Murder Suspect's Teacher: 'He thought Nazis were pretty cool guys'"
August 13, 2017, ABC News article by Michael Edison Hayden

Resources for Understanding Bias
The following resources were contributed by Susi Long on behalf of the Early Childhood Education Assembly
The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB)
"The People's Institute believes that racism is the primary barrier preventing communities from building effective coalitions and overcoming institutionalized oppression and inequities. Through Undoing Racism®/Community Organizing Workshops, technical assistance and consultations, The People's Institute helps individuals, communities, organizations and institutions move beyond addressing the symptoms of racism to undoing the causes of racism so as to create a more just and equitable society."

Don't Be a Sucker - 1947
"In this anti-fascist film produced by [the] US Military in the wake of WWII, the producers deconstruct the politically motivated social engineering of Germany by the Nazi regime."

Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards
"The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K-12 instruction. Comprised of anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes, the Standards provide a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable."

Anti-Racism Educational Consultants Network
"The ECEA is honored to present a network of some of the country's most respected professionals. They are experts in helping educators examine issues of race and racism in schools, childcare settings, and teacher education programs as they consider new possibilities for practice and policy. They consult widely, each with extensive experience in classrooms and with teachers, administrators, and preservice teachers."

Resources for Educators Focusing on Anti-Racist Learning and Teaching
"Our intent is to continue building and expanding this collection but we offer it now as a beginning, in support of educators working to (a) deepen understandings about institutional and interpersonal racism and its manifestations in early childhood settings, (b) understand the depth and breadth of histories often left out of or misrepresented in our teaching, and (c) apply new awareness to transforming practice and policy."

Articles and Other Readings

"These [three] special themed issues [of NCTE journals] explore and demonstrate not only the physical violence that Black and Brown children and youth and young Black girls encounter on a daily basis but also the symbolic and linguistic violence and the spirit-murder that are inflicted upon the lives and humanity of our children and youth of Color. In addition, all of these special issues provide the field with practical lessons and pedagogies for teaching in our current racialized and gendered context." - Lamar Johnson and April Bell

1. From Racial Violence to Racial Justice: Praxis and Implications for English (Teacher) Education (a special issue of English Journal) Edited by April Baker-Bell, Tamara Butler,
and Lamar Johnson
"We come to this project bearing soul wounds and heavy hearts, anxiety and anger, tears and fire. We sifted through a series of events and melded our wounds into a project that could heal us, our families, our communities, and Black, Brown, and other marginalized youth affected by racial violence."

2. "Beyond the Dream": Black Textual Expressivities Between the World and Me (a special issue of English Journal) Edited by David Kirkland
"In the most basic sense, this issue is about acknowledging how Black textualities, like vulnerable Black bodies, are contested in American classrooms, complicated by competing interests that wrestle daily for an ethical place in the consciousness of English language arts. It is in English language arts classrooms, as this issue suggests, that Black textualities have the power to move our assumptions past beliefs that strip away the humanity of others.

3. Black Girls' Literacies (a special issue of English Education) Edited by Marcelle Haddix, Sherell McArthur, Gholnecsar Muhammad, Detra Price-Dennis, and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz
"We now must be urgent in interrogating hegemonic systems, English education practices, and educational policy to ask how we can experience a shift in the way we teach, talk about, and represent Black girls in school and society. In this way, English education becomes a site of possibility and disruption-a space to begin to ask these questions and respond." - Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

How Two Teenagers Created a Textbook for Racial Literacy
From Facing History and Ourselves by Stacey Perlman
"Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi started the student-run organization, CHOOSE, to overcome racism and inspire harmony through exposure, education, and empowerment. This led them to collaborate with Princeton University on The Classroom Index, a textbook devoted to racial literacy."

This resource was contributed by Corinne Viglietta" Essential Everyday Bravery: Thinking and Talking About Identity and Difference in Your Classroom "-a downloadable packet with 6 stand-alone lessons, 4 short scripts, 4 video clips, and 1 long list of more resources from Folger Shakespeare Library
These resources were contributed by Jodi Derkson
The lessons were created by 10 excellent teachers, and designed to work in all kinds of classes with all kinds of students. These teachers are themselves people of different races, ethnicities, and religions, and they teach IB and AP, special needs, honors, and "regular" students in urban and suburban (mostly public) high schools in or near Washington, DC. These resources are also the product of CrossTalk, a yearlong community engagement project led by the Folger Shakespeare Library and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of their Humanities in the Public Square initiative. More info here

This resource was contributed by Emily Salinas
Drop the I-Word Campaign
"Race Forward's Drop the I-Word campaign to eliminate use of the word "illegal" was launched in September 2010 as anti-immigrant sentiment and hate crimes against communities of color had increased. Although the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many other news outlets and journalist associations have dropped the i-word, this racial slur in still being used in the media and everyday language."

This resource was contributed by Melanie Gustafson
Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution
"We aim to bridge the gap between those two clicks by offering an exhibit that highlights the achievements of women from the 1940s to the present. This exhibit explores the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life."

Choose Your Voice (middle school)
Free online teaching resources and tools, curriculum-based for grades 6, 7 and 8, to help students speak out against racism, antisemitism and intolerance.

Voices into Action (secondary school and college)
"Designed by curriculum experts, this program utilizes a wide variety of media to present compelling information on a history of human suffering, stemming from social injustice that is still a growing problem today. Explore thought-provoking issues with your students by accessing our lessons and resources on antisemitism, racism, discrimination and stereotyping."

These resources were contributed by Nadia Kalman
"For contemporary global literature from Mexico, Russia, and other countries currently in the political discourse, along with multimedia contextual materials and teaching tools, teachers might try Words Without Borders Campus. Here's a link to a blog post on building inter-cultural empathy and understanding."

Books for Teachers

A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men by David E. Kirkland

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. by H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman, foreword by Michael Eric Dyson

Black Intellectual Thought in Education: The Missing Traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke by Carl A. Grant, Keffrelyn D. Brown, and Anthony L. Brown

Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs by Steven Alvarez

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World edited by: Django Paris and H. Samy Alim

Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age by Adam J. Banks

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin

by Bryan Stevenson

"Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children
by Lisa Delpit

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America by Geneva Smitherman

The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, 2nd Edition by Gloria Ladson-Billings

The Latinization of U.S. Schools : Successful Teaching and Learning in Shifting Cultural Contexts by Jason G. Irizarry

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
These additional book resources were contributed by Elaine Richardson These additional book resources were contributed by Deborah Kelly
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High
by Melba Pattillo Beals

Books for Students

A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. by Luis J. Rodriguez

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing edited by Ilan Stavans

Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings - An Anthology edited by Roberto Santiago

Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus by Carolina Maria de Jesus

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Medina

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat

MARCH: Book One by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illustrated by Nate Powell

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake
Rich in Color We Need Diverse Books Lee & Low Books A Mighty Girl
When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri

Websites to Follow (for books for our students)

If you have resources you would like to add, please share them in the comment box below.

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There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times

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The following post was created by members of NCTE's Standing Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. ...

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Ending Curriculum Violence_Teaching Tolerance 

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Ending Curriculum Violence_Teaching Tolerance 

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Yes, curriculum can be violent—whether you intend it or not. Here’s what it looks like and how you can avoid it.

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1. Engage in Vigilant Self-Awareness

People who are white or perceived as white have more privilege and fewer barriers to resources than Black people and other people of color. If we do not know our power, we can abuse it unintentionally or fail to leverage it toward antiracism. Constant self-reflection enhances our ability to disrupt white privilege when we see or enact it. Some questions to ask yourself include

How does your identity provide or prevent access to necessary resources?

How does your power and privilege show up in your work with students, take up space, or silence others?

What single narratives are you telling yourself about students, and how does that affect grading, behavior management, and other interactions?

Do you and the academic materials you use uphold whiteness or lift up the voices and experiences of people of color?

2. Acknowledge Racism and the Ideology of White Supremacy

Acknowledging the social construct of race and racism and the ideology of white supremacy recognizes the problem so that we are not harmful in our ignorance and so that, together, we can strive for solutions. For educators of color, the work means continuing to call out racism and recruiting white coconspirators to join in antiracist work.

3. Study and Teach Representative History

No matter what subject you teach, history (including African American history, which is U.S. history) is important. Knowing our country's whole history helps us make sense of how our current education system perpetuates inequity.

For too long, we have taught U.S. history devoid of a true depiction of Black excellence and have focused on erasing the truth of racial oppression and uplifting whiteness. Our curriculum superficially talks about slavery and civil rights (notably, textbook provider McGraw-Hill called enslaved Africans "immigrants" and "workers" ), and teaching practices risk traumatizing Black students by enacting mock slave auctions, slave games, and underground railroad games. Alternately, resources such as Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS documentary series on Reconstruction or The New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project provide a comprehensive opportunity to learn and discuss history and race with colleagues and students. The Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools also have teaching materials that explore topics like the Tulsa race riots and colonization.

4. Talk About Race with Students

To open up conversations with young people, use stories from history and literature as a starting point, and ask students to take on the perspective of a character about whom they are reading. Reading literature and role-playing enhance empathy and other social cognitive skills. Teaching Tolerance's resource, " Let's Talk: Discussing Race, Racism, and Other Difficult Topics," includes suggestions for working through discomfort. The Educational Leadership article " Helping Students Discuss Race Openly " also has a great list of steps to begin the conversation. (And the September 2019 issue of this newsletter includes guidance from educator Liz Kleinrock on how to lead students through challenging topics like race .)

5. When You See Racism, Do Something

Most important, when we see racism-whether at the individual or policy level-we must have the courage to act. White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo provides guidance for engaging in gentle but firm conversations with offenders that prevents the defensiveness that race conversations inspire. Share data on specific practices and use stories to humanize the data. Build partnerships with racial-justice organizations in your communities to integrate their work in teaching and learning. Form a taskforce to assess data, policies, and practices with an antiracist lens to disrupt systemic decisions that historically have disenfranchised people of color. Be mindful that these efforts should not be carried solely by the people of color in your school, who are living and struggling with racism on a daily basis.

Shape an Antiracist Future

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes, "The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' ... One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist'" (p. 9). Teaching for an antiracist future starts with us, the educators. An antiracist educator actively works to dismantle the structures, policies, institutions, and systems that create barriers and perpetuate race-based inequities for people of color. Educating students to see and respect the humanity and dignity of all people should be a national imperative, especially if we want to heal-and have a future-as a nation.

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Educators have an obligation to confront the harm of racism, says one social-emotional learning expert.

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The King School Series is an affordable collection of 85 leveled books—just $3 each—for beginning readers, grades K-2. Featuring the King School Kids, engaging stories, and lively illustrations, The King School Series is the perfect complement to any early reading program. The Series’ carefully def…

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How to Teach Young Children to talk about Taboo Topics 

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How to Teach Young Children to talk about Taboo Topics 

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Article

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Liz Kleinrock: How to teach kids to talk about taboo topics

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When one of Liz Kleinrock's fourth-grade students said the unthinkable at the start of a class on race, she knew it was far too important a teachable moment to miss. But where to start? Learn how Kleinrock teaches kids to discuss taboo topics without fear -- because the best way to start solving social problems is to talk about them.

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Four Ways Teachers Can Support Students 

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Four Ways Teachers Can Support Students 

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Conversation with Dina Simmons

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Listen to my interview with Dena Simmons (or read the transcript):
The difference between teachers and their students has never been so stark. A recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that since 2014, white students no longer make up the majority in American schools. Future projections show the white population shrinking to a smaller and smaller proportion of the whole, and the combined populations of of students from other ethnic groups increasing so that together, they make up a steadily growing majority.

By contrast, teachers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly white.

What this tells me is that the life experiences of most of the people in charge of our classrooms have been pretty different from the experiences of most of their students.

And that matters.

It matters because our work is not strictly academic. Not by a long shot. In order for our students to perform well academically, they need to feel safe, both physically and psychologically. They need to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel seen and valued for who they are. For our students of color, finding this safe, accepting place is rare, especially if most of their teachers have a dramatically different background from their own. This problem can be even more pronounced for students of color who attend schools where their peers are also mostly white.

This does not mean that all white teachers are racists or that they are deliberately doing things to hurt their students of color. But what IS happening, far too often, is that teachers are doing things that harm these students' self-perception without even realizing it.

Dena Simmons, the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, understands this problem far too well.

In her 2015 TED talk, "How Students of Color Confront Impostor Syndrome," she tells the story of how, as a young black girl, she left the Bronx neighborhood where she lived with her single mother and two sisters to attend a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. Although she got an excellent education there and followed that up with a series of impressive academic and professional accomplishments, she always felt out of place, torn between the world she'd grown up in and her identity as an accomplished scholar. "Eternal impostor syndrome," she calls it.

This struggle was made much harder by many of her teachers, in the things they said to her and the messages they sent, messages that basically told Dena that who she was was not okay.

Later in life Dena returned to the Bronx to teach middle school, and she was determined to create the kind of atmosphere she wished she'd had, one that values each student's unique identity and history. In her TED talk, she gives us a glimpse of how that worked.

Now, we pick up where that TED talk left off, with some specific advice about what teachers can do to help their students of color not just survive, but thrive in the classroom, with a fully developed, strong sense of pride in who they are, where they came from, and what they're capable of.

1. Teach Students of Color to Love Themselves

"There's nothing more revolutionary than teaching our young people in general to love themselves," Simmons says, "and particularly young people of color, because they don't have to look too far to see negative images of themselves displayed throughout the media. We can teach our young people to love themselves by centering our instruction on their lives, their realities and their experiences, and using their lives as cultural reference to our instruction."

Here are some things teachers can do to nurture this self-love and pride in their students:

Really get to know your students. This is the first step toward helping students love themselves. This should be done in both formal and informal ways: A simple survey can help you gather information quickly, and spending time with students outside of class can help you see them in a different light. In her school, Simmons occasionally attended gym class with her students and invited them to have lunch with her off-campus.

Create ways for students to bring pieces of their lives into the classroom. By allowing students to share in school the things they value outside of school, we demonstrate that every aspect of who they are is important. One way Simmons did this was to have students create personalized playlists of their favorite (school-appropriate) music that could be played during certain class activities.

Honor their language. When teachers attempt to "fix" students' language to make it more standardized, they often communicate to students that their way of speaking is wrong. Instead, we could explain that students need to become bilingual, that using academically standard language will open doors for them in some contexts. This approach honors where students come from and acknowledges the value of their home vernacular. Simmons advises teachers to have an honest conversation with students: "How we speak when we are outside is how we speak. It's totally fine. Then there's a way we speak in the classroom, and that just makes us bilingual as opposed to right and wrong. When you say to someone, 'Cut it out,' you're saying, 'Cut out who you are,' and we don't want to do that."

Tell them you love them. "When I was in the classroom," Simmons says, "I actually had posters that would say, 'Ms. Simmons loves you,' and it wasn't uncommon to walk into my classroom and for me and a student to share I love you's with each other. When we do that, we create a space for our students of color to know that their schooling values their experiences, and it values who they are."

2. Invite Families and Community Members to Become Partners in Educating Students

"When you partner with communities, when you partner with families," Simmons explains, "students really internalize that they matter. They internalize that their communities matter, and they also begin to understand that they have a role in developing and engaging in their communities. What I learned when I had to leave the Bronx to go to boarding school was that the Bronx had nothing to offer me. How painful it was to think of the place that raised me, the place that I called home was actually not good. And so I had to spend some time reshifting and reframing how I thought about the Bronx, that the Bronx was something to return to as opposed to something to leave. And I think educators, in the process of seeing their communities and their families as assets, begin to shift from deficit-based mindset to an asset-based mindset."

Take inventory. Using a community development approach called asset mapping, build a list of all the various resources you could take advantage of, partnerships you could form with parents and community members to enrich the education of your students.

Use community resources as curriculum. Find ways to tie local resources to the things you're teaching in class. You can invite community members in as guest speakers or take students on field trips to local establishments. Doing this gives students a sense of pride in their neighborhood and helps them see home as an abundant place.

Keep parents involved through multiple channels. Invite parents to attend classroom events, use digital and non-digital means to let parents know what's going on in class and what they can do to help. If what you're doing now isn't working, try something else. Ask families what would work for them until you find an effective approach.

3. Expose Students to Role Models of Color

Growing up, Simmons says most of the role models she saw in the media were white. "So in many ways, I would say implicitly I learned to favor whiteness. I learned to think that everything white was better ... I think that is true for many people of color." By making sure all of our students-not just students of color-are exposed to a variety of diverse role models, we help them broaden their own goals and see what's possible for everyone.

Invite guest speakers and mentors of color into the classroom. Find ways to arrange visits or guest presentations people of color who work in all sorts of industries. These guests can come from your local area or, with the help of video conferencing, anywhere else in the world.

Make sure your classroom or school library has a variety of texts that include positive, diverse characters. The site We Need Diverse Books maintains a growing list of books that meet this need. Canerow is also building a similar list, and their blog expands the definition of "text" to other forms of media like music and film.

Support efforts to improve teacher diversity. Currently, there is a shortage of teachers of color in the U.S., which further limits our students' interactions with professional role models of color. This report by the Center for Amercian Progress outlines steps that can be taken by states, districts, school leaders, and universities to attract, train, and retain teachers of color. If you are a classroom teacher and have no direct impact in this area, what you can do is learn more about the problem and support efforts in your own school to improve it.

4. Disrupt the Single Narrative of Students of Color

"I think a lot of times when teachers go back home, and they talk to their friends, the stories they tell about their students only perpetuate the status quo, what it means to be a kid of color," says Simmons. "These single narratives are perpetuated, and in many ways, I think are problematic because they're incomplete, they flatten the wholeness of our students." The concept of the single narrative is illustrated beautifully by Chimamanda Adichie in her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, which I strongly recommend you watch to fully understand this idea.

We are all part of this conversation, with many of us only perpetuating the existing narrative about our students of color in the anecdotes we share about them. So how do we disrupt that? How do we work to change that narrative so society at large begins to see our students of color with more complexity, and so the students see themselves differently?

Empower students to tell their own stories. Look for ways to let students share their own diverse experiences, whether it's through spoken word, in conversations, or in more finished products like written pieces, podcasts, videos, or other multimedia.

Pay attention to your own storytelling, your own language. When you are retelling a story of something one of your students did, ask yourself if the story is contributing to a negative narrative, if it perpetuates a stereotype about a particular group of students. And check your language: When you talk about certain groups of students, do you say "these kids," or "our kids"? A subtle shift in language represents a major change in thinking.

Challenge others. When your colleagues tell these kinds of single-narrative stories, dig for context. Ask about the strengths of the students being described. Push for the full picture.

Small Changes Make a Difference

None of the actions outlined here are simple, and none of them offer a quick fix. But implementing them consistently, with the belief that this work is important, will make your classroom a place where students of color will flourish.

You can find Dena Simmons on Twitter at @denasimmons. If you enjoyed her TED talk above, check out her other two, It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? and What to do if your student comes at you with scissors?

Learn something new every week.
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Four Ways Teachers Can Support Students of Color

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By taking a few specific actions, teachers could be doing an incredible job of helping students of color reach their full potential.

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Diversifying You Classroom Book Collection 

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Diversifying You Classroom Book Collection 

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Surface-level Diversity

by Debbi Michiko Florence, Middle grade: The Only Black Girls in Town by Brandy Colbert, Jasmine Toguchi, Mochi Queen A Dash of Trouble by Anna Meriano

Ignoring Intersectionality

Three decades ago, legal scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term " intersectionality " as a way of examining how courts failed to account for the overlapping forms of discrimination faced by Black women. Today, the term is used more broadly to refer to the way race, class, gender, sexuality and other characteristics overlap and shape individuals' experiences. "We like to think about people being one thing or the other when you can be Asian and queer and an immigrant," said Martin, the University of Washington professor. While a decade ago it may have been hard to find books by and about people whose identities sit at those types of intersections, that's increasingly less true, Martin said. "You can find those books if you are looking."

Sidekick Syndrome

: Picture books Maybe Something Beautiful by F. Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell, illustrated by Rafael López, The Patchwork Bike by Maxine Beneba Clarke and illustrated by Van T. Rudd, Niño Wrestles the World by Yuyi Morales

Middle grade: Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, Dactyl Hill Squad by Daniel José Older

Treating Groups as Monoliths

by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Young adult: Black Brother, Black Brother The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America edited by Ibi Zoboi

Excluding #OwnVoices

by Traci Sorell and illustrated by Frané Lessac, Picture books: by Matthew A. Cherry and illustrated by Vashti Harrison, We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga Saturday by Oge Mora

Stopping at the Text

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Diversifying Your Classroom Book Collections? Avoid these 7 Pitfalls | KQED

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Keeping your book selection relevant means making sure it includes meaningful experiences of different kinds of people, especially from marginalized communities. Here are some strategies and book titles that can help students grow from what they read.

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Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, is the 2017 Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University. She is the author of several books including the best-selling " Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about Race. A thought-leader in higher education, she was a 2013 recipient of the Carnegie Academic Leadership Award and the 2014 recipient of the American Psychological Association Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology. She and her husband, Dr. Travis Tatum, are the parents of two sons.

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Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, is the 2017 Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University. She is the author of several books including the best-selling "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"

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You Can Coach for Equity Anytime, with Anyone 

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You Can Coach for Equity Anytime, with Anyone 

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To create the schools children deserve, we must coach educators and leaders for equity. It isn't an option for coaches to be neutral on issues of justice - and there are injustices occurring in almost every school, every day. It's our moral and professional obligation to lead and coach in a way that surfaces and interrupts these inequities.

''To create the schools children deserve, we must coach educators and leaders for equity.'' @brightmorningtm #LearnFwdTLP Click To Tweet

Every conversation I have in and about schools is a conversation about equity. Always looking through an equity lens, I notice who is sitting where, who is raising his, her, or their hand, who is being yelled at, who is reading what, who is playing with whom, who is in the front office waiting for the principal.

I think about how teachers explain concepts and check for understanding, what they assign for reading, whom they praise and why, what they are doing during professional learning time. I process what I see through my understandings of race, institutional racism, implicit bias, stereotype threat, white supremacy, and other frameworks to make sense of what I see - and, perhaps most important, to figure out how to interrupt the inequities.

Because equity issues are present in every situation, I am coaching for equity in every coaching conversation. We live in a society that is deeply inequitable, in which systems of oppression (including racism, patriarchy, and classism) are embedded in our mindsets, behaviors, and institutions, but we often don't recognize the prevalence of this systemic oppression.

This is why we, as coaches and leaders, must make it visible. To coach for equity, you must see inequities, understand how they were constructed, and know why they perpetuate.

While it's helpful to be in a system or around leaders who hold equity at the center, these conditions aren't essential if you want to coach for equity. Ultimately, you can coach for equity anywhere, with anyone. It's about what you pay attention to and what you say about what you see and hear.
What is equity?
Educational equity means that all students receive whatever they need every day to develop to their full academic and social potential and thrive. By thrive, I mean academically as well as socially and emotionally. Every child has a right to feel loved and cared for and to feel that they belong to a community. Emotional well-being is as important as academic success in my definition of educational equity.

''Educational equity means that all students receive whatever they need every day to develop to their full academic and social potential and thrive.'' @brightmorningtm #LearnFwdTLP Click To Tweet

Achieving educational equity would mean that there is no predictability of success or failure based on social or cultural factors like race, ethnicity, linguistic background, economic class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and physical and cognitive ability. Here are some examples of educational equity:

A Latinx child who enters kindergarten speaking only Spanish performs as well on reading assessments in 3rd grade as her native English-speaking counterparts.

An African American teen is just as likely as his white or Asian classmates to enroll and thrive in an engineering program in high school.

Girls are equally represented in advanced math courses - and are equally as successful as their male classmates.

There's proportionality in the demographics of kids sent to the office: If a district's African American population is 20%, then at most 20% of office referrals are for African American students.

Educational equity also means that all children are seen for who they are and schools surface and cultivate their unique interests and gifts. For this to happen, children need access to an extensive range of learning opportunities, activities, and materials as vehicles to self-realization and freedom.

''Every child has a right to feel loved and cared for and to feel that they belong to a community.'' @brightmorningtm #LearnFwdTLP Click To Tweet
How can I coach for equity?
Coaching for equity requires a robust tool set. First, you need to know what equity and inequity look and sound like. The ability to recognize these patterns is affected by your personal identity markers, so before and during any work around educational equity, you need to reflect on and cultivate deep awareness of your sociopolitical identity markers, including your own racial identity. This is meaningful work in and of itself.

''Emotional well-being is as important as academic success in my definition of educational equity.'' @brightmorningtm #LearnFwdTLP Click To Tweet

You also need foundational coaching skills - a refined ability to listen, a variety of frameworks through which you can make sense of what you hear, and a repertoire of question stems that cultivate dialogue.

Coaching for equity requires professional learning and ongoing practice and feedback from trusted colleagues.
5 tips on coaching for equity
I'm writing my next book, Coaching for Equity (Jossey-Bass, in press), and so I have many suggestions for how to have coaching conversations about equity. Here are five of my top tips.

1. Attend to emotions. Conversations about equity will raise emotions in you and in your coachees. Learning about emotions - how to respond productively and how to support someone else to recognize and engage with them - will make all the difference in coaching for equity. It's very likely that you and your coachee will feel angry, sad, nervous, impatient, confused, and a whole lot more. I've seen many coaching conversations derailed by an inadequate tool set for responding to emotions.

2. Build trust. A high degree of trust between you and your coachee is critical for you to coach effectively, especially if you're committed to coaching for equity. There are many ways to build trust. We feel trust when people keep their word and honor their commitments, are transparent and don't harbor a hidden agenda, and when we can see that someone can and will do what they say they're going to do.

3. Know how to respond to the question, "Do you think I'm racist?" As a coach, I'm often asked some form of this question. To engage with this question, you need to know what racism is. You also need to know what implicit bias is and how white supremacy manifests in our schools and a whole lot more - and so you need to be prepared. As you do that learning, here are some ways to respond to this question:

Tell me more about where that question is coming from.

Let's unpack that concept first. What is a racist? What do you think racists think, feel, and do?

Maybe. Am I understanding that this is something you want to explore? What might you have to gain, or how would you benefit, from digging into this question?

What would it mean to you if you are racist?

What do you really want to know about yourself? What are you curious to discover?

Yes, you probably are. To some degree, we all are.

As you read some of these, you might have thought, I could never say that! I want to challenge you to try some of them. You might be surprised at how effective they are at opening up conversation.

4. Gather data. If you want to help a coachee interrupt inequitable practices, you'll likely need to gather the data that illustrate these inequities. There are many kinds of data that can reveal inequities, from video to surveys to teacher-to-student interaction data to disaggregated office referral data. Knowing what to gather and how to facilitate a meaningful discussion of this data with a client is essential.

5. Hone your coach dispositions. Who you are as a coach - your way of being - has a tremendous impact on the quality of your coaching conversations. Fortunately, who you are is firmly within your sphere of control. I have identified six essential dispositions for coaches that lead to transformational conversations and are essential for equity conversations: compassion, curiosity, trust in the coaching process, humility and mutuality, appreciation, and learner orientation. Regular and intentional practice strengthens these dispositions.

Coaching for equity requires professional learning and ongoing practice and feedback from trusted colleagues. Here are 5 tips on coaching for #equity from @brightmorningtm #LearnFwdTLP Click To Tweet

To do this essential work of coaching for equity, we all have a great deal to learn. These aren't skills most of us have acquired yet, but we can develop them. In schools where coaches work effectively within an equity lens, children and adults thrive and inequities decrease. This is perhaps what we need to know most: We can coach for equity and create equitable schools.

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You can coach for equity anywhere, with anyone - Learning Forward

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To create the schools children deserve, we must coach educators and leaders for equity. It isn't an option for coaches to be neutral on issues of justice - and there are injustices occurring in almost every school, every day. It's our moral and professional obligation to lead and coach in a way that surfaces and...

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Ankita Ajith can recall learning about slavery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at her Katy, Texas, elementary school in the Houston area.

But looking back, Ajith, now a student at Northwestern University, also vividly remembers how superficial those conversations were, and how much she wishes that her predominantly white, suburban school district had given her the tools from a young age to understand America's racist past and its connection with the present.

"They taught us things that were easily digestible and sounded good," Ajith said. "It was definitely painted in the light that 'these problems are in the past,' and 'America is the land of the free' and 'everyone is equal here.'"

"It was definitely painted in the light that 'these problems are in the past' and 'America is the land of the free' and 'everyone is equal here.'"

-Ankita Ajith

In July, Ajith and three of her friends testified before the Texas State Board of Education, demanding changes to the way students are taught. They are advocating for core curriculum changes in social studies - specifically American history - classes. The college students pressed the board to acknowledge the state's "deeply anti-Black, racist past as well as the oppression that continues today." To them, educators should teach significant topics like the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements with more depth and breadth. They believe that kids, no matter what grade they are in, should learn history through an antiracist lens, not only learning about the role of white supremacy and racism in history, but doing so in a way that empowers them to pursue social justice.

And they aren't the only ones advocating the adoption of such curricula. Ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May spurred what may be the largest social movement in U.S. history, education leaders have started to reckon with how to comprehensively teach history with an antiracism lens. Colleges are holding professional development online events for educators on how to reimagine education with racial justice in mind. And school districts are working to expand their curricula on race.

As education organizations and initiatives such as Teaching Tolerance, the Zinn Education Project, Black Lives Matter at School, the Pulitzer Center's 1619 Project Curriculum and others strive to give educators the tools to teach anti-bias and antiracism, educators are grappling with how to implement these resources in early grades.

READ MORE: Students sick of 'lip service' from universities over racism

For Katie Cryan Leary, the principal of the newly opened Magnolia Elementary in Seattle Public Schools, creating an antiracist, anti-bias school can be a messy, uncomfortable journey. That's especially true in a district that, in the 19 years she's been working there, has committed to racial equity but still struggles to serve the needs of a wide range of students.

"I still see so many issues where our walk is not matching the talk," said Leary, who is white and leads a school where, she says, 62 percent of students are white.

To her, antiracism education in elementary school starts with students' awareness of themselves, of others and of how those interactions play out. She believes that social emotional learning - giving kids the tools to manage and express their feelings - is the heart of race and equity work. Developmental psychologists have called attention to the notion that children between the ages of 2 and 4 can start showing racial biases. And by the time students are in kindergarten, research shows that they show some of the same attitudes about race as the adults in their lives. Children also grow acclimated to favoring whiteness and privileged groups.

Leary uses resources from Black Lives Matter at Schools, a national movement started by thousands of educators in Seattle in 2016 that has spread to other large school districts nationwide. For the past four years, district leaders have strongly encouraged Seattle Public School educators to teach about the Black Lives Matter movement's 13 guiding principles - such as collective value, restorative justice and the empowerment of Black families - for one week in February. Some school leaders have welcomed that opportunity, and others have not, Leary said.

Additionally, throughout the year, students are exposed to a different concept every month through daily read alouds, project-based learning and classroom meetings. To help spur conversations with students about differences, race and unfairness, kindergarten to fifth grade teachers read books by writers that touch on issues of racial inequity, such as " The Day You Begin," " Ron's Big Mission" and " New Shoes."

"It's a way that we can access information and have conversations without making the white teachers the experts," Leary said.

However, she and her teachers have found it challenging, especially since the pandemic forced teaching online, to teach students about the police brutality and other racist violence they may see in the media. The teachers are unsure how families will respond to students having those conversations, even though they have received little to no pushback about the social justice curriculum they've been using since last year.

"In our classrooms, it's a safe space where kids know and trust and are connected to their teachers," Leary said. But that's not always the case with online discussions, "so we've struggled with that and have had conversations about it as a staff, and we need to keep having conversations."

She said that as educators, creating a safe space in any learning environment is something they must take seriously.

"When kids come to school, we have the opportunity to create a culture of school that may be different than their home culture, and really be able to expand their racial beings as antiracist," she said. "We have the capacity to create antiracist kids at school, whether they live in an antiracist home or not. And we don't have that ability remotely. And so we're working as a start to find out how to do that."

READ MORE: Experts answer your kids' tough questions about race and racism

Chanita Coulter, a preschool teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, also believes in the importance of having open discussions with young students and not shying away from current events.

In June, with Sarah Frayer, an elementary school teacher and instructional coach in Washington, D.C., Coulter started a nonprofit organization called Reflective Pages that aims to help educators build multicultural, comprehensive curriculums in schools.

"Our children, even though they are young, they are aware of what's going on," Coulter said. "I remember like even my younger students, maybe like 4 or 5 years old, they were aware of who Trayvon Martin was and what happened to him."

Coulter and Frayer provide educators with information about microaggressions, implicit bias, systemic racism and other barriers that can hinder students' learning. They also talk to educators about how to successfully implement a curriculum that focuses on race and antiracism, centers Black voices and highlights Black stories and achievements. One way is to pull local Black authors into classrooms to talk about black activists and scholars.

"A lot of times people hear the word 'activism' and they might have a negative connotation to it. We try to provide enlightenment in that regard," Coulter said.

In her own classroom, she and her students sent videos and wrote letters to senators about school funding and state testing. In her preschool classroom, she said her students made signs and did a walk around to protest mass shootings during a national walk out movement.

"Students are well aware of the social issues and sometimes have a hard time expressing their feelings and opinions."

-Chanita Coulter

"I think that it is important that students of color actively participate in conversations that affect their families and communities," Coulter said in an email. "Students are well aware of the social issues and sometimes have a hard time expressing their feelings and opinions."

Coulter said when she engages in conversations with her students, they are more able to name their emotions.

"I also think it is important to acknowledge that their voices matter," Coulter said. "In order to make a difference one must first be heard."

READ MORE: Inside one school's efforts to bridge the divide between white teachers and students of color

But while more schools are getting onboard with the idea of teaching antiracism, Keffrelyn Brown, a University of Texas at Austin professor and former elementary school teacher, said she doesn't know of any school that is doing this work effectively. That's not exactly surprising, she said, because society as a whole is not doing it well.

"It's one thing to bring a person in to do a talk or even send your faculty to do workshops," Brown said. "It's another thing to say that this is deeply embedded in the work that we do. It is something that we are holding ourselves accountable for. "A vast majority of schools," she added, "are not focused on antiracism - not in a superficial way, and not in a deep and substantial way either."

Some elementary school educators and consultants, like Akiea Gross, believe that substantive, holistic antiracist work within an educational setting requires educators to think beyond academic content to their own role in systemic racism.

Gross, who identifies as a trans nonbinary abolitionist educator, is the founder of Woke Kindergarten, a social media community space that hosts antiracist read alouds and shares resources about antiracism and liberation for the littlest kids. Gross said that that it's problematic if educators just add antiracist curriculum.

Instead, they must start by doing some deep reflective work on the ways they've caused harm to their students and also begin the healing with families who have had bad experiences inside schools. Teachers can also work collaboratively with students to set goals and guidelines instead of simply meting out the rules.

"We are a part of the curriculum, the way that we show up, the way that we enter spaces," Gross said. Gross believes that if there is a bureaucratic chain of command in a class setting, teachers must recognize and push against keeping that certain structure.

"You can actively teach being antiracist by discussing and pointing out that hierarchy and creating more of a communal learning environment where you are creating a mutual respect between you and your kids," Gross said.

Gross's "Woke Read Alouds" on YouTube discuss topics on antiracism that go beyond the words and pictures of the books. In the read aloud for the book "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild" by Peter Brown, about a tiger who decides to act differently than his fellow anthropomorphic animal neighbors, Gross talks about big topics like "politics" and "rules" and who made the rules for Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian people.

Ankita Ajith and her three college-age friends plan to keep fighting for a curriculum centered on antiracism. Since testifying before the Texas State Board of Education in early July, the college students have spoken to the board's chair and vice-chair about revisiting and reviewing the state social studies standards. Their proposed revisions will be placed on the agenda for the board's September meeting, said Nitant Patel, a friend of Ajith's who is also involved in the campaign.

"We can't afford to overlook this anymore," Ajith said. "I want to make sure that they're not avoiding teaching difficult subjects just because they are nuanced or uncomfortable to discuss."

She believes that the change they seek is now inevitable. "It's something that will happen sooner or later."
This story about antiracist curriculum was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletter.

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Aaricka Washington, The Hechinger Report

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How some educators are teaching antiracism to the youngest students

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Ankita Ajith can recall learning about slavery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at her Katy, Texas, elementary school in the Houston area. But looking back, Ajith, now a student at Northwestern University, also vividly remembers how superficial those conversations were, and how much she wishes that her predominantly white, suburban school district had given her the tools from a young age to understand America's racist past and its connection with the present.

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[Image description: Illustration from All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold & Suzanne Kaufman. Children of various races and faiths pointing to locations on a world map.] If you're nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity. Bold and *marked books are written or illustrated by #OwnVoices makers of color. Raising Luminaries is free and accessible for readers who can't afford a paywall. Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book Anti-Racism For Beginners: Part 1 Acknowledging & Celebrating Racial Diversity Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you're into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:

...

" How do I teach my kids to be anti-racist when I'm still learning myself?"
- Anonymous, Books For Littles Facebook Group (archived)

...

It's normal to get flustered when when our children talk about race. But if we let nervousness keep us silent and still, our fear becomes a weapon.

Growing up, I was told that discrimination would magically disappear if we stop acknowledging racial difference. All people are the same. Skin color doesn't matter. Only bad people are racist. If we are all nice and well-behaved, racism will go away.

This is the fallacy of colorblind ideology. It's a tool to keep us complicit in white supremacy. Don't be a tool.

We must talk about race with young kids. Racism thrives in silence.

When we refuse to talk about race at an early age, children absorb our silence as shame. We're taught that if we have nothing nice to say - say nothing at all. Well - white folks are aggressively silent when it comes to race! Does that mean that being Brown or Black is something to be ashamed of?

Kids pick up when we refuse to acknowledge racial difference - and how we treat people of color. Why are we surprised then, to see nice, well-behaved children reflect unconscious bias against people of color, then grow into adults who blame people of color for violence and harm against them?
(It's your job to be that adult.)
Your child needs at least one adult to speak truth to BS about racial assumptions.

My White mother who openly talked about race from birth - and how society would perceive and treat me because of my multiracial heritage. She raised me to understand that discrimination against me was not my fault. Violence would happen to me because of my race, my gender, my class but it wasn't caused by me - it was caused by white supremacy.

The Mominator refused to let me internalize the idea that I deserved racism. To do that, she first needed to acknowledge my race and the fact that I would have obstacles in life that white kids didn't.

We can help our children understand racism - and empower them to work toward racial equality.

Raise kids of color to feel proud of their culture and their right to self-advocate.

Raise white kids to recognize their duty to stand up against injustice.

But first, you've gotta acknowledge that racial differences - even though they are an imaginary, human-imagined construct, exist as a real thing in our society, with real-life impact on real-life people.

Start by telling our kids that yes - we do see skin color and racial identities.

For folks who were never given space to talk about racism and discrimination as kids (or even racial diversity), it's scary to start. We don't want to say the wrong thing and mess it up.

No worries, we are going to start very gently with non-controversial, easygoing books that just show kids that racial diversity exists. In future collections, we'll get into more emotionally loaded topics - like racial discrimination, racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.

And this diversity is glorious.

Acknowledge & Celebrating Racial Diversity

From two anonymous BFL members:

"My daughter came home saying she didn't like her brown skin and wanted white skin and 'bright' hair instead. I'm looking for books that reinforce pride in who she is."

"My white daughter said to me the other day, 'I don't like dark skin. ' I ran to the internet to research books like these."

Yikes.

Use these comments as learning opportunities. Read these books to discuss biases they've absorbed during a quiet time home together (story time!) Encourage kids to speak bias aloud so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

When children point out that they like particular skin tones, body shapes, or hair textures more than others - don't shout at them or insist they are wrong. Kids this age can't untangle feelings from fact. Shaming them for a gut reaction is just going to get them to clam up.

Instead, help them untangle bias from fact on their own. Ask why they feel this way. Use in an open, non-judgemental tone. Keep asking questions to unpack these assumptions. We're not here to tell them what to think, we're here to model critical thinking about racial bias moving forward.

Discuss how all bodies are good bodies - how we differ, and what we have in common.

All Are Welcome, *Lovely, We're Different, We're The Same

Acknowledge & Celebrate Cultural Diversity

When we over-simplify racism, we tell kids that racism is simply bias against people based on skin color - it's not.
How do we counter the entrenched dominant narrative's focus on whiteness?
(That's colorism, another problem we can tackle later.)

Racism expands beyond skin color - it's assumptions and discrimination against individuals and groups of people, based on racial identity. This includes not just skin color, but also cultural norms and behavior, language, and other markers of racial and ethnic identity.
*On The Day You Begin, *Where Are You From?, *Alma And How She Got Her Name
White supremacy is assuming that racism would be over if people of color just assimilated and acted more like white people, that assimilation is even a goal for people of color, and that non-white culture is deviant or inferior to whiteness.

Read stories that show how people of color are not monolithic - we're complex individuals who can't be reduced to the caricatures of mainstream media. Our ethnic heritage is something valuable worth exploring, and our ancestors traditions, achievements, and challenges have an impact on who we are today.

But our race and ethnicity is not the only thing that defines us. Show kids how we all have a right to pride in our heritage - just not at the expense of punching down another culture.

Not pictured: *Islandborn is another lovely book, which I recommend with reservations. In 2018, several survivors came forth about Junot Díaz's problematic behavior toward women. One of these reports has been shown to have been overblown - but I'm not comfortable with the way we're dismissing all survivors of his actions because of this. The book itself is great - so I'll let you decide how to move forward with all that on your own.
Support these resources via Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
Explain How Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Having a broad range of experiences to draw from, mindsets to brainstorm, and abilities to solve the problems facing humanity is a very good thing. Human diversity is good for all of humanity and evolution and stuff. I am pretty sure this is SCIENCE.

The idea that winnowing humanity into one make-believe-super-race, or segregating us all into silos based on our racial identity sounds ABSURD. Right? RIGHT?!

Obviously some families are not absorbing the fact that genetic diversity is good for society and the fate of humanity, so we have to make this clear. That whole 'melting pot' assimilation thing our teachers celebrated 20 years ago turned out to be a bad idea.

What we need is more of a chunky stew, with folks proudly retaining and celebrating our individual racial and cultural identities while cognizant of the challenges and discrimination many groups face. These books help kids see how diversity makes us stronger.

Stay Curious, Stand Brave & Talk About Race

Don't stop here. Now that your kids understand that human skin, hair, and all of that stuff comes in a broad change of colors, shapes, and textures - help them see how all people deserve basic human rights, respect, and kindness.

Click here for part 2 of raising Anti-Racist Kids - Children's Books That Teach Kids About Social Power & Paternalism

If you want reminders when I update these resources and publish new podcasts, join the email list.

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race - Raising Luminaries

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Image description: Illustration from All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold & Suzanne Kaufman. Children of various races and faiths pointing to locations on a world map.] If you're nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity.

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Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup

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Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup

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Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup - Pretty Good

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Your kids aren't too young to talk about race. Here are a few resources to get your started.

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6 Things Anti-Racist Educators Want Grown-ups to Know about Teaching and Raising Kids

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6 Things Anti-Racist Educators Want Grown-ups to Know about Teaching and Raising Kids

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Grown-ups often get uncomfortable when kids point out skin color, but that's a natural part of processing the world, said Thomas López. But the problems emerge when those differences convey negative associations. Racist perceptions are prevalent enough that kids will absorb implicit bias , whether or not the adults in their lives express racist attitudes, she said. "They're breathing those things in, so if you're not actively countering those messages, then they're going to stick."

and other media can help start conversations about race with kids . Jewell emphasized telling kids the truth and encouraging them to ask questions. The speakers also made clear that these conversations are not one-and-done events. Black families, by necessity, have multiple versions of about racism as their kids age, "to make sure their kid doesn't become the next Michael Brown ," said Minor. Non-Black families must do the same.

3. Be Willing to be Uncomfortable

For adults accustomed to the false paradigm of " not seeing color ," starting to address systemic racism will be uncomfortable. By sitting with that discomfort, teachers and parents demonstrate the importance of these issues and model a willingness to make mistakes. Allyn said she finds strength in being able to say, "I'm messy, I'm not sure I know how to do this, but I want to keep doing this. I want to work on this for the rest of my life, the best I can."

The speakers also noted how heavily the work of raising and teaching anti-racist kids weighs on educators of color . Minor said he entered college with the goal of becoming the best reading teacher in New York City, but fighting systemic racism in schools takes time and energy from that pursuit. "My great stress comes from having been robbed of my dreams by racism."

4. Teaching Kindness is Not Enough

Minor said that many people think that racism means being mean to Black people. That limited definition makes it harder to see the connections between individual actions and systemic issues, such as disproportionate disciplinary rates for Black students. Jewell defines racism as both personal prejudice and "the misuse and abuse of power." She said that's a definition that people of any age can understand. "It also allows us to see that being nice isn't going to end racism. It allows us to understand that we need to more than just unpack our own biases but we have to move it into institutions ... and look at the policies and procedures and laws."

5. Be Radically Pro-Kid

During the question and answer period, a teacher from a rural, predominantly white school asked how to respond to colleagues who might push back against anti-racist initiatives and proclaim that " all lives matter ." Minor's advice was to be "radically pro-kid." It is an educator's job to create opportunities for children and to teach kids to create opportunities for themselves, he said. "As such, anything that stands in the way of opportunity for a child is my enemy. So, police shooting brown children - you can't read if you're dead. Kids being malnourished because they live in food deserts - you can't write powerful poetry if you don't have all your vitamins." Minor said he considers it his responsibility to make things uncomfortable for educators who do not see kids being shot by police or not having enough to eat as problems worth addressing in school. "So when people say things like 'all lives matter,' it's really important to note that, yes, we do understand that all lives matter, but until Black lives matter in a demonstrably clear way, through law enforcement, through education, through access to food and medical care, until Black lives matter, all lives cannot matter."

6. Teachers Have Power

Jewell said she felt she had more power as a classroom teacher than she did as an administrator because she worked directly with students and parents every day. Teachers should use that proximity to relay what families are experiencing to school leaders and to ask challenging questions , she said. "Don't be afraid. Just go forth and do it, because if you're not going to, somebody else might not."

Kwame Alexander , the bestselling and who organized the town hall, closed the event with a moment of silence. During that time, the black screen filled up, one by one, with the of hundreds of individuals killed by racist violence. "We have the capacity to make that page blank," Alexander said.

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6 Things Anti-Racist Educators Want Grown-ups to Know about Teaching and Raising Kids - MindShift

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For adults accustomed to the false paradigm of "not seeing color," starting to address systemic racism will be uncomfortable. By sitting with that discomfort, teachers and parents demonstrate the importance of these issues and model a willingness to make mistakes.

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Early Childhood Education Assembly Call to ActionCountering Anti-Blackness in Society & Schools

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Early Childhood Education Assembly Call to ActionCountering Anti-Blackness in Society & Schools

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September 2020 | Volume 78 | Number 1
Grade Expectations Pages 12-13
Cornelius Minor is a grading equity advocate and author of We Got This. Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be (Heinemann, 2018). A former middle school teacher, he is a lead staff developer with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. How can grading practices support students who fell behind during the recent closures?
First, I want to challenge the assumption of your question-the term "fall behind" is a social construct. This idea of where a person should be is not a naturally occurring thing. We know from child development psychologist Jean Piaget that all people develop differently and grow at different paces.

Essentially, powerful teaching and learning are based on two things: assessment and intervention. When we meet students this fall, how will we most honestly and mindfully assess them and understand where they are? And then how will we move kids forward at a rate that's developmentally appropriate to them?
What are the most pernicious grading practices in use today?
Pernicious grading practices start out as pernicious pedagogy. I cannot separate grading practices from pedagogy, and I cannot separate pedagogy from the history of classism, sexism, racism, and ableism in the United States. The idea of what is successful at school is still very much constructed through an able-bodied, monied, aggressively competitive white male lens.
You've argued that when left unchecked, the attitudes behind grading policies can be traumatizing
Everybody wants to blame it on the practice. But even if we change practices, if we still believe certain kids are just more worthy and smart, grading will remain traumatizing. I'll give you one example, and we've all seen this happen: A teacher calls roll and then goes down the rows of desks collecting homework. Part of that ritual is public shaming. The kids who do not have homework to hand in are often given a mean look or a negative comment: "Oh, not again, Johnny." That communicates the message to all the other kids that this child is not as worthy. Kids pick up on that and start building social hierarchies as young as 1st grade. And to be clear: this happens disproportionality to children of color.
Is there such a thing as antiracist grading?
Absolutely. But again, I want to be very careful because one thing that's happening right now is that people almost want an antiracist activity playbook. You can't say, "I've adopted these three antiracist grading policies and now I'm antiracist." Antiracism is addressing the ideologies that govern schools. There absolutely is such a thing as antiracist grading, but it starts with me examining the biases that I bring into school and the discriminatory ideologies and structures that lead to the types of pedagogy I engage in. It's about me disrupting the very curriculum that I teach, and then it gets to the grading. Think of grading as the output: If your programming code is bad, the output of the program will always be bad.
How would doing that inner work change grading practices?
One thing we understand from Universal Design for Learning is that there are multiple ways a kid can express their knowing. And so if you know 2+2=4, one way you can express your knowing is by writing it. Another way you can express your knowing is by discussing it. A third way is by creating a model that shows it. A fourth way is by illustrating it and a fifth way is by performing a play. But in too many schools, only one way is considered legitimate. So if you write it, you get an A and that's it. There might be 100 kids in the school who know 2+2=4, but if only two of those kids can write it, then only two of those kids will receive A s. That is profoundly discriminatory.

One of the first aspects of truly inclusive grading is understanding that the assignment doesn't matter, the learning outcome does. At the end of the week, all I care about is, did the kid meet the learning outcome? I don't care about how they got there.
If the ultimate goal is more equitable grading, where can teachers start?
If I were to give teachers a starter kit, it would be to examine the ideologies that you bring into classrooms-the bad code, to repeat the computer metaphor. Three particularly pernicious ideologies show up in grading. The first is the ideology of should know. There's this false belief that if a 2nd grader walked into my classroom, there are certain things she should know. Rather, it's our job as teachers to discern what students do know and then move them forward.

The second thing I would eliminate is the ideology of transactional gratitude. In most academic spaces, there is a silent pact that teachers make with students: I will agree to teach you well if you demonstrate to me that you are thankful for it. And if you do not demonstrate to me that you are thankful for it, I will withhold quality teaching from you. A teacher will be in the lounge and say something like, "You know, I've done everything to make sure that McKibben kid understands how to add. But all she does is yell. She's not thankful. So I'm not doing it no more." Or, "Can you believe I stayed after school for two hours to help Sarah with her essay and she still didn't turn it in? That kid can forget about it from me." We expect students to show up with gratitude because we do our jobs.

The third is the ideology of deservedness. Even though grading is about proficiency, it often gets conflated with behavior. You can have a student who is proficient at calculus, but if the teacher doesn't like the fact that they are consistently late to class, that kid gets marked down. Again, there's an unspoken pact teachers have with their children: I will agree to teach you well if you demonstrate to me that you deserve it.

If teachers start by examining-and eliminating-those three ideologies, then the grading that will come out on the other end of the system will be far better for children.
-Sarah McKibben
Editors' note: This interview has been edited for space.

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"Antiracist" Grading Starts with You - Educational Leadership

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September 2020 | Volume 78 | Number 1 Grade Expectations Pages 12-13 Cornelius Minor is a grading equity advocate and author of We Got This. Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be (Heinemann, 2018).

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subscribe to Parenting: Difficult Conversations podcast

subscribe to Parenting: Difficult Conversations podcast

Even babies notice differences like skin color, eye shape and hair texture. Here's how to handle conversations about race, racism, diversity and inclusion, even with very young children.
A few things to remember:

Don't shush or shut them down if they mention race.

Don't wait for kids to bring it up.

Be proactive, helping them build a positive awareness of diversity.

When a child experiences prejudice, grown-ups need to both address the feelings and fight the prejudices.

You don't have to avoid topics like slavery or the Holocaust. Instead, give the facts and focus on resistance and allies.

In addition to Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for Social Impact at Sesame Workshop, we spoke to Beverly Daniel Tatum: We recommend her TEDx talk as well as her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race.
Additional Resources:

Babies begin to notice race at 6 months old - in fact, according to this pair of studies by Professor Kang Lee at the University of Toronto, they actually show signs of racial bias by this age.

One in 10 children is multiracial - according to Pew Research Center. This includes children with parents of two different races, plus those with at least one multiracial parent.

Watch the whole "I Love My Hair!" video from Sesame Street.

Thanks to Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton. Derrick Gay, and Jinnie Spiegler of the Anti-Defamation League, which has a wide range of resources for anti-bias education.

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Talking Race With Young Children : Parenting: Difficult Conversations

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subscribe to Parenting: Difficult Conversations podcast subscribe to Parenting: Difficult Conversations podcast Even babies notice differences like skin color, eye shape and hair texture. Here's how to handle conversations about race, racism, diversity and inclusion, even with very young children. A few things to remember: Don't shush or shut them down if they mention race.

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How Should I Talk about Race in My Mostly White Classroom_

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Sponsored by Pear Deck and ISTE U

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

For years teachers have been looking for ways to improve the academic performance of all students, especially students of color and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. While some of these efforts have been successful, many more have had lackluster results.

In the past, we've explored different approaches teachers can take to do a better job of reaching all students: interviews with Dena Simmons, Zaretta Hammond, Pedro Noguera, and Hedreich Nichols, to name a few. In these conversations, we looked at more effective ways of relating to students, strategies for working toward equity outside the classroom, and instructional methods that are more culturally responsive.

This post continues that work with a fresh response to the question of how to better serve diverse students. It's a framework that deals directly with the curriculum side of things, the standards, the actual content we teach in our classrooms. The framework is called Historically Responsive Literacy, and it was developed by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, a professor, a former middle school educator, and the author of the book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, where she makes the case for this framework.

In short, Muhammad believes we're not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards are lacking. The emphasis in our current standards is mainly on skills-skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests-and not a whole lot else. Some teachers go beyond the tested material, pushing students to think critically, exploring social emotional competencies, and designing opportunities for inquiry-based learning; unfortunately, the standards themselves don't require those things.

But there was a time in history when a more complete, more human form of "curriculum" did exist, and it energized and inspired its students-all of them Black men and women-to read, write, speak, and publish with the kind of passion and dedication we would want all of our students to have about learning. This curriculum evolved within the Black literary societies of the 19th century. These groups met regularly to read, write about, and discuss a wide range of texts and ideas. Their goals were far loftier than basic skill development or scores on a test, and engagement-to borrow a term we use in modern education-was at an all-time high.

These societies were the inspiration for Muhammad's Historically Responsive Literacy framework, a four-layered pedagogical model that places skills on an equal plane with three other learning pursuits: identity, intellect, and criticality.

The framework was designed with Black students in mind, but it will benefit all students. Muhammad explains it this way: "If we start with Blackness (which we have not traditionally done in schooling) or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all" (p. 22).

In our interview, she unpacks all four layers of her framework and helps us understand what it looks like to implement them in the classroom. What follows is a summary of our conversation.

First, Two Clarifications

Is Historically Responsive Literacy Just for "Literacy" Teachers?

No. In the book, Muhammad explains that in the past, "literacy was synonymous with education, so although I name 'literacy,' these four pursuits can be used and layered with math, science, ELA, social studies, or physical education/health" (p. 57).

In other words, this is not just a framework for ELA teachers, and in the book, Muhammad explores how to implement HRL in many different subject areas.

Is HRL different from Culturally Responsive Teaching?

Think of HRL as living under the broader umbrella of Culturally Responsive Teaching, which includes relationship-building, instructional strategies, and curriculum. "My work is taking a more historic look back and putting a practical model to the theory," Muhammad says.

The Four Layers of Historically Responsive Literacy

Historically Responsive Literacy is built on four layers, four "learning pursuits" that Muhammad believes should receive equal priority

1. Identity

For students to be fully engaged in school they must first find it relevant, and that starts with identity.

"Identity is who you say you are, who others say you are... (and) who you desire to be," Muhammad says. "I feel like children are trying to make sense of all three areas, and the curriculum and the pedagogy should be an opportunity for students to know themselves."

Muhammad believes this is especially important for children of color because "when we look at representation in children's literature, in society oftentimes, and historically, they are invisible or represented in negative ways. So the classroom needs to be a space for students to affirm and celebrate and validate who they are, so that they know they are enough, so they know they are brilliant and excellent and beautiful. Because society doesn't tell us that all the time."

Along with self-knowledge, the learning pursuit of identity should also include knowledge of others who are different from ourselves. "When students learn about the lives of other people," Muhammad says, "they are less prone to hate, to treat them in harmful or hurtful ways."

What it looks like in the classroom: Start by asking yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help students to learn about themselves and about others?"

From there, plan instruction and write learning goals to satisfy that question. Muhammad gives an example from science. "Some teachers have written it (in language like) Students will understand their environmental identity and their roles and responsibilities regarding the planet. Then in the lesson or unit there are opportunities for students to deeply reflect about how they recycle or (whether) they take care of the earth and the planet and the environment."

Finally, be sure to assess for it. "Kids know that if my teacher values it that she or he or they are going to test it," Muhammad says. "You can assess it in discussion, in a quiz, or a summative kind of test at the end: What are five things you can do to take care of the planet? Or Name five roles that humans play on climate change. So it could be a qualitative or a quantitative assessment, but if you value it enough, you can assess it."

2. Skills

So much of our current curricula and standards already focus on skills, so this part of the framework is nothing new; what's important is to not throw it out when the other three layers are added.

Muhammad explains that this abandonment of skills is a common problem when new approaches to schooling are introduced. "That's a way of thinking that we have to dismantle," she says. "Sometimes we think that when we add identity or when we add voice and freedom of expression, that somehow we don't focus on skills at all. But that's just simply not true. You can have it all. You can have voice and fun and engagement and skills."

What it looks like in the classroom: Teaching skills is more or less what you'd expect typical school content to be, what our current standards are already prescribing. "In math it can be learning equations. In ELA it can be citing textual evidence. In social studies, it can be questioning the source. In physical education it can be learning to play basketball."

So the skills themselves may be taught in whatever way works best for your students. The difference now is that in terms of class time and assessment, their weight will be equal to that of the other three layers.

3. Intellect

Along with identifying the skills students need to acquire, Muhammad urges us to ask What do we want our students to become smarter about?

Because our recent standards have been so skills-driven, knowledge has fallen by the wayside in a lot of schools, and that can strip away the joy that comes from simply learning new things about the world. But the Black Literary Societies of the 19th century valued knowledge as a vital part of a person's development. "So I'm pushing this idea of intellectualism," Muhammad says, "of treating young people as if they are scholars and intellectuals and thinkers."

She sees the loss of intellectualism even in how we prepare and treat teachers. "It's like we're sucking the power out of them by telling them to read a script in a curriculum. We need to go back to teacher as intellectual, teacher as scholar, reserving the field for the brightest among us who are knowledge-seekers."

And Muhammad's definition of intellectualism goes beyond simply gathering facts. "Intellectualism is when you do something with that knowledge, where you apply it somehow, in your discussion, in your activism, in your actions."

What it looks like in the classroom: When developing lessons and units, ask yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help to teach students new knowledge and concepts? New histories, new people, places, and things?"

Muhammad cautions teachers not to confuse skills for knowledge. "You shouldn't say they became smarter about equations or citing textual evidence," she says. "That's not intellect. Those are skills."

4. Criticality

"Criticality is helping students to read, write and think in active ways," Muhammad explains, "as opposed to passive-when you ask a question and there's one correct answer, and you just take it in. We don't want them to be passive consumers of knowledge. We want them to question what they hear on the news."

"We see the word critical and sometimes our minds can go to critical thinking," she continues. "But it's more than just deep and analytical thinking. Criticality is deep and analytical thinking to understand power, equity, anti-racism and other anti-oppressions. This is where we help students to be woke."

This fourth layer is essential "because oppression exists in the world. Period. We want students to leave our schools not contributing to more oppression or wrongdoing and hurt in their relationships and with strangers. We also don't want them to be silent. If they see oppression, we want them to actively respond to it."

What it looks like in the classroom: "With criticality," Muhammad says, "the teacher is asking, How does my teaching and learning help students to understand power, equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression? So (students are) reading, writing, thinking in active ways to understand power, inequality, equity, oppression. They're investigating different standpoints, especially the marginalized point of view, and reading between the lines. In other words, reading for what's not being said and for what's not there.

The brilliance of the framework is revealed when Muhammad explains that the four layers are not separate, but progressive, each one building on the layers that came before it, starting with identity: "They see themselves, they validate themselves, they're learning about other people, which creates a safe space to learn the skills. If you learn the skills, you can learn the intellect. You cannot learn the intellectualism without first having those skills to do so. If you have the intellectualism and that knowledge, you can critique the knowledge. Because of all the layers that came before it, you now have the capacity to disrupt and to dismantle. If you're just woke without the identity and the skills and the intellect, you're not going to be able to make change in ways that you could with those things."

Tough, but Possible

Making this kind of shift-especially if our standards still don't reflect these four layers-will not be an easy task to take on. This concern has been expressed when Muhammad presents her framework to teachers. But despite its challenges, she feels this type of curriculum is exactly what any parent would want for their child.

"It's not a matter or a question of if it's tough," she says. "The question is, is it possible? Everything is tough. And if you had your own child, if you're a parent, parents are going to equally value the beautiful ways that their child loves themselves: identity, the skills they have, the intellect they have, and the social consciousness they have. I don't see parents saying No, let's just talk about my child's reading skills. They talk about their emotional intelligence, they talk about the whole child."

"And that's what we're trying to get to," she says. "This is humanizing work."

Come back for more.
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Historically Responsive Literacy: A More Complete Education for All Students

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Based on the work of 19th century Black literary societies, this fresh approach to curriculum focuses on identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

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Here's How W. Kamau Bell Talks About Race With His Kids

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Here's How W. Kamau Bell Talks About Race With His Kids

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"She knows she's half her mom and half me. She knows her mom is a different color than I am, and slowly we have to say, 'And here's what all that means.'"

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and host of an upcoming CNN series, United Shades of America.

He also has two young daughters, and in an interview for BuzzFeed's podcast The Tell Show, he talked about what it's like to raise inquisitive, mixed-race children.

He doesn't avoid talking about race with his 4-year-old daughter Sammy...

Mike Hinson / BuzzFeed

"The thing that I've learned most is not to shy away from talking to her about race, or even racism, in a way that she can understand. Kids will let you know if they don't understand, because they'll say 'I don't understand.'"-W. Kamau Bell

But he waited until she brought it up first.

"She realized she was a different color from her mom, but she had no judgement about it," says Bell. "She thought [we] were the same color. She was like, 'Me and dada are the same color.' And, weirdly, I was like, Yay! Because that's what race does. It screws you up!"

He knows his daughters are in new territory...

Neither Bell nor his wife, Melissa Hudson Bell, knows what it's like to be a mixed-race kid. And, says Bell, "The identity of what it means to be mixed in America is a bigger, growing identity. So [even] that will probably change over the next 10 to 15 years."

http://www.selinaalko.com/

http://www.selinaalko.com/

Ted Lewis / Via Courtesy Selina Alko

Children's book author Selina Alko with her husband, Sean Qualls

Once you start talking about race, you'll eventually start talking about racism.

To do that, Bell looked for children's books about Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. That way, he says, "My daughter has heard the word slavery before she gets to school and some teacher talks about it in a way that I'm not comfortable with, or not there to help clear it up with her."

Bell has also learned that you can tell kids anything, because they don't know anything.

Mike Hinson / BuzzFeed

"What I've learned is that you can tell kids anything, because they don't know anything... They're here to figure out what's going on in the world, so they're not going to be like, 'That's too much information. I can't handle that right now.'"-W. Kamau Bell

For the full interview, subscribe to The Tell Show on iTunes or listen here.

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Here's How W. Kamau Bell Talks About Race With His Kids

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"She knows she's half her mom and half me. She knows her mom is a different color than I am, and slowly we have to say, 'And here's what all that means.'" W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and host of an upcoming CNN series, United Shades of America.

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The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Brené with Ibram X. Kendion How to Be an Antiracist

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Brené with Ibram X. Kendion How to Be an Antiracist

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Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I'm Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. Today, I'm talking with Professor Ibram Kendi. He's a number one New York Times best-selling author and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He's also an ideas columnist at The Atlantic and a correspondent with CBS News. He is the author of four books, including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has another book called, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which he co-authored with Jason Reynolds, and it's a remix of the Stamped from the Beginning book that is meant for YA, teen readers - an incredible, incredible book. And he's got a new book coming out called Antiracist Baby, which is a board book that will be published this month in June. Completely evidence that it's never too early to start talking about anti-racism.

BB: He's also the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about all those books, but we're going to really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves. It's an incredible conversation. I welcome you to the table to sit with us, talk, think, feel, ask, question, and lean in really, really far to what we need to learn about ourselves and the world. I want to start this conversation with a quote from Professor Kendi: "By not running from books that pain us, we can allow them to transform us. I ran from antiracist books most of my life, but now I can't stop running after them, scrutinizing myself and my society, and in the process changing both." Let's jump in.

BB: Alright, first let me say that I am incredibly grateful for you joining us on Unlocking Us, thank you for that.

Ibram X. Kendi: Of course, I'm so happy to be on.

BB: I always start these podcasts with not the perfunctory, but the honest, "How are you?" How are you doing right now?

IK: I'm okay. This is quite the time in American history, and as someone who studies anti-Black racism, I'm simultaneously enraged to see the deathly effects of that racism, but simultaneously energized to see all of the people resisting that racism.

BB: How are you holding up with the COVID-19 pandemic on top of all of this, as the underscore to all of this?

IK: I think that that has been difficult for me, partly because my colleagues and I, we partnered with the COVID Tracking Project to build this COVID racial data tracker. And so we're... It's like the premier tracker of racial data on COVID. And so I'm seeing the data coming in and the disparities all over the country, and so that's been difficult. And then simultaneously, my wife, Sadiqa, her family is... Her hometown is Albany, Georgia, and Albany, Georgia and that general area of Southwest Georgia has one of the worst outbreaks in the country. And simultaneously, it's a trauma desert, it doesn't have a tremendous amount of high-quality healthcare, in contrast to New York City, which also of course has been a major outbreak. And so, seeing and hearing those stories firsthand of people suffering, obviously, it's been difficult. And this is a primarily Black area.

BB: I want to get into... I want to talk a lot about How to Be an Antiracist, your book that I think is life changing. I want to talk about your new book that's coming out in a couple of weeks. Tell us the title of that new book.

IK: Antiracist Baby. It's a board book.

BB: I can't wait. I want to start because when we talk about the pandemic, when we talk about what's happening right now in the world with a rebellion, the protest, you wrote an article that went up on The Atlantic this morning.

IK: Yes.

BB: It's called "The American Nightmare: To be Black and Conscious of Anti-Black Racism is to Stare Into The Mirror of Your Own Extinction." I want to... Can I read a piece of this to you and ask you about it?

IK: Sure, yeah.

BB: Would you rather read it or would you... Can I read it to you?

IK: Yeah, you can read it. That's fine, yeah.

BB: Okay. You're using as an epigraph, a quote from Malcom X from 1964, "We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare." And then you write, "A nightmare is essentially a horror story of danger, but it is not wholly a horror story. Black people experience joy, love, peace, safety. But as in any horror story, those unforgettable moments of toil, terror, and trauma have made danger essential to the Black experience in racist America. What one Black American experiences, many Black Americans experience. Black Americans are constantly stepping into the toil and terror and trauma of other Black Americans. Black Americans are constantly stepping into the souls of the dead because they know that could have been them, they are them. Because they know it is dangerous to be Black in America because racist Americans see Blacks as dangerous. To be Black and conscious of anti-Black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction."

BB: This is not just about the police brutality; this is not just about Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd; this is about the tens of thousands of Black victims of Covid.

IK: Yeah.

BB: Talk to me about this article. What do we need to understand?

IK: Well, I think first and foremost, the article revolves around a very, very prominent book that was written in 1896 by Frederick Hoffman, who, basically it was a book of statistical tables and racial data that showed not only racial disparities in crime rates, but also racial disparities in infection rates and racial disparities in mortality, or I should say death rates, and so he took this massive amount of racial data to proclaim that Black people were not subjected to racist policies. That wasn't the cause of Black disease, of Black death, and even Black people being disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. He made the case that this data shows that Black people are headed towards gradual extinction, and it's their fault. They are by nature or behavior, a dangerous, diseased, dying people, and to recognize anything else is to not recognize the facts. And so this idea, normalizing Black pain and suffering and death has only continued to this day, and so essentially when you normalize, when you just believe that Black people should be disproportionally dying of police violence or even COVID-19, you're thereby not going to challenge, let alone look for the policies that are actually behind this disproportionate Black death.

IK: And so then those who are experiencing those policies that are then leading to that trauma and terror, and even toil, they're going to be experiencing the American nightmare. And the reason why I use the term the American nightmare is because Black people are constantly told that America is this land of equal opportunity, that police officers protect and serve, that we too have access to the American dream. And obviously, based on the experiences of Black people, we've really, as Malcolm said, 50 years ago, experienced the American nightmare.

BB: When you talk about the Hoffman book, it's such a devastating reminder to me, because I see this a lot right now of how statistics, academics, science can be dehumanizing tools as much as kind of the language that we use.

IK: Yeah, without question. And let me give an example. So when we first were able to start getting states in early April to release racial data, and then we saw these racial disparities. We saw that Black people were disproportionately being infected and even dying, of COVID. The first response of people to that data, of many people to that data, was to say Black people are not taking the virus seriously, Black people are not socially distancing, there's something wrong with Black people, and then we were able to disprove that. Basically survey data in mid-March had already proven that actually Black people were taking the virus more seriously than white people. So then it's zeroed in to, well, it must be the result of Black pre-existing conditions.

IK: And then those pre-existing conditions are caused by Black people making disproportionately bad or unhealthy behaviors. So it just always, essentially, you take these racial disparities, and we've been arguing over their existence, even before Frederick Hoffman. Is it because there's something wrong with Black people, or is there racist policy? And those who believe we live in a nation that's post-racial, that there's equal opportunity, they're not going to ever see the racist policies that are even in many cases, hard to see, instead they're just going to blame Black people.

BB: It's almost, and I don't think it's almost, it is the confirmation bias of racist beliefs.

IK: It is, yeah, it is. And that's what's striking about Frederick Hoffman, because he opens his book arguing that, "I am free of bias. I am free of prejudice or sentimentally."

BB: Which should be our first flag, right?

[chuckle]

IK: Exactly, right. And then, ends the book stating that the gradual extinction of Black people is only a matter of time, and it's based on the data. And to give another example, you have many people arguing that police violence, disproportionate police violence is the result of Black people being disproportionately violent, and Black people are disproportionately violent, they say, because, well, just look at the violent crime data. There's this widespread belief that Black neighborhoods are more dangerous because of violent crime data, the same violent crime data that Frederick Hoffman in this book in 1896 really popularized. But what Americans don't realize, and this is what I've been trying to get people to see, is that there's no relationship between the violent crime in those neighborhoods and the Blackness of the people.

IK: In other words, people believe that the reason why those neighborhoods are violent is because there are Black people there, and that's why when they see Black neighborhoods, they assume that those neighborhoods are violent because the Black people and their culture and their behavior and even their genetics are predisposed to violence. But if that was the case, then all Black neighborhoods would have the same levels of violent crime. In other words, higher income...

BB: Because that would be the... Yeah, that would be the consistent variable.

IK: Precisely. And so, higher income Black neighborhoods would have the same levels of violent crime as extremely impoverished Black neighborhoods. That is not the case. And it's not the case in white America, it's not the case in Asian America, Native America, Latinx America. In every America, if we want to split up America racially, you have higher levels of poverty, long-term unemployment, you're going to have higher levels of violent crime, whether you're talking about a white community or neighborhood with higher levels of violent crime or Latinx or Black. So we know statistically that actually what is the consistent variable is poverty and unemployment. But people still want to call these dangerous Black neighborhoods as opposed to dangerous unemployed neighborhoods.

BB: One of the things that I find so powerful about your work, there are many things, but one of the things I find so powerful is your ability to unpack things, lay them out, and the steps always lead back to policy. It always leads back to systemic policy.

IK: And I think that's one of the things I'm trying to get people to realize, and especially, I think one of the things that happens with our discussions on race is we personalize groups, meaning we make groups into individuals, and, even though every group is made up of individuals, we say, "Oh well, this group is disproportionately obese, so therefore, why can't this group "diet or exercise more" in the way I used to do when I weighed a little bit more. But that's actually... We can't think of groups as individuals, when we think of... Especially we can't think of disparities as the result of the personal choices of the individuals in groups, because I think that's what happens, that's how we have been misled into believing, but when we actually... All of the data points to and all of the analysis points to, is that when you have two groups, there's going to be all different types of behaviors in both groups, whether that...

BB: Complete variance, right?

IK: Precisely. So you take white people and Black people, you have white people who eat unhealthy, you have white people who are vegans, you have Black people who eat in an unhealthy manner, and then you have Black people like me who are vegans. And so... And then you have vegans who are white, who don't really eat vegetables. Right? And so it's so much variable, and so we emphasize the negativities that we see among those individuals who are Black, and then ignore the negativities among the individuals who are white. And so we say, "Oh, those Black folk and their soul food, that's why they're unhealthy," as if you don't have white people who gathered this weekend and had hamburgers and hot dogs only on their barbeque menu. So I think that it's critically important for us when we think of groups and group inequality, to recognize that what changes communities, what changes groups, it's not their individual behaviors, it's policy change.

BB: I want to slow down here and go into slow motion for a moment, because, what you're saying is so profoundly important at the crux of, I think, of your entire book. And for me as a researcher, it's... We take groups and we take stereotypes and characteristics of groups, and what it seems to me that we do, and I think you write about this, but I want to check in with you to make sure I'm understanding it correctly because this is what I see. We see the most kind of negative, socially agreed upon, not good characteristics of groups of color, and we assign it to the entire group. Then we take the best characteristics of one or two people in the white folk group and assign it to that entire group. That's true, right? You see that...

IK: Exactly. So that's what I talk about how we generalize the individual negativities of people of color while we individualize the individual negativities of white people.

BB: And you know what keeps coming back to me, and I'm going to date myself with this because this was a huge raging issue as I was in school and then graduate work: the bell curve is such an example of the manipulation of statistical data to confirm a racist hypothesis. Okay. Yeah, I just... You know what? We do that. We do that. I can think of times when I do that, maybe not about race, but I do do that with... I'll tell you where I do it. I do it with political identity. I take the best part of the people I see in my group and assign it to everyone in my group. And the worst part, and it's so self-protective and self-destructive at the same time, isn't it?

IK: It is. It is. And I know How to Be an Antiracist, in particular, I remember giving a talk about this book, I believe I was in Gainesville, Florida, and this woman who was obviously a Republican or a conservative, got up during the Q&A and basically challenged me, basically by saying, "You're just another liberal who is just criticizing conservatives completely and never being able to look back on the problems of things that liberals do." And I was like, "Did you read the book?" [laughter] Because obviously, you didn't read the book, because the book was just as critical of people who identify as liberals or Democrats as people who identify as conservatives and Republicans.

BB: I want to read something from the book, early-on pages. Is it weird when I read to you? Is it okay?

IK: It's fine, yeah.

BB: Okay. "The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and be an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race in each moment determines what, not who, we are." And you write, "I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be not racist. I am no longer speaking through the mask of racial neutrality. I am no longer manipulated by racist ideas to see racial groups as problems. I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist, I am no longer policing my every action around an imagined white or Black judge trying to convince white people of my equal humanity, trying to convince Black people, I am representing the race well." This book is incredibly vulnerable in terms of you sharing your own experiences. Why was that important to you as you were writing this?

IK: So, I remember when I was thinking about this book and I was sort of thinking about the pulse of the book, even the heartbeat of the book. I recognize that the heartbeat, historically, of racism has been denial, has been to deny that one's ideas are racist, one's policies are racist, and certainly that one's self and one's nation is racist, and so then I was like, "Okay, by contrast, the heartbeat of antiracism is confession, is admission, is acknowledgement, is the willingness to be vulnerable, is the willingness to identify the times in which we are being racist, is to be willing to diagnose ourselves and our country, and our ideas, and our policies." And the reason why that's the heartbeat is because, like with anything else, the first step is acknowledging the problem. We can't even begin the process of changing ourselves, of acting in an antiracist fashion, if we're not even willing to admit the times in which we're being racist. And so I realize that essentially to be antiracist is to admit when we're being racist. And so I realize that in order to really give voice to that, in order to really model that for people I had to do that to myself and for myself.

BB: And you do it, and you do it throughout the book and you move forward a bunch and you slide back, and you share that with us. To me, that is the heart of the book, that there is such a deep humanity in this book. Was that intentional on your part? Did you write it from a perspective of, "This is what it means to be in the human struggle?"

IK: I think so. And I mean, I think that, to be honest, the first few chapters were a huge struggle for me to write, precisely because of how vulnerable I had to be and how many... I had to basically admit and chronicle some of the most shameful moments of my life, especially as someone who was raised in a home to value and love Black people, to be able to have to write about those times in which I did not value or love Black people, let alone other groups, was very, very difficult. And so it really wasn't... And so I think I struggled and it actually... I think the first few chapters, it took me almost like a year to write, and it really wasn't until as I write about in the end of the book that I was diagnosed with cancer, that I just wondered whether indeed I would even live to see the book come out, and I think because of that, in a way freed me to be vulnerable and to be completely sort of open and naked in writing the book.

BB: Yeah, there's just courage on every page. I mean, really, and I have to say you don't see that very often in books. You don't see that very often in the world, so thank you for that. I think the central message is that the opposite of racist isn't not racist, The true opposite of racist is antiracist. Can you break that down for us and help us understand how the opposite of racist is not, not race... Not racist is not the opposite of racist.

IK: Sure, so I think... Let me say it in this way. So when you think of... So I define a racist as someone who is expressing racist ideas or supporting racist policies with their action or inaction, I know we're not supposed to use terms in the definition, but I think what's critical about understanding what it means to be racist is understanding what a racist idea is, and what a racist policy is. And once you understand what a racist idea and racist policy is, you begin to realize that there's a fundamental contrast to that, and that contrast is not some sort of neutrality. And so if a racist idea is any idea that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group... In other words, a racist idea connotes racial hierarchy, then what's the opposite of that? The opposite of that is ideas that connote racial equality, that challenges directly that idea of racial hierarchy and says, "No. All the racial groups are equals."

IK: And there's no in between racial hierarchy and racial equality. Either all the racial groups are equals, or certain racial groups are better or worse than others. And so there's no not racist idea, there's only a racist idea and an antiracist idea. And the same thing with policy. If a racist policy is leading to racial inequity, then an antiracist policy is leading to racial equity. There's no in between inequity or equity, and if racist policies lead to injustice, then by contrast, antiracist policies lead to justice. There's no in between injustice or justice. And so then when you take a person, you have people who are either expressing racist or antiracist ideas. So in any given moment, they're either being racist or antiracist, there's no not racist sort of category.

IK: And then I should also add very quickly that when people typically say, "I am not racist," it is in response to someone challenging something that they just did or said that indeed probably was racist. So again, I mentioned how the heartbeat, or in order to be antiracist, we have to be willing to admit the times in which we're being racist. By contrast, in order to be racist, we never admit the times in which we're being racist, and instead we say we're not racist.

BB: I have a couple of questions. So what do you say to the person who when you say we're either racist or antiracist to the person who says, "That's a false dichotomy. There can be neutrality between antiracist and race, there can be neutrality between injust and just, between inequality and equity or equality." I can't find what that neutrality is. But I would really love to know how you answer that because I get that a lot, especially when I quote you, but I can't think of a single example, because the systems are already in place. So if we were at net zero, how does that... I mean, it may be so but we're not, so what do you answer?

IK: Yeah so I state that are you... I would... So people have asked me asked that, and typically what I state say is, "Are you stating that because from a defensive posture?" In other words, you don't want to identify as racist, and you view those antiracists in some way that you don't want to sort of identify with. So this is fundamentally defensive so you can create a category for yourself. And typically, we know when people are creating categories for themselves because you can't define your category. And so are you creating this category for us, or are you creating this category for yourself? And if you're creating it for us, then define it for us, so we can understand it.

IK: What does it mean to be not racist? I know what it means to be racist. I know what it means to be antiracist. What does it mean to be not racist? And if you can't provide a very clear and consistent definition, then that shows me that you're fundamentally being defensive, and you're fundamentally seeking to create a category for yourself.

BB: That is so powerful, and starting with the defensive posturing that I think there are people that don't want to be in the racist category of course, because there's so much shame attached to that.

IK: Yeah.

BB: And they don't want to be in the antiracist category because there's so much frickin work attached to that.

IK: Yes.

BB: Do you know what I mean?

IK: Yes.

BB: Like antiracism work is, no joke, exhausting and vigilant, and there's shame in it too because it's... So it's interesting because - can we dig into something that is kind of at the intersection of your work and my work to help me figure out something?

IK: Sure.

BB: You don't seem to be... And I've only read this book and a couple of articles that you've written or maybe three or four articles from The Atlantic, but I will be getting the baby board book for sure. And it'll become my new go-to, like, I'm looking at Barrett, who's in here with me. She's like, "This will be the new. Every baby we know will be getting this book." You don't seem to be a proponent of shame as a social justice tool.

IK: No.

BB: So, let me ask you this question because I think this goes to the creating categories out of defensiveness. One of the things that I've seen and I see it a lot, I see it a lot in my social feeds, I see it a lot when I have really difficult Q&As when I'm on book tours. Let's say you and I are talking, and I share a racist idea, or I make a racist statement, and you hold me accountable for that. Right? Which is fair. You question and we dig in. But you say... I am going to feel shame about that, for most, I think most, maybe not all, but most white, I hope, most white Americans, or maybe Americans in general will feel shame about being held accountable for racist thinking or thoughts or speaking, then I go into shame. But what I'm struggling helping people understand and maybe you can share your thoughts on it with us is being held accountable for racism and experiencing shame around that, is not the same as being shamed about racism.

IK: Mm-hmm, yeah.

BB: Does that makes sense to you at all? Or am I off? I don't know.

IK: No, I think it makes sense. And I think that... Well, two things I'm trying to think of what to say first because I feel like I'll forget the other. Do you ever feel that way?

BB: All the time.

IK: So I think one thing is that... So if we talk about racist ideas, to grow up in America is to grow up, and for racist ideas to constantly be rained on your head and you have no umbrella. And you don't even know that you're wet with those racist ideas, because the racist ideas themselves cause you to imagine that you're dry.

BB: Right.

IK: And then someone comes along and says, "You know what, you're wet, and these ideas are still raining on your head. Here's an umbrella." You can be like, "Thank you, I didn't even realize I was drenched."

BB: Yeah, yeah.

IK: And then with all these ideas, and then the question, this is why I don't think people should feel ashamed, is there were other people and very powerful people in a history that was constantly raining those ideas on your head, and so what that means is, for instance if you're a white American, who has racist ideas, and then you, let's say, perpetuated those ideas by, let's say, not hiring a Black person because you thought they were lazy. You were simultaneously a victim and a victimizer. And so I think it's critical for people to recognize that literally, and as I talk about in How to Be an Antiracist, there's a specific reason why you had so many powerful Americans trying to convince white Americans that Black people were inferior; it was out of their own self interest.

BB: Yeah.

IK: And so then, white Americans and other Americans were tricked into believing that Black people should be enslaved in 1855, and then meanwhile poor whites, whose poverty was directly the result of the riches of white slaveholders were like, "Yeah, it should be this way." And so then those people were able to get richer and richer, and so me coming to that poor white person who believes Black people should be enslaved and then who have even sort of worked on slave patrols and brutalized Black people trying to run away, I'm basically coming to them and saying, "Here is the way you were a victimizer and here is the way you were a victim." And it's critically important, I think, for people to understand, people have been tricked, they've been manipulated, they've been hoodwinked, and that's why I think, that's what I'd want people to realize.

BB: Yeah, thank you for the umbrella. I didn't know I was wet. I think that might be where we lose people.

IK: Yeah.

BB: Wow. Do you ever... I think about this, I think my background is in social work, so I have my master's in social work and PhD in social work, and my bachelor's too, and so I've probably taken 20 classes on the nature of oppression. I guess the thing that always strikes me about oppression as a construct, and I know I'm going to personify it, and I know this is probably not right, but I would love your thoughts on it because I've tried to figure it out for so many years is, God, it's so hard to fight because it has an answer for everything, like it is...

IK: Yeah, yeah.

BB: Do you know what I mean?

IK: Mm-hmm.

BB: Like, it's such a formidable foe. It's like every time, like when you said to me, I got goosebumps when you said, "It's raining on you. But part of what it's raining on you is the message that you're dry."

IK: Mm-hmm.

BB: It is such a formidable foe, isn't it?

IK: It is, and that I think that it's critically important. What I'm trying to do is bring people back into reality, right? So they can realize that it's being rained on them, that that rain is coming down on their head, that they're slipping and falling and harming people in ways that they don't even realize. And when you step that back into reality, then you can actually recognize what's actually happening to you and what you're doing to other people. And then you can also begin to see how and why you have people protesting all over this country and why people are enraged and why that resistance is going to continue. Literally racist ideas, literally separate people from reality, and it prevents people, even too, from helping themselves.

IK: And so I talked a lot in my book about the ways in which even you have Black elites who believe ideas about the Black poor and who sort of reproduce racist ideas about the Black poor, not realizing that racist policies against them are being justified through ideas about the Black poor, or you have white Americans who are believing in racist ideas that these people of color will just use and abuse and take advantage of so-called social entitlement programs like Medicare for All, or increasing Social Security funding, or basic income, or other... Or paid leave, things that other countries have. And so therefore, I don't want none of that. And then it results in them not having the social safety net when they fall, their friends not having it, their family not having it, and then when they fall and become hurt, then they're told it's immigrants' fault. And so it's this constant sort of people being hurt...

BB: God.

IK: And then they believing that it's these other people who are the source of their pain, as opposed to the people who they actually support, who are the source of their pain.

BB: I'm a terrible podcast host, because I'm sitting here with my hands over my mouth, and that's not... I can't do that, but that's my response to this. I read an article, I think it was during the 2016 election, all I can remember is an MD-PhD, public health person, and I think the name of the article is: "Racism is Killing White People." And it's because they were voting against the very things, the services, and the safety nets that they themselves will need just because of the racist rhetoric that they attached to it.

IK: Exactly.

BB: It's...

IK: Yeah, Jonathan Metzl and that's based on his book Dying of Whiteness. And he talked about...

BB: Is that the who that... Is he an MD? Is that the one I'm talking about?

IK: MD-PhD, yes, yeah.

BB: My husband's a pediatrician, I think I read it in, there was an excerpt of something in American Pediatrics or something. So tell us who that was and what that book was, and we'll put it on our show notes.

IK: So yeah, it's Jonathan Metzl, who's a MD-PhD, I believe at Vanderbilt, and his book was entitled Dying of Whiteness, and he looks at the white resistance to the extension of ObamaCare or even the extension of Medicaid in particular states and how that not only harmed, obviously people of color disproportionately, but even white people, and how the resistance to creating more insurance and affordable healthcare has harmed white people, let alone people of color, or even probably the most striking aspect of that book was so he not only looked at healthcare, but even the massive debate currently over gun control.

BB: Gun control.

IK: And gun safety and gun rights, and how first and foremost, you've had white men who have been advocating for the reduction or elimination of gun safety laws so that they can arm themselves, so that they can protect their families against Muslim terrorists and Black criminals and LatinX invaders as they call them. And what's fascinating is those very states where they've been able to successfully eliminate these gun safety policies, it's led to a massive surge in people being killed, white men being killed by hand gun via suicide, so the very people, white men who've been pushing for the reduction in gun safety laws have then led to them, given them greater ability to accumulate guns, and they've used those guns to kill themselves, so literally, people are dying of whiteness.

BB: Can I just ask you just like a no bullshit question here?

IK: Mm-hmm.

BB: Why does that make so much sense to some of us and no sense, it seems, to other people? Why do some of us see the through line and some of us don't see the through line? Do you understand what I'm asking? It's a weird question.

IK: Yeah, yeah. I think first and foremost, because we're living in different sort of realities, and so, for many of these white men who are advocating, who are proud card-carrying members of the NRA, who are advocating for the accumulation of weapons by white men, they believe... I should say they've been made to believe that the cause of their own personal pain, the reasons why they're struggling in society or they do don't have more than they already have, is because of these immigrants and these people of color. They also generalize, when there's a Black person who commits murder, or a LatinX immigrant or a terrorist who commits murder, in their mind, those are the central sort of problems that are harming America and are threatening them. And so they're in tremendous amounts of fear, because they're constantly told by their politicians, by the people they listen to, that these are the people you should fear, and then they're told, "Your rights are being taken away. White men are being chastised and criticized, and demeaned by women, by people of color, by everybody, and so we are your defenders and you need to defend yourself through these weapons."

IK: And, but then what's happening is they're actually getting these weapons and killing themselves, and then all of those individual suicides are individualized, so there's not this collective national outcry about the incredible level of white men who are committing suicide, because, again, if something bad happens to white people, it's individualized.

BB: I've just been thinking a lot about your book around the How to Be an Antiracist book, and I've been thinking about how there is a very short distance in my mind between the dehumanizing dog whistle language from this administration to calling the cops on a bird watcher, to George Floyd. And it's my training, again, I think in social work systems theory, that these things lie on a continuum, but that that walk is very short between these things. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

IK: Oh yeah, I agree. I mean, I actually tweeted out last week after we heard about what happened to George Floyd, that we should be seeing that, I think I said something to the... Well, let me just say the idea, and that is, when it comes to police violence, oftentimes the beginning of police violence is someone, and in this case, a white woman calling the police saying, "A Black male is threatening my life. I need your help, come help me," when indeed she is actually the person who's threatening the other person, but anyway, she calls up the police, and then the police come, imagining that there's this so-called Black super predator who's preying on this innocent white woman, and that it is their job principally to protect them, and so, then they come imagining the need for force. And then Christian Cooper ends up as George Floyd in Minneapolis.

BB: In a split second.

IK: In which an unarmed person is now dead. And so, there's a very straight line from Central Park to Minneapolis, and we understand because that was essentially the lynching era, but that lynching era has continued.

BB: And I think I would back the line up, because I think for me, a big part of my studies was dehumanization and the process, and the very invisible process of dehumanizing, which every genocide in recorded history starts with dehumanizing and starts with language. So when we hear things like, when we talk about immigrants and the White House uses words like infestation, and when we use words like... I don't even think I've ever heard white people referred to as thugs in my life. It's people have a very hard time understanding that once we move people outside of what we believe is humanity, that it's possible to do anything to them.

IK: It is. And I think that is the reason why when you have those racist ideas that cause you to demonize people of color, and then that is combined with racist policies that are over-policing their neighborhoods, or allowing police officers who kill them to not be prosecuted, or to get off, it only continues this cycle that not only do they not matter to me, they don't even matter to the state.

BB: Right. You wrote something, I think this was a quote from the New York Times, and I feel like I could talk to you for... I hope you come back again, and we can talk more about all the great policy change that's happening. That's what I'm hoping.

IK: That's what I'm hoping, too.

BB: But I want to read this quote because and it says, "By not running from the books that pain us, we can allow them to transform us." This is a quote from you. "I ran from antiracist books most of my life. But now I can't stop running after them, scrutinizing myself and my society, and in the process changing both."

IK: That's what we need to be doing. I think many of us have learned, even from your work, we have to be constantly growing. We cannot harden ourselves, and certainly our children into, "They're stupid or we're stupid." We have to say, "You know what, that was not a smart thing that I did or said. That was a racist act. But I am not essentially a racist." No one is. Everyone has the capacity to change, everyone has the capacity to be antiracist. Everyone has the capacity to grow. And if we're not growing as human beings, then what are we? What's distinguishing humans from other beings? It's that capacity for self-awareness and growth.

BB: That's right, meaning making. I always go back to that quote from Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living or get busy dying." And I think if you're not learning and growing, which can be painful, stretch marks, bruises, you're dying in a way. Okay, Ibram, walk me through, because I really want to get one of your books for my soon to be 15-year-old son, and so tell me about the sequence of Stamped from the Beginning. Is there a YA version?

IK: Yes.

BB: So how does it work?

IK: So when I wrote Stamped from the Beginning, which again, chronicled this history of racist ideas, literally from their origins to the present, so upwards of 600 years of history, people would come up to me and say, "You know what, I wish I would have learned this in middle school, in high school. I didn't understand and know this history." And so, people kept telling me that, "You know what, this book needs to be before every middle schooler and high schooler." And so we decided that, "Let's create one." And Stamped from the Beginning is upwards of 500 pages, and so we decided we needed a specific book. And so I asked Jason Reynolds, who's, he's probably one of the more gifted YA novelists, who historically has written on race and racism, and he has his own voice and his own style. And I asked him a couple of times, he said no a couple of times, but eventually he agreed, and so he took Stamped from the Beginning, and completely rewrote it for young people in their voice, in his patented lyricism. And yeah, they've fallen in love with it. It actually debuted number one New York Times, so yeah, people are really responding to it well.

BB: You know what I love, is it's never too early to talk to our kids about this. And now you've given us the gifts of a board book, a YA book, and then books for adults.

IK: And that's, I want, especially in this moment, when there are a lot of people who want tools for not only understanding racism themselves, but even teaching and instructing their kids, and I'm hoping also that people realize that they should be having these discussions with their children. Their children are not color blind. The data shows that children as early as six months recognize race, and children as early as two to three years old have begun to consume racist ideas. And if you're not teaching those children antiracist ideas, if you're not challenging those racist ideas, and they're only going to grow up and then one day say something, you're going to feel completely embarrassed. Because like with anything else, people have to be taught to be antiracist, just as they're taught, indirectly, by so many things they see and experience and hear, to be racist.

BB: And I think it's been also my experience that, when you don't... The biggest mistake a lot of people I see making, is we don't talk about race, but we've raised nice and kind kids, so we assume that that's going to translate to something, and it translates to nothing, except the messaging that it's scary and not okay to talk about race.

IK: Exactly. Yeah, if the modeling... Can you imagine, there are adults, and many adults who struggle to talk about race and racism, and... But could you imagine if those adults were talking about these issues as early as 2 or 3, or 1, or as soon as you can speak, then... And I think, part of this also, is, as I'm learning on thinking through how to parent my child, of course, we've learned from you, and one of the things we're trying to model for her, is how to have difficult, uncomfortable conversations and how necessary those conversations are for her having a healthy, happy, and productive and impactful sort of life. And so this talking about race and racism is one type of difficult conversation we need to teach her how to have.

BB: Yeah, and, God, I just don't think there's a bigger gift that we... On top of knowing that you're loved and worthy of love and belonging, I don't know if there's a greater gift that we can give our kids, than the ability to lean into difficult conversation and to be vulnerable. Yeah. Okay, I have this last 10 rapid fire, and it's really important, it's more lighthearted, but it's about getting to know you as a person, and I think, sometimes, one of the hardest things about being an activist is not being seen as a person and can be sometimes dehumanizing in its own way. So if you would allow me, I'd love to ask you these 10 questions.

IK: Sure. Yeah. Let's do it.

BB: Okay, ready? Number one's fill in the blank. Vulnerability is?

IK: Courageous.

BB: Number two, you're called to do something brave, but your fear is real and it's stuck right in your throat. What's the first thing you do?

IK: Think about what the right thing to do is, and focus on that, rather than my fear.

BB: What is something that people often get wrong about you?

IK: That I'm very, very serious and angry all the time.

[chuckle]

BB: Okay. What's the last show that you binged and loved?

IK: That we binged, let's see. Probably... Oh, God, what's the show that was the... Probably the lead show on HBO, that just ended. I'm forgetting the name of it.

BB: Game of Thrones?

IK: Game of Thrones, yes.

BB: Okay, got it.

IK: Game of Thrones. So, literally... So, my wife and I, we hadn't seen it at all, any of the episodes, and we just binge-watched it late last year, and we both really liked it, except the ending, of course, but...

BB: Now, that's a binge, that's a hella binge right there, if you watched it all. Okay, a film that you really love?

IK: So I think, one of the films that I really love, particularly in context to our conversation, is After Earth, which was a movie with Will Smith and his son, in which they are sort of lost on this mysterious sort of planet, and he's hurt, and they have to figure out a way to elude people, or I should say beings and beasts that are trying to kill them. And Will is seeking to really get his son, and speak through his son, to get his son to essentially get them both to safety because he's hurt. And I remember at one point, he's trying to encourage him to face this dangerous, or horrible sort of villain beast that sort of makes up the movie, and he says something to the effect that, "Fear is not real. Danger is real, but fear is a choice," and he obviously wanted him to make a different choice.

BB: God, what a quote.

IK: Yeah.

BB: Okay, a concert that you'll never forget.

IK: Probably... So I... One of my favorite groups in the '90s, when I was growing up, was Jagged Edge, this R&B group, and so I was able to not only see them in concert, but even meet them when I was a freshman... Oh, not a freshman, when I was at FAMU, where I did my undergrad in Tallahassee, Florida.

BB: Favorite meal.

IK: So I'd say my favorite food now is probably avocado, and it's fascinating because I only really started eating avocado probably in the last five years, and one day... And I'm the type of person, if it doesn't look good to me, then I'm not going to want to eat it, and so, since it was green, I'm like, how could... It just looks weird. But then one day I tried it, and I haven't looked back since.

BB: The rest is history, avocado history. Okay, what's on your nightstand right now?

IK: Where... Oh.

BB: He's literally looking at it.

IK: Yeah. What the Eyes Don't See.

BB: Okay.

IK: Which is "A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American city," by Mona Hanna-Attisha, which essentially is the story of the Flint water crisis, and how this pediatrician was very critical in not only sort of breaking the problem or demonstrating the problem, but even seeking to lead its recovery.

BB: Okay, a snapshot of an ordinary moment in your life that brings you real joy.

IK: Ordinary moment, is my 4-year-old daughter, I'm home after being somewhere, and she just jumps into a massive sprint, she comes and say hello and hugs me around my legs. That always brings me joy.

BB: Yeah. Last one. What's one thing that you're deeply grateful for right now?

IK: I think I'm deeply grateful for being surrounded by people, who sort of practice love with me, and who show their love as I seek to show my love to them, and so people... I believe people choose to love, and I'm sort of deeply grateful that people have chosen to love me.

BB: Well, your work is life-affirming and life-changing. Professor Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist. We just have a couple of short weeks to wait for Antiracist Baby, the board book, to come out. I'll make sure that we profile that on all of our channels, and we'll put it up on brenebrown.com. I think danger is real, to go back to your quote, I haven't seen that movie, but that quote's amazing. "Danger is real, but fear is a choice," and I am grateful for you for choosing courage. Thank you for making us braver.

IK: Well, thank you, and of course thank you for all your work, and glad we had a chance to sit down and talk about this.

BB: Me too, thank you.

(music)

Again, I want to thank Ibram Kendi for joining us on Unlocking Us. I'm committed to having him back on the program, if he'll join us, to talk even more, about antiracism and everything he has to teach us. If you want to follow Dr. Kendi, on Twitter, he's Dr. Ibram, @-D-R-I-B-R-A-M, Instagram, @-I-B-R-A-M-X-K. You can also go to our show page, on brenebrown.com, and you'll see all of his books, links to all of his books, and how to find him on social media, his website, and learn more about the work he does. I always sign these podcasts, I sign off on these podcasts by saying, "Stay awkward, brave and kind," and I would add to this one, in addition to awkward, brave and kind, I know we have to make choices, we have to use our voice in service, and for me, that rarely means giving voice to the voiceless, I think the voiceless have voices, and they've been screaming, for centuries. I think our work is to show up, be brave, give ears to the earless, and that's not easy, but right isn't easy, very often. Take good care of yourselves.

© 2020 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brown, B. (Host). (2020, June 3). Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist. [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. Cadence13. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-ibram-x-kendi-on-how-to-be-an-antiracist/

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Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist

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Ibram X. Kendi and I talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi's groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves.

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Early Childhood Anti-Bias Education Booklists

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Early Childhood Anti-Bias Education Booklists

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Early Childhood Anti-Bias Education Booklists

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Recommended books for young children, teachers, and parents for each chapter of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves as well as additional resources on anti-bias themes and topics.

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Responding to Microaggressions in the Classroom: Taking ACTION

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Responding to Microaggressions in the Classroom: Taking ACTION

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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The term "microaggression" was coined in 1970 to name relatively slight, subtle, and often unintentional offenses that cause harm (Pierce, 1970). Since then, a substantial body of research on microaggressions has demonstrated their prevalence and harmful effects (Boysen, 2012; Solorzan, et. al., 2010; Suárez-Orozco, et. al., 2015; Sue, 2010).

Whether an observer, the target, or the unintentional perpetrator of microaggressions, faculty often don't know how to respond to them in the moment. We may feel frozen (if the observer) or defensive (if the target or perpetrator). How we respond can shift the communication climate from supportive to defensive, which can have an adverse effect on student learning and comfort (Dallimore, et al, 2005; Souza, et al, 2010). Despite the feelings of paralysis or reactivity that tend to emerge in response to microaggressions in the classroom, certain practices can be implemented to increase the likelihood of maintaining a supportive climate. The following communication framework is offered as one of many possible response strategies to help faculty feel better equipped to effectively respond when a microaggression occurs. I developed this framework (first introduced in Chueng, Ganote, & Souza, 2016) as an interactive response one could take to a microaggression by a student in the classroom. The acronym and steps below provide a guide on how to take ACTION rather than feeling frozen when faced with a microaggression.

A sk clarifying questions to assist with understanding intentions.
"I want to make sure that I understand what you were saying. Were you saying that...?"
C ome from curiosity not judgment.

Listen actively and openly to their response.

If they disagree with your paraphrase and clarify a different meaning, you could end the conversation. If you suspect they are trying to "cover their tracks," you may consider making a statement about the initial comment to encourage learning.

" I'm glad to hear I misunderstood you, because, as you know, such comments can be..."

If they agree with your paraphrase, explore their intent behind making the comment.

" Can you tell me what you were you hoping to communicate with that comment?"

"Can you please help me understand what you meant by that? "

T ell what you observed as problematic in a factual manner.
"I noticed that . . ."
I mpact exploration: ask for, and/or state, the potential impact of such a statement or action on others.
"What do you think people think when they hear that type of comment?" "As you know, everything speaks. What message do you think such a comment sends?" "What impact do you think that comment could have on ..."
O wn your own thoughts and feelings around the impact.
"When I hear your comment I think/feel..." "Many people might take that comment to mean..." "In my experience, that comment can perpetuate negative stereotypes and assumptions about... I would like to think that is not your intent."
N ext steps: Request appropriate action be taken.
"Our class is a learning community, and such comments make it difficult for us to focus on learning because people feel offended. So I am going to ask you to refrain from stating your thoughts in that manner in the future. Can you do that please?" "I encourage you to revisit your view on X as we discuss these issues more in class."
"I'd appreciate it if you'd consider using a different term because it is inconsistent with our course agreement regarding X..."

When practiced, the ACTION framework can be a tool that is quickly retrieved out of your mental toolbox to organize your thoughts and unpack the microaggression in a way that addresses the situation and cools down tension. When students make comments that are microaggressive in the classroom, doing nothing is a damaging option (Souza, Vizenor, Sherlip, & Raser, 2016). Instead, we can engage thoughtfully and purposively in strategies that maintain a positive climate that is conducive to learning and models the skills needed in responding to microaggressions in any context (Souza, 2016).

For more on microaggressions, including how to cultivate a classroom environment that limits them, join Tasha Souza for What are Microaggressions and What Can I Do About Them?

Sources & Resources
Boysen, G. A. (2012). Teacher and student perceptions of microaggressions in college classrooms. College Teaching, 60( 3), 122-129.

Cheung, F., Ganote, C. M., & Souza, T.J. (2016). Microaggressions and microresistance: Supporting and empowering students. In Faculty Focus Special Report: Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom. Magna Publication. http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/diversity-and-inclusion-in-the-college-classroom/

Obear, K. (retrieved August 12, 2012). How to Facilitate Triggering Situations. Online manuscript. Alliance For Change: Boston, MA. www.AllianceForChange.com

Pierce, C. (1970). Offensive mechanisms in Black Seventies. Boston: Porter Sargent.

Solorzano, D., Ceja, M., & Yosso, T. (2000). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate: The experiences of African American college students. Journal of Negro Education, 60-73.

Souza, T.J. (2016). Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom: Concrete Strategies for Cooling Down Tension. In Faculty Focus Special Report: Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom. Magna Publication.

Souza, T.J., Ganote, C. M., & Cheung, F. (Nov., 2016). Confronting Microaggressions with Microresistance and Ally Development. Conference pre-conference presentation/handout for POD Network, Louisville, KY.

Souza, T., Vizenor, N., Sherlip, D., & Raser, L. (2016). Transforming conflict in the classroom: Best practices for facilitating difficult dialogues and creating an inclusive communication climate. In P. M. Kellett & T. G. Matyok (Eds.), Transforming conflict through communication: Personal to working relationships. (pp. 373-395). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Souza, T.J., Dallimore, E., Pilling, B. & Aoki, E. (2010). Communication climate, comfort, and cold-calling: An analysis of discussion-based courses at multiple universities. In L.B. Nilson & J.E. Miller (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development, 28, (pp. 227-249). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Suárez-Orozco, C., Casanova, S., Martin, M., Katisaficas, D., Cuellar, V., Dias, S., & Smith, N. (2015). Toxic rain in the classroom: Classroom interpersonal microaggressions. Educational Researcher, 44(3),151-160.

Sue, D.W. (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

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Responding to Microaggressions in the Classroom: Taking ACTION

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Whether an observer, the target, or the unintentional perpetrator of microaggressions, faculty often don't know how to respond to them in the moment. The ACTION framework is an effective tool for organizing your thoughts, unpacking the microaggression, and addressing the situation calmly and deliberately.

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If You Don’t See Race, What Did You Miss?

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If You Don’t See Race, What Did You Miss?

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Education Week - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo

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The new question-of-the-week is:
What are the best ways to respond to educators who say they "don't see race" when they teach?
It's, unfortunately, fairly common to hear teachers say they don't see race or they don't see color in their classrooms.

There are a lot of problems with that perspective, and this series will try to examine them.

These next five posts are actually the second "installment" in a three-part series. Last fall, Shannon R. Waite, Ed.D., from Fordham guest-hosted a six-part series on the same topic. A third-and final-installment of several posts with additional responses will appear in early summer.

Today, Makeda Brome, Ashley McCall, Cindy Garcia, Jamila Lyiscott, Julie Jee, Kendra M. Castelow, Ed.S., Janice Wyatt-Ross, and Maurice McDavid "weigh in" on the question. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Makeda, Ashley, and Cindy on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also be interested in many other previous posts on Race & Gender Challenges.
Do not be a "Racial Identity Denier" Makeda Brome is an instructional math coach at Fort Pierce Westwood Academy in Fort Pierce, Fla. She is entering her 10th year of teaching and was recently named the St. Lucie public schools Teacher of the Year for the 2019-20 school year. She has two master's degrees: one in curriculum and instruction and a second in educational leadership:
Wow. This is a heavy question, but I will do my best to present the start of an answer. First, I would like to say that most educators who say they "don't see race" might also say they are colorblind. To those that would claim either statement, I would say there is no such thing as being colorblind. I would say that those who "do not see race" or claim to be colorblind are denying the racial identity of their students. My good friend Val Brown recently coined this as someone who is a "Racial Identity Denier" or RID©. When you do not see a student's race, you are denying the very fabric of their being. You are denying something that they cannot and should not "rid" or deny themselves of. How can we deny in others what they cannot and should not deny in themselves? A student cannot not see their race. It looks them in the face every day as they look in the mirror. Their race contributes to the experiences that they have as they navigate through society.

Even if one were to claim that they legitimately "do not see race," one of our jobs as educators is to prepare students to enter society. that is in fact not colorblind and sees race as something to be feared rather than embraced. So even with that claim, one not seeing race would still have to know the perspective of seeing the race of their students to prepare students for a society that will.

Secondly, I would argue that educators who "don't see race" are denying themselves of beautiful experiences in the classroom. The most important thing they deny is relationships with their students. How can you (an educator) have a relationship with me (a student) if you do not acknowledge all that makes me who I am? Diverse relationships should be sought out with the intention to honor one's whole self. Educators should be intentional about building relationships with all their students.

Educators also deny rich classroom opportunities or learning experiences when they "don't see race." How does one talk about the space race without talking about Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson? How do we use GPS to navigate to new places or find our lost phones without Dr. Gladys West? How do we claim to be advocates of social justice and change without the likes of people like Cesar Chavez, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Dolores Huerta? This barely scratches the surface of people of different races who have made impacts on democratic societies like the United States. They are celebrated now, but at the time of their inventions or call to actions were denied respect, justice, or credit because of their race. Our students and their whole selves should be celebrated and seen in our classrooms now. Not as an aftereffect. I challenge those who claimto "not see race" to ask the following questions:

1. When I claim to not see race, what else am I not seeing in my students?

2. What rich learning experiences am I and my students missing out on when I color (myself) blind?

3. When I claim to not see color, do I realize that I am denying someone an essential part of their experiences and existence while simultaneously holding on to mine?

These are not easy questions, nor are they meant to be. They are meant to provoke, prod, and propel you to a better understanding of yourself and the students you teach every day.
An allegory about peanut allergies
Ashley McCall is a 3rd grade English/language arts educator at Chavez Multicultural Academic Center in Back of the Yards (Chicago) where she serves as a teacher representative on the local school council. She is a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellowship alumna and a member of the Teach Plus Board:

Imagine you are seated at a restaurant table with friends preparing to enjoy an evening meal. A waitress arrives eager to take drink orders and assess the table's familiarity with the food menu. After reading through the day's specials and taking notes on beverage preferences, she turns toward the kitchen.
"Wait," you interrupt. "You did not ask whether or not any of us have allergies. I am allergic to nuts. Could you please make note of this for the chef?" "Oh," the waitress responds. "I don't see allergies. For years, humans existed on this earth without attention to these whimsical reactions to substances, and it has become a mental crutch for us. We feed everyone the same here, and allergies really are not a thing you need to worry about in this space." Then she walks away.
Now, if this was a real interaction, everyone would find the scene and the waitress' response completely absurd. Why? Because the majority of the population believes in attention to and consideration for human allergies? Because we have scientific evidence of the sometimes dangerous physical and psychological experience of an allergic reaction? Because it would have cost the waitress nothing to simply acknowledge and make note of the allergy and continue with service? Because it is her (and the restaurant's) job to provide the best (and safest) possible service to its customers? All of the above.

Teachers who say they "don't see race" fall into the same absurd trap as a waitress who does not acknowledge the allergy of a patron. This phrase almost exclusively slips out the of the mouths of our white colleagues who believe that by "not seeing race," they take on a colorblind lens which allows them to treat students fairly and provide the same experience for all. Fairness, however, is not the job of the educator. We ought to pursue equity in our experiences with students.

As educators we must, to the best of our abilities, see our students, families, and neighbors in the fullness of their identities. Race may be a social construct, but it informs our students' day-to-day experiences: rides on the bus, walks to and through stores, drives down the Dan Ryan, and kicking back in the park with friends. This construct fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, inflates numbers of students of color referred for special education services, and exascerbates mental-health battles for black and brown youths and adults alike. To say, "I don't see race" is to say, "I don't see you. I don't know you. And I'm not ready and willing to hear and believe you." I do not know an educator that would ever say this to a student. But until all teachers are ready to see and explicitly engage with issues of race in the classroom, we are sending this harmful message subconsciously.
Funds of knowledge Cindy Garcia has been a bilingual educator for 14 years and is currently the district instructional specialist for PK-6 bilingual/ESL mathematics in the Pasadena Independent school district (Texas). She is active onTwitter @CindyGarciaTX and on her blog:
It is important for educators to see race, because ignoring race means ignoring the funds of knowledge that a student brings to school. By not seeing a student's race, teachers are not seeing the full student. Teachers need to support students in using the skills and experiences they have had in their culture to support their learning in school. There is no reason to start at zero each school year, when students have learned valuable lessons at home and in their communities.

When a student's race is acknowledged, it sends the message that their race is not an issue. Ignoring their race might make students feel that there is something off or not OK because it is never taken into account. If a student feels that an obvious physical characteristic, that many times is seen as a negative, is seen as an asset, they will form a positive connection to their classroom environment. It is not necessary to fixate on race or bring it up constantly, but if an opportunity presents itself, then it should be addressed.

If the class is reading a book and the main character shares the same race as one of the students, why not have that student share some of their ideas or thoughts based on their point of view as a person of that race? If you are studying something related to Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks, why not have students that have race in common with those historical figures share their perspectives as members of the same racial community? If a teacher chooses to "not see race," it does not mean that racial stereotypes or bullying based on skin color will not take place. Choosing to "see race" could help reduce stereotyping or bullying because now they have a better understanding or connection to different races rather than just seeing them as something different.

"The impetus to pretend that one is colorblind is essentially racist" Jamila Lyiscott is a social-justice education scholar, nationally acclaimed speaker, spoken-word artist, and educational consultant. She serves as an assistant professor of social-justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the co-founder and director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. She also holds an appointment as senior research fellow within Teachers College, Columbia University's Institute for Urban and Minority Education. She is the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom:
All educators see race, whether they claim to or not. The impetus to pretend that one is colorblind when it comes to race is a misguided attempt to treat all students the same, when all students, even within any racial group, are different. The impetus to pretend that one is colorblind is essentially racist. It is wielding the power to erase the identity of students. To refuse to see. To impose a blind view on children of color because of racial illiteracy-or the inability to navigate the nuances and realities of race and racism with fluency.

Because we exist in a very hyper-racial society, with unique manifestations of what race means across the world, racial identities play a major role in how we are each socialized. The idea of being socialized means that we do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, since birth, each of us has been shaped by individuals and institutions that color our experiences and perceptions of the world. Exactly how we are shaped by this socialization process depends on many factors, but one major factor is race. Because of the abiding systemic racism in America, for example, one's racial identity will profoundly shape what communities they live in (i.e., American communities remain highly segregated by race), what schools they attend, class status, experiences with our justice system, etc. There are also cultural cues and norms that align with racial identity and shape how each of us experience the world. So the way that an educator sees themselves and their students is deeply conditioned by how they have been socialized to see their racial identity and that of their students from messages at home, representations in media, messages from our justice system and other institutions, as well as exposure (or lack of exposure since our country is still segregated) to diverse racial groups.

The problem is not that we are different. Educators should and must center the diverse wealth of racial, linguistic, and cultural beauty that exists powerfully in the lives of our students. The problem is that we ascribe racist stigmas to difference and, thus, reinforce racial oppression. So to any educator who claims not to see race: We are not invisible. It is your duty to see us.

Not seeing race is "solving nothing" Julie Jee has been an English teacher at Arlington High School in New York since 2001. She teaches 12 Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition and sophomore English at the regents level. Julie loves to read, run, take photos, and spend time with her husband and three children:
"Not seeing race" is an easy way out because if those educators saw race, they would see how systemic racism has affected every aspect of the education system, from the government level down to the books that are taught. They would see that racism has deep roots in our country's history. They would see racist violence and other acts of hate as examples of that pervasive racism, not simply isolated incidents that have no connection to each other throughout history.

When educators tell me that race doesn't matter, I say that they've erased an opportunity to be anti-racist. They've squandered the moment and made it about them and their so-called forward way of thinking instead of actually doing what's best for their students. Students of color need to be seen in their entirety. That understanding needs to combat systemic racism in our education system. When educators say they don't see race, they are abetting this system and solving nothing.

"One size fits all" is not conducive to learning Kendra M. Castelow, Ed.S., is an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher in a public school district in Georgia. She is a member of the Conferences Professional Council at Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International Association and past president of Georgia TESOL. As a member of the 2016 Leadership Robins Region class, she seeks to nurture and maximize public and community relations among political, economic, and business sectors:
There is a 19 th-century proverb, "A hit dog will holler." It implies that a defensive response to a statement indicates guilt. When educators say they "don't see race," I view it as that defensive response that shows educators who say it are guilty of seeing race and using that race against the person. At the very least, these educators say they "don't see race" to simply avoid discussions about race. When you use race against a person, you vilify racial differences and reduce the impact and/or importance of those racial differences. If educators say they "don't see race" when they teach, then I would internally decide that those educators have already been accused of being racist by students' families or fellow educators. Furthermore, the same educators have said some things or behaved in some ways in their classroom that would cause students discomfort and/or would offend educators.

After you plod through your own internal dialogue of clichés, clear out your own dusty closet of hidden bias and wipe off that cloudy mirror you use to reflect upon your own actions, experiences, and theories. Consider taking one or all the following approaches:

1. Respond with your own story about when educators or other people didn't "see race" with you. If educators said that when they taught me, they didn't "see race," I would say that they didn't see me. It would make me feel invisible. I know that educators' hidden biases are obvious when rambunctious students of color are sitting away from the groups of classmates, up by the board, or back in the corner. Educators must see race when they teach, because there may be some students who have been bruised by past educators who ignored social and cultural cues. Educators who "don't see race" are blind to the results or impact of racism and marginalization and will miss the opportunities to repair damage and reverse wrongs.

2. Respond with ways a teacher can use their privilege to challenge and remove modes of racial discrimination from their educational environment. Research and cite historical facts that demonstrate the result of unchallenged privilege and how it allowed people to use race to discriminate against others or to remove race from an issue.The saying "majority rules" should be applied in the education of diverse learners. For example, Jim Crow laws were put in place to intimidate former slaves and tip the scales in the white residents' favor. Although slavery was abolished, the freed slaves struggled to live independently, and those in power (and place of privilege) created the Jim Crow laws to take advantage of those freedmen and further intimidate and incapacitate them. When educators don't "see race," they are selectively blind to the condition and mindset of racially diverse people and risk creating additional policies that will further intimidate and incapacitate those racially diverse students.

Educators hold a place of privilege in their classrooms and in their schools/learning organizations. Culturally proficient instruction places the educators as advocates for their learners and in the perfect position to remove obstacles and barriers that are not conducive to learning. For educators to become advocates, they troubleshoot their learning environment and identify obstacles and barriers, such as racial and other hidden biases. In order to do this effectively, educators must be aware of their own mindset, including racial and other hidden biases that positively and/or negatively affect their classroom environment and rapport with their students. It is a good idea to give students "a fair shake." Once transparent and personal reflection occurs, then focused advocacy and differentiated instruction can truly take place.

3. Respond with how seeing race can help a teacher differentiate their instruction and use culturally proficient instructional strategies with their students. "One size fits all" is not conducive to learning for all learners. Some teachers refuse to differentiate their instruction because all the other students "get it" and the racially diverse student in question should "get it," too.Various types of data concerning a variety of groups of learners should be examined through the lens of cultural proficiency. For example, just because the standardized scores of a subgroup of African American boys are lower than others' does not mean that those African American boys are not capable of learning. It might mean that those educating those students need professional development in utilizing culturally proficient instructional strategies. The building-level and district-level educational administrators should collect qualitative data on the educators to guide their professional learning and development sessions.

I have had many people tell me the same: "I don't see race." This cliché is a smoke screen. When people have communicated this to me, they have said it in the same way a leader distracts their followers and makes them look the other way so as not to see the injustices inflicted upon the past or done behind their backs. This deflection ("I don't see race.") has caused me to ponder, what are trying to hide? and So what do you REALLY think about me? Therefore, I ask you: What do you really think about your students?

"There is nothing racist about...what you see with your own eyes" Janice Wyatt-Ross is the program director for a dropout prevention/re-engagement center in Lexington, Ky. She and her husband of 23 years are the parents of two daughters:
As children, we are taught to identify and sort by color, shape, and size. Are we to suppose that we lose this skill as it relates to people? Realistically speaking, humans, and that includes children, exist in all shapes, colors, and sizes. Educators who say that they "don't see race" when they teach are disregarding the existence of entire groups of students. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a person's skin color. People of color do not have the privilege of not addressing or acknowledging race. For many of us, there are daily reminders that we are not white. Our skin tone is the first thing we see in the mirror each and every day. If you are honest, it is the first thing you notice when you see me or my likeness.

The argument is often made that people should not be judged by the "color of their skin" but by "the content of their character." This argument has been taken to the extreme as to erase an aspect of someone's humanity. To be truly equitable and inclusive requires a real look at who is sitting around the table or whose voice is recognized and amplified. This notion of "colorblindness" leads to all white spaces. Teachers should be conscious of race in their classrooms for things such as grouping students for projects, lesson planning, curricular decisions, and even in their hiring practices. It is important that various perspectives are represented.

I acknowledge that I am black. It is a fact. There is nothing racist about acknowledging what I have known all of my life and what you see with your eyes. It becomes racist when you work to exclude me because of my skin color.

Begin with 'understanding" Maurice McDavid earned his bachelor's degree in elementary education with a minor in history and Spanish. He has taught middle school history, English, and Spanish, as well as high school geography. He was dean of students for three years and is now in his first year as an assistant principal at a bilingual elementary school.:
My response to teachers when they say, "I don't see race," begins with understanding.

I can remember when colorblindness was pushed as what was politically correct. I quickly remind staff that as a black male educator, I am made aware of race every single day. I have been employed in buildings where I was the only certified black staff member and in other buildings where I have been one of two, and that causes an awareness of race for me. Black students seem to flock to me as do teachers who are having an issue with their black students. For those who are willing to engage in conversation, I then ask them to consider how being black has impacted me and impacts our students in ways that are real and tangible. I share with teachers that my mother raised me and that she grew up during the '60s and '70s. So while I have not seen marches for voting rights, I was raised by someone who has experienced blackness in a generation of outright racism. It impacts the way I see everything and colors the way I experience life.

I share with them that race still has an impact today that goes beyond history. I remind them of the power of imagery and the need to see someone who looks like you having success. If popular imagery of black people includes athletes and entertainers, then it does become difficult to envision oneself as a teacher. As a high schooler, I had a young black girl tell me that my hopes and dreams of law school were for white people. This is the reality of race in modern America. There is so much more to say on this topic, but to summarize, teachers who do not see race are refusing to see an integral part of the identity of their students. The response to these teachers should be personal on one hand and should include data on the other. The combination of personal testimony and the data helps to open the minds of those interested in learning.

Thanks to Makeda, Ashley, Cindy, Jamila, Julie, Kendra, Janice, and Maurice for their contributions.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It's titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first eight years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. The list doesn't include ones from this current year, but you can find those by clicking on the "answers" category found in the sidebar. This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts Race & Gender Challenges Classroom-Management Advice Best Ways to Begin the School Year Best Ways to End the School Year Implementing the Common Core Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning Teaching Social Studies Cooperative & Collaborative Learning Using Tech in the Classroom Parent Engagement in Schools Teaching English-Language Learners Reading Instruction Writing Instruction Education Policy Issues Assessment Differentiating Instruction Math Instruction Science Instruction Advice for New Teachers Author Interviews Entering the Teaching Profession The Inclusive Classroom Learning & the Brain Administrator Leadership Teacher Leadership Relationships in Schools Professional Development Instructional Strategies Best of Classroom Q&A Professional Collaboration Classroom Organization Mistakes in Education Project-Based Learning
I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

Look for Part Two in a few days.

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Saying 'I Don't See Color' Denies the Racial Identity of Students

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The new question-of-the-week is: What are the best ways to respond to educators who say they "don't see race" when they teach? It's, unfortunately, fairly common to hear teachers say they don't see race or they don't see color in their classrooms. There are a lot of problems with that perspective, and this series will try to examine them.

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How to Respond to Racial Microaggressions When They Occur

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How to Respond to Racial Microaggressions When They Occur

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by J. Luke Wood & Frank Harris III

Over the last decade, there has been a significant rise in awareness among educators and the public about racial microaggressions. Coined by Chester Pierce in the 1970's, racial microaggressions are the subtle forms of racism that are communicated to people of color through messages that degrade and demean them. Many people of color in the academy have experienced being told (with a sense of surprise) that they are "so articulate," or assumed to have cheated on exams or papers when they outperform low expectations, being treated as intellectually inferior, being overlooked at the campus stores and eateries, and being told they come from "bad" schools or neighborhoods.

Despite an increased awareness of racial microaggressions in academia and the public, institutions rarely take proactive and effective approaches to address them. This is due, in part, to observers not knowing what to do when they occur. Often, when an observer witnesses someone microaggressing another person or group of people, they experience a sense of shock or surprise and struggle to determine how to respond quickly and effectively. Consequently, racial microaggressions often go unchecked and often result in racial battle fatigue, which is physical and psychological stress that comes from being immersed in chronically racist environments.

In the widely referenced article, Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life, Dr. Derald Wing Sue and colleagues argued that this sense of paralysis occurs because observers are typically unsure about what actually occurred, lack awareness on how to respond, are concerned about negative repercussions that may occur if they do respond, perceive that it may be better do to nothing, or somehow convince themselves that what observed really did not happen. Our belief is that educators have a moral duty to respond when a microaggression occurs. Simply put, not interceding is allowing harm to occur.

In light of the aforementioned challenges in responding to microaggressions, we developed the R.A.V.E.N-a framework that is particularly useful when responding to microaggressions that occur in public (physical and online) spaces. The R.A.V.E.N. is a five-step approach that entails 1) Redirecting the conversation or interaction, 2) Asking probing questions, 3) Values clarification, 4) Emphasizing your own thoughts, and 5) offering concrete Next steps. Each step of the R.A.V.E.N. is further explained below.

1. Redirect the interaction with the goal of immediately stopping the conversation to prevent further harm from occurring. For example, For example, observers can do so by intervening and asking the aggressor if they could "speak with them for a moment." If the microaggression occurs in a public space, like a physical or virtual classroom, then the message should be direct, "I'd like to pause this conversation right here, because I'm concerned with the language that is being used." Observers could also immediately correct and pull them aside depending upon the level of egregiousness of the message. Regardless of the approach that observers decide to take, they should remember that they need to intercede to stop harm from occurring.

2. Ask probing questions to the aggressor to help them understand their statements and actions and how they can be perceived as rude, threatening, or harmful. Because racial microaggressions are often the consequences of implicit bias, aggressors are not always aware that their statements and actions are harmful. Therefore, asking probing questions can be an effective way to create the cognitive dissonance that is necessary to recognize that their statements or actions are problematic. For example, observers could ask: "I think I heard you say that student barely speaks English and doesn't belong in college. What did you mean by that?" or "I want to make sure I understand you, were you saying that non-native English speakers shouldn't be in college?" In most instances, these questions will prompt the aggressor to reflect and reconsider what they said.

3. Values clarification is the third step in the R.A.V.E.N. Values clarification involves identifying shared organizational values (e.g., trust, diversity, inclusion, safe spaces, welcoming environments, treating everyone with dignity and respect) and conveying to the aggressor that their actions or statements are not aligned with these values. Every organization has a mission statement or set of principles, values, or standards of community that are designed to guide actions and behaviors. Often, classrooms also have standards of expected behavior set forth in the syllabus. Thus, observers can appeal to these values by saying, "At the beginning of the semester, we all agreed to create an environment that was safe and welcoming. The statement you just made is not aligned with these values." or "What you said is not aligned with our institutions values of equity and inclusion."

4. Emphasize your own thoughts and feelings is the next step in the model. Oftentimes aggressors fail to recognize that a racial microaggression is not only harmful to the person or persons who were directly targeted but also to those who are present to observe it. Thus, when intervening, it is important to not only empathize with those who were targeted but also emphasize your own thoughts and feelings about the harm that has been done. Using "I" statements (e.g., "I think," "I feel," "I was hurt," "I was disappointed.") followed by an explanation of how the aggressor's words or actions may have hurt a targeted person or group can be an effective way to do so. For example, one could say "I was saddened to hear you say that about people from Valencia Hills. I think someone from that community would be hurt by what you said." or "When you said that John was 'articulate,' I felt like you were implying that John spoke better than you expected him to speak."

5. Next steps is the final action, where one suggests what the aggressor can do to correct or change their behavior moving forward. This can include a range of actions designed to address the harm that has been done as well as to reduce future harm. These actions can include offering an authentic apology to the person or persons who were targeted, being more mindful of their actions in the future, and guiding them to resources on implicit bias and microaggressions.

The R.A.V.E.N. is not intended to be a sequential process but rather a framework to guide thinking and actions to disrupt racial microaggressions when they occur. The framework also works best when actions and statements are unconscious in nature and not intentionally racist as the latter requires a direct and stern response. Ultimately, we find that individuals benefit from having a framework such as this to consider what they would do. Otherwise, they are likely to do nothing. Microaggressions are harmful, so don't be a bystander...do something.

Smith, W. A., Allen, W. R., & Danley, L. L. (2007, December). "Assume the position...You fit the description": Psychosocial experiences and racial battle fatigue among African American male college students. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(4), 551-578.

Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., & Colleagues. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62(4), 271-286.
Dr. J. Luke Wood is the associate vice president for faculty diversity and inclusion and distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University. Dr. Frank Harris III is a professor of postsecondary education and co-director of the Community College Equity Assessment Lab (CCEAL) at San Diego State University.

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How to Respond to Racial Microaggressions When They Occur

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Over the last decade, there has been a significant rise in awareness among educators and the public about racial microaggressions. Coined by Chester Pierce in the 1970's, racial microaggressions are the subtle forms of racism that are communicated to people of color through messages that degrade...

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Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.

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Why White Students Need Multicultural and Social Justice Education

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Why White Students Need Multicultural and Social Justice Education

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Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Sponsored by PowerSchool and ViewSonic

These last few weeks have been especially difficult for me as the news continues to reflect that racism still exists in 2020. I've witnessed video footage of Ahmaud Arbery shot and killed while jogging, George Floyd murdered by the police, and Christian Cooper harassed while bird watching in Central Park. As we think about the next generation of adults we are influencing, particularly our White students, now more than ever, we need to teach more than kindness.

As an equity advocate, I have lots of conversations about culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education. Not too long ago while I was consulting with an elementary school principal she said, "Multicultural Education is nice, but we are well over 90% White at my school."

A common myth regarding multicultural education is that it is about helping students of color see themselves within the content. But multicultural education is about more than just race: It refers to any form of learning or teaching that incorporates the histories, texts, values, beliefs, and perspectives of people from different cultural backgrounds ( Glossary of Education Reform). And even if the majority of your students are White, it doesn't mean we shouldn't teach from a multicultural perspective.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for a bunch of Kumbaya moments in the classroom. This is not a post about how we need to teach students to embrace diversity and love each other. It's about the influence we can and should have on our students. Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings taught us that we teach what we value. Therefore, we are part of the problem if we refuse to teach about antiracism and speak out against police brutality. Our students look up to us as adults, and many of our students mimic our behavior. If we are silent around social justice matters, we send a loud message to our students about where we stand as these issues impact many of the communities we serve.

In fact, we need to go beyond multicultural education. In this 2017 interview, Zaretta Hammond differentiates between multicultural education and social justice education, which provides "a lens for the student, really being able to look at the world and seeing where things aren't fair or where injustice exists." To ensure the changes our society is hurting for, we need to give our White students both multicultural and social justice education. Additionally, Dr. James Banks, the father of multicultural education, advocates for educators to teach our students about social and civic action. Ensuring that students engage in multiple perspectives without coupling their learning with civic engagement does not complete the process of developing socially just citizens who are willing to take a stance against the mistreatment of others. We need to help our students find ways they can take action in response to what they have learned.

Going back to the principal I was speaking with about whether there was a need for multicultural education at her school, I was thinking, "This is why multicultural and social justice education is so important!" Even with her assumptions that because there wasn't a lot of racial representation at her school, does that mean the small percentage of students of color don't matter to her? If that's the case, what would her teachers say? Would they support her sentiments?

Why Multicultural Education is 100% Relevant in All-White Schools

"Whiteness" is Complex

When someone asks why multicultural education is needed at a predominately White school, an assumption is being made that White people are a homogenous group. But White people are as heterogeneous as other racial and ethnic groups: there's socioeconomic status, gender and sexual orientation, identity, religion, language, age, and disability, to name a few. All of those represent different cultures. Sometimes, when you're in a dominant culture and used to things being a certain way, you don't necessarily think about your ancestry or heritage and how things have changed over time. And because conditions have changed over time, it may appear that Whiteness is Whiteness, but there are so many different cultures embedded within that broad category.

I think it's essential that we help teach our White students about their ancestors and the origins of when their families first arrived in the United States. The languages, the cultures, the traditions, all those things don't necessarily have to be lost. They can be retrieved.

Let's go back to the 1790s, where the first census was started. With the first US Census, they classified race. The classifying of race allowed those in power to determine or allow a few rights: Who gets the right to get jobs? Who gets the right to marry? Who gets the right to own property? That's how the social construct of race started.

Above is a view of Europeans, or some of the first immigrants, who were coming from various countries. And if you look at the picture, they're White people, right? But they're coming from multiple countries. At this time, there were several languages represented. You had folks that came from Italy, Germany, Russia, England, and so on. There were all types of cultures coming into the United States.

There were also various forms of religions represented when the Europeans began to arrive in the US. In Russia, you had the Orthodox church. In England, you had the Anglican church. When they first came, they weren't willing to give up their culture and become this one White race. They held onto their traditions, values, and beliefs. But we see that over time, things have changed to where White supremacy and racial hierarchies began to form. Today, there are a lot of families who have European origins that may not necessarily speak the language from their original land of ancestry because those things might have been lost over generations.

Multicultural Literacy Is a Separate and Necessary Literacy

The concept of "literacy" is broad. Still, it can be divided into many different sub-categories. One of these is multicultural literacy, the ability to uncover biases relating to culture, and the skills to view the world through different cultural perspectives.

Dr. Robin DiAngelo says, "Historically reinforced ideologies such as individualism and color-blindness have left many White people racially illiterate but racially conscious when perceiving other racialized groups." So because they're in the dominant culture, they don't necessarily have to think about race, but they'll maybe notice racial issues that are not related to Whiteness.

In other words, maybe they might notice police brutality in a Black community. Perhaps they might see issues of race with Islamophobia and discrimination. But we want our students to do more than notice; responding to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination is essential.

Having literacy in this area is also key for equipping White students to participate more actively in conversations about racial justice. If they are not regularly exposed to these conversations, they are less likely to speak up on this topic. White friends and colleagues tell me all the time that they want to say something when racism and equity come up, but they often hold back because they don't know what to say or are afraid to say the wrong thing. With a higher level of multicultural literacy, our students will build more confidence.

What We've Been Doing Isn't Enough

Although multicultural education certainly isn't new, it's clear that what we've been doing up to this point hasn't been enough.

As recently as a few weeks ago, there have been instances of White people utilizing the police as a means to address their encounters with people of color. The underlying issue of racism is apparent in many of these instances. Discussing current events and helping White students understand why they should also be upset at discrimination and racism may prevent a continuous cycle of White people remaining silent and complicit when issues happen that do not directly impact them.

These conversations are essential to have. It's also critical to teach students about becoming allies and co-conspirators, especially at the middle and high school levels. It might be a little bit difficult with your first and second graders, and maybe your kindergartners, but I think there are some messages you could still portray to your students even at that age.

What Can Multicultural Education Teach Our White Students?

We've already established multicultural education goes beyond race. There's so much within the concept of "culture," and we must help our White students understand how race can impact them and how they can actively use whatever privilege they have to reduce issues of racism, discrimination, and bigotry.

1. Understanding Their Own Cultural and Ethnic Background

It's not uncommon for White people to say, Oh, I'm just White. I don't have a culture. We need to teach our White students about what their cultural background is and their ethnic backgrounds so they can understand and think about their language and religions going back to their ancestry. Lessons on their culture may help them start to understand how privilege and White supremacy began. So begin with going back and taking some time to help your students understand that. You can also work with students by exploring community history and cultural influence.

One of the things you can teach your students, your White students, is in history. Many White immigrants have been accused of marginalizing other White immigrants. For example, the Irish and Italians were mistreated, discriminated, and marginalized against by other White immigrants. If we can teach our White students how their ancestors might have perpetuated that oppression or perhaps were part of that oppression against each other, maybe that will help them understand a little bit how in 2020, oppression continues to exist to those who are not included in the dominant culture. They can kind of see how the "haves" and the "have nots" happened back then. One of the things we want to do is help students relate items from their background knowledge and be able to bring those to light.

2. Studying Implicit Bias in Everyday Language

Another thing we can do is discuss everyday language. How are words associated with white and black used? Words such as blackmail, blackballed, or blacklisted have different connotations than words like white labeled or whitelisted. We can have students examine how these words may spark negative perceptions based on their meanings and associations.

Consider how words such as "alien" or "immigrant" may trigger the thoughts of someone of Mexican descent. These types of stereotypes in our language may trigger our Latinx community. The same rule applies to phrases like "You should speak up more, you're so quiet" to an Asian student.

The language we use every day may not seem significant because of the implicit biases we have developed in our lives. The words we use daily are influenced by how we were raised, our social circle, and the media. We may not notice how some of the words we use may have adverse effects on particular groups of people (stereotypes, derogatory language, etc.). We can teach students about implicit bias and how to overcome bias in our language usage.

3. Examining Representation in Curriculum and Beyond

Let's take a look at our school curriculum. Have your students investigate how various cultural groups are represented in the school's curriculum. Lead these discussions with your students and have them understand it because a lot of times, that's not a thing we think about. When we are discussing representation in the school's curriculum, allow opportunities for a dialogue beyond heterosexual, cisgender, Christian-based educational norms. Instead, talk about subjects that aren't reflected, such as disabilities, and how they are depicted in the curriculum. How are people from the LGBTQ community portrayed or even acknowledged in the content? Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of a single story. We need to make sure that we can bring in various perspectives in our curriculum and instruction.

If students find minimal to no representation of certain groups in the curriculum, discuss ways to bring in a variety of multicultural perspectives. The website We Need Diverse Books is an excellent resource for building a more inclusive classroom library, and Milner published an article that discusses developing a multicultural curriculum for an all-White classroom.

From there, you can expand your communications by discussing popular culture and how various groups are represented in multiple media outlets such as the news, music, movies, and social media. Have them study or research certain groups and how the articles that come up and the titles of those articles. What do the reports say versus other articles about various groups?

4. Understanding and Recognizing Privilege

A combination of multicultural and social justice education can help students see the trouble with implicit racism and how even though they are not doing anything actively racist, they are still benefiting from a legacy of racism. Calling the cops to say that "an African American man is threatening me and my dog" is a result of White privilege. Knowing that Black people have historically been mistreated by law enforcement and using that knowledge to one's advantage is inhumane.

Teaching White students about power and privilege may be a touchy subject for some as White guilt and fragility may seep into the mindset of White teachers and students. However, we must learn to "disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." Starting at a young age, we can help our students learn to understand that not everyone has access and the same opportunities as others. Students as young as six years old can learn about race and class. And this work doesn't have to be limited to social studies class. We can embed these principles in all subjects, including mathematics.

5. Dismantling Racism

It is not enough to teach White children to embrace racial and cultural diversity. We've got to go beyond cultural competency. "Children must also develop individual and group identities that will recognize and resist the false notions of superiority and racial entitlement" (Derman-Sparks, Ramsey, and Edwards, 2011). Because today we have to teach our students how to be antiracist and how to work to dismantle racism actively.

Invest in meaningful dialogue that brings awareness to issues impacting both local and global communities. Additionally, a social justice-minded educator teaches their students to develop their own socio-cultural consciousness and advocacy skills so they can advocate for themselves and others.

For elementary students, that action may include students committing to do more than not bully or laugh at each other. They may also commit to bystander intervention by stepping in and helping their peers who they see are being mistreated. We can help our students take a stance instead of just teaching them to be kind to each other and not engage in activities that include mistreating others.

For secondary students, action may include writing their school board about their concerns and calls for change. A strong student group organized with a mission and objectives goes a long way toward challenging institutional practices that are unjust toward certain groups. On local and national scales, have students engage in lessons that address mass incarceration, police brutality, civil rights, immigration, racism, healthcare disparities, unequal pay issues, trauma, suicide, drug abuse, and women's rights, and privilege.

Sometimes we teach our students how to be kind to others, embrace diversity, and respect differences. We can go beyond that by teaching our White students how to be antiracist actively and do their part to support advocacy towards social justice and reform. The foundation for teaching our students how to engage in these practices actively is by helping students understand their White racial identity and positionality in society. From there, students may have a better understanding of the need for a multicultural approach in education and what they can do to find their voice and role in creating a socially just society.

Additional Resources
Framing Brave Conversations About Race and Ethnicity 8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom Teaching About Racism, Antisemitism and White Supremacy How Does Race Affect a Student's Math Education? Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America Diversity Equity and Inclusion Activity for Project Based Learning Racism No Way: Anti-racism Activities, Years 3-12 How Should I Talk About Race in My Mostly White Classroom?
Learn more from Sheldon Eakins on his website, the Leading Equity Center, where he offers resources, courses, and his podcast, the Leading Equity Podcast.

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Why White Students Need Multicultural and Social Justice Education

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Sponsored by PowerSchool and ViewSonic These last few weeks have been especially difficult for me as the news continues to reflect that racism still exists in 2020. I've witnessed video footage of Ahmaud Arbery shot and killed while jogging, George Floyd murdered by the police, and Christian Cooper harassed while bird watching in Central Park.

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ALL students Need Anti-racism Education 

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ALL students Need Anti-racism Education 

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Schools across the nation are committing to the all-important work of anti-racism. Schools with predominately white or privileged students should be no exception.

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Dena Simmons: How students of color confront impostor syndrome

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As a black woman from a tough part of the Bronx who grew up to attain all the markers of academic prestige, Dena Simmons knows that for students of color, success in school sometimes comes at the cost of living authentically.

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8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom

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8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom

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White supremacy, and the concept of whiteness that it relies on, grows when it goes unnamed and unchallenged. In the absence of honest conversations about race, it festers like a wound. It's more important than ever to have these tough conversations with our students.

Let's be real: It might feel scary to take this plunge. But the thought of you and your students discussing race is much scarier to white supremacists. Frank, open conversations about race -- grounded in understanding, solidarity, and equity -- are dangerous only to those who fear difference.

We've put together some helpful resources, including lesson plans, articles, and tools, to help you get started. You'll need to make adjustments based on your student population and community, and you should adapt the focus for your grade level and subject area. These important conversations can benefit all classrooms.

Here are eight ways to make a difference.

1. Review the research on reducing bias and prejudice.

The two articles here offer concise summaries of the proven strategies for reducing kids' racial predispositions. These strategies are effective from kindergarten to high school.

2. Unpack "color blind" ideology.

Acknowledge and discuss that we have complex identities, and that while race is a construct, it can shape how we're perceived and the privileges we have.

3. Find relevant, high-quality teaching resources and professional development.

Dig into Facing History and Learning for Justice, the two best websites for social justice education.

4. Expose the history of racism and white supremacy.

Gain perspective on past and present incarnations of white supremacy and their effect on modern institutions.

5. Expand students' horizons through cross-cultural communication.

Counter bias and prejudice by helping students get exposure to and form relationships with people from different backgrounds and perspectives.

6. Focus on news, web, and media literacy.

White supremacists use propaganda, specifically on social media, to recruit young people to the cause. Give your students the critical skills to counter these messages.

7. Cultivate your students' capacity for empathy.

Racists demonstrate an inability to take the perspectives of others and acknowledge their histories, experiences, and feelings. Build this capacity in your students by practicing listening and taking perspective.

8. Empower students to take action.

It's important to encourage students -- especially those entering adulthood -- to take action to stop racism and white supremacy. These resources offer strategies, lessons, and tools to help students make a commitment to social change.

Help students get beyond the buzzword with this classroom discussion activity.
Image courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

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8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom | Common Sense Education

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Help your students build a better world with these strategies, lessons, and tools.

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In the 2013-2014 school year, black students accounted for 16% of students enrolled in U.S. public schools, but 33% of arrests in those schools. That's according to a 2017 analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center. Meanwhile, white students accounted for 50% of enrollment and 34% of arrests, and Hispanic students accounted for 25% enrollment and 25% of arrests.

"If you've got a kid who is black, there's a decent amount of research that shows that good, well-intentioned and not overtly racist people will look at that situation and judge it to be more threatening," said Josh Gupta-Kagan, a law professor at the University of South Carolina.

Gupta-Kagan spoke to NPR's Kat Chow in 2017, two years after a troubling video went viral, showing a school resource officer in South Carolina throwing a black student from her desk to the ground.

The video angered many parents in the district, and led them to question the role SROs should play in schools. Hugh Harmon, then-head of the district's black parents association, told Chow his group has been asking for some time, "Is [the SRO] a school police officer, or is he a resource as the name suggests?"
Black students are more likely to be suspended.
In 2018, NPR's Anya Kamenetz reported that between 2012 to 2016, black high school students were twice as likely to be suspended as white or Hispanic high school students.

Students with disabilities were also twice as likely to be suspended as those without disabilities. According to federal data, special education students are also more likely to be Native American or black.

Kamenetz wrote, "research suggests suspension and expulsion, arrests and referrals to law enforcement, [are] associated with dropping out of school and going to jail. All of these consequences happen more frequently to black students, even in preschool."

Implicit bias isn't just a police problem - it happens in preschool, too.

A 2016 paper from the Yale Child Study Center looked at how implicit bias plays out in preschool classrooms. The study was simple: Preschool teachers were shown videos of four children - a black boy and girl, and a white boy and girl - and were asked to flag any "challenging behavior." The kicker was that the videos didn't actually display any challenging behavior.

According to NPR's Cory Turner, researchers used special eye-scan technology to measure where the teachers were looking. Lead researcher Walter Gilliam wanted to know: When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch?

"What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs," Gilliam said. "Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy."
White school districts receive more funding on average than nonwhite districts.
In 2019, a report from the nonprofit EdBuild began with a striking number: $23 billion. That's how much more funding predominantly white school districts receive compared with districts that serve mostly students of color.

As NPR's Clare Lombardo reported, EdBuild found that high-poverty districts serving mostly students of color receive about $1,600 less per student than the national average, while districts that are predominately white and poor receive about $130 less.

What's causing that disparity? A school district's resources often come down to how wealthy an area is and how much residents pay in taxes, explained Rebecca Sibilia, founder and CEO of EdBuild.

"We have built a school funding system that is reliant on geography, and therefore the school funding system has inherited all of the historical ills of where we have forced and incentivized people to live," she says.

Funding inequities will likely get worse during the current pandemic. With state income and sales tax revenues crashing, some governors are already cutting their education budgets. Education leaders are warning the cuts could lead to a devastating financial meltdown for schools.

According to recent reporting from Cory Turner, "schools won't just need help making up for dramatic gaps in state spending. They'll need extra money to pay for the extra things they're being asked to do: feed children and families in hard-hit communities, help millions of students make up for learning time they've lost while home, and make sure schools are safe when children do finally return to class."

In many states, Turner found, these cuts will hit vulnerable, low-income communities the hardest.

The same is true when it comes to the challenges around remote learning. About 1 in 4 Americans don't have access to high speed internet at home, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. And those unconnected households are more likely to be black or Hispanic, Pew found. With schools relying so heavily on remote learning during the pandemic, students in these households are also more at risk of falling behind.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Four Ways Racial Inequity Harms American Schoolchildren - MindShift

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In the 2013-2014 school year, black students accounted for 16% of students enrolled in U.S. public schools, but 33% of arrests in those schools. That's according to a 2017 analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center.

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Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers | Pew Research Center

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Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers | Pew Research Center

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Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project

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Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers

Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.-young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.

As America becomes more racially diverse and social taboos against interracial marriage fade, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of multiracial adults are proud of their mixed-race background (60%) and feel their racial heritage has made them more open to other cultures (59%).

At the same time, a majority (55%) say they have been subjected to racial slurs or jokes, and about one-in-four (24%) have felt annoyed because people have made assumptions about their racial background. Still, few see their multiracial background as a liability. In fact, only 4% say having a mixed racial background has been a disadvantage in their life. About one-in-five (19%) say it has been an advantage, and 76% say it has made no difference.

While multiracial adults share some things in common, they cannot be easily categorized. Their experiences and attitudes differ significantly depending on the races that make up their background and how the world sees them. For example, multiracial adults with a black background-69% of whom say most people would view them as black or African American-have a set of experiences, attitudes and social interactions that are much more closely aligned with the black community. A different pattern emerges among multiracial Asian adults; biracial white and Asian adults feel more closely connected to whites than to Asians. Among biracial adults who are white and American Indian-the largest group of multiracial adults-ties to their Native American heritage are often faint: Only 22% say they have a lot in common with people in the U.S. who are American Indian, whereas 61% say they have a lot in common with whites.

The U.S. Census Bureau finds that, in 2013, about 9 million Americans chose two or more racial categories when asked about their race. The Census Bureau first started allowing people to choose more than one racial category to describe themselves in 2000. Since then, the nation's multiracial population has grown substantially. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of white and black biracial Americans more than doubled, while the population of adults with a white and Asian background increased by 87%. And during that decade, the nation elected as president Barack Obama-the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.

The share of multiracial babies has risen from 1% in 1970 to 10% in 2013. And with interracial marriages also on the rise, demographers expect this rapid growth to continue, if not quicken, in the decades to come.

Yet the Pew Research survey findings suggest that the census's estimate that 2.1% of the adult population is multiracial may understate the size of the country's mixed-race population. Taking into account how adults describe their own race as well as the racial backgrounds of their parents and grandparents-which the census count does not do- Pew Research estimates that 6.9% of the U.S. adult population could be considered multiracial. This estimate comprises 1.4% in the survey who chose two or more races for themselves, an additional 2.9% who chose one race for themselves but said that at least one of their parents was a different race or multiracial, and 2.6% who are counted as multiracial because at least one of their grandparents was a different race than them or their parents.

These findings emerge from a nationally representative survey of 1,555 multiracial Americans ages 18 and older, conducted online from Feb. 6 to April 6, 2015. The sample of multiracial adults was identified after contacting and collecting basic demographic information on more than 21,000 adults nationwide. For comparative purposes, an additional 1,495 adults from the general public were surveyed, including an oversample of non-Hispanic adults who are black and have no other races in their background and who are Asian and no race.

To be sure, not all adults with a mixed racial background consider themselves "multiracial." In fact, 61% do not. An added layer of complexity is that racial identity can be fluid and may change over the course of one's life, or even from one situation to another. About three-in-ten adults with a multiracial background say that they have changed the way they describe their race over the years-with some saying they once thought of themselves as only one race and now think of themselves as more than one race, and others saying just the opposite.

In addition to painting a portrait of multiracial Americans, the survey findings challenge some traditional ideas about race. The Census Bureau currently recognizes five racial categories: white, black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Hispanic origin is asked about separately as an ethnicity and is not considered a race.

But when Latinos are asked whether they consider being Hispanic to be part of their racial or ethnic background, the survey finds that about two-thirds of Hispanics say it is, at least in part, their race. For the majority of this report, Hispanic origin is treated as an ethnicity, rather than a race, and multiracial Hispanics are those who say they are Hispanic and two separate races (for example, someone who is Hispanic and also chooses black and white as his or her races). This is consistent with how the Census Bureau counts mixed-race Hispanics. However, because Hispanic identity is tied to both race and ethnicity for many Latinos, Chapter 7 of this report explores a broader definition of mixed race.

The Multiracial Experience

The survey finds that many multiracial adults, like other racial minorities, have experienced some type of racial discrimination, from racist slurs to physical threats, because of their racial background.

Again, the specific races that make up an individual's background matter. For example, while about four-in-ten mixed-race adults with a black background say they have been unfairly stopped by the police because of their racial background, only 6% of biracial white and Asian adults and 15% of white and American Indian adults say they have had this experience. A similar pattern is evident for other types of racial discrimination.

For multiracial adults with a black background, experiences with discrimination closely mirror those of single-race blacks. Among adults who are black and no other race, 57% say they have received poor service in restaurants or other businesses, identical to the share of biracial black and white adults who say this has happened to them; and 42% of single-race blacks say they have been unfairly stopped by the police, as do 41% of biracial black and white adults. Mixed-race adults with an Asian background are about as likely to report being discriminated against as are single-race Asians, while multiracial adults with a white background are more likely than single-race whites to say they have experienced racial discrimination.

Demographically, multiracial Americans are younger-and strikingly so-than the country as a whole. According to Pew Research Center analysis of the 2013 American Community Survey, the median age of all multiracial Americans is 19, compared with 38 for single-race Americans.

The Pew Research survey finds that multiracial adults also are less likely than other adults to be college graduates and less likely to be currently married. But when they do wed, mixed-race Americans are more likely than other adults to marry someone who also is multiracial. Mixed-race adults are also more likely than the general public to have close friends or neighbors who are multiracial.

Even so, shared multiracial backgrounds do not necessarily translate into shared identity. Only about a third (34%) of all multiracial Americans think they have a lot in common with other adults who are the same racial mix that they are, while only half as many (17%) think they share a lot with multiracial Americans whose racial background is different from their own.

The Size of the Multiracial Population

It was less than 50 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case bearing the evocative title Loving v. Virginia, struck down laws prohibiting mixed-race marriages. And it has been only 15 years since the U.S. Census Bureau first allowed Americans to choose more than one race when filling out their census form.

Since then the multiracial population has grown significantly. To measure its size, the Pew Research Center used a different method than the Census Bureau for determining an individual's racial background. In addition to self-reported race, Pew Research took into account the racial backgrounds of parents and grandparents. This approach led to the estimate that multiracial adults currently make up 6.9% of the adult American population.

Using this definition, the Pew Research survey finds that biracial adults with a white and American Indian background comprise half of the country's multiracial population-by far the country's largest multiracial group but also the one whose members are the least likely to consider themselves "multiracial" despite their mixed-race background.

Black and American Indian biracial adults account for an additional 12% of the total multiracial adult population, while those with a white and black background make up 11%. Those with white, black and American Indian in their racial background make up 6% of the mixed-race population, and white and Asian biracial adults account for 4%. An additional 11% are Hispanic multiracial adults. The remaining share of the mixed-race population is scattered across the 16 other combinations of races represented in the Pew Research sample.

The relatively small share of all U.S. adults who are mixed race obscures the rapid growth of the multiracial population. If current trends continue-and evidence suggests they may accelerate-the Census Bureau projects that the multiracial population will triple by 2060.

Feeding this growth is the increase in mixed-race couples and, as a natural consequence, births of children who have a multiracial background. For example, since 1980 the share of marriages between spouses of different races has increased almost fourfold (from 1.6% to 6.3% in 2013).

The share of multiracial children is growing at an even faster rate. In 1970, among babies living with two parents, only 1% had parents who were different races from each other. By 2013, that share had risen to 10%. Today, nearly half (46%) of all multiracial Americans are younger than 18. By contrast, only 23% of the overall U.S. population is under the age of 18.

As the multiracial population in the U.S. grows, its profile is also changing. While biracial white and American Indian is currently the predominant group among mixed-race adults, in 2013 a majority of mixed-race babies were either biracial white and black (36%) or biracial white and Asian (24%). Some 11% were white and American Indian.

The Multiracial Identity Gap

Multiracial identity is complicated, as much an attitude that can change over a lifetime as it is a genetic or biological certainty. Only four-in-ten adults with a mixed racial background (39%) say they consider themselves to be "mixed race or multiracial." Fully 61% say they don't consider themselves to be multiracial.

When asked why they don't identify as multiracial, about half (47%) say it is because they look like one race. An identical share say they were raised as one race, while about four-in-ten (39%) say they closely identify with a single race. And about a third (34%) say they never knew the family member or ancestor who was a different race. (Individuals were allowed to select multiple reasons.)

This multiracial "identity gap" plays out in distinctly different ways in different mixed-race groups. A quarter of biracial adults with a white and American Indian background say they consider themselves multiracial. By contrast, seven-in-ten white and Asian biracial adults and 61% of those with a white and black background say they identify as multiracial.

For some mixed-race Americans, the pressure to identify as a single race is a significant part of the multiracial experience. According to the survey, about one-in-five (21%) say they have felt pressure from friends, family or "society in general" to identify as a single race.

A similar share says they have attempted to look or behave a certain way in order to influence the way others perceive their race.

Being Mixed Race

A majority of multiracial adults say they are proud of their mixed racial background (60%), more see their racial background as an advantage than a disadvantage (19% vs. 4%), and they overwhelmingly say they have rarely if ever felt ashamed or like an outsider because of their mixed racial background.

While these views are broadly shared by each of the five biggest multiracial groups, the large proportion of white and Asian biracial adults who see their racial background as an advantage stands out. About six-in-ten in this group (58%) say their racial background has been an advantage to them in life. In the other four groups, only about one-in-four or fewer say their racial heritage has been as helpful.

This contrast further sharpens when white and Asian biracial Americans are compared with single-race whites and Asians. According to the survey, white and Asian biracial Americans are even more likely than single-race whites (58% vs. 32%, respectively) or Asians (15%) to say their racial background has been an advantage.

Social Connections

Mixed-race adults often straddle two or more worlds, and their experiences and relationships reflect that.

Overall, biracial adults who are both white and black are three times as likely to say they have a lot in common with people who are black than they do with whites (58% vs. 19%). They also feel more accepted by blacks than by whites (58% vs. 25% say they are accepted "very well") and report having far more contact with their black relatives: 69% say they've had a lot of contact with family members who are black over the course of their lives, while just 21% report similar levels of contact with their white relatives. About four-in-ten (41%) say they have had no contact with family members who are white.

By contrast, biracial adults who are white and Asian say they have more in common with whites than they do with Asians (60% vs. 33%) and are more likely to say they feel accepted by whites than by Asians (62% vs. 47% say they are accepted "very well"). More also say they have had a lot of contact with family members who are white than say the same about Asian members of their family (61% vs. 42%).

For biracial adults who are white or black and American Indian, their connections with the white or black community are often stronger than the ones they feel toward Native Americans; about one-in-four or fewer in each group say they have a lot in common with American Indians.

Other survey findings suggest these differences may slow the development of a multiracial group identity similar to the sense of linked fate and shared experience that unites many blacks and other minority groups. Overall, the Pew Research survey finds that few multiracial adults think they have much in common with other mixed-race Americans-even those who share their racial background.

Marriage and Friendships

As a group, mixed-race adults are much more likely than all married adults to have a spouse or partner who is also multiracial, the survey finds. Among all mixed-race adults who are married or living with a partner, about one-in-eight (12%) say their spouse or partner is two or more races. By comparison, only 2% of adults among the general public who are married or living with a partner say the same.

The survey also finds that multiracial adults with a white background are significantly less likely than single-race whites to have a white partner (67% vs. 92%). Multiracial adults with a black background are also less likely than single-race blacks to have a spouse or partner who is black only (54% vs. 86%).

A similar pattern emerges when the focus turns to the friendships formed by multiracial Americans. Mixed-race adults are more likely than the general public to have friends who are multiracial. According to the survey, eight-in-ten multiracial adults say at least some of their friends are mixed-race, compared with 62% for all adults.

The Politics of Multiracial Americans

Overall, the politics of multiracial Americans resemble the country as a whole. About six-in-ten (57%) multiracial adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 37% support or lean toward the Republican Party, and 6% favor neither major party. Among the general public, about half (53%) tend to favor Democrats, while 41% support or lean toward the GOP.

But just as the country is a mix of individuals and groups with different party preferences and ideological leanings, multiracial Americans are likewise politically diverse.

Multiracial Americans with a black background favor the Democratic Party, similar to the party preferences of single-race blacks. For example, about nine-in-ten biracial black and American Indian adults (89%) identify or lean toward the Democratic Party, as do 92% of all single-race blacks. By contrast, single-race whites favor the Republican Party over the Democrats by a ratio of 55% to 41%.

White and Asian biracial adults also tend to favor the Democratic Party over the GOP (60% vs. 38%), roughly similar to the 68% to 26% advantage held by Democrats among single-race Asians.

The political leanings of biracial white and American Indians-the country's largest multiracial group-closely resemble those of single-race whites. Among this group, the Republican Party holds a 53% to 42% advantage over the Democrats, making it the only major mixed-race group that tilts toward the GOP. (The sample of single-race Native Americans was too small to analyze.)

The remainder of this report examines in greater detail the attitudes, experiences and demographics of multiracial Americans. Chapter 1 traces the history of efforts by the U.S. Census Bureau to measure race and reports on the latest government estimates of the size of the multiracial population. Chapter 2 describes how the Pew Research Center used a different method than the Census Bureau to measure racial background and how that method produces a significantly larger estimate of the country's multiracial population. Chapter 3 describes how multiracial adults see their own racial identity and how they believe others see their racial background. Chapter 4 focuses on how the racial backgrounds of the country's largest multiracial groups shape their attitudes and experiences in different ways, including the likelihood they have encountered racial discrimination. Chapter 5 describes the social connections of multiracial Americans, including how much mixed-race adults say they have in common with other races and how accepted they feel by different racial groups. Chapter 6 examines the party preferences and political ideology of multiracial adults as well as their views on abortion, aid to the poor, marijuana legalization and other issues. Chapter 7 reports on the elements of Hispanic identity and the percentage of Hispanics who consider their Hispanic background to be, at least in part, their race. It also explores an expanded definition of multiracial adults that includes Hispanics who are one race but say they consider their Hispanic background to be part of their racial background.

Other Key Findings

In their ideological preferences, white and American Indian biracial adults are the only group where political conservatives outnumber liberals (37% to 18%), virtually identical to the ideological preferences of single-race whites. Biracial Americans who are white and Asian or white and black tilt toward the political left.

Few multiracial adults (9%) say a relative or member of their extended family has treated them badly because they are mixed race. But these experiences vary considerably by multiracial group. For example, white and black biracial adults are much more likely than adults with a biracial white and American Indian background to say they have been treated badly by a family member (21% vs. 4%).

Today's mixed-race parents are more likely to have talked to their own children about being multiracial. Fully 46% of multiracial parents say they talked to their adult children when they were growing up about having a mixed-race background. By contrast, about a third (32%) say their parents had similar conversations with them.

One-in-four mixed-race adults say people are often or sometimes confused by their racial background. And one-in-five (19%) say that they have felt like they were a go-between or "bridge" between different racial groups.

For multiracial adults, as for the general public, race is not the most important element of their personal identity. Some 26% of multiracial adults say their racial background is "essential" to their identity (as do 28% of all adults). Both multiracial adults and the general public are much more likely to point to gender (50% for multiracial adults, 51% for the general public) or religion (39% for both groups) as essential parts of their identity.

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Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers

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Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.-young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.

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Take this test to learn more about your own bias and learn how bias is the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.

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Social Justice Standards | Unpacking Identity

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Social Justice Standards | Unpacking Identity

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This is the first in a series of self-paced presentations for individuals, easily modified for a group.

ability to access audio and video on your device;

pen and paper;

and about one hour.

Learn

What is identity?

The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing or person is definitively recognized or known.

The set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group.

Source: Websters II New College Dictionary

Go Deeper

Think about how a person's different identity categories might create sameness as well as uniqueness.

Our identity consists of the various characteristics we use to categorize and define ourselves and the various characteristics that are constructed by those around us. Sometimes people only think of identity as those visible characteristics of a person, but sometimes our identity characteristics are invisible.

Read the following identity characteristics list:

Gender

Ethnicity

Race

Religion

Socioeconomic status

Language

Marital/relationship status

Parent or childless

Family size and composition

Sexual orientation

Education

Career

Think about which of these characteristics are visible, and which are invisible?

Apply

Think about the list of characteristics again. For each image, use the categories to describe the subject.

Look at the picture. Complete the table below.

Working in a cohort? Share your thoughts with a partner.

Go Deeper

Match the picture to its story.

Name: Elizabeth
I am a high school student. Everyone thinks that I am a Hispanic female. I am skinny and have long brown hair, and I wear glasses.

Name: Brandon
Everyone thinks that I am in high school. I am athletically built. I always get complimented on my smile, and people tell me that I must be happy all the time because of it.

Name: Guadalupe
I am Guadalupe. Everyone thinks that I am in grade school and a child. I am short and Latina. I have dark brown eyes and long brown hair. People always compliment me on my manners and say that I am very nice and polite.

Let's learn more about each of the subjects in the previous pictures.

Reflect

Take a few moments for reflection using these questions:

1. Did you match Elizabeth, Brandon and Guadalupe to their respective pictures?

2. What were the identity characteristics you established for each of their stories?

3. Why do you think you were successful or not successful in defining those categories for someone else?

4. What assumptions did you make in order to do that? What do those assumptions tell you about yourself?

5. What did you learn from their individual stories?

Working in a cohort? Share your answers with the group.

Now, let's spend some time thinking about our own identities.

The following activity will take you through a series of statements about your identity.

Step 1-Create a two-column chart like the one below on a sheet of paper.

Step 2-For each statement, offer one to three different endings. For example, if the statement begins with "I am," you can complete the sentence by saying a teacher, happy, a runner.

Go Deeper

You now have a list of approximately 21 statements that contribute to your personal identity. These are all important pieces that contribute to who you are.

Next, add a third column to your chart. Identify if each statement is visible/invisible/both.

How many of the characteristics you included in your list fit neatly into one of the following categories: Gender, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, Socioeconomic Status, Language, Sexual Orientation, Education, Career, Relationship Status?

Reflect

Take a moment to look back at the statements about yourself.

1. Were you surprised by any of your answers?

2. How do these statements help you to better understand who you are as a person?

3. What are the visible characteristics of your identity?

4. What are the invisible characteristics?

Learn

Now that you have begun to think about the many different pieces that make you unique, we will look at how we have developed this identity or how this identity is socially constructed.

Watch the Geneva Gay video then answer:

1. What does Gay say about the social construction of identity?

2. What does Gay say about the individual's capacity to independently construct him or herself?

3. What identity characteristics are socially constructed and which are independently constructed?

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas whole group.

Go Deeper

Geneva Gay talks about the many different characteristics of identity and how these characteristics can be used as baselines for the creation of identity. However, she is careful to warn that these baseline concepts should never be used as descriptions for specific individuals, but as a place to begin the conversation around the different categories and groups that we use to define others and ourselves.

Let's consider how this relates to Teaching Tolerance's Social Justice Standards.

Teaching Tolerance's Social Justice Standards establishes the following five standards within the Identity domain.

Students will:

ID.1. develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society;
ID.2. develop language and historical and cultural knowledge that affirm and accurately describe their membership in multiple identity groups;
ID.3. recognize that people's multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals;
ID.4. express pride, confidence and healthy self-esteem without denying the value and dignity of other people; and
ID.5. recognize traits of the dominant culture, their home culture and other cultures and understand how they negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces;

Consider what these standards might look like in a school setting through the following scenarios:

Scenario 1:

For show and tell, Joi brings in a picture of her family on a church camping trip. "My family goes camping a lot. I like camping," she says. "I'm a Christian, and sometimes my family goes camping with church. I'm also a big sister, so I have to help my parents take care of my little brother, especially when we go camping."

Which of the five identity standards are demonstrated in Joi's story?

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas with a partner.

Scenario 2:

Omar's mother is serving as a chaperone on her son's field trip. On the bus ride, the teacher, Ms. Robin, overhears a conversation between Omar and Peter. "What is your mother wearing on her head?" Peter asks.

"It's called a hijab," Omar replies. "Many Muslim women wear them."

"Why does she wear it?"

"Our religion teaches us that the hijab is a way of being humble and modest. Muslim women wear it to show they love God."

Which of the five identity standards are demonstrated in Omar and Peter's discourse?

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas with a partner.

Scenario 3:

Patrick is being raised in a traditional Christian home. This year in Mr. Sanderson's social studies class, he has been learning about the world's different beliefs systems. Patrick enjoys the company of friends from different religions and is interested in their beliefs and practices. Though he remains devout, he wonders if being curious makes him a bad Christian. Patrick talks to his Sunday school teacher Mrs. Patterson who assures him that he can be Christian and befriend and learn form people of different religions as well. In fact, her best friend of thirty years is a Jewish woman she grew up with!

Which of the five identity standards are demonstrated in Patrick's story?

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas with a partner.

Scenario 4:

As part of a class project, Rebecca completes the following personal mission statement: "I am more than one identity. I will celebrate all of my in-group and out-group identities and work to understand how they overlap to make up who I am as an individual. I will not allow others to put me into boxes." Rebecca explains to her peers in small group discussion that being a student, sister, female, Latina, Spanish speaker and dancer are all interconnected and equally important. She displays her personal mission statement on the outside of her class binder.

Review the identity anti-bias standards. Which identity standards are present in Rebecca's scenario?

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas with a partner.

Apply

Stop and think about your students.

How do your students display the identity anti-bias standards? How can you help your students develop these skills?

One way to help students develop these skills is by exploring the anti-bias standards through text.

The following text illustrates Identity standard 2: Students will develop language and historical and cultural knowledge that affirm and accurately describe their membership in multiple identity groups.

"The black woman's role has not been placed in its proper perspective, particularly in terms of the current economic and political upheaval in America today. Since time immemorial, the black man's emasculation resulted in the need of the black woman to assert herself in order to maintain some semblance of a family unit. And as a result of this historical circumstance, the black woman has developed perseverance; the black woman has developed strength; the black woman has developed tenacity of purpose and other attributes which today quite often are being looked upon negatively. She continues to be labeled a matriarch." ("The Twin Jeopardies of Race and Class" Shirley Chisholm)

The following text illustrates Identity standard 3: Students will recognize that people's multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals.

"I really had this idea that I could do everything a hundred percent. You know like you can be a hundred percent worker, a hundred percent mother, a hundred percent wife. And you can't. It's impossible. And you have these terrible decisions to make: Do you stay home? Do you work? Do you go after the brass ring in your career? What do you do with your children? You unconditionally love them and you would give anything for them. You would give up your life, you career, your home. It's complicated. It's complicated." ("StoryCorps: Job Interview" Tia Smallwood and Christine Smallwood)

Reflect

How can you use one of these texts in your class to facilitate the growth of students' understanding of identity?

Evaluate your materials.

Pick a text you currently use. Reference the text directly or think about the text, depending on your familiarity with it.

Evaluate the text's effectiveness to help students develop identity by answering the following question:

Which identity standard(s) is illustrated in this text and how?

Working in a cohort? Share your ideas as a group.

Learn

Let's examine identity in the classroom. Think about the following while watching the video.

What is unique about Anna's students? How does Anna's practice help her students develop positive identity?

Think about the following while listening to Robert.

What does Robert learn is important about the teacher's influence on student self-identity during his people colors activity?

Think about the following while listening again to Anna.

What is key to understanding the Social Justice Standard: "Students will recognize that people's multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals"?

Working in a cohort? Share your ideas as a group.

Go Deeper

Complete the following matrix thinking about what you observed from Robert's and Anna's videos. Return to watch the video(s) a second time if necessary.

Apply

Our identities are ever changing. Let's take a minute to revisit our goals and objectives for this module:

Define what shapes our identities

Understand the five identity anchor standards in the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards

Relate how identity has many characteristics and affects relationships within the school building and classroom

Set a SMART goal for your practice.

What specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and relevant, timely goal can you set for yourself in your practice that will help to facilitate identity understanding in your students?

In Summary

Although we construct our identities to some extent, society does, too.

Our identities affect the way we interact with the world.

Our identities affect the way the world interacts with us.
Meredith Schilsky is president and chief creative director of the Warehouse Project & Gallery.

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Social Justice Standards | Unpacking Identity

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This is the first in a series of self-paced presentations for individuals, easily modified for a group. ability to access audio and video on your device; pen and paper; and about one hour. What is identity? The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing or person is definitively recognized or known.

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INTERVIEW WITH BEVERLY DANIEL TATUM
edited transcript

Beverly Daniel Tatum, is a clinical psychologist, professor and President of Spelman College. She is an expert on race relations and author of Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community.

What is white privilege?

White people, who also have a race but don't always think about what it means to be white in a largely white-dominated society, sometimes struggle with the concept of white privilege. What are the benefits or the advantages to being white in a society that has historically given benefits and advantages to members of the dominant group? If you are a person who has that privilege, you don't necessarily notice it. It is sometimes taken for granted. Let's use the example of racial profiling. If you're driving on the highway and you are not randomly stopped, you don't get to the end of your drive and say, "Gee, I wasn't randomly stopped today." You just take for granted that you got in your car, drove to your destination, without incident, like you do most days. It's not something that you think of as a function of being a white person in this society, you know?

If you go looking for an apartment and you find the apartment you like, and you rent it without difficulty, you don't say, "Gee, I benefited from being white today. I got that apartment I wanted." If you go shopping in the grocery store and find hair care products and make-up that work for you, you don't think, "Gee, I'm benefiting from being white today. The hair care products I need and the make-up I want were readily available for me."

Can I find opportunities to express my culture if I'm of Asian or Latino descent? How often during the course of a day will I be asked if I speak English, or how long I've been in this country? Will the physical symbol of my face always mark me as a foreigner? These are not things that white people think about on a day-to-day basis - they just take it for granted.

In one of my courses at Holyoke, "The Psychology of Racism," I ask students on the first day of class to get in small groups and talk about themselves in terms of their own racial or ethnic backgrounds. In one of my sessions, that there was a young white woman in a small group talking about these issues, and she was struggling with how to describe herself in terms of her race or ethnicity. Finally she said, "I'm just normal."

When asked what did she mean in that context, she said, "You know, I lived in an all-white neighborhood. I grew up with people a lot like myself, and I was just like everybody else - I was just the norm."

What I think is so significant about her choice of words - to say "I'm just normal" - is that it implies that those around you, who weren't from that background, are "abnormal." She never would have said that, but it is embedded in how we think.

How does a person support racist systems without being personally racist?

Many people say "But I'm not racist. I don't have prejudiced beliefs. As a white person, am I racist, simply because I live in a society in which I'm systematically advantaged?"

For me the relevant issue is not, "Are you racist?" but are you actively working against that system of advantage? Active racism is what I think many people would stereotypically think of as "racist behavior": name-calling, acts of racial violence, intentional discrimination, cross burning, etc.

But there is a lot of behavior that also supports a system of advantage that we might describe as passively racist. For example, in education - if I am teaching a course in which I exclude the contributions of people of color, only talk about white people's contributions and only talk about white literature. And I never introduce my students to the work of African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans. I may not be doing that with the intention of promoting a sense of cultural superiority, but in fact the outcome of leaving those contributions out is to reinforce the idea that only white people have made positive cultural contributions.

I know a young woman who went to her English professor and asked, "Why is it that there are only white writers on our list? This is a 20th Century American Literature course. How come there aren't any writers of color?" Her professor, to his credit, was quite honest and said I'm teaching the authors I studied in graduate school. It wasn't malice on his part. He didn't wake up one day and say, "Over my dead body will there be writers of color on my syllabus." He was simply teaching the authors with whom he was most familiar.

Another example of individuals supporting racist systems can be found in our lending institutions. I might be an individual loan officer who considers herself to be quite progressive, very open minded; a person with limited, if any, prejudice. And yet I might work for a bank that has the practice of charging higher percentage rates to people who live in particular neighborhoods - specifically neighborhoods that have been redlined. So when a person of color from that neighborhood comes to see me, my own inclination might be to give that person a favorable loan. But if the policy of the bank is to give loans at a particular rate in a particular neighborhood, I might enact that policy, apart from my individual attitude, and in my decision-making reinforce the institutional racism embedded in that practice.

If we want to interrupt these cycles, we have to be quite intentional about it. Even without any malicious intents, such passive acts of giving into certain institutions or traditions will perpetuate systems of advantage based on race.

What are the obstacles to an equal society? Why can't we be "colorblind"?

Does creating more equitable environments mean loss for some people? That's what the controversy around issues like affirmative action is about. It feels like a loss, people feel like opportunities are being taken away from them. They don't necessarily see that there is a gain for the whole society, and perhaps even for them, by creating opportunities for everybody to contribute more fairly. It's not just about taking things away, it's about creating a better environment for everyone. A safer environment - a more just environment is a more peaceful environment. Martin Luther King said there is no peace without justice. We live in a world that is increasingly torn by violence, not always described as racially motivated violence, but violence which is very much related to systems of oppression. And to the extent that we're able to interrupt those systems, we're able to create a better quality of life for everyone.

Part of the problem is that people often struggle with the concept of meritocracy. They grow up with this notion that we live in a meritocracy, that people get what they deserve. It is an idea that has been part of their socialization. And to understand racism, or sexism or classism, or other isms as systems of advantage based on race or social group membership - these really fly in the face of that notion of meritocracy.

Think about the government assistance in home financing that took place for the World War II generation in the 1950's. Who got access to those loans? Where were those new houses being built? In the suburbs. And what resulted from the racially-restrictive covenants that blocked access to that new housing for people of color? If you got a government loan with your GI Bill and bought a house in an all-white area and that house appreciated in value - that was all made more available to you as consequence of racist policies and practices. To the child of that parent, it looks like my father worked hard, bought a house, passed his wealth on to me, made it possible for me to go to school, mortgaged that house so I could have a relatively debt-free college experience, and has financed my college education. How come your father didn't do that? Well, there are some good reasons why maybe your father might have had a harder time doing that if you're African American or Latino or Native American, or even Asian American.

The best response to the colorblind notion I have ever heard came to me from an African American father who I was interviewing for a study I was doing on the experiences of black youth in predominantly white communities.

He was talking about his experiences with his children in school. They were often the only black children in a mostly white class. And he talked about the teachers who would say something like, "I'm color blind. I treat all the kids the same, all the children the same."

And his response was, "The same as what? The same as if they were all white? My children, as the only black children in the class, are not having the same experience as the white children in that class. The white children are seeing themselves reflected in the schoolbooks, in the classroom teacher. My children are sometimes called names that white children don't hear themselves being called. Their experience is not the same. So for you to say you're colorblind, that you're treating the children all the same, is to say that you're not acknowledging the reality of my child's day-to-day experience, and that feels very invalidating."

Doesn't the existence of multicultural curricula in the United States prove that we're making progress?

We use diversity as an umbrella term to describe the differences among people - whether those differences are cultural, religious, socioeconomic, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, etc. When we think about the benefits of diversity, I think we have to think about the fact that we are not interested in bringing people together just so we can say, "I know somebody who is different from me." It's not just about getting to know people as friends, though certainly there can be very important and useful friendships that emerge in diverse environments. But when I think about diversity and the value of it, I think about really different approaches to problem solving, different approaches to thinking about our society that might lead us to more equitable systems, the various talents that people bring.

In some schools they try to address diversity through what we might describe as a celebration of heroes and holidays. We are going to talk about Martin Luther King in January or February. We are going to have this day where we are celebrating holidays and people are going to bring in foods from different backgrounds, and it's a fairly superficial discussion of diversity, without really engaging in the meaning of that diversity in people's lives.

So for example, as an African American, I might come to school and talk about the holiday Kwaanza as part of diversity celebrations in the school. I happen to be in a family where we do celebrate Kwaanza as well as Christmas. However, if that is all we talk about in terms of my heritage, then I would feel like we had missed the boat. We have to be clear that it's not just understanding that he eats beans and rice, and she eats egg rolls and this person celebrates Kwanza. It's not about that. It is also about understanding the history of the way those groups have been treated in our society, and what we need to do to interrupt that history; to interrupt that current situation in terms of making sure that everybody has equal access.

So it's not just understanding somebody's heroes and holidays, but it's also understanding issues of social justice and how the society operates in ways that systematically advantages some members of our community, and systematically disadvantages other members of our community.

And if we can use our understanding of diversity in those terms and can connect with one another as allies working towards a more socially just environment, then I think we have really maximized the benefit of diversity.

How does racism affect everyone?

When I speak to audiences about this topic of race and racism, one of the questions that I often ask is for them to reflect on their own earliest race-related memory. In general, you can say that people of color tend to have earlier memories - particularly if they grew up in the United States - than those who are white. Having said that, when you ask them what emotion is associated with this early memory, almost everyone, both people of color and white people, will talk about things like fear, anger, sadness, shame, embarrassment, sometimes guilt.

What's really striking to me about this is not only do so many people have this experience, but when asked if they had discussed their experience with an adult or a parent or a teacher at the time, many people said they did not. They already knew that it was a topic you weren't supposed to talk about. Somehow the adults in the environment had communicated to them that this is something we don't discuss. Sometimes the people of color will say I was upset by what happened to me, and I was too embarrassed to tell anybody else about it. Sometime white adults will say that it was a trusted adult who was the source of the confusion. One of the things that makes the process so insidious is that it comes from people we know, love and trust. It's your mother who rented the videotape that was full of stereotypical images. It's your favorite uncle who tells the jokes at Thanksgiving. It's your next door neighbor who makes the casual comments that imbeds. It's your favorite English teacher who leaves writers of color off the syllabus.

What's really significant to me about this is not only that people have these negative experiences, but they've also internalized the idea that we shouldn't talk about it. And that, I think, is really problematic if we are ever going to get beyond the issue of racism as an impediment to social justice in our society because we have to be able to talk about it order to move beyond it.

Why do some people voluntarily separate themselves socially based on race?

People are naturally drawn to people who they see as being familiar. However, if you want to connect with somebody who is different from yourself, you have to be able to understand where is that person coming from. And one of the things that I've observed when we talk about, for example, racial group differences, is that students of color often come already thinking about themselves as members of particular groups. Whereas white students don't necessarily come to college thinking of themselves as quote white.

That, I think, is important in terms of how young people are coming together. Because if I'm coming to school thinking about myself as African American, or Latina, or African American, and I'm interacting with white students -- many of whom may have grown up thinking that the thing to do is to be colorblind. And that white student, in her effort to connect with me, says something like, "Gee, I don't think of you as a black person." Or, "Why do you put so much emphasis on being a Latina?" Or, "Why is being African American so important to you?"

And if that is a very important part of my adolescent identity development process, just asking me that question is going to signal to me that you don't get it, that you don't understand where I'm coming from. Then I have to decide do I want to explain myself to you, or not? I might be willing to explain, once or twice. But if I find that everybody I meet outside of my group needs an explanation, that might get a little old. I might get tired of that.

So I might choose to hang around with people to whom I don't have to explain why I wear my hair the way I do, or why I like to listen to this kind of music as opposed to that kind of music. Or why I speak Spanish on the phone to my mother. That if I don't want to explain certain parts of myself frequently, I might choose to hang around with people who are similar to me. And that's an understandable response.

Generally speaking, identity questions really start to come to the surface during adolescence. That's when young people really start to think, "Who am I? What do I want to be when I grow up? How do I want to interact with other people in the world? Who do I want to connect with?" All of these are questions about identity.

But when you talk to young people of color, many of their identity questions are linked to their sense of themselves as members of a particular racial or ethnic group; not only who am I, but who am I as an African American woman? Who am I as an African American male? Who am I as a Latina? Who am I as a Cherokee? When you talk to young white people, they may be thinking about who they are and who they want to relate to, and how they want to think about themselves in the world. But it may not necessarily be linked to their sense of what it means to be white - particularly if they've grown up in a predominantly white community, or gone to predominantly white schools.

Now you might ask why do so many young people of color think about their racial group membership? If white kids aren't thinking about it, why are kids of color thinking about it? And one of the reasons they're thinking about it is because other people bring it to their attention.

How do cultural influences (television, media, etc.) make whiteness the norm and people of color "the other"?

Certainly if we're talking about white people living in predominantly white communities, it is certainly true that many people will grow up without having direct contact with people of color. And because they don't have that direct contact, the information that they have is coming to them largely from second hand sources; maybe from the television they've watched, the movies they've seen, the jokes they hear people tell, the casual comments they hear relatives making. So that the information is coming in stereotyped packages, typically.

One of the problems with stereotyping and the self-fulfilling nature of it, is that if you've heard these things, and then you meet somebody, you are likely to look for those characteristics.

Certainly if we think about how young children begin to understand race and the images that they are exposed to, we can say that white children receive many images in which they see themselves reflected. Their parents go to the library, they check out library books, and they see white children in them. They watch television, they see white children playing. Which is not to say they never see messages or images of people of color, but they're seeing lots of white images -- not only on television but in their homes, in their families, in their neighborhoods. So as a consequence of that, they will tend to think of white as the norm.

One of the things that we know about white children is that they often express curiosity about that which they perceive as different. You know, the white child in the grocery store who might see a dark-skinned person for the first time saying, "Mommy, mommy, why is that person so dark?" They're not asking, "Mommy, mommy, why are we so light?" The question is framed in terms of the other.

On the other hand, young children of color growing up, even if they live in environments that are fairly homogenous - black kids growing up in black neighborhoods, Latino children in Latino neighborhoods, etc. - are going to also be bombarded with images of white people in the media, in the books they get from the library, in the television they watch. So that even though they may be surrounded by a community in which they see themselves reflected, in terms of the bigger society, they, too, are also watching the same television programs, reading the same children's books, exposed to the same curricula in school, etc. So children of color don't necessarily start out asking why do white people look the way they do, but why do I look the way I do? Young children come to understand the wider world in terms as one that is dominated by white people.

How can we have control over racial stereotypes?

"The Lion King" was a very popular film, and my kids saw it more than once, I will confess. However, when I watched it with them, I pointed out some concerns I had. I told my children that I was bothered by the fact that the hyenas - who were the bad guys of the film - have voices that make them sound like black people and Spanish speaking people. Now, some people would say I'm making too much of that. But think about the fact that young children watch movies like this repeatedly and these messages are seen over and over again. They do have an effect on how we view others.

Now, am I saying that you should never let your children see a film that has a stereotype in it? No. What I'm saying is that you need to help your kids think critically about them so they can recognize them as stereotypes and think critically about whether they make sense or not.

Once, while we were driving through a city not far from where we live, my son saw a young black man running down the street. He said to me, "Why is that kid running?" I said, "I don't know why he's running. Why do you think he's running?" And my son said, "Maybe he stole something." And I was horrified to hear him make that comment. Where would he have gotten that idea?

So I said, "Well, what would make you think so?" He said, "You know, we're in a city. Sometimes people in cities steal things." And I pointed out that we have been in the city many times, parked our car, and never had a problem. I've had one thing stolen from my car in my life, and that happened in the small town, predominantly white, in which I live now. Well clearly he sees the nightly news. He watches television. He had absorbed those messages.

Books, computer games, the Web, television - there are so many places that we can be exposed to stereotypes, that we can be exposed to distorted information. And there is a whole universe of information that we're not getting. Think about these stereotypes, these omissions, these distortions as a kind of environment that surrounds us, like smog in the air. We don't breathe it because we like it. We don't breathe it because we think it's good for us. We breathe it because it's the only air that's available.

And in the same way, we're taking in misinformation not because we want it. When you or your child sits in front of the television on Saturday morning watching cartoons, you're not saying let's have our daily diet of stereotypes today. But you're being exposed to them because they're just there, in the commercials, in the images that you're watching. And it's so pervasive that you don't even notice it sometimes. In fact, a lot of the time you don't notice it.

We're all breathing in misinformation. We're all being exposed to stereotypes, and we all have to think about how we have been impacted by that. You sometimes hear people say there is not a prejudiced bone in my body. But I think when somebody makes that statement, we might gently say to them check again. That if we have all been breathing in smog, we can't help but have have our thinking shaped by it somehow. As a consequence, we all have work to do. Whether you identify as a person of color, whether you identify as a white person, it doesn't matter. We all have been exposed to misinformation that we have to think critically about.

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RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings | PBS

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INTERVIEW WITH BEVERLY DANIEL TATUM edited transcript Beverly Daniel Tatum, is a clinical psychologist, professor and President of Spelman College. She is an expert on race relations and author of Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community.

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Why did you enter the field of education? No matter your years of experience or journey, you can count on someone who will ask you to reflect on your "why." A majority of professionals unpack their why with narratives of positive educational experiences or an inspirational teacher. I feel awkward during those moments because, when given the opportunity to speak my truth, the conversation shifts drastically.My pathway into education was not ignited by what teachers did for me, but rather by what those who were responsible for my growth and learning did not do and the lack of intentionality to create an identity-affirming environment.

As a Black student, I attended an elementary school that lacked racial diversity. I did not see many students or any teacher who looked like me. There was not a space for dialogues about humanity in ways that would foster global consciousness. A diversity of literature depicting Indigenous, Black, or people of color was not accessible, and textbooks presented a singular story steeped in Eurocentric worldviews. My school's educators failed to understand how identity validation and inclusive environments are catalysts to students' success. I struggled to feel seen. How can educational leaders claim that schools demonstrate excellence if equity is not at the forefront of systems, policies, or pedagogical practices?

Three decades later, I serve as a chief equity and inclusion officer and work with K-12 students, teachers, and educational leaders to create spaces that foster belonging and dismantle systems that maintain marginalization. In my district, student clubs such as the Student Alliance for Equity, Black Student Union, Future Black Leaders, Latino Student Alliance, and Muslim Student Association talk about the root causes of cultural disconnections. Through their conversations, I have been reminded of my childhood and try to amplify their voices to ensure that racially and ethnically diverse students feel visible.

When we assert that we see all students as the same, we dehumanize and discount their experiences, perspectives, and identities. Racial experiences are real, and the classroom can be a space where all students unpack the impact of implicit bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. Race-conscious educators must embrace discomfort. We need to examine our beliefs and the experiences that shape how we respond to others, but courageous conversations about cultural and racial differences do not happen by chance.

To have these conversations in my school community, we have formed Racial Dialogue Circles with administrators, teachers, and families that engage small groups around race. The series ends with a community action plan for racial equity. Many of our teachers and administrators also participate in Undoing Racism trainings to combat colorblindness. If we can acknowledge that people have different experiences within the same community, we can be cognizant of the power structures that create variance within students' school experiences.

Teachers analyze achievement gaps and data pertaining to disciplinary referrals and exceptional learners. However, we don't often reflect on systems, biases, and practices we have created that breed inequitable outcomes.

Students have reminded me that disproportionalities in the data communicate how educational leaders value equity and foster stereotype threats, which are a contributing factor of racial and gender achievement gaps. When students of color are overidentified for special education services and disciplinary referrals and not in advanced placement (AP) or high-ability courses, the visible disproportionality conditions people to adopt stereotypical beliefs about Black and Brown students' behaviors and intelligence. Instead of delving into the origins of unbalanced outcomes, there is a tendency to initiate a "how to fix students of color" conversation. It is easier to make a student the scapegoat for low performance rather than question the delivery of instruction or relational issues.

When I ask students of color to share their insight regarding the lack of representation in AP courses, I often hear stories related to self-doubt, discouragement from peers who lack confidence in their own capabilities, or how an adult convinced them to consider a "manageable" academic load. Students of color can sense deficit thinking and need to see leaders taking steps to eradicate barriers.

Students tell me that teachers give them fist bumps in the hallways every day, but that does not equate to a relationship. To have a relationship is to understand and disrupt the structural barriers. Representation matters, and when it is lacking, we have to question the cause.

My childhood school experience reflects the same historical content that many students are still spoon-fed today. It is difficult to understand your identity, cultural diversity, and parallels between the past and present when history is taught from a Eurocentric worldview. When students of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds are not able to learn about their history, they are forced to function within an oppressive environment absent of multiple perspectives.

Numerous textbooks fail to emphasize multicultural perspectives. Researcher Geneva Gay asserts that textbooks offer a narrow focus on African Americans in comparison to other ethnic groups and use partial accounts of slave trade and selective chronicles of social activism to create a contrived pathway to equality. Students might be familiar with the story of Dr. Martin Luther King but never learn the work of Ella Baker or Fred Shuttlesworth.

In 2019, we should not have to subject elementary students into dressing up as pilgrims and Indigenous people to capture a singular story. Students want to see cultural studies as course requirements, not electives. Importantly, students of color want teachers to be aware when perspectives are missing and include supplemental resources, texts, and experts who share counter-stories. Who is recognized? Who is forgotten? We owe our students a culturally responsive education that doesn't skew history.

It is imperative to give students opportunities to be a part of the change they would like to see. We need to understand what school looks like through their eyes, what drives connections to the classroom environment, and what causes students to disengage.

I openly discuss systems of support with students and the ways in which school officials or policies have fallen short. I don't collect narratives to file away in a drawer; they shape the way I develop learning experiences for school leaders. For instance, when I conduct equity-related trainings for teachers, administrators, and community partners, I discuss racial microaggressions and the impact they have on the mental health of students of color; racism and implicit bias cause high anxiety as well as depression.

When I talk to students of color about their emotional health, I learn that their anxieties typically stem from the lack of an identity-affirming environment where racial experiences are acknowledged. It's important to provide a space for students to share living experiences, whether through student clubs or focus groups. Ask students in what ways they feel seen or heard and how you can collectively create an environment that honors their identity.

As educators, we strive to have relationships with students, but we must recognize that relationships are not only about niceness. If we neglect to validate racial identities, omit multiple perspectives, and uphold disparities, our actions will convey a different message about our intentions and the connections we want to establish. We can create safe and brave spaces for students if we strive to see the world through their lens. To understand our bias (from which no one is exempt), the Harvard Implicit Bias Test, tips for immersion in outside perspectives, and Sara Ahmed's book Being the Change can be helpful tools.

Before we can begin to understand the humanity of others, we have to understand our own identity and the ways we have been socialized to interact with the world. We all play a critical part in developing identity-safe spaces that affirm learners and their racial experiences. The work never stops.

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Identity-Affirming Schools Need Race-Conscious Educators - ASCD

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Why did you enter the field of education? No matter your years of experience or journey, you can count on someone who will ask you to reflect on your "why." A majority of professionals unpack their why with narratives of positive educational experiences or an inspirational teacher.

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How One District Learned to Talk about Races 

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How One District Learned to Talk about Races 

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Sponsored by Pear Deck and Kiddom

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When it comes to improving the way we serve diverse populations, most schools have been throwing a whole lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks: one-day trainings, book studies, attending sessions at conferences, bringing in speakers. There are a lot of people doing great work in equity, so we use what we find when we find it and squeeze it in with all the other initiatives meant to make our schools better.

If this sounds familiar, you may be starting to feel like this piecemeal approach is lacking cohesion, that even though you and your colleagues have been shifting your practices to some degree, something is missing. Maybe it's that only some staff members are really on board with the changes, while you're sensing resistance from others. Or behaviors are changing, but you get the feeling that hearts and minds are not fully present. Or it could be that you're addressing some equity-related problems, but not in a consistent way across the board.

One school district that found itself in this situation was Broward County Public Schools in Florida, the sixth largest school district in the United States. Broward County encompasses 31 cities and serves nearly 300,000 students from widely diverse backgrounds, representing nearly 200 different languages and cultures.

Superintendent Robert Runcie (left) with a group of Broward students.

David Watkins, Broward's Director of Equity and Diversity, says that although district leaders had always implemented progressive policies and worked to reach their most vulnerable youth, the work was disjointed. "What we found was a lot of pockets of good work," he says, "but not a systemic process to make sure that it gets into the hands of teachers across the system as end users."

Just as in so many districts across the country, there was a cultural mismatch between the teaching population and the students they served. "Educators (were) struggling to understand the populations they were serving and how to apply some of the policies and practices we were implementing."

Current events added another layer of difficulty: Teachers felt ill-equipped when students wanted to talk about the racially charged stories that kept coming up in the news. For fear of getting these conversations wrong, many teachers simply changed the subject. Watkins sensed that they needed help. "How do they allow this very important rich conversation to take place in their rooms but not make themselves vulnerable to a misstep in communication and potentially cost them their job?"

David Watkins, Director of Equity and Diversity for Broward County Public Schools

Talk as a Foundation

It's not easy to talk about race. Regardless of your ethnic background, conversations about race feel like they are loaded with land mines just waiting to go off. People get defensive. Or scared. No one wants to say the wrong thing. So a lot of times, we avoid talking about race altogether.

And that's not good. Because race definitely impacts our schools, our students, and our work as educators, and if we're ever going to make real progress on race-related issues, we need to be able to talk about it in open, honest, and productive ways.

That's the idea behind Courageous Conversations About Race, an online course that teaches participants how to talk about race. In February 2018, Broward County enrolled 300 of its educators in the course, and the results have been significant. Participants, who describe the course as life-changing, say they wish every educator would take it.

The course, powered by PCG's EducatorEd, is built around the idea that one of the biggest barriers to making progress on race-based issues is people's discomfort with talking about it, so it gives participants the tools they need to have these challenging conversations.

The course begins by helping educators understand why talking about race is important, "to help them to understand how difference plays out, what differences are, and why understanding that actually improves their productivity and their work," explains Glenn Singleton, who created the course. "Diversity training tends not to work in its traditional form (because) we don't address the why up front."

During the process of exploring the why, the course also helps teachers deeply examine their own beliefs and equips them with tools for talking about it. One set of tools is called the Four Agreements.

The Four Agreements of Courageous Conversations

A key component of the Courageous Conversations protocol is the Four Agreements, rules for engaging in these challenging discussions. Even without taking the course, learning about these four agreements can shed light on what it takes to make progress in a conversation about race.

1. Stay Engaged

"In our society," Singleton says, "we have given permission to disengage from this conversation." So making a commitment to stay engaged, rather than leaving when things get uncomfortable, ensures that the important conversation will actually happen.

2. Speak Your Truth

"Come to this conversation with a willingness to share what's real for us, even if what's real for us is not what's real for others," Singleton says. This is a lot easier said than done, however, which naturally leads to the third agreement.

Glenn Singleton, author and creator of Courageous Conversations About Race

3. Experience Discomfort

"We have to get good at being uncomfortable," Singleton says. "We're actually building the educator's capacity to stay engaged as it becomes uncomfortable, to raise my capacity to be uncomfortable. We call that productive disequilibrium."

4. Expect and Accept Non-Closure

"We can't have educators frustrated because they can't fix it, tie it up in a bow, and have it done," explains Singleton. "It's something that is still persistent in our society. There is still a challenge that we're facing at the larger level, and so we need to be able to stay engaged, even though the final solution isn't yet in sight."

Outcomes for Broward

Of the 300 participants who enrolled in the course, only three did not complete it. Everyone else gave overwhelmingly positive reviews.

"When we did the surveys," Watkins says, "we struggled to find anyone critical. They believed that this was something that they'd been waiting for, that having this type of online experience, addressing something that's been this taboo, and equipping them with the resources to better communicate with their own students, was something they had not seen before."

The effects of the course went beyond teachers' individual attitudes and behaviors, prompting many of them to take on more of a leadership role when it came to equity.

"You had a lot of teachers who said, you know what? I was thinking about leaving education. Now I'm actually thinking about not only staying, but doing something more impactful," Watkins says. "When I started looking at the signatures of a lot of the teachers who had gone through the course, they put 'equity liaison' as their signature. They then become the point person in their school, the go-to person for school leadership and for colleagues to ask questions, to facilitate conversation, experiences, and opportunities related to what they learned through the course."

Singleton has seen this type of growth many times in teaching this course, and he attributes much of it to the course's approach of meeting people where they are.

"Wherever you enter is perfect, and everyone is entering from their own place," he says. "You're not in this training to reference yourself to another person or another group of people. You are referencing yourself from where you begin to where you end. And if you can experience growth and understanding, consciousness and healing, as you make that progression, that's what enables you to develop the high level of efficacy to transform your practice in the classroom. And that's what you're seeing now in Broward."

"I watch human transformation happen in a relatively short period of time around a topic that so many believe is intractable," he says. "And this to me is what makes my work, I think, the best work in the world."

To learn more about the course, visit the PCG EducatorEd website. You can also check out the book by clicking the book cover below:

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How One District Learned to Talk About Race

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Working for Racial Justice as a White Teacher 

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Working for Racial Justice as a White Teacher 

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Robert Roth on an anti-racist approach to high-school history

Camilo Hunica

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
One of this year's largest youth-led Black Lives Matter protests took place on June 3 in front of Mission High School in San Francisco, where Robert Roth taught U.S. History and Ethnic Studies from 2005 until he retired in 2018. Roth was in the crowd, listening to teenage speakers who were urging white people like himself-including white educators, who make up 79 percent of the U.S. teaching force-to step up as allies in the fight for racial justice.

It was a message that Roth has been attuned to for a long time. In 1964, when Roth was himself a teenager, he joined what became the nation's largest anti-school-segregation boycott in New York City. As a student at Columbia University in 1968, he was a key part of one of the largest college anti-war and anti-racist protests of that era. And since he first started teaching in San Francisco in 1988, Roth has been grappling with what it means to be an anti-racist teacher working in majority Black and Latino schools.

For Roth, in his 30 years in education this meant changing his curricula to highlight the role people of color played in transforming our society; helping develop the ethnic-studies program at Mission High School; working with students and teachers to make ethnic studies a part of every high school in San Francisco Unified District today; and learning from his students and from teachers of color about how to make his classrooms work for everyone, so that all students feel intellectually challenged and engaged.

More in this series

In conversations in 2018 and 2020, I asked Roth to reflect on how he approached teaching U.S. history as an anti-racist educator. This Q&A has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Kristina Rizga: As part of your U.S. history class this year, you recently taught a unit on the civil-rights movement. Can you talk about the content of this unit?

Robert Roth: The traditional history of the civil-rights movement-the one that you find in most history textbooks-goes from 1954 to 1965. It starts with Brown v. Board of Education and then focuses on Dr. King and Rosa Parks and nonviolent civil disobedience. It ends with the march in Selma, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and then the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It is a triumphal story of the successful end to legal segregation, and Black people securing voting rights.

I teach the events that are part of this narrative, but I also teach about the massive protests in the North over police brutality and segregated housing that happened at the same time. I teach that in 1965, after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the Watts Rebellion took place over racist police practices, and that the fight against police violence and voter suppression continues to this day. The Movement for Black Lives is a continuation of this fight, and not just something that started a few years ago. We study Dr. King and Rosa Parks, but we also study Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Black Panther Party. We use resources like the Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools to help reframe the curriculum.

History is made by masses of people, not just by three or four great leaders. If all you teach is the history of icons, it doesn't place any of our students in that history. When students learn, for example, about the Children's March in Birmingham or the Chicano student-led walkouts in East Los Angeles in 1968, they can see themselves in these movements and can see that young people just like them have changed the world. Especially at a time like today, when Black and brown youth are leading such a powerful new wave of activism, this is so important. History is happening right now, and a history class can be a window into the ways in which the past and present are intricately connected.

Rizga: What do students produce as work in your classroom?

Roth: They do everything! They write essays, work on group presentations, write poems, act out scenarios from the past, imagine themselves as part of any given historical moment, do research papers and reflection pieces, analyze text, and create beautiful posters with their own point of view about what they are learning. They present their work to their classmates, publish pieces to share with other classes, and debate current issues. Their imagination and creativity always amaze me.

I'm always giving feedback, pushing students to analyze text and not just summarize it, to use evidence to back up their opinions. But I don't want to thwart their own intellectual energy. I want them to have the space to explore and take risks and to think deeply about a subject, not just memorize a random fact or date. I want the classroom to come alive with their thoughts and their voices.

Rizga: What are some of the most important things you've learned about grading and commenting on student work?

Roth: It's really important to let students know that you will be in dialogue with them about all aspects of their work, including their grades. If a student knows that they are seen and heard, they can handle critique and challenge. But if they feel condescension or disrespect, they will very often tune out. An effective teacher is able to name a student's strengths, and not just their weaknesses. If the back-and-forth is just negative-looking at what's not there, picking on what a student doesn't yet know how to do-then that's a recipe for disengagement. And in order to understand the student's strength, you have to understand the student. Where is this young person coming from? What are the ways in which you see their brilliance, their intellect? What are the areas in which you can define clearly that they need improvement, and how do you engage with them for a year in those areas? This academic dialogue with students is really the centerpiece of a year's work.

I love to look at student work. I love to see what their ideas are, what strikes them, how they are growing academically. And I want to get right in the middle of their process and muck around with them as we figure out together how to build their skills. That means reading carefully what they write, not just correcting grammar without commenting on their ideas. And it means drawing lessons about my own teaching from their work: What do I have to teach better? What was unclear in what I asked students to do? What concepts do I need to teach more clearly?

When you have a system based on grades, you have to give consistent feedback so that students know how their work is being evaluated. If you're not in that kind of consistent academic dialogue with them, then you are holding all the power: Students have no idea what you want, and they have few ways to challenge how they are being graded. At Mission High, teachers meet regularly to share student work, and to figure out how to give meaningful feedback to help students grow. And we try, as best as we can, to return work on a regular basis-not just put it in a folder and give it back at the end of a marking period.

Rizga: How do you build relationships with your students?

Roth: First, have a sense of humor. A high-school teacher is working with teenagers. If you don't have a sense of humor, forget it. Having said that, the core of my relationship with students is about their academic success. Yes, many students will connect with me about challenges in their lives or just to talk, and my door is always open. If I sense something is wrong, or I learn about a struggle outside of class, I will reach out. And if I hear about a student's success in another class or something that they've done in the community, I'm all over it.

But the center of our relationship is about school. I'm cautious about invading their private space if they're not reaching out to me. But they know that I care about their success, that they can talk to me at any time about the class, about their grade, about their other classes. And that I will take their work seriously, remember what they did on the last project, highlight their achievements, and never give up on them. That's the core of it.

Rizga: What advice do you have for white educators who, like you, work mostly with Black and Latino students and want to develop an anti-racist teaching practice?

Roth: Everything we've been talking about this entire interview relates to anti-racist teaching. It's about respecting our students, engaging with them, giving young people the space to show their own intellect and scholarship, and having all of this inform our practice as teachers. I've been teaching for 30 years, but I always look to learn more from my students, from their parents and guardians, from their communities, and from my colleagues of color. I have never forgotten that their lives are very different from mine. I have been schooled continually to listen and to learn and to actively support and fight for the leadership of people of color. As a teacher, I am always attentive to cues from my students about what they need, what kind of relationship they want to build with me as a teacher.

You're not just the teacher of students of color; you are teaching within Black and brown communities that are being marginalized and gentrified in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of our students are undocumented and have had harrowing experiences getting and staying here. When there is a challenge to DACA, it impacts so many of them and their families. And yet here they are, each day in class, hanging in and doing their work. As a white educator, I think you have to see all of this and feel it and stretch yourself across boundaries.

Rizga: What are some of the key moments in your career that contributed to professional growth?

Roth: Early on in my teaching career, I was part of an educators' network called IRISE, which was led by Black teachers throughout the Bay Area. IRISE challenged teachers to reflect on their work with Black students; to study the pedagogy developed by Black educators like Asa Hilliard, Theresa Perry, and Noma LeMoine, to name just a few; and to be change-makers at our own schools. I've tried to do that throughout my years of teaching.

I've also been teaching partners with many teachers of color, including Pirette McKamey, who is now the first Black principal at Mission High, and who has been the touchstone for my development as an educator throughout these 30 years. That study, those relationships are so fundamental for white educators who want to grow as anti-racist educators. Anti-racist teaching involves more than changing curriculum. It demands a deep, heartfelt love for the students that we teach. You have to develop relationships with students that are very deep and that transcend just their years in high school. I don't think there's a formula, but you have to approach all of this as a lifelong journey.

As for curriculum: It's an exciting time to be a history teacher, because the teaching of history is being challenged more than at any time I can remember. That's why President Trump has gone out of his way to attack sites like the Zinn Education Project and the 1619 Project. The white-male supremacist narrative about U.S. history is beginning to be turned on its head, and anti-racist history teachers are confronted with rising to the challenge. How do we help students make sense of this period? How do we teach about the origins of policing in the U.S.? How the prison system exploded as a system of social control against Black people in the period following Reconstruction? How do we address the rise of anti-Chinese racism in this period? How do we make time to cover something like the Mendez v. Westminster case, because it shows so clearly the connections between Black and Latinx movements? Or the ways in which the coronavirus has impacted Native people on Pine Ridge Reservation?

Rizga: Which fundamental changes to the overall system would make educators more effective?

Roth: For one thing, there has to be a priority on the education of Black and brown students: More resources, higher pay for teachers in schools that serve these communities, incentives for experienced and successful teachers to stay in these schools. I think that education programs have to recruit teachers of color and be much more attuned to anti-racist pedagogy that has been out there for a long time.

Teachers should not have to teach five classes. They need more time to look at student work, to meet with colleagues, and to revise curriculum. This is all about how much money a society is willing to devote to the education of children. In a city like San Francisco, where there is so much private money, the school system is always facing budget cuts. How can that be? Veteran teachers who have honed their craft and been successful with students need to be given time to mentor new teachers.

I think that the whole standardized-testing system, which has been a billion-dollar industry, is a cruel joke. There needs to be a much more holistic system to evaluate schools, keep educators accountable for the outcomes of Black and brown students, and not just show us differences in income, race, and access. I've watched these tests be redesigned for 30 years, and they are still doing the same thing: showing you differences in opportunities and then replicating disadvantages.

Rizga: What advice would you give to new teachers coming in now?

Roth: I would say, "Hang in there." It's an incredibly rewarding journey. The first few years are going to be more than hard, but they will also be so exciting. Find some mentors that you trust, really get to know your students, and don't give up quickly. You can't become an effective teacher in two years. You have to go through the bumps, and each year the rewards get greater.

Teachers are glorified on the one hand, but on the other hand, disrespected and not seen as scholars or thinkers-instead as people who just deliver information and get along with kids. Researchers at a university get more of a voice about teaching than a teacher who's been doing it for decades. Because of all of these things, there is a lot of pressure for young teachers to leave. But it's an incredible job, and there's incredible joy to it. Stick with it.
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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Working for Racial Justice as a White Teacher

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Robert Roth on an anti-racist approach to high-school history Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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This concept--the Spheres of Control--posits that the things we're worried about or that we complain about fall into three domains: things we have control over, things we can influence, and things that are outside of our control and influence.

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What are and ways to address microaggressions 

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What are and ways to address microaggressions 

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Educators, how culturally responsive is your classroom library?

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Educators, how culturally responsive is your classroom library?

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Questionnaire

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Anti-bias education is not just doing occasional activities about diversity and fairness topics (although that may be how new anti-bias educators begin). To be effective, anti-bias education works as an underpinning perspective, which permeates everything that happens in an early childhood program-including your interactions with children, families and coworkers-and shapes how you put curriculum together each day.

This article is an excerpt of the second edition of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards. An NAEYC bestseller, this book helps early childhood educators fulfill their mission of helping all children reach their full potential. The new edition-with major updates to all chapters, including gender identity-will be available early in 2020.

The four core goals of anti-bias education

Four core goals provide a framework for the practice of anti-bias education with children. Grounded in what we know about how children construct identity and attitudes, the goals help you create a safe, supportive learning community for every child. They support children's development of a confident sense of identity without needing to feel superior to others; an ease with human diversity; a sense of fairness and justice; the skills of empowerment; and the ability to stand up for themselves or for others.

Goal 1: Identity

Teachers will nurture each child's construction of knowledgeable, confident, individual personal and social identities.

Children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

This goal means supporting children to feel strong and proud of who they are without needing to feel superior to anyone else. It means children will learn accurate, respectful language to describe who they and others are. Teachers will support children to develop and be comfortable within their home culture and within the school culture. Goal 1 is the starting place for all children, in all settings.

Adding to early childhood education's long-term commitment to nurturing each child's individual, personal identity, anti-bias education emphasizes the important idea of nurturing children's social (or group) identities. Social identities relate to the significant group categorizations of the society in which we grow up and live and which individuals share with many others. Social identities include (but are not limited to) gender, racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and economic class groups. (In the forthcoming book, social identity is described in detail in Chapter 2.) A strong sense of both individual and group identities is the foundation for the three other core anti-bias goals.

Goal 2: Diversity

Teachers will promote each child's comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds.

Children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep, caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.

This goal means guiding children to be able to think about and have words for how people are the same and how they are different. It includes helping children feel and behave respectfully, warmly, and confidently with people who are different from themselves. It includes encouraging children to learn both about how they are different from other children and about how they are similar. These are never either/or realities because people are simultaneously the same and different from one another. This goal is the heart of learning how to treat all people caringly and fairly.

Some teachers and parents are not sure they should encourage children to "notice" and learn about differences among people. They may think it is best to teach only about how people are the same, worrying that talking about differences causes prejudice. While well intentioned, this concern arises from a mistaken notion about the sources of bias. Differences do not create bias. Children learn prejudice from prejudice -not from learning about human diversity. It is how people respond to differences that teaches bias and fear.

Another misconception about Goal 2 is that exploring differences among people ignores appreciating the similarities. Goal 2 calls for creating a balance between exploring people's differences and similarities. All human beings share similar biological attributes, needs, and rights (e.g., the needs for food, shelter, and love; the commonalities of language, families, and feelings) and people live and meet these shared needs and rights in many different ways. A basic premise in anti-bias education is " We are all the same. We are all different. Isn't that wonderful! "

Goal 3: Justice

Teachers will foster each child's capacity to critically identify bias and will nurture each child's empathy for the hurt bias causes.

Children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.

This goal is about building children's innate, budding capacities for empathy and fairness, as well as their cognitive skills for thinking critically about what is happening around them. It is about building a sense of safety, the sense that everyone can and will be treated fairly.

Learning experiences include opportunities for children to understand and practice skills for identifying unfair and untrue images (stereotypes), comments (teasing, name-calling), and behaviors (isolation, discrimination) directed at themselves or
at others. This includes issues of gender, race, ethnicity, language, disability, economic class, age, body shape, and more. These are early lessons in critical thinking for children, figuring out what they see and hear and testing it against the notions of kindness and fairness.

These lessons build on young children's implicit interest in what is "fair" and "not fair."

As children come to identify unfair experiences and as they learn that unfair can be made fair, children gain an increased sense of their own power in the world. Children cannot construct a strong self-concept, or develop respect for others, if they do not know how to identify and resist hurtful, stereotypical, and inaccurate messages or actions directed toward themselves or others. Developing the ability to think critically strengthens children's sense of self, as well as their capacity to form caring relationships with others.

Goal 4: Activism

Teachers will cultivate each child's ability and confidence to stand up for oneself and for others in the face of bias.

Children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.

Goal 4 is about giving children tools for learning how to stand up to hurtful and unfair biased behavior based on any aspect of social identity. Biased behavior may be directed at oneself or another. It may come from another child or adult or from children's books, television, and films. This goal strengthens children's development in perspective taking, positive interactions with others, and conflict-resolution education.

Actions of teasing, rejection, and exclusion because of some aspect of a child's social identities are a form of aggressive behavior. They are just as serious as physical aggression. The old saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is false. Children's developing sense of self is hurt by name-calling, teasing, and exclusion based on identity. And children who engage in such hurtful behaviors are learning it is acceptable to hurt others, the earliest form of bullying. An anti-bias approach calls on teachers to intervene gently but firmly, support the child who is the target of the biased behavior, and help both children learn other ways of interacting.

Children's growth on Goal 4 strengthens their growth on the other three goals. If a child is the target of prejudice or discrimination, she needs tools to resist and to know that she has worth (Goal 1). When a child speaks up for another child, it reinforces his understanding of other people's unique feelings (Goal 2). When children are helped to act, it broadens their understanding of "unfairness" and "fairness" (Goal 3).

Guidelines for your curriculum

Just about every subject area in the typical early childhood program has possibilities for anti-bias education themes and activities. For instance, early childhood education themes of self-discovery, family, and community are deeper, and more meaningful, when they include explorations of ability, culture, economic class, gender identity, and racialized identity. So, too, issues of fairness (Goal 3) and acting for fairness (Goal 4) arise as children explore various curriculum topics.

Differences do not create bias. Children learn prejudice from prejudice -not from learning about human diversity. It is how people respond to differences that teaches bias and fear.

The ideas for specific anti-bias education content and activities come from three major sources. One is from children's questions, interests, or interactions with each other that classroom teachers see as important to respond to and develop. Teacher-initiated activities are a second source of anti-bias activities, based on what classroom teachers and families think is important for children to learn. A third source is significant events that occur in the children's communities and the larger world that classroom teachers think need to be explored with children.

Here is an example of an anti-bias education topic at snack time.

It is snack time in the 4-year-old room. The teacher sets a small pitcher of water on the table for children to pour and drink. Lupe, whose home language is Spanish, looks up and asks, "Agua?" Casey, sitting next to her, says with annoyance, "No! It's water-not ahhgwa" (exaggerating the pronunciation). The teacher stops what she is doing and turns to Casey and says, "Lupe is right. What you call 'water' her family calls 'agua.' There are many words for water, for crackers, for oranges, for everything! We all have words. We have different words. It's pretty wonderful!"

At group time, the teacher follows up by asking children about the different words they have for people in their family. As the children call out Grandma, Oma, Pops, Daddy, Papa, Abuelita, and more, she writes them on a chart. She assures them that none of the words are wrong. They are just different. And they all mean someone who loves them.

Meet anti-bias goals in every corner of the classroom

The ongoing examination of how people are simultaneously the same and different provides children with a conceptual framework for thinking about the world they live in. For example, children playing with blocks can learn that although some children like to build tall towers and some like to build long, flat structures on the floor, all the children like to build. Art projects can show enthusiasm and admiration for blacks and browns along with all the other wonderful colors of the spectrum. The common curriculum topic of harvest time can include respecting and making visible the people who grow, pick, and transport our food.

Everyday activities offer opportunities for Goals 3 and 4 as well. Arguments over toys can include discussion of fairness and kindness. Exclusionary play, stereotypes in books, or teasing are experiences open to critical thinking about hurtful behavior and for problem solving toward just solutions.

Planning Anti-Bias Education Activities for Your Program's Curriculum

An anti-bias education approach is not a recipe. Rather, teachers include anti-bias issues in their planning by considering the children and families they serve and the curriculum approach their program uses. Here are key questions to ask yourself as you and your colleagues plan learning activities and environments. Begin by asking yourself these questions for one or two activities a week, and see how they change what you do and how the children respond.

Where do I best fit anti-bias goals and issues into my curriculum plans for the day and the week?

Who might be left out of this curriculum? How will I use the topic to include each child, connecting to the diversity of their social identities and to their individual needs? How can I be sure no one is invisible or unnoticed?

What ideas, misconceptions, and stereotypes might children have about this topic? How can I learn what these are and provide accurate information and counter misinformation and stereotypes?

How can I use this topic to support and strengthen children's innate sense of justice and their capacity to change unfair situations to fair ones?

What learning materials do I need to gather to incorporate an anti-bias perspective into this curriculum topic?

Use child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities

Children's questions, comments, and behaviors are a vital source of anti-bias curriculum. They spark teachable moments as well as longer-term projects. However, it is not sufficient to do anti-bias activities only when a child brings up a relevant issue. Teacher-initiated activities are also necessary-be they intentionally putting out materials and books to broaden children's awareness or planning specific learning experiences around issues that matter to families and the community.

You do not wait for children to open up the topic of reading or numbers before making literacy and numeracy part of the daily early childhood curriculum. Because you have decided that these understandings and skills are essential for children, you provide literacy and numeracy discussions and activities in your classroom. A balance between child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities is as vital in anti-bias education as in any other part of the early childhood curriculum.

Here's an example of how a teacher begins with a children-generated teachable moment and follows up with teacher-initiated activities:

After a windstorm broke dozens of small branches off of the trees surrounding their preschool, several 4- and 5-year-old boys begin building a "club house" by dragging branches and bunches of leaves to a corner in the playground fence. Valeria (4 years old) starts dragging a branch to join them and the boys shout, "No girls allowed! No girls allowed!"

The teacher considers encouraging the boys to welcome their classmate into their play-but then she hesitates. There are larger societal issues embedded in this interaction. As an anti-bias educator, she decides she needs to address the underlying ideas, especially that girls can't or shouldn't engage in play that emphasizes physical strength or that "real boys" don't include girls in their play.

Deciding to find out what the children are thinking, the teacher asks, "Why do you think no girls are allowed?" She listens carefully to the boys' responses: "Girls can't move the big branches." "And they can't build high!" "We're going to be superheroes! Girls can't be heroes." And, finally, "We don't like girls." All these statements reflect commonly held stereotypes about girls. Additionally, she thinks, not seriously addressing the situation reinforces the additional stereotype that boys don't have to pay attention to the feelings of others.

Seeing an opportunity to expand their thinking, the teacher suggests testing these claims. She says, "Well, let's find out if girls can move the big branches and build high or not." Since many of the children are now gathering around, she invites everyone to join in the challenge. "What do you think is going to happen?" she asks. With much laughter the children run and gather branches. Some girls are faster than some boys, some boys are faster than some girls. Everyone is able to add branches to the club house, which is suddenly much higher!

Bringing the children back together, the teacher says, "It looks like both girls and boys can lift big branches and build high. Thinking that boys would be better at these things than girls was a stereotype." Several children repeat the word stereotype (preschoolers love big words!). Still holding their attention, the teacher clarifies and gives words to the program's values: "Stereotypes are unfair. In our school we want everyone to be treated fairly. What can we do so that we can be sure that we play together fairly?" The next steps are suggested by the children. One suggestion is a sign that says "Everyone can play here." "How about," says one of the boys who began this episode, "how about if we want to play alone, we just say 'you can have a turn in a few minutes'?"

Knowing that one interaction is never enough to help children think in new ways, the teacher plans and carries out further activities. She adds to the classroom library books in which female athletes and firefighters are strong and fast. At circle time, she reads books in which girls and boys play together in big muscle games. She invites a female carpenter in to help the children build with real tools. And she begins a curriculum on "Being a hero," about all the ways boys and girls can be powerful helpers.

In the next staff meeting, the teacher relates what she has done and is planning to do, and why. She asks her colleagues to consider the frequency of gendered exclusionary play in the program and they agree to take the important step of identifying how (explicitly and implicitly) they may be supporting a binary view of gender (see Chapter 9 in the forthcoming book) in their classroom. For example, how often do they call out "boys and girls" rather than "children"? Do they ask "strong boys" to help move furniture and big blocks? Do they comment on girls' clothing or hair instead of asking about their interests and accomplishments?
Do they support boys' tender, sharing, inclusive behaviors or mainly comment on their noisy, power-focused play? The teachers agree to observe each other as well as the children and see what changes they can make to avoid the damage that gender stereotypes have on children's sense of themselves and of others.

Using a combination of child-initiated, teachable moments and teacher-initiated, pre-planned activities is the most effective way to expand children's ability to grow in the four anti-bias education goals and to talk about, think about, and understand the world around them.

Pay attention to the realities of children's lives

While the four core anti-bias education goals are the same for all children, specific activities should be relevant to the children's backgrounds and their lives. Some children need support to resist messages of racial or cultural inferiority; others need guidance to develop a positive self-concept without absorbing social messages that they are the "normal" ones and other children are less than, strange, or negatively different. Children of wealthy families need help resisting the message that material accumulation defines their worth and that of others; children of families with fewer resources need support to resist messages that undercut their families' worth. Some girls may need extra support to develop confidence and interest in experiences that are math and science related; some boys may require help to develop skills for having nurturing, cooperative interactions with their peers
and to engage in play that reflects these attitudes.

Closing thoughts

As in all other areas of the curriculum, teachers tailor and scaffold anti-bias education materials and activities to each child's cognitive, social, and emotional developmental capacities. They plan and choose learning experiences that stimulate children to explore the next step of new ideas and skills and allow each child to apply new understandings and behaviors in his or her daily life.

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Understanding Anti-Bias Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum

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This article is an excerpt of the second edition of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards.

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Gholdy Muhammad agreed to answer a few questions about her new book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

By the way, this is the 100th book-related column published in this blog, including 96 interviews with authors and a handful of book reviews and lists of book recommendations by teachers. You can see them all here.
Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is an associate professor of language and literacy at Georgia State University. LF: You propose a four-part "equity framework" for literacy instruction including: "1) identity development; 2) skill development; 3) intellectual development; and 4) criticality." Could you describe these elements, particularly "identity development" and "criticality" since it seems that teachers might be more familiar with the middle two? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
The historically responsive equity framework is not just for literacy instruction or literacy educators per se but for all teachers across the disciplines. The framework does bring diverse texts and literacies into all content areas in K-12 classrooms. In my research, I take up the ways in which literacy was defined historically within black communities, particularly in black literary societies. And I found that literacy was synonymous with education. Literacy was also defined within the four frames of identity, skills, intellectualism, and criticality, the four-part equity model. In other words, as black people were learning, they were cultivating each of those four areas of their lives. If we compare these four areas to schools today, I find that most educators are teaching skills only, or their state learning standards. Yet, our students need more.

The four-part equity model was derived from examining archives and historical artifacts during the 19th century. I studied black literary societies to understand their literacy practices and learning. I asked questions such as, What types of texts did they read? What were some of their goals for learning? What factors contributed to their personal and academic success? I found that members of literary societies read diverse texts written by diverse authors. They were highly collaborative and believed in the collective responsibility for one another's learning. But importantly, they did not seek to just advance their skills in language, history, math, or science. Instead, they had wider goals for learning, which resulted in the Historically Responsive Model for teaching and learning. Collectively teaching these four goals or standards helps to cultivate students who are socio-conscious beings, who deeply have a strong sense of self and others, and who are academically successful.

Identity is made up of who we say we are, who others say we are, and the people we desire to be. Students are constantly making sense of who they are, and, I argue, classroom instruction needs to be responsive to their identities. Because we are complex beings, we have racial, cultural, gender, environmental, and community identities, to name a few. Not only is it important to teach youths who they are, but educators should also teach students about the identities and cultures of others different from them. When we have true, clear, and complete understandings about people different from us, we are less inclined to hate, show bias, or hold false views of others. When youths have a strong sense of their own histories and identities, it becomes a refuge or a protection. When they don't know themselves, others may tell them, and sometimes that may not be positive. With each lesson or unit plan, teachers should ask, How does our curriculum and instruction help students to learn about themselves or others?

Criticality is the capacity and ability to read, write, think, and speak in ways to understand power and equity in order to understand and promote anti-oppression. I define oppression simply as any wrongdoing, hurt, or harm. This can be racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, or any other oppression. In my work, I discuss the difference between lower case "c" critical, which is just deep and analytical thinking. But Critical with a capital "c" is related to power, equity, and anti-oppression. It is helping youths to be "woke" socio-politically. Criticality calls for teachers to connect their teaching to the human condition and to frame their teaching practices in response to the social and uneven times in which we live. This means helping students understand content from marginalized perspectives. As long as oppression is present, students need spaces to name, interrogate, resist, agitate, and work toward social change. This will support students toward being critical consumers and producers of information. It will also help to build a better humanity for all. With each lesson or unit plan, teachers should ask, How does our curriculum and instruction help us understand power, equity, and anti-oppression?

These four learning standards connect with Gloria Ladson Billings' definition of culturally relevant education as she pushed for academic success (skills and intellect), cultural competence (identity), and socio-political consciousness (criticality) in classrooms. The Historically Responsive Model or the four learning standards I discuss returns the excellence of black educative spaces and uses this history as a blueprint to improve classrooms today. There is not one child who does not need to advance identity development, skill development, intellectualism, or criticality. Collectively teaching and learning toward these four pursuits helps to teach the whole child to be successful for a full and quality life.
LF: You give this four-part framework the name of "Historically Responsive Literacy," connecting it back to 19th century black literacy societies which, I, embarrassingly, had never heard of prior to reading your book. Could you talk about that historical connection? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Actually, many people have not heard of this American history. The author of the prominent book that fully captures the history, Elizabeth McHenry, entitled her book, Forgotten Readers, because our ancestors' stories and histories have been forgotten and left out. I would also add that these histories are not taught in K-12 schools. When I engaged in historical research to better understand these learning spaces, I wanted to know: How can we take the teachings from black historical excellence to advance educational achievement for all youths today? When I study state standards, curriculum programs, state assessments, and teacher evaluations, I don't find that they largely focus on identity and criticality, which is why we don't see this type of teaching in all classrooms. These four critical parts of the system lack culturally responsiveness. Across the nation, we have frameworks, textbooks, and literature that are oftentimes not written by people of color. Nor do these largely represent the fullness of people of color.

I learned that black literary societies were developed by black males in 1828 in the urban Northern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. Membership was from 10-100 people. They were also called reading rooms, lyceums, literary institutions, and writing clubs. They met regularly in basements of churches, classrooms, homes, or anywhere where they could be in community with one another. They paid membership fees, and many of their funds went to texts and cultivating their libraries. Often, they would check out a book, read it, and present a short lecture on the content of the book upon returning it. They read across topics of mathematics, science, history, and English. But literacy was central to all their content learning. They did not just come together to read and enjoy literature (like many book clubs today), but they also had goals of using knowledge to benefit other black people and the conditions of society at large.

Black literary societies' members left meticulous records for our learning today. They recorded and published their activities and other writings in newspapers, books, and pamphlets. I use their practices as a roadmap and plan for reimagining and redesigning curriculum and instruction for students. In Cultivating Genius, I give a fuller list of examples showing how I took teachings from history and applied them to today's classrooms, but a few ideas include how:

Libraries were essential to all achievement, so teachers today can cultivate their classroom libraries to include diverse authorship and international texts.

Literacy was the foundation to all disciplinary learning, so teachers today can bring in opportunities for youths to read and study from multimodal texts in different genres.

Learning was highly collaborative, so teachers today can create opportunities where individualism and competition aren't privileged over collectivism.

When we use the theories and teachings of black historic thinkers, we will have different and more advanced schools and classrooms. We have so long prescribed what youths need, all along leaving black history, black excellence, and black frameworks out of the picture. But when we "return" to and look back on history, we can advance in unique and exciting ways. Black Literary Societies are the blueprint.
LF: "Deficit" thinking and perspectives come up several times in your book. Can you talk about what you mean, how they can impact students, and what teachers can do to change those mindsets? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Yes, "deficit thinking" comes up quite often in the book because deficit perspectives and thinking lead to poor and basic instructional practices. Deficit thinking can be viewed in different ways. First, it is any thinking, perspectives, or ideologies that are negative, false, incomplete, or destructive. It can also be defined as capturing someone's story as a single narrative or starting one's story in false, damaging, or incomplete ways. Deficit thinking is a type of oppression and leads to racism or other forms of harm. Sadly, we have a history of misrepresentation of certain groups using ads, literature, and other media. This type of propagation has conditioned the minds and hearts of people to have deficit views. The conditioning is then perpetuated in homes, communities, and schools.

The consequence of deficit thinking creates trauma and harms our young people. We talk a lot about emotional trauma or trauma from childhood but we talk less about the effects of racial trauma in schools for our students. What happens when teachers think less about other people who share the same race or identity of their students? Do teachers think this type of thinking never manifests or makes its way into classrooms? We don't leave our racism, biases, political agendas, or ideologies at home when we enter classroom spaces. When deficit thinking leads to trauma, our students may be affected for the rest of their lives. Our young people may feel like they don't belong; they may feel worthless or that they are not good enough. Their academics and engagement are negatively affected as a result. This can follow them throughout their lives and disrupt their joy.

When I ask teachers to tell me about their black and brown students, sometimes I hear comments such as, they are unmotivated, they can't read, or they have discipline problems. I follow this question by asking if they would introduce their own children in the same way. Oftentimes, parents would not. They would find something positive to say about their own child. This is why I returned to black historical excellence and named the book Cultivating Genius. I am proclaiming that we start our children's stories with genius, especially black children's, because the nation has struggled to get it right with us the most. We must disrupt deficit ways of thinking and being. Our youths are genius. They are not all those things that systemic oppression has created. And young people deserve to be taught by geniuses, those who seek knowledge and deeply love the students in their classes.

To change the mindset, teachers must do their self-work or find another profession. Just as a person has to heal from abuse in order to be whole, happy, and productive, if teachers have deficit perspectives, they must recognize them, name them, and work toward disrupting and dissolving this type of thinking. That may come from proper education, therapy, or exercises that lead toward anti-racism, anti-bias, and anti-oppression.
LF: Can you share summaries of specific lessons that you think might reflect your recommendations for what literacy instruction could look like? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Usually, when I develop lesson or unit plans, I try to connect the learning around the human condition or a social issue. For example, Flint, Mich., has a water crisis with a lack of clean water. This issue became the impetus for a science and math lesson I was working on for students in Atlanta and New York, but it is an issue that can be explored across different content areas. In this math example, the students learned about the percentages of lead content found in water and graphed equations. In the science class, they defined environmental justice and water quality, which was connected to Next Generation Science Standards. I started this lesson by showing a photo essay by real residents of Flint with captions depicting experiences. This led to the discussion of water and our personal use and dependency. We read political cartoons, youth-spoken word poetry, a timeline, a short news article, photographs, and statistical data of lead content. I layered these short, powerful, and engaging texts as a way for my students to access and engage in learning. We read and discussed the texts together, and the students worked collaboratively in groups. We also had textbooks available to support learning. The lesson plan went across multiple days. What I learned is that identity and criticality became great points of entry for students who struggled with math and science skills. They connected the water crisis in Flint to their local communities. One science teacher in New York followed up by testing the lead content in water near their school. Students also learned vocabulary such as Legionnaires' disease, marginalization, and water crisis.

The students benefited from the unit plan and found the lessons engaging. Units like this prepare students for life and teach them not to be passive consumers of information and news. Instead, lessons like this one teach them to interrogate, critique, and agitate toward social change, especially in their own communities.

This historically responsive unit shifted traditional ways of teaching science and math. First, it brought more literacies and texts into these content areas. Students were taught to read the word and the world. Students read from diverse texts and even read poetry in their STEM classroom. The model also restored intellectualism into the learning, and students learned new knowledge in addition to skills. I assessed each learning standard using discussion, collaborative group worksheets, exit slips, and a summative assessment. This lesson plan can even be extended by setting learning goals in English/language arts or social studies classrooms, too. Here is a breakdown of how the lesson fits into the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework outlined in Cultivating Genius:

1.Identity: Students will understand their personal dependency on water.

2. Skill: (Math) Students will learn to examine percentages of lead content found in water. They will also learn how to create equations with two or more variables to represent relations between quantities as well as graph equations on coordinate axes with labels and scales.

Skill: (Science) Students will define environmental justice and name the importance of water quality for humans.

3. Intellect: Students will learn about the water crisis in Flint, Mich.

4. Criticality: Students will learn to consider how the government prioritizes community needs based on socioeconomic status and/or race and understand the media's role in the government's response to a crisis.

More units like this are offered in the book. This is one example, but I have observed the pure genius of teachers designing learning around the model. In doing so, they keep a few questions in mind as they plan:

What issue is most urgent for students' learning? How does this issue connect to the world? How can I connect content-learning skills to this issue?

What multimodal text can layer in my lesson or unit plan to teach this topic/issue? Teachers think about print and nonprint texts.

What creative and engaging exercises will I engage students in to teach this topic/issue?

How can I assess each of the four learning standards?

LF: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share?
Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:

Cultivating Genius and the historically responsive model offered in the book is for all teachers K-12 across all discipline areas, even physical and health education. I also use the model to frame my college courses and syllabi at Georgia State University. The four learning standards of identity, skills, intellect, and criticality are areas of growth that EVERY child needs in every class.

I am reminded by many wonderful teachers with whom I work that some of the greatest anti-oppressive leaders and change agents in the world have held a strong sense of self and knowledge of other people (identity), skills, intellect, and criticality. We want to help cultivate students who will not be neutral on oppression or students who would contribute to more oppression in the world. Instead, we want to cultivate young people who, across the course of their lifetimes, will disrupt, disquiet, or unhinge oppression.

This means we must teach beyond sanctioned curriculum and standards such as the Common Core. We must evaluate and interrogate the curriculum we are given to teach. We must hold publishers accountable for the lack of diverse and critical content they produce. We must stop trying to make something culturally responsive when it wasn't designed that way in the first place. We have to stop putting fresh coats of paint on the same debilitating structures of education. We must start fresh with a curriculum that was designed with black and brown youths in mind and written by black and brown people, too. We have a growing population of culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse youths and families. It's time for the course of education to change. Indeed, the genius for this transformation is at hand. We need only to properly respond.
LF: Thank you, Dr. Muhammad!

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Author Interview With Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: 'Cultivating Genius' (Opinion)

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For the 100th book-related post in this blog, Gholdy Muhammad agreed to answer a few questions about her new book, "Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy."

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This year's NCTE 2020 Virtual Annual Convention was like no other. In the backdrop of COVID-19, meeting in person was not possible, but that did not stop the Standing Committee on Literacy Assessment (LAC) from continuing our work on supporting teachers in becoming assessment leaders. This year, we were excited to highlight another dimension to our work: considering progressive assessment practices as advocacy work as we move assessment from a deficit-oriented mindset to an advocacy perspective.

The twin pandemics, COVID-19 and the social and racial unrest in the US, have created both an advocacy challenge and an opportunity in literacy assessment.

For some teachers, moving to a distance learning format has disconnected us from our classroom students, whether we are in preschool or college classrooms. This disconnect has made it harder for teachers to draw from a variety of expressive means and document the diverse ways that students communicate what they know. At the same time, the move to distance learning has put a pause on most high-stakes state testing, providing teachers an opportunity to use formative types of assessment practices.

As part of our committee's NCTE blog series, we have asked teachers to tell us their assessment stories from the spring of 2020. Respondents have talked overwhelmingly about the challenges of informally and formatively assessing students and not being able to connect with their students. They have also discussed the challenges of trying to modify assessment practices for an online platform. You can still join the conversation and tell us your story here.

For this past year, we used these stories to guide our work as a committee. We have tried to reorient how we think about assessment in a way that moves it from a deficit perspective to one of advocacy. Shifting to an advocacy perspective allows teachers to observe and document what students know from different perspectives. What and how students know can be understood in tandem with the families and communities they are part of.

Shifting from a deficit-oriented mindset to an asset and advocacy perspective means emphasizing a narrative that focuses on:

This year was also an election year and there was more on the ballot than who would occupy the White House come January 20, 2021. Voters across the United States came out in record numbers so their voices could be heard. The committee put assessment on the ballot in November and encouraged teachers to be advocates by getting to know how state tests and assessments are linked to federal, state, and district offices and officials. In the committee's final panel discussion, we further explored teachers as advocates and discussed two questions: What does advocacy mean to you? and What takeaways do you have for teachers when engaging in advocacy work?

The new year will bring new ideas and change and the LAC will remain dedicated to teachers, families, and communities as we continue to change the conversation on assessment.
Bobbie Kabuto is a professor and chair of the Elementary and Early Childhood Education Department at Queens College, City University of New York. She chairs the NCTE Standing Committee on Literacy Assessment. NCTE Standing Committee on Literacy Assessment
Chair, Bobbie Kabuto (Queens College, Flushing, NY)

Valente´ Gibson (Jackson Creek Elementary School, Columbia, SC)

Chris Hass (Center for Inquiry, Columbia, SC)

Elisa Waingort (Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

Kathryn Mitchell Pierce (Saint Louis University, MO)

Melissa McMullen (Comsewogue School District, Wading River, NY,/Hofstra University)

Peggy O'Neill (Loyola University, Baltimore, MD)

Eric D. Turley (Kirkwood High School, MO)

Jessica Wheeler (Jefferson Forest High School, Bedford, VA)
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.

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Teachers as Assessment Leaders and Advocates: Continuing to Change the Conversation on Assessment at #NCTE20 - NCTE

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This year's NCTE 2020 Virtual Annual Convention was like no other. In the backdrop of COVID-19, meeting in person was not possible, but that did not stop the Standing Committee on Literacy Assessment (LAC) from continuing our work on supporting teachers in becoming assessment leaders.

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Dena Simmons

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March 2021 | Volume 78 | Number 6
Equity in Action Pages 30-34

Dena Simmons

Since Alicia's last name begins with an H, the instructor called her name before mine.

"Alicia Hernández," the instructor read, anglicizing the pronunciation of my friend's name.

Busy rustling through her bookbag for a notebook and pen, Alicia did not hear her name, leaving our instructor to scan the room looking for an Alicia Hernández. When the instructor's gaze landed in our direction, she looked at both of us, and without skipping a beat, said, "One of you two."

With a roomful of white classmates, she assumed that one of us had to be the obvious owner of the Central American surname.

Our instructor called the next name after Alicia's and proceeded as if she had not just insulted us, as if she had not just reduced us to a blob of one-of-you-two.

I could not concentrate for the rest of the period. My heart raced. My body grew tense. My mind filled with questions: How come she didn't make an effort to learn our names after four weeks of taking attendance? Why did she think it was acceptable to diminish our individuality? When will these public assaults, these public erasures, stop?

With her actions, our instructor communicated to us and our classmates that, like her, they did not need to learn our names. They did not need to get to know us. They did not need to regard us as more than one of the two girls of color in a sea of whiteness.

Opposing SEL Mindsets

While my instructor taught us the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL) in child development, she was not culturally competent. She illustrated how an educator could be well-versed in textbook SEL practices and still inflict harm on students. Simply put, to be effective equity-centered educators, we cannot be emotionally intelligent without being culturally responsive (Simmons, 2019a).

That college experience, along with many others from my schooling and work life, exemplifies why SEL faces the risk of becoming white supremacy with a hug if we do not apply an anti-oppressive, antiracist lens (Madda, 2019; Simmons, 2019b).

Through my work with school districts nationally, I have learned that some educators share distinct reasons for implementing SEL depending on who their students are. In mostly Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) school districts, SEL is often about compliance and control. SEL then becomes another way to penalize and police BIPOC youth for their non-whiteness and to justify their supposed inferiority for lacking "these necessary skills" (Kaler-Jones, 2020; Simmons, 2019c). What is even more perverse is the implicit belief that SEL skills are exactly what BIPOC students need to function in underresourced classrooms and to smile through the pain of racism. On the other hand, for white, privileged students, SEL is about supporting college and career readiness. These opposing mindsets lead to different practices and outcomes, which ultimately perpetuate a racial hierarchy that positions white students on top.

As we confront our country's sin of racism, we must acknowledge that our nation's schooling has always been an education in whiteness (Brooks & Theoharis, 2018), which manifests as textbooks lauding white heroes, excuses about too few "qualified" BIPOC teacher candidates, dress codes that criminalize Black hair, productivity over people, and well-meaning educators who correct Black diction but claim color-blindness. In this context, any curriculum, policy, or practice in our nation's schools that is not deliberately and actively combating racism, bias, and oppression can easily be used as a weapon to put BIPOC students in their place.

Relatedly, the overwhelming number of articles that cite SEL as critical to employability (Committee for Children, 2016) also puts white hegemony on display. It seems we cannot talk about SEL without talking about what we deem, in a narrow sense, as employable and professional. For me, that has always meant talking white, dressing white, and acting white-unspoken rules I have learned on my educational and professional journeys. If we laud SEL for how it supports youth with career, business, and economic success, we must also reckon with our blind obsession with capitalism and its relationship with the white supremacy upon which it was built. We can still prepare students for future success without diminishing their identities, without sending them the message that there is only one way to be successful. We have to begin to open our minds to the possibility of genius outside of whiteness.

SEL that fails to address our sociopolitical reality and combat racial and social injustice will not prepare our young people for the world they will inherit-one fraught with hate, misunderstanding, and bigotry. SEL alone will not keep politicians from making laws that disenfranchise BIPOC communities. SEL alone will not keep educators from suspending BIPOC children at disproportionate rates. SEL alone will not keep teachers from having low expectations for BIPOC students. SEL alone will not prevent cops from killing BIPOC people. If SEL alone were the magic bullet, perhaps George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Walter Wallace Jr. would still be alive today. We need more for our collective healing.

Is SEL, alone, enough to provide this? Absolutely not.

In Need of Collective Healing

Over the past year, there has been much talk about the importance of SEL in schools as a necessary response to our pandemic reality. There has been an influx of stand-alone courses about managing stress and anxiety, pushes for educators to focus on self-care, and free student resources offering mindfulness strategies for the uncertainty. As a long-time proponent of SEL, I could not be happier.

However, as we embrace this new urgency, we must address not only the trauma of COVID-19 but also that of racism. Pushing for "neutral" SEL only aims to protect white comfort. That is, courses that teach educators how to manage stress and anxiety without speaking to the stress and anxiety stemming from racism disregard the experiences of BIPOC people and contribute to the trauma of erasure. Likewise, pushing for teacher self-care without also advocating for school systems to value teacher health and well-being puts the onus on educators, making collective care nearly impossible. And asking students to practice deep-breathing in response to systemic oppression is simply offensive.

Collective healing starts with committing to eradicating our country's wound of racism and not looking away, sanitizing history, or advocating for neutrality. It means taking a stand against the injustices we witness in our districts, schools, and classrooms, whether that happens through community organizing, peaceful protest, or speaking up in-the-moment. It means creating space for processing the collective traumas of the pandemic, racism, and other forms of oppression in our school communities. It means abolishing white supremacy culture from our schools to prevent the constant spirit-murdering of BIPOC students, educators, and families. It means implementing culturally and contextually responsive practices. It means prioritizing care through partnering with community therapeutic providers and building healing-centered practices into the fabric of schooling. It means ensuring equity, justice, and humanity in our teaching and learning. And it means loving and honoring BIPOC members in our school communities, not just saying we do.

An Antiracist Approach to SEL

Last June, while in quarantine, I became the victim of a hate crime. Shattered, I had no choice but to focus on my healing. I reflected on what was important to me, what inspired me, and what made my spirit feel most whole. In the process, I rediscovered my voice, the one that had been tone-policed, silenced, and punished for the past six years because it was, as I was told, "too strong" and "too powerful."

As part of my healing journey, I left my job, in the middle of a pandemic. I needed my voice to ring louder than other people's doubts, slights, and limitations. I left so that I could save myself, so that I could dream. And I left so that I could invest my time into changing the very system that failed me and is failing so many others.

For me, that has led to the development of LiberatED, a new program that takes an anti-racist approach to SEL and healing. Instead of assuming what people need, the LiberatED team and I are connecting with school communities through a listening tour to collect stories, needs, and ideas about healing, SEL, racial justice, and abolitionism. From what we learn from educators, families, and students during the listening tour, we will create resources, curricula, and training. In this way, LiberatED will become a community-generated, student-centered approach to SEL, racial justice, and healing. In our preliminary conversations with school leaders, we have learned that educators have great interest in implementing SEL and diversity, equity, and belonging (DEB) practices in their districts. However, many do not know where to begin or how, especially as it relates to racial justice. Above all, schools want to do well by their students, but I remain steadfast in my belief that good intentions are not enough. While the interest in SEL and DEB work is heartening, interest does not always result in action. We need to start our racial justice journeys now.

To this end, I invite educators to start a practice of reflecting on their identity, positionality, power, and privilege. Had my college instructor understood the damaging effects of her white-centered perspective, perhaps she would have called Alicia's name again and waited for a response. Perhaps she would have admitted to the class that she was still learning names. Perhaps she would not have left Alicia and me scarred with her nonchalant erasure. Bound to white supremacy's need for urgency and productivity (Western States Center, 2003), my instructor breezed through attendance in her desire to be efficient. However, there is a tension between equity and efficiency. Equity takes more time. Efficiency saves time, but at what cost?

Additionally, schools could collect data and devise action plans from their own listening tours about what belonging means for their school communities, especially since many of us are physically apart this school year. In the process of transforming how we teach for our new virtual and hybrid settings to build connectedness and engage students, we could check in with our students through surveys and one-on-one conversations to ensure we are meeting their needs.

Though we are already exhausted and overwhelmed with so many pressures related to the pandemic, we still must find the time to take inventory of our curricula, pedagogy, and policies to ensure they prioritize student safety and belonging. That is, affirming our BIPOC educators, students, and families must be a part of every pandemic-safety plan. This moment calls for developing partnerships with community organizations to support children and adults with healing, SEL, mental health resources, food security, and basic needs.

Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future

So much time has passed since that college experience. Yet I still shudder at the memory of my instructor's reduction of my individuality. Too many others have a collection of similar reductions, similar scars, from well-meaning educators, whose unchecked privilege and a lack of cultural competence harmed them. The field of SEL cannot similarly fall victim to this pattern. We cannot rely solely on good intentions, on how we teach empathy, without being self and socially aware enough to interrogate how such a kind field could perpetuate white supremacy culture.

Ultimately, my hope is that, through projects like LiberatED and through schools committing to racial justice and collective healing, we can begin to dismantle structural, institutional, and individual practices that harm young people, that inhibit their optimal social, emotional, and academic development. Educators and students deserve to express themselves freely without fear, to be treated with respect and valued, to feel safe, and to go to schools that challenge bias, discrimination, and oppression.

As I've written before, the pandemic is our equity check, our opportunity to do and be better. LiberatED is one part of my effort to be and do better, part of my freedom-dream for a future where we are liberated from the burden of hate and oppression, where we are all free to live and learn in the comfort of our own skin.

References

Brooks, J. S., & Theoharis, G. (Eds.). (2018). Whiteucation: Privilege, power, and prejudice in school and society. New York: Routledge.

Committee for Children. (2016). Why social and emotional learning and employability skills should be prioritized in education. Seattle, WA.

Kaler-Jones, C. (2020, May 7). When SEL is used as another form of policing. Communities for Just Schools Fund.

Madda, M. J. (2019, May 15). Dena Simmons: Without context, social-emotional learning can backfire. EdSurge.

Simmons, D. (2019a). You can't be emotionally intelligent without being culturally responsive: Why family and consumer sciences must employ both to meet the needs of our nation. Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences, 11(2).

Simmons, D. (2019b). Why we can't afford whitewashed social-emotional learning. Education Update, 61(4).

Simmons, D. (2019c, October 4). A call to action for SEL's next 25 years [Conference presentation]. 2019 SEL Exchange, Chicago, IL.

Western States Center. (2003). Dismantling racism: A resource book for social change groups. Portland, OR.

Dena Simmons is the founder of LiberatED. She is a lifelong learner, educator, and activist who supports schools throughout the nation in implementing social-emotional learning and culturally responsive, antiracist, and equitable practices. She is the author of the forthcoming book, White Rules for Black People (St. Martin's Press, 2022). Follow her on Twitter @DenaSimmons and @LiberatED_SEL.

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March 2021 | Volume 78 | Number 6 Equity in Action Pages 30-34 Dena Simmons Since Alicia's last name begins with an H, the instructor called her name before mine. "Alicia Hernández," the instructor read, anglicizing the pronunciation of my friend's name.

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Find out how we're making classrooms better places for students and teachers through our world-class products and customer-acclaimed service.

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Today's education system resembles much of what you'd see in the early 1900s: rote memorization, a teacher speaking to dozens of pupils who must remain silent unless called upon, curriculum at scale. Coronavirus-related distance learning pushed that same operation online, and because of the severity of the crisis, educators and parents understandably yearn for getting back to normal. But for educator Gholdy Muhammad, normal hasn't served all students well, especially in literacy education, and no amount of testing or data has changed that. Instead of continuing with this form of education, Muhammad developed a model of learning that strikes more deeply into who we are and what agency we have in the world.

Skills are necessary to improve oneself, but intellectualism is about what can change the world, notes Muhammad. And when you can think with criticality, you can identify what change is needed for how things should be. Joy is another aspect of the framework because it's essential to buoy one's journey.

But teachers Dominique Herard and Suzie McGlone say they have been teaching students this way for several years and trying to convince other teachers to do the same. Muhammad's book and the ideas that are organized under HRL gave the teachers the framework to understand what they were doing and how to communicate those ideas with other educators and caregivers.

She said the depth of understanding the text made a difference for students. "This whole dynamic way of teaching that is so valuable and is so important really works to uplift the community. And it helps children learn, helps families learn and helps whole classes see learning a whole different way," said McGlone.

"People got to get their hearts right first for it and then they have to work on their minds," said Muhammad, critiquing how some of the tools for a more inclusive school experience, like HRL, can fall short on implementation. Often, educators want the strategies and toolkits, but they haven't changed their opinions of students of color or those from marginalized communities, which makes strategies difficult to implement. They're unable to ever see the genius in these students because of bias and systemic racism and most teacher education programs haven't addressed anti-racism.

"We need to build our sense of criticality and our sense of identity so that no matter what space we're in, we know who we are and we know how to navigate those spaces because we know how to learn," said Herard.

"It is going to take very intentional work," said Muhammad. "You cannot wait for your administrator to send you to a PD. Do the work now yourself."

For Herard, one of the obstacles she faces is getting buy-in from white teachers to try a way of teaching, like HRL, that better serves all students, especially Black and brown students. She said that oftentimes, white teachers don't give her recommendations the same value that it would be given if a white teacher makes those recommendations, which is a prevalent micro aggression people of color face, especially in the workplace. But as more white educators are seeing the value of HRL and begin to spread the message to others, more teachers are adopting these strategies and beginning to see the genius in their students. She and McGlone are working together to educate caregivers and community members in this way of learning to get their support as well.

"And then there was this beautiful conversation that kind of flowered in front of me where I was feeling like I was the one doing all of the learning in that space," recalled Herard. "That first experience also gave me an understanding of just the reciprocal nature that education provides, not me needing to know everything as the teacher, but in this space where we're all growing and we're learning together because that's certainly what it felt like for me."

The conversation then sparked student's interpretations of liberation into poetry, songs and words.

"All of my students were students of color, particularly Black and Latinx students, and that sort of gave me a window into what education could be," she said. "It could involve imagination and could involve creativity and it could involve speaking to liberation and how you're surviving in a system that really wasn't built for you."

The experience was a departure for Herard, who attended private schools and private boarding schools. "Prior to that, my school experience had always been, you know, somebody talks at you for a long time and you read something and then you answer it and you repeat. And it was very, very rote." Those lessons worked for her at the time but didn't sit well with her over the years, especially when she was contemplating entering the education field. There were some classes during her school years that encouraged discussions and critical thinking. But feeling like she had a voice in the conversation didn't occur for her as often as it did for her white peers. She attributes that observation to the school's curriculum and teachers' implicit bias.

"I had teachers who didn't think that I could learn in the same way as other students who were there," said Herard.

It's experiences like these that Muhammad is trying to address through HRL. Much of the teaching workforce grew up on a Eurocentric education and it's not surprising bias is reflected in student achievement. She recommends starting small by trying out HRL techniques in one lesson and see how they can fold it in. In addition to lesson plans, she said there's greater work to be done that starts with the self.

"It validated things that I was trying to do with my students, as well as with other mostly Black or teachers of color that I work with in Boston public schools," said McGlone.

The conversation Herard held with her students covered the past and their present-day community. And then she asked her students why they thought the subject of homelands was in a book about voting. "We can, just with these questions, bring together the idea of the importance in having a voice and importance of knowing history, all throughout that particular book," said Herard.

In addition to the standard curriculum, McGlone taught her students deep explorations of poems and speeches from prominent African Americans, like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in order to understand the context of the time and discuss with one another how they're relevant today. Students then had the opportunity to memorize and recite speeches after school to family members and the school community. Students could also perform dances or songs every spring. Diving more deeply into these texts was part of a program she started at her school with teachers of color called "Urban History Alive." King was especially relevant to the students because he attended nearby Boston University, where he met his wife, and a plaque outside his former home commemorates his time there. McGlone also connects students with community activists, including local Cape Verdean Americans.

Rethinking education with this framework is essential right now because so much of school curriculum and design centers white history and white identities.

"When the world highlights you in positive ways, and white ways, you don't need to focus on identity as an explicit learning goal in school. When the world has not oppressed you, you don't need criticality as a goal," Muhammad said. But folks of color, especially Black people, have been oppressed and marginalized. "The framework is a new way forward in education to really give a more complete and comprehensive education."

But the Historically Responsive Literacy framework isn't just about Black or brown students, but can center other means of exclusion, like religious culture, sexism or ableism.

"What the model helps teachers and leaders to do is to reframe curriculum, to set objectives and goals and standards around all five. Because right now we have been drawing upon European history and white history as our model and not Black history. And that has taught us to really just teach skill."

Since her book was released earlier this year, teachers have been widely sharing her book in order to apply the historically responsive literacy framework to their classrooms.

In her book " Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy ," Muhammad , a professor of education at Georgia State University, looks to 1830s-era literary societies as a highly engaged model for teaching and learning that can cultivate literacy, intellect and self-efficacy. Literary societies were spaces where groups of people could meet regularly, discuss ideas and better understand themselves. In Black literary societies in particular, the connections and learnings helped members build the resilience they needed in a world that was especially hostile to them. She studied speeches from prominent African Americans of that time and asked, "What were some of their goals for education? What did they read and write? How did they organize? What did their classroom experiences look like?"

During that time, an estimated 320,000 Black people were living in Northern states that had abolished slavery, but they were denied most basic rights. They were excluded from schools, libraries and educational opportunities, among others, which is why being a part of a literary society was crucial for learning skills and learning about the world. It was also a place to test ideas among a group of people who also wanted intellectual refinement and joy among one another. Participating in a literary society meant closely reading relevant texts, writing opinions and debating them with others to really deepen one's knowledge and skills. Having knowledge and skills enabled members to hold their own in debates and push against ideas of white supremacy and systemic racism of the time.

"That was the beauty of these spaces. They were intellectual spaces where - reading, writing, debating, listening, meaning-making, questioning - all these literacy practices happened across disciplinary areas," said Muhammad.

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How Historically Responsive Literacy Can Make Learning More Relevant to Students - MindShift

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Today's education system resembles much of what you'd see in the early 1900s: rote memorization, a teacher speaking to dozens of pupils who must remain silent unless called upon, curriculum at scale. Coronavirus-related distance learning pushed that same operation online, and because of the severity of the crisis, educators and parents understandably yearn for getting back to normal.

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Dena Simmons, Ed.D., is the founder of LiberatED, a collective at the intersection of racial justice, social emotional learning (SEL) and healing in education rooted in radical love. Simmons has expertise in anti-racist education, emotional intelligence, social justice, teacher education and curriculum development. She is a graduate of Middlebury College and Pace University with a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. Simmons has delivered two TEDx Talks, as well as a TED Talk on Broadway, and has been featured widely across various media outlets. Identified as one of a new generation of activists for social change, she is the author of an upcoming book, White Rules for Black People. Simmons recently spoke with Learning for Justice to discuss lessons learned from the pandemic and what to carry forward to make education more equitable.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We are looking back at lessons learned from the pandemic and the sudden move to remote learning. What aspects of the educational system should we move forward, using the pandemic as a pivotal point for ways to imagine better?

I feel like we need to throw the whole system away. It sounds like I'm taking the easy way out by saying that, but what we've learned through the pandemic is that much of what we were doing before was because it was convenient and what we knew. However, there's a tension between equity and efficiency. We need to be doing the work of equity, which takes time. It's a process, but we have not yet invested in it, as we've learned from the heightened inequities during COVID-19. If we invested in creating equitable spaces, my hope is that we could dream up collective liberation too.

At the same time, we have seen how, when we have pressure on us, we can innovate and make so much happen with limited resources. We suddenly found resources and saw more public-private partnerships to support the education of young people in this country. Where was that commitment before?

You have said the United States functions with inequity by design. How do we get people to see the potential in imagining something different for education-that it can actually be for everyone?

The first step is honoring our collective humanity and understanding our education system does not serve all children well. For all of us to thrive, it needs to serve every child well. I'll just give an example in terms of equity. If we look at the sidewalk-I'm a city girl-there's a little dip. That dip was made so that getting up from the street to the sidewalk is accessible. I'm not in a wheelchair, but I still benefit. I benefit from that little dip when I have my luggage or when I'm walking with my niece or nephew. Like the little dip, we all benefit from equity, and that may get people to start thinking about how we can ensure that education is a place where all children can thrive.

If we look at what's happening right now in the country with the work I'm doing as an activist, as an anti-racist educator, as someone who unapologetically speaks about white supremacy, anti-Blackness and Black genius, we see how this work has been dismissed and called "too political." We see the backlash and protests. Some folks have decided that Black humanity; Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC); and queer humanity and genius are political. The pushback we get is [that] we need to be neutral.

People will see the potential of education once they realize that every student is someone's child. Our students are people. They hurt, they laugh, they experience joy, they cry. Instead, I think we continue to think about what's good for my child, instead of what's good for our children. We need to move beyond that self-centeredness.

You've said that you lost some of yourself to survive in white spaces. How has this experience helped you to realize how someone can "come back to" themselves?

I grew up and went to the same school in the Bronx from Head Start to eighth grade, and I thrived there. Everyone looked like me. I felt safe to be myself. Once I entered into white spaces, I was made to feel inferior. I started to feel like a hollow vessel in my predominantly white boarding school. I was not safe to be Black. I had to assimilate very quickly to be considered successful and acceptable. That continued to happen up until the point where I told the university where I worked that I was leaving to save myself. It's full circle-now I'm in the moment where I'm returning home, and returning home is returning to me.

In June of 2020, at my former university, I became a victim of a racist attack. I took time off to heal. The distance made me realize how unwell I had been. I realized that my pattern was wake up, go into my white space and fight. During my distance from the university, outside of that toxicity, I realized, "Yo, I have been in a state of unwell for mad long." Though we have models of people who've persevered in these spaces, I just want to be. I just want to rest and relax. That's also part of our revolution.

Part of my healing also included breaking up with a very narrow version of what success means. For too long, I was made to believe that success only lived in whiteness. I needed to unlearn that.

That's why we have to create schools where students can believe in their creative genius and not feel like they're not enough because their genius doesn't fit into a box that was never even created for them. We really have to ask, "How do we make the world safer for queer and BIPOC? And how do we reimagine a world where we eradicate toxic whiteness and heteronormativity?"

You've spoken about the need for culturally responsive social emotional learning. What can educators do to get more culturally responsive SEL in their classrooms and schools?

Good teaching includes building relationships, and good teaching is ensuring that the social and emotional aspects of our young people are healthy. However, we've talked about SEL more as an outcome. That's what happens in education: We decide that everything is an outcome, and we have to test to this outcome. As a result, when we start to think of SEL in this very narrow, static way, we lose the dynamism of the work. At LiberatED, the way we think about SEL is that it, like racial justice, like healing, is a process, and we have to focus on the process along with the desired outcome: a world where all children feel safe to thrive in the comfort of their own skin. We also have to realize that superb teachers have always been building relationships, helping students resolve conflict, helping students through difficult emotions.

In this way, we have to honor the genius that already exists within the teaching staff and the educator force who have already been doing this work before we separated it out and called it a thing. SEL and healing should be the air that we breathe in schools, and so should racial justice. Those are all parts of this work. And you're culturally responsive because culturally responsive practices are, at the core, student centered and community centered. If we paid attention and asked the right questions, then we would know what our students and educators need.

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Dena Simmons, Ed.D., is the founder of LiberatED, a collective at the intersection of racial justice, social emotional learning (SEL) and healing in education rooted in radical love. Simmons has expertise in anti-racist education, emotional intelligence, social justice, teacher education and curriculum development.