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Powerful Perspective

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I'm undoing the conditioning that started when I was a kid, as a survival method when I was one of only a few Black students in an all-white school in Indianapolis. If I made my white classmates comfortable, I thought, maybe they would forget that I didn't belong there. I straightened my hair, listened to more pop music, shopped at Gap, and learned how to speak, dress, and behave in a manner that would delight the white people around me.

At home, things were different. I grew up in a pro-Black household, where my mother made sure I understood that my history and Black identity did not begin with slavery or end with the civil rights movement. We read books about ancient African kings and queens; I memorized the "I Have A Dream" speech" at 10 years old; and if my teacher assigned a report on an astronaut, I knew mine would be on Mae Jemison. This information was not necessarily meant to be shared but rather to fortify me as I entered all-white spaces, serving as my armor against white supremacy.

In the workplace, though I have always pushed for greater diversity both in the office and in our content, I made sure to tread lightly when discussing race relations, hoping that "playing the game" would eventually place me in a position to create opportunities for other Black women where we've historically been excluded. But despite my armor, the emotional burden of being one of few Black women was often too much. In 2016, the day after Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop in front of his girlfriend and small child, I struggled to focus at work. Meanwhile, white colleagues continued to buzz around the office, going about business as usual. Compelled to do something, I wrote an article highlighting the work of an organization promoting Black Lives Matter, but I refused to take on the emotional labor of facilitating any forums or discussions within my office. It felt like leadership's responsibility to set the tone around this issue and deliver a message of support for their Black employees. Later that evening, after most people had gone home, I dropped by the office of a fellow Black colleague and broke down in tears of frustration as we talked about the strain of carrying the immense weight of this tragedy while smiling and nodding at white colleagues who were chatting about vacation plans or other more frivolous concerns. Sometimes I wondered, had I made my white colleagues so comfortable that they had somehow forgotten I was Black? I realize now that prioritizing white comfort had actually had a numbing rather than a transformative effect.

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White People: Your Comfort Is Not Our Problem

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I'm ashamed to admit that, throughout my career, I have strategically measured the professional cost of speaking candidly and openly about my feelings about white supremacy and the plight of Black people in America. That's all changed in the last couple of weeks.

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If you're at all tuned in to the news or social media, you're aware of what's going on in America. If you're not, Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck for eight minutes, leading to his death, while three other officers looked on. This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, since getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for black men. Protesters quickly took to the streets in civil disobedience, white bodies put themselves on the line for black bodies, and we made our voices heard. Property can be replaced; human life can not.

And then, almost overnight, it escalated. Protests turned to riots as police started showing up in riot gear and attacking protesters and press en masse with rubber bullets, tear gas, and night sticks. A woman to rubber bullets. Another woman claimed that police "stomped" on her pregnant belly and induced a miscarriage. One video appeared to show an NYPD vehicle driving into protesters .

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Social media is the enemy of American police. When smartphones became the norm, something that black people knew was happening for centuries suddenly confronted people who would never experience this reality. With proof comes the demand of accountability.

Something is very, very wrong in American police culture. This is why the saying "ACAB" - or "All cops are b*****ds" - has become a popular rallying cry. It doesn't actually mean every single cop is a bad cop, just like saying Black Lives Matter doesn't mean white lives don't. "ACAB" means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of color. Bad cops are encouraged in their harm by the silence of the ones who see themselves as "good."

Holding one police officer accountable every time a black person is killed by police is not enough. The issue isn't "a few bad apples"; it's a tree that is rotting from the inside out, spreading its poison.

Many ask where black police stand in all of this. To quote Cornel West, we must "understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics." Black police officers are currently choosing to prioritize their own financial wellbeing and stability over the collective black struggle. They exist in a separate class, free of the risks that black men without a badge carry. They ignore, and thus perpetuate, racial violence to protect themselves and their income.

The fraternity culture of the American police force - where the bad ones lead and the good ones stay silent - has got to go. We don't need to end police brutality; we need to end policing, period.

We are told the police are designed to serve and protect, and to some degree, that is true. They serve their own interests and protect the white and wealthy. Racism is written into the American criminal justice system, well exemplified by the sentencing guidelines for powder cocaine compared to crack cocaine: the same drug, except one is more prevalent among the white and wealthy, and another is more prevalent among the poor and black.

If the goal of the police is to protect lives and property from unsafe people, they are objectively failing as they continue to kill black men and women at disproportionate rates.

There are concerns about the idea of abolishing the police force - some worry women would be less safe, for instance, and would have no one to call if they were subject to domestic violence or rape. But police are already failing domestic violence and rape victims. With 40 percent of American police officers involved in domestic violence at home, can we trust them to protect victims if they perpetuate the same violence? There are community initiatives to protect domestic violence victims that are safer and more trustworthy, like shelters, hotlines, and individuals within the community. Beyond that, 60 percent of DV victims didn't want police involved in the first place, and police presence makes one in three survivors feel less safe. Add to that the disgracefully low conviction rate for rape victims, and it's clear that the police fail all women every day as well.

People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. Black men face a one in 1,000 chance of dying at the hands of a cop. The wives of abused police are forced to live with abusers who have access to guns in fear of their lives. If police aren't protecting women, people in mental duress, and black people, who exactly are they protecting?

It's time to end, or at the very least, completely reform the American police. Use your voice and your body and demand change and accountability. No amount of property can quantify how much a single life is worth. Live in the moment, and let it radicalize you.

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What I mean when I say I want to abolish the police

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If you're at all tuned in to the news or social media, you're aware of what's going on in America. If you're not, Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck for eight minutes, leading to his death, while three other officers looked on.

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Time Magazine cover...

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Resist the Temptation

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Racism is the temptation white people have yet to overcome

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Thirty cities, they say. Thirty cities. Thirty cities burned from coast to coast. You can hear the tsk-tsking everywhere. You can see the heads shaking with disgust, with frustration, with deep d...

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It’s Trauma!

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The Brown Bookshelf

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During the twenty-eight days of Black History Month, we profile a different children's or young adult author and children's illustrator, looking for the best new and unnoticed works by African-Americans. From picture books to novels, books fresh off the presses to those that have lurked in the background unsung for months or years. Specifically, we look for:

New books

Books that have "flown under the radar"

Children's or Young Adult books written/illustrated by an African-American (or someone of the African Diaspora)

Books published by a traditional publisher for the trade market

Nominations will be accepted from September 30th to November 1st. To nominate, post a comment here at the website, or email us at email@thebrownbookshelf.com. You can nominate as many books as you like.

Please check out past 28 Days Later campaigns to see who's already had the spotlight.

- The Brown Bookshelf

NOTE: Please note that due to the limited resources of the team, we can only take nominations for traditionally published books. We may highlight a small number of self-published authors for the 28 Days Later campaign, but these authors will be nominated and picked by the Brown Bookshelf team. If you have any questions on this matter, please email us at teambrownbookshelf@gmail.com.

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During the twenty-eight days of Black History Month, we profile a different children's or young adult author and children's illustrator, looking for the best new and unnoticed works by African-Americans. From picture books to novels, books fresh off the presses to those that have lurked in the background unsung for months or years.

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

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Peggy McIntosh

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Always center the impacted

Listen/learn from those who live in the oppression
Leverage your privilege

Yield the floor

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Recognizing and overcoming our biases...

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Recognizing and overcoming our biases...

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"Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we've seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how."

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How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them

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Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we’ve seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

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Ways to use your voice

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Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry

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The Southern Poverty Law Center gathered hundreds of stories of everyday bigotry from people across the United States. They told their stories through e-mail, personal interviews and at roundtable discussions in four cities. People spoke about encounters in stores and restaurants, on streets and in schools.

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Research on implicit bias. Section on Education within.

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Few things are more awesome than listening to kids playing on the playground. There's magic in that mix of laughter and exhausted breaths - giggle, pant, giggle.

Just the other Saturday at Maplewood's Memorial Park, I was watching my 5-year-old playing with his friends from day care. The kids have just started kindergarten and are now split up among four schools. Some industrious mom had the idea to get them together again.

It was a great idea. It was also the moment when I saw the messy birth of my son's otherness.

They were playing on one of those spinning things - you know, the one where kids learn about centrifugal force and as a bonus get crazy dizzy. They were having a blast.

"Only white people," said a little girl.

I heard it, but I wasn't quite sure that's what I heard.

"Not you, you're black," said the girl, reaching out to touch my son. "You're not white. Only white people can play."

What to do? How to do it? What to say? How to say it?

I couldn't escape the searing historical parallels of a little white girl telling a little black boy - my son - what he can and cannot do because of his skin color.

My instinct was to go over and drop science on her and all of the other little children.

But then my systems kicked in. My automatic scary-black-man recalibration systems. The infinitesimal adjustments that black men employ not only to succeed in school and at work, but also to help us keep it 100, stay woke, all while trying to make white folks feel comfortable enough to keep us around.

Whether it's turning down your Kendrick Lamar when the white woman gets on the elevator or flashing those disarming smiles at white women you pass at night on the sidewalk, black men learn to present safeness.

Why do I always have to make white people feel comfortable at the expense of who I am and my mood and my music and my thoughts?

Walter Scott - and every other unarmed black man killed by police officers - is why.

To support a family is why.

If I scared the white people at the playground with my reaction, what would be the impact on our little family in Maplewood? Would we be on the next email thread for a play date? Would the other families talk about my son's angry dad?

I made all these calculations in the five seconds after he was told he couldn't play because he was black.

Then I noticed my son. When the little racist girl reached out to touch him, he moved out of the way and laughed. He kept right on playing.

The garbage that came out of that child's mouth meant nothing to him. Yet. It marks the beginning of what is likely to be a gradual process. One day he'll wonder why, when he plays with a certain group of friends, he is always the villain. Similar inquiries will follow, until he has his own system of recalibrations and adjustments.

I knew a moment like this would happen eventually. I just didn't think it would happen at age 5 on the playground.

And what of the little girl? She, too, is a casualty in this - infected by racism before she can even spell the word.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole exchange as kids being kids. She's young enough that she hasn't developed the filters to catch what she's being taught at home. There's a direct line from what she's learning to her mouth. I thought about all the time my son spent with this child in his day care class. What else had she expressed to him, or to the other students about him?

Besides the idea that, just by virtue of her complexion, she is more entitled to something as simple as spinning on the playground.

Who will she become when she grows up? Will she be a prosecutor, a manager at a tech firm, a politician? Systemic racism apparently begins at the playground.

I was still processing the incident while my son and his friends ran over to the slides.

I turned to the parent closest to me, who hadn't heard the exchange.

"Who is that child?" I asked.

The dad told me the girl's name and pointed out her mother. The mom was standing about a dozen feet away in a group of other moms talking about how the kids were adjusting to kindergarten.

I tried to imagine a productive confrontation, but couldn't get beyond my opening line: "Excuse me, can we talk about the racist trash that just came out of your daughter's mouth?"

I told the dad next to me what had happened. He didn't know what to say, because honestly, who really does? He unfortunately did what a lot of white people do in these moments: He tried to explain it.

"Really?" he said. "That's not her personality."

In the end I did nothing.

I agonized over it, of course. My wife and I have since had several discussions about what we could have done, what should have been said, and to whom. At one point I decided that the thing to do would have been to bring the matter directly to the parent. But leaving the children out of it didn't seem right.

I recalled a moment from my childhood in Hawaii. One of my best friends, Dominic, was white. He was from a big family and being at his house was like stepping into an '80s sitcom. I was over there all the time. Dominic's dad was my mom's boss on the Air Force base.

But one day, when I asked my mother if I could go to Dominic's, she said no. She said the same thing the next time I asked, and the next. After a few weeks, I gave up.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I heard the story. Dominic's family was having a party. We kids were probably in front of the Nintendo or running around the yard. The parents were inside, talking about the New York Knicks' full name, the Knickerbockers. "Their real name should be the New York Nigger-bockers," Dominic's mom said, with a laugh.

My mother, the only black person at the party, gathered her things, found me and told me it was time to go.

I don't blame my mother for not explaining. But I would have benefited from knowing what had happened.

Two years later, my mother and I moved to Montgomery, Ala. I walked into the halls of Alabama's public schools completely unprepared for the racial dynamics that would meet me there. It was an intense couple of years as I received a middle-schooler's crash course in racial truths.

Sitting here today, with the string of black men dying on camera at the hands of government agents who are often not held accountable, and with a major presidential candidate who passively, if not wholeheartedly, accepts the admiration of the KKK and other white supremacist groups, I must make a different decision from my mother.

My son has watched too many boys and men that look like him die before his eyes on television. We don't shield him from those images.

"What happened, Daddy?"

I explain.

"What did he do wrong?"

His mother and I exchange looks. I try to answer. Best I can. He pauses, then he's back to his Hot Wheels races.

So as I mulled how I could have handled the incident at the playground and how I will handle it the next time - because, sadly, there will be a next time - I rejected the idea of simply talking to the parents.

Instead I will interrupt the children as they play, or study, or swim in the pool. I will do this for three reasons.

First, the children being groomed to be racist need to learn that acting on their racism has consequences, the least of which is that they will be met with resistance. The children have to see that people will stand up to them and call out their ignorance.

Second, all the white children in earshot also need to see that resistance and be taught that standing by silently is an endorsement.

And most important, I have to model for my children ways for them to confront racism without going all scorched earth. They need to see from their parents how to speak to ignorance, wield their dignity and push back against individual and systematic efforts to define, limit and exclude them.

During the walk home from the playground, my wife, my son and I talked about race while our 2-year-old daughter listened from her stroller.

My son nodded and said, "Yes, sir," the way a 5-year-old does. It wasn't our first conversation on the subject. My wife and I have been very deliberate in our attempt to introduce him to concepts of race and history. The goal is for him to be confident, keen, yet still open-minded about those around him - a goal many adults are still striving for.

It's clear that someone in that little girl's life is pursuing a different goal.

We don't have a choice but to talk to our son about Ferguson, Eric Garner, workplace frictions, Baltimore, Charlotte, Alton Sterling and on and on. And yet I mourn each of those conversations. With each degree of awareness comes a corresponding loss - of silliness, of whimsy, of childhood.

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'Only White People,' Said the Little Girl - ProPublica

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Few things are more awesome than listening to kids playing on the playground. There's magic in that mix of laughter and exhausted breaths - giggle, pant, giggle. Just the other Saturday at Maplewood's Memorial Park, I was watching my 5-year-old playing with his friends from day care.

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A weekly sampling of articles, blogs and reports relevant to TT educators.

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After China privatized public housing in the 1990s, homeownership became a common aspiration for urban families, and later, a prerequisite for a couple tying the knot. The resurgence of centuries-old beliefs, coupled with soaring real estate prices, have reinforced the social norm that the husband should provide the majority of the money for buying a home upon marriage, and also be the sole holder of the title. A 2012 study found that 70 percent of brides or their families contributed to the purchase of a home, yet a woman's name appeared on only 30 percent of the deeds.

The arrangement bears enormous economic consequences when couples divorce. The Supreme Court interpreted China's Marriage Law in 2011 to allow the holder of the title to keep property upon divorce. The divorce rate has more than doubled in the past decade, and with most women's names left off property titles, Chinese women have been losing a lot of money when marriages dissolve.

Decisions about having children can serve as leverage for women in domestic bargaining. This power is amplified by the government's recent move to scrap the one-child policy and allow all couples to have two children. And sometimes women resort to extraordinary measures to share in homeownership.

Two years ago, the elderly couple who lived next door with their son and daughter-in-law unexpectedly traded their spacious apartment for two humbler dwellings. I later learned that the young woman had been refusing to conceive until her husband's parents gave her a home of her own.

But the overall impact of these social changes on women's work-family choices is distressing.

Housework and child-rearing have always fallen on women's shoulders, even during the Mao era, when women were held up by the government as men's equals. Their responsibilities increased in the reform period, beginning in early 1980s, as the state rolled back child care support and the middle class began to invest in early-childhood education. In the meantime, women also began to pursue careers of their choosing, and to compete with men under the new rules of the market economy.

While many mothers, like my own, managed to juggle their domestic duties and professional tasks with remarkable grace, the demands on women without significant spousal support or social policy protection create an impossible balancing act.

"Raising two children in Beijing would definitely cost me my job," a friend who works in marketing at Google in Beijing confessed to me, explaining why she would not take advantage of the end of the one-child policy.

Also daunting is the widespread pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. "A woman used to have an easy time finding a job after she had given birth once," said a classmate at my high school reunion. "Now employers have reasons to worry twice."

While these issues may resonate in the context of Western feminist debates, they are so new to China that the public still has little expectation of positive change. My suggestion to my female friends that fathers should take half of the child rearing and housework responsibilities is often met with a surprised look or a smile of disbelief.

It's not only children putting caregiving demands on urban Chinese women. Elderly populations in Chinese megacities have soared - for example, in Shanghai nearly 30 percent of the 14 million residents are older than 60, an increase of over 5 percent from a year ago - straining the country's rudimentary system for caring for the urban elderly. Seeking to shift some of the burden to families, the government passed a law in 2013 requiring adult children to visit their parents regularly.

But the decree merely reflected what was already taking place. Married couples care for their elderly parents in most urban families, studies show, with the bulk of the responsibilities falling on women. Wives are often expected to care for their own parents as well as their husbands'.

Is it a wonder, then, that a growing number of professional women in China, buttressed by their education credentials and financial independence, are deciding to delay or forgo marriage and family? A 2010 study shows that half of the women with a university degree or above are unmarried or divorced. Derided as "leftover women" in the news media and by the government, they are subjects of well-intentioned exhortations, like those from my high school teachers, as well as less-than-generous assumptions from society at large.

A few days ago, a female acquaintance who works in a state publishing house told me, matter-of-factly, that she had rejected a well-qualified female job applicant for an editor position because the woman, being single at 36, clearly "has severe personality flaws" or "psychological issues."

Widespread as it is, gender discrimination has prompted little public debate. Disparaging comments and stereotypical portrayals of women continue to fill cultural productions from children's books to television dramas. In this year's Chinese New Year celebrations, a comedy skit on one of the country's most-watched television programs sponsored by the state compared an unmarried woman to a secondhand cotton jacket, while another showed, without irony, a female official teaching a subordinate how to ingratiate herself to her male boss.

Dissenting voices, though limited in number, are seeking their own channels of expression. Gender-related discussions are flourishing on social media, where terms like "straight-man cancer" are used to mock narrow-minded male chauvinism. Offline, feminist groups such as "lean in" circles have sprung up to foster female bonding and the exchange of career advice, while university theater clubs are producing shows with a feminist bent like "The Vagina Monologues." More radical moves, however, such as the protest planned by women's rights activists over sexual harassment on public transportation, have met a ruthless state crackdown.

In 2013, a 23-year-old female college graduate from Beijing filed a lawsuit against a tutoring firm for turning down her job application. The company rejected her, she explained to the news media, because it said that the post of executive assistant required a man, someone who could carry out physical tasks such as refilling the bottle on a water dispenser.

When the case was settled, with the tutoring company paying the woman $4,500, it was hailed as the country's first gender discrimination lawsuit.

"Finally someone is standing up to protest," said the woman's lawyer.

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Opinion | Why Chinese Women Still Can't Get a Break

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After China privatized public housing in the 1990s, homeownership became a common aspiration for urban families, and later, a prerequisite for a couple tying the knot. The resurgence of centuries-old beliefs, coupled with soaring real estate prices, have reinforced the social norm that the husband should provide the majority of the money for buying a home upon marriage, and also be the sole holder of the title.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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"240 years later, a woman has secured a major U.S. political party's presidential nomination.

Perhaps this is why it took so damn long:"

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Drag Donald Trump

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Newest State Supreme Court Judge Believes Affirmative Action

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America with Jorge Ramos - Timeline | Facebook

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240 years later, a woman has secured a major U.S. political party's presidential nomination. Perhaps this is why it took so damn long:

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UNBELIEVABLE article. A friend of the author asked via social media to his friends of color to explain White privilege to him and this is her response. Very well done. Demonstrates how difficult questions can be asked and models how to respond without alienating or scolding. AMAZING

(Also, as I read I thought of our conversation earlier this summer about compassion)

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Recently, I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a handful of folks on Facebook.

To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this "White Privilege" of which I'm apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I'm now hearing. Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I'm somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I'm not saying I'm colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I'm missing what's going on. Personal examples only. I'm not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.

Hi, J. First off, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted your post and made it part of mine. I think the heart of what you've asked of your friends of color is extremely important and I think my response needs much more space than as a reply on your feed. I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding.

Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I've experienced in my lifetime, In fact, I just spoke with my sister Lesa about how to best do this yesterday, because I realized many of my friends ― especially the white ones ― have no idea what I've experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the '70s and '80s ― it's shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out or rock the boat. To just "deal with it," lest more trouble follow (which sadly, it often does).

2) Fear of being questioned or dismissed with "Are you sure that's what you heard?" or "Are you sure that's what they meant?" and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

So, again, I'm glad you asked, because I really want to answer. But as I do, please know a few things first:

1) This is not even close to the whole list. I'm cherrypicking because none of us have all day.

2) I've been really lucky. Most of what I share below is mild compared to what others in my family and community have endured.

3) I'm going to go in chronological order so you might begin to glimpse the tonnage and why what many white folks might feel is a "Where did all of this come from?" moment in society has been festering individually and collectively for the LIFETIME of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today regardless of wealth or opportunity.

4) Some of what I share covers sexism, too ― intersectionality is another term I'm sure you've heard and want to put quotes around, but it's a real thing, too, just like white privilege. But you've requested a focus on personal experiences with racism, so here it goes:

One day my mom ID'd one as the boy from across the street, went to his house, told his mother and fortunately, his mother believed mine. My mom not only got an apology, but also had that boy jump in our pool and retrieve every single rock. No more rocks after that.

Then Mom ― a primary school teacher and always the educator ― even invited him to come over to swim sometime if he asked permission. Everyone became friends. This one has a happy ending because my mom was and is badass about matters like these, but I hope you can see that the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

The point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you've achieved something it's only because it was taken away from a white person who "deserved it," that is white privilege.
The first was the white doctor giving me a physical at Kaiser:
Me: "I need to send an immunization report to my college so I can matriculate."

Doctor: "Where are you going?"

Doctor: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"
The second was in a store, looking for supplies I needed from Harvard's suggested "what to bring with you" list:
Store employee: "Where are you going?"

Store employee: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"
The third was at UPS, shipping off boxes of said "what to bring" to Harvard. I was in line behind a white boy mailing boxes to Princeton and in front of a white woman sending her child's boxes to wherever:
Woman, to the boy: "What college are you going to?"

Woman: "Congratulations!"

Woman, to me: "Where are you sending your boxes?"

Woman: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

I think: "No bitch, the one downtown next to the liquor store."

But I say, gesturing to my LABELED boxes: "Yes, the one in Massachusetts."

T hen she says congratulations but it's too fucking late.

6. In my freshman college tutorial, our small group of 4-5 was assigned to read Thoreau, Emerson, Malcolm X, Joseph Conrad, Dreiser, etc. When it was the week to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one white boy boldly claimed he couldn't even get through it because he couldn't relate and didn't think he should be forced to read it. I don't remember the words I said, but I still remember the feeling ― I think it's what doctors refer to as "chandelier pain" ― as soon as a sensitive area on a patient is touched, they shoot through the roof. That's what I felt.

I know I said something like my whole life I've had to read "things that don't have anything to do with me or that I relate to" but I find a way anyway because that's what learning is about ― trying to understand other people's perspectives.

When what he said about me was revealed months later (by then he'd come to respect and rely on me), he apologized for prejudging me because I was black and female. I told him (not unkindly, but with a head shake and a smile) that he was ignorant for doing so and clearly had a lot to learn. It was a good talk because he was remorseful and open.

He then told me that when he drove home from work late at night, he was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car, and they assumed it was either stolen or he was a drug dealer. When he told a cop friend about this, he told Warren to put a stuffed animal in the rear window because it would change "his profile" to that of a family man and he was much less likely to be stopped.

10. Six years ago, I started a Facebook page that has grown into a website called Good Black News because I was shocked to find there were no sites dedicated solely to publishing the positive things black people do.

And let me explain here how biased the coverage of mainstream media is in case you don't already have a clue ― as I curate, I can't tell you how often I have to swap out a story's photo to make it as positive as the content. Photos published of black folks in mainstream media are very often sullen or angry-looking. Even when it's a positive story!

I also have to constantly alter headlines to 1) include a person's name and not have it just be "Black Man Wins Settlement" or "Carnegie Hall Gets 1st Black Board Member" or 2) rephrase it from a subtle subjugator like "ABC taps Viola Davis as Series Lead" to "Viola Davis Lands Lead on ABC Show" as is done for say, Jennifer Aniston or Steven Spielberg.

I also receive a fair amount of highly offensive racist trolling. I don't even respond. I block and delete ASAP.

Okay, J, there's more but I'm exhausted. And my kids need dinner. Remembering and reliving many of these moments has been a strain and a drain (and again, this ain't even the half or the worst of it). But I hope my experiences shed some light for you on how institutional and personal racism have affected the entire life of a friend of yours to whom you've only been respectful and kind.

I hope what I've shared makes you realize it's not just strangers but people you know and care for who have suffered and are suffering because we are excluded from the privilege you have to not be judged, questioned or assaulted in any way because of your race.

As to you "being part of the problem," trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and to not only to treat people of races that differ from yours "with respect and humor," but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, to not let "jokes" or "off-color" comments by friends, co-workers or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else's shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.

With much love and respect,
A version of this post originally appeared on goodblacknews.org

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What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege

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Recently, I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a handful of folks on Facebook.

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There shouldn't be a next time.

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Confucius Say What? Whitewashed by the Colorblind

Panel 1

[Image] Five women sitting at a table. The one in the middle is Asian, and the rest are white. All are smiling.

[Caption] I was at a retreat for an international women's volunteer organization. I was the only Asian there.

Panel 2

[Image] A woman with short light hair, with her hands raised, palms together.

[Caption] Overall it was great, but then it happened...

Short-Haired woman: Confucius say: man who cut self while shaving lose face.

Panel 3

[Image] The Asian woman between two white women at the table. All are smiling, but the Asian woman has one arm wrapped around her torso.

[SFX] Ha ha ha

[Caption] I don't know why I laughed along.

Panel 4

[Image] The three women. The woman on the left is gesturing expressively. A blank speech bubble indicates she is talking. The Asian woman is not smiling.

[SFX] Ha ha ha

[Caption] And then it happened again.

Panel 5

[Image] The same three women. The woman on the left has her hand raised, pointing upward. A blank speech bubble indicates she is talking. The Asian woman now has both arms crossed, and looks unhappy. The two white women are still smiling.

[Caption] ...and again.

Panel 6

[Image] The Asian woman sitting alone at a boardroom table. She looks very sad, and her shoulders are slumped.

[Caption] I can't remember if there was a fourth. What I remember is how it made me feel. I instantly felt awkward and that I didn't exist. My colleagues were oblivious about what these jokes might mean to someone like me.

Panel 7

[Image] A white man with a goatee, facing the reader and looking confused.

[Caption] When I told my husband (who is white):

Man: Are you looking for something to be upset about?

Panel 8

[Image] A white woman with short dark hair, facing the reader and looking confused.

[Caption] When I told my best friend:

White woman: I never think of you as non-white. I just think of you as a person.

Panel 9

[Caption] Well yes, I am a person. But part of what makes me a person is my Chinese heritage. The color of my skin, the shape of my eyes, and the history of my people - it's all part of my personhood.

Panel 10

[Image] The panel mimics a computer screen. In the top right corner is an icon of a paintbrush that says "Tool - Brush" On the screen is a stick person with long black hair, smiling. The mouse arrow hovers right next to the stick figure.

[SFX] Click

[Caption] It's hard when people claim to treat you as a person, but their concept of "person" is so centred on the Caucasian experience.

Panel 11

[Image] The stick person looks concerned and is looking down at a new icon reading "Color". A mini-menu has popped up underneath the icon with the option "Default." The mouse arrow is hovering over "Default" The Tool icon in the top right corner is now of a Paint Bucket.

[SFX] Click

[Caption] "Not seeing color?"

Panel 12

[Image] The stick figure is now a fully-rendered person: the Asian woman. But her skin remains uncolored. The icon in the top right corner is still a paint bucket.

[SFX] Poof!

[Caption] ...just means defaulting to the societal standard, which is white. ]]Panel

Panel 13

[Image] The Asian woman, now with her normal skin colour, reaching upward to the top left of the screen, and hitting "Undo (CTRL + Z)" with her forefinger. She looks annoyed.

[SFX] Click!

[Caption] But I'm NOT white. My race is a significant part of my personhood. It affects how I experience things, including jokes about Asians.

Panel 14

[Image] A faded aggregation of panels 4,5,7, and 8 - the laughing white women, the husband and the best friend. All four pictures are background to the caption.

[Caption] When they don't "see color", it becomes okay to make jokes about Asians in front of me, and then accuse me of getting upset over "nothing."

Panel 15

[Image] The Asian woman, sitting at the boardroom table, alone. She is looking directly at the reader and looks sad.

[Caption] One of my African American friends scolded me for not speaking up. He said I should have made them stop and reminded them I am Chinese. Would I have made a difference? Would they have reacted the same way as my best friend and my husband? Would they have dismissed me as overreacting? I don't know. But, for my part, I think I'll try to say something next time, though I'm not sure what. There's only one thing I know for sure. There will be a next time.

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Full story

I was at a retreat for a women's volunteer organization - this organization works primarily with girls, but it was an event where adult leaders were invited from the entire region. Adult volunteers were there from several counties.

I was the only Asian woman there.

There are many non-caucasians in the organization, but there weren't any at this retreat. They all looked white to me - but I'm not fool enough to claim to know for sure of anyone being white through and through. To my quick assessment of the room, I was still the only person who was Asian.

I had a wonderful time at the retreat. I didn't feel out of place and certainly felt welcomed by everybody there. Truly, truly, these were incredible women and they were all great volunteers. We taught each other new things, discussed organizational changes, and planed regional events. It was nice to be part of this group of women.

But then there was this one moment. I have been processing "the moment" for a while now, and I'm not sure how I should have handled it.

I wish I could remember exactly what the conversation was. I wish I could remember why I even laughed after that first joke, but I think I did because it wasn't a joke completely out of the blue. It followed the course of the conversation so I didn't think it was strange. It was the following two or three jokes that didn't sit right with me.

It started when someone told a "Confucius say," joke.

For the uninitiated, it's usually some clever turn of phrase in broken, English. For example: "Confucius say man who cut self while shaving lose face."
I laughed the first time. And then the next one was said - in that broken English and fake Chinese accent. And the next one. I can't remember if there was a fourth.

What I remember is how it made me feel.

Offended isn't the right word. It feels too strong. I wasn't "offended". But I instantly felt that I did not belong, that I was not part of them. That I wasn't white...and they were oblivious about what those jokes might mean to me.

When I told my friends, the reactions I got from my white friends were starkly different from my non-white friends.
My white husband said, "are you looking for something to be upset about?"
My white best friend said, "I never think of you as non-white. I just think of you as a person."

Well yes, I am a person. But I am a person who happens to be Chinese, who felt awkward and non-existent when they told those jokes. It's not like I can change the color of my skin or the shape of my eyes or the history of my people. That too is part of my personhood, but the jokers seemed to not notice. And when you don't acknowledge that part of me, it becomes okay to make jokes about Asians in front of me, and then accuse me of getting upset over "nothing".

My friend who is African American scolded me for not stopping them in the moment. He said I should have made them stop making those jokes and reminded them that I was Chinese. That I should have said the jokes were offensive. He scolded me for having laughed at the first joke. That it made me complicit and that I've somehow done a disservice to all the people in the organization and society as a whole.

But it took me days to even put a word to my experience. It took me days to understand it in any way and to put it into context for myself. I know I wasn't ready right then to say a single word about it. It's hard when people claim to treat you as a person, but their concept of "person" is so centered on the Caucasian experience. "Not seeing color" means defaulting to the societal standard, which is white. They are saying that they treat everyone as white people - instead of as people who have racial differences, who live different lives because of those differences. This is why saying Asian jokes is okay in their mind. They're not treating me as a person. They're treating me as a white person.

If I had spoken up and shamed these women, my newly made friends, told them that their jokes were racist, what exactly would have happened? Would it have made a difference, would they try to understand why it was problematic? Or would they all react the same way as my best friend and husband, and think that I'm over-reacting, being too sensitive?

I wish I had a nice neat bow to finish up this little essay but I don't. I don't think I can figure all this out in one little essay. For my part, I think I'll try to say something next time. I'm not sure what I will say. There is only one thing I know for sure.

There will be a next time.

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Confucius say what? Whitewashed by the colorblind - Empathize This

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I was at a retreat for a women's volunteer organization - this organization works primarily with girls, but it was an event where adult leaders were invited from the entire region. Adult volunteers were there from several counties. I was the only Asian woman there.

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"We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

Imagine your school's graduation day some years from now. You look around at your community abuzz with the joys of watching a new generation of students launched. You know they are ready. Each and every scholar has made her mark on the school. Each has grown into a confident, expressive version of that younger person who showed up in the admissions office just years earlier. The school has become a place where students, families, educators, and administrators have thrived, not regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, and other social differences, but because of them. Your school has helped students and adults build the emotional stamina and cultural skills necessary to cultivate and nurture multiple-perspective thinking and nuanced understandings. At last, your school has lived up tp the ideals stated in its mission and diversity statements.

Imagine further: Your school has had near-bottomless funds to create this multicultural environment. Still, the challenges your school faced surprised you. Though you had thought that affordability was the greatest challenge to access, you found yourself surprised by a different set of barriers - unexpected mindset barriers. Overcoming these mindsets, it turns out, was central to developing a multicultural community.

Examining the We/Them Paradigm

Let's start with a leading mindset barrier about the term "diversity." For years, my unspoken mindset was that "diversity" meant increasing the numbers of students, faculty, and administrators of color. Over time it expanded to include ethnically, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse people as well. As I quietly constructed my understanding of the term, I remained unaware that I was stuck in a we/them paradigm. "We" were striving to attract and admit "them."

When the term "inclusion" came along, I remember thinking, "Yes! That's a great term. We need to be inclusive once diverse people get here!" Notice my use of the word "we." As my colleague Verna Myers writes in her book Moving Diversity Forward, "Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance." Though I embrace and often use that quote, I can't help but also notice that in both statements there is unspoken power and privilege. We get to invite them. We get to ask them to dance. In a we/them mindset, the risk is that "diverse" candidates might be treated, and therefore feel, more like guests than full-fledged community members. Even the most well-intentioned, well-funded diversity efforts can be undermined by the prevalence of this kind of unexamined we/them thinking and the divisive barrier it holds in place.

As a daughter of racial and class privilege, I am tragically familiar with this kind of thinking. In examining when and where this mindset took hold, I find more memories than I care to admit, many going back to childhood events I once viewed with wide-eyed innocence. For example, every summer my family traveled to northern Maine to a lake community populated with beautiful summer cabins owned by extended family and multigenerational friends. Not only was I deeply attached to this place and its traditions, I took immense pride in the fact that my family had "founded the town," thanks to an 1807 United States government land grant. Free land! Founded a town! My heart and mind filled with pride every time I thought of this remarkable intersection of luck and achievement.

Neither family stories nor the history I learned in school had contextualized my family's presumed good luck or achievement. With the violent history attached to the distribution of land grants unknown to me, I lapped up tales of my pioneering ancestors and felt a deep sense of belonging as a founding family. Only at the age of 48, when a graduate school course began to expose me to history I'd never known and perspectives I'd not heard, did my paradigm begin to shift. As it did, I felt overcome with grief as I realized how my own ignorance had allowed me to repeat history in ways that lifted up my self-image while simultaneously casting judgment upon those I'd been taught to see as "other." After 48 years of thinking myself a "good" person wholly detached from racial injustice, I had to examine the origins and limitations of that thinking.

I embarked on a journey to examine where my ideas about being a good person had come from. I was clear that, in my family, part of being good included kindness and charity. I recalled how Saturday mornings at the lake began with a family trip to the dump, often with a donation of hand-me-downs for the local Indians. ¹ One summer when we replaced the screens on our cabin's front porch, for instance, my parents had us carefully roll up and bind the old screens and lay them at the dump's perimeter. Part of going to the dump was the excitement of seeing the Indians take what we'd set aside. I felt proud to be from a family who would take the time to separate the trash for "the needy," a term used interchangeably with "the less fortunate."

The connection that was never made for me was that the people I was feeling so virtuous about helping were suffering because of the displacement caused by my family moving in on their land as part of a national effort to displace and oppress indigenous people. Looking back, I understand how twisted it was to see myself as generous in "helping" those I'd been taught to see as less fortunate, given that their disadvantage was inextricably linked to my advantage.
In my segregated upper class, white world, the topic of displaced indigenous people never made it into polite conversation. Without learning to make connections like these, I remained able to feel as if "we" had nothing to do with "their" circumstances. No one ever taught me that land grants, citizenship, Social Security, and GI Bill benefits were all resources and rights disproportionately distributed to white Americans at the expense of everyone else. In the void, frequently articulated ideas about a level playing field and the land of the free filled my head with glorious ideas about a fair society in which my family had benefited from nothing other than its own smarts, a strong work ethic, high morals, good luck, and good genes. Yes, we actually used that phrase in my family - "good genes."
And this is a crucial component of my we/them mindset: not only am I prone to feel disconnected from "them," but deep down, I can feel superior. After all, if the playing field were level, "we" must be better players. Right? This set me up both to adopt a helping-and-fixing mindset and feel fully entitled and equipped to do so. What I completely missed was that those I had been taught to see as "less than," in fact embodied values, strengths, and humanity that I lacked. What I've learned as I've worked with independent schools across the country is that these mindset limitations are not unique to me; they are both ubiquitous and undermining best intentions to create 21st century institutions. With a mindset focused on including "them" in "our" community and culture, not only is it possible to offend and alienate those "we" seek to include, it's possible to miss the whole point: Multicultural education is not an act of generosity; it is a strategy to right historic wrongs and evolve beyond the limitations of a single culture in order to grow individual and collective human potential.

Shifting from a We/Them Paradigm to a Multicultural Paradigm

Successful multicultural environments include not just a range of people, they equally value the range of cultural behaviors and values that a range of people brings. To drive home the point, think about this: If diversity were merely a matter of populating a space with different kinds of people, we could say that plantations were diverse. Successful multicultural initiatives embrace all community members' cultures in order to create a climate expansive and adaptive enough for all to feel a sense of investment in creating something new together.

And yet, for members of the dominant culture, imagining our culture as one of many can be illusive. Because my ideas about good/bad and right/wrong were echoed in families, institutions, and media portrayals all around me, they never felt like the norms of a single culture; they felt universally right. Cultural habits such as conflict avoidance, emotional restraint, individual accomplishment, and efficiency didn't feel like one way of being in the world; they felt like the best way of being in the world. This self-serving mindset positioned me to judge and feel superior to people from cultures different from mine, effectively reproducing the very divide diversity and inclusion initiatives purport to dismantle.

Only when I began to understand my own cultural attitudes and behaviors, and their limitations, was I able to grow beyond them. It's not that my cultural ways of being in the world are bad or wrong, it's just that they are exactly the wrong tools for the job of creating deep, authentic human connection, an essential ingredient in multicultural initiatives.

To illustrate this point, let me share two cornerstones of my cultural training, how both undermine cross-cultural engagement, and how I'm working toward new understandings and competencies around each. Though I frame them in a personal perspective, experience tells me that they are shared widely among many whites - especially in independent schools. Both are practiced behaviors that need to change if we are to create true multicultural communities in schools.

I learned conflict avoidance through phrases such as "Never discuss politics or religion in polite company," "Don't rock the boat," and "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." By studying subtle facial and conversational cues, I discovered what was and was not acceptable conversation. Crossing the acceptability line often resulted in a swift change of topic or deafening silence that delivered a pang of shame and reminded me to stick to safer topics. I became a master of light and friendly conversation.

Though I can still do this comfortably at social gatherings, I've learned that bridging the we/them divide demands a different form of engagement. When the elephant in the room is a history of denial and ignorance about 400 years of unjust public and private policies and practices, uncomfortable conversations are inevitable and necessary. This presented me with an immense personal challenge. Being raised in a conflict-avoidance household not only made me want to run when conflict arose, it left me with zero conflict navigation skills.

The good news is that these conflict navigation and resolution skills, and the emotional stamina they require, can be developed. As Howard Stevenson, professor of urban education and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, reminded audience members at last December's NAIS People of Color Conference, it's a matter of competence, not character. The even better news is that increasing conflict navigation and resolution skills frees me to engage more competently with everyone in my life. This is a basic human skill that I now realize my culture did not teach me. The trick for me has been to become increasingly comfortable with discomfort. A motivator for me has been learning about the degree of discomfort that people of color experience every day in white-dominated spaces. Leaning into conflict and tension in the name of collective growth is one way I can take some of that load off community members of color while also making myself a more competent and resilient human being.

Emotional restraint, another piece of my rearing, was taught to me without language. By carefully observing the judgments cast upon those deemed too emotional, I learned to rein in my own. Whereas crying appeared to indicate weakness and deserved pity, anger seemed to be a more serious, if not dangerous, character flaw. I came out of childhood with engrained habits of stuffing my own emotions while harshly judging strong emotion, especially anger, in others. In fact, I saw anger itself as the problem.

Though anger, which usually accompanies conflict, can still make my stomach clench, I now understand that it's a critical messenger. People do not get angry for no reason and listening deeply, without interruption, is essential to dismantling the we/them barrier. We are all human. We are wired to get angry when we feel unjustly treated or marginalized. I now feel that asking people to suppress anger is a form of violence. Judging or dismissing people's anger is the opposite of good customer service, the opposite of unconditional love. Those most dissatisfied are the very ones whose feedback offers insight about our community's current limitations, barriers yet to be dismantled. I now consider the expression of anger, or its milder form, irritation, as a gift. Expressing either emotion in dominant-culture environments is done at great risk, but it's a risk that can bring immeasurable reward if those on the receiving end have the skill and stamina to process it.

As with learning to navigate conflict, increasing my ability to listen to strong emotion both within myself and in others makes me a more competent and resilient human being. More to the point, it enables me to shift from being a barrier to a school's evolution into a multicultural community to being an effective player in the process.

Beyond the Barrier

It fascinates me how circular all of this is. My indoctrinated cultural habits allowed me to overlook, or even judge as wrong, the wisdom and insights that come from living life on the margins where resourcefulness, connectedness, and resilience abound. As I craved the comfort of people familiar to me, I ended up isolating myself in a world unaware of America's racially divisive history and impacts. I had no idea of the harm I could do to another person, or to an entire initiative, simply by clinging to my own comfortable cultural habits. And the last thing I ever imagined was that I might be the one who needed some helping and fixing, that my culture had failed to develop my full humanity.

How could I begin to contribute to dismantling a mindset that I didn't know I harbored? How could I negotiate cocreating a new culture when unconsciously I was overly invested in my own? Though crossing the we/them barrier is an essential first step toward dismantling it altogether, a lack of self-awareness among dominant-culture members too often reinforces the barrier in ways that remain unspoken, unexamined, and anxiety provoking.

My work brings me to campuses across the country where diversity and inclusion ideals remain trapped in the frozen text of mission statements, the land of best intentions. Though campus after campus teems with big-hearted, loving, "good" white people, I observe community members fearfully dancing around one another, instead of courageously interacting with one another. The fear is palpable as old habits such as conflict avoidance and emotional restraint keep us from one another. To me, it feels like a tragic love story, one in which people are longing to be with one another, and yet hidden barriers hold them at arm's length. These barriers can be made visible and can be overcome. What can be most surprising is that the kind of institutional change diversity statements envision requires personal transformation for those of us raised in the dominant culture, transformation that builds basic relationship skills. Multicultural education is not an act of charity; it is an invitation to become fully human with and for one another.

Note

1. I now know to refer to the indigenous people displaced by my family as members of the Maliseet nation.
Independent Ideas Blog
20 Simple-yet-meaningful Things Educators Can Do Every Day

As you make your way through the school year, just remember that it's not about doing that one "big thing." It's often the small things that teachers do for their students that end up leaving a lasting impression.
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"We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein Imagine your school's graduation day some years from now. You look around at your community abuzz with the joys of watching a new generation of students launched. You know they are ready.

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Amazing TED talk - must watch!

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Quiet Revolution developed by author Susan Cain to support and give voice to Introverts.

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Quiet Revolution: Unlocking the Power of Introverts

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Advice and stories for introverts and extroverts alike on how to appreciate our quiet sides. Featuring essays, videos, interviews, and more.

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"The ability to empathize may be the most critical need in this century, and some research suggests that mindfulness can help cultivate empathy."

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Linking to Real-World Problems and Multiple Perspectives

Make what you are teaching relevant to what is going on in the world. The classroom walls aren't magical barriers to the realities outside of them. If there's something happening in the news that you can link to your content, do it. Choose something controversial, or ask your students if they have questions regarding anything they have been hearing about. Chances are that someone is going to mention teacher strikes, honeybee decline, trash pick-up, even the events in Gaza or Robin Williams' death. This is an opportunity to teach children high-level thinking skills:

Discerning fact from opinion

Figuring out your own and others' point of view

Interpreting all of this information to decide on your own "truth."

Of course, this is not an opportunity for a teacher to impose his or her beliefs on the students. It is important to choose topics about which you feel you can be pedagogically neutral as you support students' own journey of learning how to be critical thinkers and forming their own opinions.

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It is also important to note that many of the practices that demonstrate a social justice orientation are also reflective of best practices in teaching. Social justice is not an "add on" for classrooms. This is a both/and proposition. Teachers can both maintain high-quality content instruction and create a classroom with a social justice orientation. Also, a social justice orientation is appropriate for all classrooms. This isn't something that just gets done in diverse classrooms, or classrooms that lack diversity, or urban classrooms -- or any other special category of school. It is a way of teaching and being that supports high-level thinking and learning throughout our lives.

Connecting to Students' Lives

When making curricular decisions, consider, value, and build on the diverse prior learning experiences of your students. This can be as simple as knowing a little bit about every student's background, if they are coming from another school, or if they have an interest in a particular area. Acknowledging and showing that you value what students are already bringing to the classroom is an important step in creating a classroom for social justice.

Linking to Real-World Problems and Multiple Perspectives

Make what you are teaching relevant to what is going on in the world. The classroom walls aren't magical barriers to the realities outside of them. If there's something happening in the news that you can link to your content, do it. Choose something controversial, or ask your students if they have questions regarding anything they have been hearing about. Chances are that someone is going to mention teacher strikes, honeybee decline, trash pick-up, even the events in Gaza or Robin Williams' death. This is an opportunity to teach children high-level thinking skills:

Discerning fact from opinion

Figuring out your own and others' point of view

Interpreting all of this information to decide on your own "truth."

Of course, this is not an opportunity for a teacher to impose his or her beliefs on the students. It is important to choose topics about which you feel you can be pedagogically neutral as you support students' own journey of learning how to be critical thinkers and forming their own opinions.

Creating Classroom Community

Create opportunities for students' voices to be heard. They need to be taught how to participate in a discussion. As teachers, we can encourage both sharing one's own ideas and responding to the ideas of classmates. The teacher's role is to use questioning that can help students make connections between the big ideas that inform the lesson content.

Classrooms can also provide time for collaboration toward a common goal. Teach students to be "academic siblings." We all know that sometimes siblings get on each other's nerves, but ultimately you know that you can count on your siblings to have your back, be honest with you, and support you.

Also, teachers can take a critical look at the materials in the classroom. Do the books, stories, and other curricular materials present one specific narrative? If they do, revamp what you have to be sure that your materials include examples from diverse aspects of society, including ethnicity, religion, language, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status in a non-stereotypical manner.

Include Authentic Assessments

Authentic assessments are opportunities for students to write for real audiences, share knowledge with a wide audience, and engage in the kind of work that occurs outside the classroom. For instance, if you are having students learn how to write letters, be sure they actually get mailed to a real person. A few years ago, I saw a classroom where students wrote letters to a fictional zookeeper. They went into the teacher's homework pile. Although the letters were fine, I suggested that the students revise them and send them to an actual zookeeper. As they made these revisions, the students learned that a zoo has multiple zookeepers for different animals. They each decided which zookeeper they would send letters to. That led to researching the animals in that zookeeper's care. The letters were richer, more personal, and just plain better. And then, they got responses! Getting those responses taught the students that they could make things happen in their world -- that they could be agents of change.

There are many other ways that you can be an advocate for social justice in your classroom. I have suggested just a few. It's also important to note that you don't need to do all of them in order to have a social justice orientation. As you think about your classroom, try to find small ways to include the ideas outlined here within the practices that you know will work best for you and your students.

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Creating Classrooms for Social Justice | Edutopia

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It is also important to note that many of the practices that demonstrate a social justice orientation are also reflective of best practices in teaching. Social justice is not an "add on" for classrooms. This is a both/and proposition. Teachers can both maintain high-quality content instruction and create a classroom with a social justice orientation.

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Current Events => Social Justice teaching

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Current Events => Social Justice teaching

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"Unlike 20 years ago when teachers and parents had to intentionally raise current events topics with young people, nowadays students are already part of the conversation. Through their smartphones, social media outlets, and overheard conversations, they know what is happening. And yet, do students really understand the headlines they see? Do they have the chance to grapple with the information, or is it simply seeping into their psyche with no opportunity to ask questions, dig deeper, or explore how they feel about it?"

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Marriage equality, refugees seeking safety in Europe, the Confederate flag, police shootings of black and Latino men, the presidential election, Caitlyn Jenner, ISIS, and immigration are just a few of the news stories that inhabited the headlines this year on our phones, laptops, and newspapers. Unlike 20 years ago when teachers and parents had to intentionally raise current events topics with young people, nowadays students are already part of the conversation. Through their smartphones, social media outlets, and overheard conversations, they know what is happening. And yet, do students really understand the headlines they see? Do they have the chance to grapple with the information, or is it simply seeping into their psyche with no opportunity to ask questions, dig deeper, or explore how they feel about it?

Most educators feel a sense of responsibility to talk with their students about what's going on in society and the world. Indeed, it's the reason that many decided to become teachers in the first place. With topics both large and small -- from the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality to the lack of diversity in the Academy Awards, from racism in policing to the school dress codes controversy -- teaching about current events has enormous benefits for students. And it almost always has a social justice lens with which to learn, analyze, and discover.

Whether teachers have a few minutes, one class period, or an entire unit to spend on a current event topic, the opportunity is ripe with learning potential. Students' high interest and motivation lay the groundwork for being an informed citizen and talking at home with parents and family members. Current events discussions offer ample opportunity for skill building (e.g. vocabulary development, reading and writing informational and analytical text, oral expression, critical analysis -- all part of the ELA Common Core Learning Standards). Students can build and practice their social and emotional skills, and these topics often present an opportunity to connect the present with the past. Finally, because so many current events topics shed light on human and civil rights, teachers have an excellent conversational bridge as well as a lens for addressing equity and justice, a topic that so many young people are hungry to discuss.

As you reflect on what and how to bring current events topics into your classroom, consider the following:

1. Thoughtfully consider who is in your classroom.

All current events topics have the potential to raise sensitive issues for students, especially around identity. Whether the topic brings up race, religion, sexual orientation, immigration, etc., think about the composition of your students. The young people who might identify with the topic personally will likely have a range of thoughts and feelings about discussing the topic: relief, embarrassment, annoyance, pride, excitement, or nothing at all. Do not assume that all of the students in that identity group know about or are interested in talking about the topic at hand, and be careful not to put those students in the position of being the "authority" or main possessor of knowledge on the topic. Do not ask or expect them to speak for all students in this identity group. If you anticipate that the topic could be very emotional for some students, consider speaking with them prior to the lesson.

2. Explore opinions and perspective.

Most news topics raise controversial issues with different points of view. Use the topic as an opening to help students understand what they believe and why they believe it. Provide opportunities to talk about and write their opinions on the issue. Engage them in reading about and listening to the opinions of others -- their classmates as well as op-ed columnists and subject matter experts. This can and should complicate their thinking and propel them to question, change, and/or sharpen their points of view, and articulate those positions with evidence. Discussion, debate and dialogue should be foundations for these conversations.

3. Make the anti-bias, social justice theme explicit and clear.

Whatever the subject is, bring to the center of the discussion the specific aspect of diversity, bias, or injustice that it raises. For example, when discussing homelessness, explore the stigma and stereotypes of homeless people in the U.S. You may also need to provide some foundational skill development in understanding the language of bias, or give background information in order for students to understand a current controversy (e.g. understand the history of and discrimination against Native American people, including the history of mascots and symbols in sports, in order to make sense of the Washington Redskins' name controversy).

4. Make the lesson interactive and use technology.

As much as possible, create interactive and engaging activities that also develop skills and expand knowledge. This could take the form of debates, mock trials, student surveys or interviews, small-group discussions, role plays, teach-ins, or a simpler activity. Take advantage of students' interest and acumen in the digital world by integrating student blogs, photography and video, and social media platforms, and by following specific hashtags, infographics, and analysis of how social media has helped to facilitate current activist efforts.

5. Do something.

Topics in the news can easily lead to despair, anger, and hopelessness. Especially for young people, it is critical that we give them the perspective and tools to do something about the injustice they see in the world. Exposing students to the wide range of responses to injustice, including activism strategies both past and present, goes a long way toward their turning these negative emotions into positive actions. If possible, work together on a class project, and encourage students to get involved in larger efforts on issues that are important to them.

What does current events instruction look like in your classroom? Please share in the comments section below.

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Turning Current Events Instruction Into Social Justice Teaching | Edutopia

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Marriage equality, refugees seeking safety in Europe, the Confederate flag, police shootings of black and Latino men, the presidential election, Caitlyn Jenner, ISIS, and immigration are just a few of the news stories that inhabited the headlines this year on our phones, laptops, and newspapers.

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An open Dropbox compiled by scholars of research on Race and Policing

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In the wake of the tragic killings of two black men by police this week, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, librarians around the country have been looking for ways to support and educate their communities. Chelsea Couillard-Smith, a librarian for Hennepin County (MN) Library, created a #BlackLivesMatter booklist for teens.

The idea for the booklist begin as Couillard-Smith, who shares a juvenile title on Twitter every week for #FridayReads, thought about recent events and which books might provide a starting point for reflection and conversation. "I really wanted to promote both How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. It quickly evolved into this list. I selected a small number of titles that I thought would be good conversation starters for teens engaged in discussions about race and justice," she explained.

Couillard-Smith was inspired by the effort of several other library resource lists and guides. "There are many great resources that I drew on for ideas including the Oakland Public Library's Black Lives Matter Resource series," she says.

As for the impact of the #BlackLivesMatter booklist? Couillard-Smith says, "If it gets these books into the hands of a few more teen or adult readers in our region, I'll be happy."

The list is reprinted with permission of Hennepin County Library.

Read This: #BlackLivesMatter Reads for Teens

Teens are naturally curious about current events and their roles as emerging citizens. Including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry titles, this list offers a great starting point for discussions of race, justice, and privilege.
How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon
Told through multiple perspectives, this teen novel examines the shooting of a Black teen by a White man. Complex and thought-provoking, it highlights the weaknesses inherent in eyewitness accounts.
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brandon Kiely
Jointly written by authors Jason Reynolds and Brandon Kiely, this teen novel follows the experiences of Rashad, a Black teen savagely beaten by a police officer, and Quinn, a White teen who witnessed the attack. As lines are drawn in the community and at school, both teens struggle to make sense of the larger societal forces shaping their lives.

In this teen novel, a Black 16-year-old on trial as an accessory to murder recounts the path that led him into trouble. As small moral decisions become gateways to larger problems, readers will wrestle with questions of innocence and culpability that are never clearly answered.

In this heroic crown of sonnets, Nelson asks readers to bear witness to the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Black teen lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman. The questions raised about our country's racial history still resonate, and provide much for readers to discuss in the context of current events.

This collection of poems about the Civil Rights movement examines both well-known historical figures and the everyday folks living under racial oppression. While often uplifting and triumphant, Shange is nonetheless honest about the strides yet to be made.
Black Lives Matter by Sue Bradford Edwards
This nonfiction book for teens examines a number of recent high-profile cases of police brutality and racial profiling, placing them in historical context and analyzing a wide range of viewpoints.

This juvenile biography of Black teen Claudette Colvin examines the role she played in helping to integrate Montgomery's bus system during the Civil Rights Movement. An inspiring role model of activism for teens, Colvin's story also highlights the machinery behind political movements and the interconnected communities that create and sustain change.

A juvenile nonfiction account of the horrific murder of a Black teen in 1955, and the way it galvanized the Civil Rights Movement in America. Full of primary source material, including haunting images of the victim and his killers, it will resonate with teens eager to discuss contemporary parallels.

This nonfiction collection for teens of true stories features the experiences of teenage convicts on death row. Incorporating the voices of their families, victims, and those involved in their cases, it provides a complex view of our legal system and raises important questions about justice and racial equality in America.
March: Book One by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illus. by Nate Powell
This memoir for teens and adults in graphic novel format begins the inspiring story of Congressman John Lewis who stood on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager.

A diverse collection of authors, educators, and artists share essays on their experiences of being "other" in Minnesota, and the current state of race in an increasingly diverse Midwestern landscape. Written for adults, it's sure to spark discussions among teen readers, too.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates
Accessible to both teen and adult readers, Coates' letter to his son highlights the long history of brutality against Black bodies in the United States, and reveals the hopes and fears of a Black father for his child.

This article was featured in our free SLJTeen enewsletter.
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Librarian Creates #BlackLivesMatter Booklist for Teens

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In the wake of the tragic killings of two black men by police this week, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, librarians around the country have been looking for ways to support and educate their communities. Chelsea Couillard-Smith, a librarian for Hennepin County (MN) Library, created a #BlackLivesMatter booklist for teens.

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GLSEN works to ensure that LGBT students are able to learn and grow in a school environment free from bullying and harassment

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GLSEN works to ensure that LGBT students are able to learn and grow in a school environment free from bullying and harassment

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THINKB4YOUSPEAK GUIDE FOR EDUCATORS OF GRADES 6-12

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A blog on race, diversity, education, and children's books.

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Does your poetry collection need a refresh? Are you looking for ways to entice readers with lively poetry this spring? Do you love poetry, but are cautious about how to teach it in ways that will resonate with students?

In time for Poetry Month in April, check out our upcoming webinar featuring tips and strategies from renowned poet, educator, and literacy advocate Pat Mora about how to use poetry with students in various educational settings.

Continue reading

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Does your poetry collection need a refresh? Are you looking for ways to entice readers with lively poetry this spring? Do you love poetry, but are cautious about how to teach it in ways that will resonate with students?

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Video of the police killings of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, man Alton Sterling and Minneapolis resident Philando Castile, as well as a mass slaying of five police officers at a peaceful rally in Dallas, dominated the news cycle this past week. The incidents reignited a wave of Black Lives Matter protests and discussion about high numbers of disproportionately black people killed by law enforcement across the country.

But while policing is one of the core issues at stake, so too is the implicit privilege enjoyed by those who aren't the subject of so much physical force by the authorities. On Twitter, users responded with the hashtag #WhitePrivilegeMeans in an attempt to shed some light on the forms this privilege actually takes.

While #WhitePrivilegeMeans has trended before, Twitter user Matt Edelstein (@Shoq) told Mic via email he restarted the hashtag in the wake of the shootings in order to provide an "approach for a complex idea that white people are pretty resistant (or unwilling) to understand."

"I decided to resurrect the tag while the topic was being made hot by the Anton, Phillipe and Dallas horrors ... and all the noise I knew would be on cable all weekend," Edelstein wrote. "... In any event, as a 9 year veteran of Twitter, and a strong friend and supporter of [activist Deray Mckesson, who was arrested during a recent protest in Baton Rouge] and the movement, I felt it was a splendid teaching moment and that tag simply had to be resurrected right now, while the topic was very germane. Especially since the Dallas shooting was giving the #bluelivesmatter crackpot police apologists a chance to seize the narrative."

According to Edelstein, the hashtag trended for approximately seven hours, saw over 180,000 tweets, and resulted in a bevy of negative feedback from aggrieved Twitter users unpleased with the hashtag's message.

Here's a sample of what Twitter was saying about privilege in the past few days.

July 11, 2016 at 6:19 shp.m.: This story has been updated with more information about the revival of the #WhitePrivilegeMeans hashtag by Twitter user Matt Edelstein (@Shoq).

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#WhitePrivilegeMeans Trends on Twitter Amid Nationwide Black Lives Matter Protests

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Video of the police killings of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, man Alton Sterling and Minneapolis resident Philando Castile, as well as a mass slaying of five police officers at a peaceful rally in Dallas, dominated the news cycle this past week.

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Teaching White Students about Race/Identity

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Teaching White Students about Race/Identity

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"Silence is a racial message and a “tool of whiteness.” In order to support the goals of their diversity mission statements and work toward a “racially just America,” schools need to take a more proactive approach to teaching white students about race and racial identity."

"Students must develop a sense of how systemic racism works on an individual, community, and institutional level.

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Growing up in the suburban Midwest, I (Ali Michael) never talked about race with my family. We were white, all of our neighbors were white, and it never occurred to us that there was anything to say about that. As a result, in later years, I developed a deep sense of shame whenever I talked about race - particularly in college, where I was expected to make mature personal and academic contributions to race dialogues.

At a certain point, I realized that this shame came from the silence about race in my childhood. The silence had two functions. It was at the root of my lack of competency to even participate in conversations on race. But it had also inadvertently sent me the message that race was on a very short list of topics that polite people do not discuss. My parents did not intend for me to receive this message, but because we never talked about race, I learned to feel embarrassed whenever it came up. And so even when I wanted to participate in the conversation, I had to contend with deep feelings of shame and inadequacy first.

Research on white racial socialization is beginning to emerge within the field of racial socialization that makes it clear that many white people share my experience. In particular, the research suggests that for fear of perpetuating racial misunderstandings, being seen as a racist, making children feel badly, or simply not knowing what to say, many white parents tend to believe that there is never a right time to initiate a conversation about race. ¹ They talk to their children about race if it becomes relevant in their lives (mostly in negative contexts). Otherwise, they tell their children that people are all the same and that they should not see race.

While white parents' intention is to convey to their children the belief that race shouldn't matter, the message their children receive is that race, in fact, doesn't matter. The intent and aim are noble, but in order for race not to matter in the long run, we have to acknowledge that, currently, it does matter a great deal. If white parents want their children to contribute to what researchers Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer describe as a "racially just America" ² in which race does not unjustly influence one's life opportunities, their children will need to learn awareness and skills that they cannot acquire through silence and omission.

White Racial Socialization

Scholars differentiate between active and passive socialization, as well as proactive and reactive socialization. Active racial socialization occurs in contexts in which racial socialization is deemed essential for children's ability to effectively navigate their world. Because many white families generally do not consider racial competencies among the skills their children will need when they grow up, they tend to socialize passively and reactively. This strategy leads to silence about race in many white households. Because U.S. society is already structured racially, silence leaves unchallenged the many racial messages children receive from a number of socializing agents, which consistently place whites at the top of the racial hierarchy. Silence is thus hardly a passive stance; labeled "whiteness-at-work" by Irene H. Yoon, education professor at the University of Utah, ³ silence is a socialization strategy that perpetuates a racist status quo.

Racial socialization for white youth, then, is the process by which they learn what it means to be white in a society that currently values whiteness. It differs markedly from the racial socialization of people of color because of the ways that whites tend to benefit materially from systems of racism.

While the research on white racial socialization is new, a 2014 study by Bartoli et al. ⁴ describes the results of 13 in-depth family interviews in which white parents and their children (ages 12 to 18) were interviewed both separately and together as a family in the first qualitative study of its kind. They found that most of the white families opted to socialize their children by telling them not to be racist, not to talk about race, not to use the word "black," and not to notice racial differences. They wanted their children to believe that all people are the same and that racism is bad. They defined racism as overt, violent, and, for the most part, anachronistic. They felt that, if they emphasize these messages, they will impart to their children messages of racial equality. However, the individual interviews with their children showed that when children only know what not to do or not to talk about, they don't have the lenses to understand racial dynamics in their lives, nor the skills to address them.

Regarding race, the messages that white teens in the Bartoli et al. study received were contradictory and incomplete. While they believed that everyone is the same, that race is superfluous, and that hard work determines where one gets in life, they also professed beliefs about differences among racial groups, including that black people are lazy or poor, that poor black neighborhoods are dangerous, and that black people are physically stronger than whites. Because these white teens lacked a systemic analysis of racism, they had no way of understanding the impact of the structural racism they observed around them, such as the de facto segregation through academic tracking in their schools or in the geography of their cities. Thus, in spite of the fact that they had been taught that race does not matter and that they should be color-blind, when faced with a question that challenged them to explain structural racism, the only answers available to them were ones that relied on racial stereotypes. Overall, the teens did not seem to be able to differentiate between what is racist and what is, simply, racial. They tended to classify any mention of race as racist.

The Role of Schools in White Racial Socialization

While most scholars of racial socialization agree that the primary means of racial socialization happens in the home, there is also broad consensus that it is a multidirectional process and that messages reach children through books, media, television, music, and schools. Many white parents in the Bartoli et al. study used school as one of their only conscious racial socialization strategies, sending their children to racially diverse schools in the hope that they would learn the racial competence they needed by being in a racially diverse environment. Yet few schools currently engage in conscious policies to support the development of positive racial identity, in spite of the fact that research has shown that such work could lead to a better racial climate as well as stronger academic outcomes for all students. ⁵

Independent schools tend to have mission statements and/or diversity statements that indicate that they want their school communities to be diverse. But such statements tend to reflect the racial socialization goals of most white parents: wanting to have racially diverse communities in which race does not matter. They rarely reflect an awareness of the need to teach racial skills and competencies in order to foster healthy racially diverse communities. Nor do they reflect an awareness that white children need to learn specific competencies in order to be full members of those racially diverse environments.

Some may argue that school is not an appropriate place for racial socialization. This view assumes that it is possible to maintain racial neutrality in schools. In fact, the neutral/color-blind approach that most schools currently use does racially socialize youth - it simply does so in a particular direction. As stated earlier, silence is a racial message and a "tool of whiteness." In order to support the goals of their diversity mission statements and work toward a "racially just America," schools need to take a more proactive approach to teaching white students about race and racial identity.

Howard Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania runs programs in schools intended to help black youth contemplate the messages they receive about race from different sources and fortify themselves against negative racial messages that hinder them from being fully themselves or fully successful. Such racial socialization makes it possible for black students to resist, confront, deconstruct, analyze, and/or embrace the racial socialization they are receiving at school and from their families, to take more ownership of their racial identity, and to make it positive.

What would the parallel process of positive racial identity development look like for white students?

Our research team set out to design a set of strategies for schools that want to take proactive steps toward assisting white children to develop a positive racial identity. We begin with messages, providing a general framework for white racial socialization. We then address specific content knowledge and skills that would empower students to become proactive in their engagement with racial issues and conversations.

Messages About Race

One could fill a book with the myriad messages about race in this nation. What matters most are the messages we want our students to hear. Here's a short list of some of the central messages schools can offer.

Talking about race is not racist. It's OK - and important.

Because white students receive color-blind messages, they come to believe that merely talking about race is racist and, therefore, something that should be avoided. Students need to learn that there's a vast difference between talking about race and being racist. Racial talk leads to greater racial understanding and helps undermine the power of racist laws, structures, and traditions. Racist talk, on the other hand, helps to perpetuate the status quo and to further entrench racial myths and stereotypes. Avoiding race talk makes race itself unspeakable, which, in turn, gives it a negative connotation. Most white adults and teens participate in conversations about race only when there is a problem. They need support in changing their worldview to see the ways in which race is always present, regardless of whether there are problems associated with it. Further, race and racial differences aren't all bad. Racial tension is a reality, but so are cross-racial friendships and communities.

Race is an essential part of one's identity. Being white may have little meaning to some whites, but that does not mean it has no meaning. All white people are white in the context of a society that continues to disadvantage people of color based on race. Being white, in essence, means not having to deal with those disadvantages and therefore not having to notice them. Schools can help foster awareness about the meaning of whiteness by helping white students develop a positive racial identity, which requires an understanding of systemic racism. While students may need to be reassured that they did not ask to be white, or for any of the advantages that might come with it, they should also know that the reality in which they are embedded ascribes unearned privileges to their whiteness. It is through seeing themselves in a larger racialized context that white people can begin to understand how they can work to change racism - and change what it means to be white.

Create a positive white identity that allows white students to move toward it. In her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Daniel Tatum suggests that, in the traditional context of race, there are only three ways to be white: ignorant, color-blind, and racist. With options like these, she asks, who would choose to identify with their whiteness? She suggests that we have to create a fourth way to be white: the antiracist white identity. Schools need to create spaces in which students can identify as white and simultaneously work against racism. Whites have choices regarding how to use the privilege that comes from being white. All of the above considerations as well as content knowledge below can foster an antiracist white identity.

Content Knowledge

At the very least, schools that believe in equity and justice and want their students to be future leaders need to help students - especially white students - understand the history of race and racism and how both play out in contemporary society. This racial content knowledge constitutes a basic social literacy that all students should have.

Be clear about the meaning of "race."
Race is a social construct, not a biological fact. But too many people believe the latter - confusing a few distinguishing traits with essential difference. So schools first need to clarify our biological sameness and explore the implications of race as a social construct. One strategy for doing this is to ask students, "What does it mean to be ________ (Asian, black, Latino, Native American, white)?" Then point out how their answers usually do not correlate with phenotypic characteristics, but rather with social ideas and constructs. Studying how whiteness was constructed historically through institutions that served whites while denying services to nonwhites or through residential segregation also helps students see how whiteness began to be associated with certain social patterns and realities.

Understand systemic racism.
Understanding systemic racism helps change the conversation from one of individual culpability to one in which we are all heavily influenced by our position within a system of racial stratification. It helps students broaden their lenses beyond their immediate surroundings and see how racism shapes the wider landscape of their lives. Without a systemic analysis of racism, it is impossible to understand why race continues to matter. Students must develop a sense of how systemic racism works on an individual, community, and institutional level.

Learn how antiracist action is relevant to all.
The course of history for any population in the United States was and will continue to be determined by the history of all racial groups. Even though they tend to be taught in isolation, racial group histories are, in fact, deeply interconnected and interdependent. Without explicit acknowledgment of such interdependence, students will find it difficult to understand their connection to other racial groups. ⁶ Further, the history of antiracist struggles in the United States involved white people. The stories of these antiracists throughout history should be taught so that white students can envision possible ways to be white and antiracist.

Understand stereotypes and their counternarratives.
Students are exposed to numerous stereotypes of people of color. It's essential for students to be able to recognize these, understand how they might have developed, analyze the function they play to maintain social hierarchies, and learn accurate information that counters the stereotypes. They need to hear counternarratives - stories of people whose lives do not conform to the stereotypes. They also need multiple stories of various racial groups to fully move beyond stereotypes and understand the richness existing within each community.

Skills

Part of the work of supporting an antiracist identity for white students involves teaching them skills to be proactive in discussing race, confronting racism, building interracial friendships, and acknowledging racism.

Develop self-awareness about racist beliefs.
Building a positive racial identity requires one to recognize and counter one's inaccurate beliefs about race. We routinely learn stereotypical and incorrect information from the world around us. Students should be encouraged to realize that no one is free of racist beliefs; therefore, the aim is not to not have them, but rather to recognize them and access the content knowledge needed to refute them. Self-awareness about race is a lifelong practice that asks us to notice race and racial bias consistently and critically.

Analyze media critically.
Learning to filter and evaluate the racial messages students receive from media can help students apply their knowledge about race and recognize its impact in the world around them. This skill also helps them begin to realize the ways in which racist messages are delivered and reinforced. Such analytical skills will then provide them with further knowledge and language to resist and counter those messages in conscious and proactive ways.

Learn how to intervene.
White youth (and many white adults) are often at a loss about what to do when they witness racism. They need skills to recognize, name, intervene in, and/or reach out for assistance in racist incidents. Such skills might include recognizing relevant situations, identifying one's own sphere of influence, and accessing resources to respond either in the moment or afterward. It is not always appropriate or safe to intervene with racism in the moment, be it overt or subtle. But the capacity to name it, to withdraw from it, to ally oneself with the target, or to otherwise refuse to collude with it can be an empowering act for the student and, in itself, promote social change.

Manage racial stress.
It is essential to provide students with tools to be able to understand their emotional reactions and learn to manage them. Strategies include identifying the sources of anxiety, normalizing them, and accessing relevant support in allies. Over time, the very process of confronting racism and withstanding the relevant anxiety makes the practice easier to navigate.

Honor and respect racial affinity spaces for students of color.
Many schools now recognize the efficacy of creating racial affinity spaces for students of color, particularly with regard to countering the effects of stereotype threat ⁷ and creating a sense of safety and camaraderie within predominantly white spaces. Learning to accept that such spaces can be important resources for peers of color, without feeling threatened or excluded from those dynamics, can be an important step for white students who want to participate in the construction of a healthy multiracial community. Racially competent white students would understand such a gathering of students of color as ultimately supportive of interracial relationships, rather than in opposition to them. White racial affinity groups can also be powerful spaces for white students to cultivate and affirm their antiracist identities. This would not be a white cultural group or a white activity space; white students should never meet in an exclusively designated white space except for explicitly antiracist purposes. That said, so much growth can happen when white people challenge and support one another to learn about race and racism, particularly because white students do often have different learning needs from students of color that can be accommodated in an affinity group space.

Develop authentic relationships with peers of color and other white students.
This skill involves learning to connect with peers of all different races with an understanding of the racialized context within which those relationships take place. In this context, the ability to name and discuss race in all of its facets (both enriching and problematic) is essential, so that everyone's reality can be accounted for, engaged with, and affirmed. This, in turn, will lead to more authentic interracial relationships.

Recognize one's racist and antiracist identities.
Students must be able to acknowledge the "both/and" possibility of simultaneously being racist and antiracist. It's not unusual for white Americans to project both a sense of friendliness and rejection toward people of color. ⁸ Acknowledging this seemingly contradictory state of being can be crucial to breaking down the binary in which people are always either "racist" or "not racist" and creates the space to receive important critical feedback that may challenge one's self-image as antiracist, yet simultaneously offer the possibility of growing in one's antiracism.

Racially Just Schools

White children are racially socialized by a number of forces, many of which, as educators, we cannot directly control. Schools, however, can play a crucial role in shaping racial socialization for white children. Ideally, white racial socialization in school would promote children's abilities to build productive and genuine relationships with the people of color in their lives, and to recognize the effect that race has on their experience. In this way, children can be more than simply passive participants in an unjust racial system, but actually shape the racial reality in which they are embedded in the very ways that so many parents and schools already wish for.

The white racial socialization perspectives and skills proposed here will contribute not only to healthier schools and communities, but also to healthier individuals, less susceptible to the acquisition of misinformation and therefore less likely to perpetuate harm toward others. These skills and perspectives create spaces where it is more difficult for racism to thrive because there are more white people resisting it and deconstructing it. This work stands in stark contrast to color-blindness, which provides ample room for the status quo to develop stronger roots. A community in which critical race analysis plays a central role is one in which people truly have a choice about how to be more fully themselves, outside of the preestablished roles assigned by racial constructs. Given the importance of this work, it's hard to imagine why we wouldn't embrace it.

If we want a racially just world, we need racially aware schools.

Notes

1. Eleonora Bartoli, Ali Michael, Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards, Howard C. Stevenson, Rachel F. Shor, and Shannon E. McClain. Chasing Colorblindness: White Family Racial Socialization. Manuscript submitted for publication. 2014.

2. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer. "To Imagine and Pursue Racial Justice." Race, Ethnicity and Education 15(2): 259-289, 2012.

3. Irene H. Yoon. "The Paradoxical Nature of Whiteness-at-Work in the Daily Life of Schools and Teacher Communities." Race, Ethnicity and Education 15(5): 587-613.

4. Bartoli et al., 2014.

5. Diane Hughes, Emilie P. Smith, Deborah J. Johnson, Howard C. Stevenson, and Paul Spicer, "Parents' Ethnic-Racial Socialization: A Review of Research and Directions for Future Study," Developmental Psychology, 42(5), 2006, 747-770.

6. See texts by Ronald Takaki and James Loewen.

7. Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, New York: W.M. Norton & Company, 2010.

8. Irwin Katz and Glen Hass, "Racial Ambivalence and American Value Conflict: Correlational and Priming Studies of Dual Cognitive Structures," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55(6): 893-905, 1988.

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What White Children Need to Know About Race

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Growing up in the suburban Midwest, I (Ali Michael) never talked about race with my family. We were white, all of our neighbors were white, and it never occurred to us that there was anything to say about that.

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Ask teachers to describe the impact they hope to have on their students, and most will eventually say something along these lines: I want my students to grow into responsible citizens. I want my students to participate in society in an active, productive way.

And maybe: I want my students to change the world.

But how many of us know how to make that happen, really? Can we explicitly teach students how to change the world? If this question has been whispering in the back of your mind, the resources in this collection will help.

What is social justice, and how does it fit into the curriculum?

The National Association of Social Workers defines social justice as "the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities." To study social justice is to learn about the problems that dramatically impact quality of life for certain populations, and how people have worked to solve those problems.

If you teach social studies, you'll have no trouble finding direct curricular links to social justice. The National Curriculum Standards for the Social Studies includes Civic Ideals and Practices as one of its 10 Themes of Social Studies, and this includes an emphasis on learning how to get involved in influencing public policy. In history and social studies class, social justice teaching is a natural fit.

In other content areas, teachers disagree over whether social justice has a place. We put ourselves in a vulnerable position by exploring issues that are seen as more controversial than others (a topic I will get into in the next section), and some teachers prefer to completely steer clear of those kinds of complications. For others, social justice was a driving force in why they became teachers, and they weave it into whatever content they are teaching. If you choose to address some or all of these issues in your classroom, the next section offers some tips for doing it effectively.

Some Advice for Teaching Social Justice

As an undergraduate, I served as a student counselor for three years and a resident assistant (RA) for one. I regularly delivered workshops on social justice topics, and I learned a few important lessons along the way. Here are some things to keep in mind when studying social justice issues with your students:

Make getting to know students a key component of any social justice teaching. If you and your students don't spend time examining your own backgrounds, biases, and beliefs, you will be missing an essential component of any social justice curriculum. We all view every social justice issue through the lens of our own experience, and these different lenses can block our growth and learning if we aren't aware of them. If we fine-tune our self-awareness, our individual lenses can richly inform classroom conversations and help us understand issues on a much deeper level, directly from each other.

Know that not all students feel the same way about these issues. Most, if not all, of these resources have been created from a pretty liberal, progressive viewpoint. For example, one of the lessons in the Teaching Tolerance series described below is on Confronting Unjust Laws. The lesson uses California's Proposition 8 as an example of an unjust law. But not all of your students (or their families) will see a law like Prop 8 as unjust. In fact, some may strongly oppose same-sex marriage. That doesn't mean you can't talk about controversial issues; in fact, teaching students how to respectfully discuss an issue with people who don't see things the same way is a lesson that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

Familiarize yourself with the material before teaching. Sometimes we just skim materials before we teach. With social justice topics, this would be a mistake. Not knowing exactly what's in all of your teaching materials, including the texts or videos you and your students will be looking at, can leave you vulnerable to problems when unexpected content pops up.

Keep your administrator in the loop. As with any potentially controversial lesson, it is essential that you talk to your administrator about it ahead of time. Show the curricular connections between your planned lessons and the standards you're teaching. Talk about potential problems or objections that may come up and how you both plan to address them. That way, if your administrator gets a phone call from a concerned parent, she or he won't be blindsided.

Featured Resources

When I set out to find good resources for social justice teaching, I was looking for classroom-ready materials, lesson plans with supplementary texts or videos that would prompt students to learn about, think about, and talk about social justice issues. I also hoped to find some that would actually teach students about activism, about how a citizen zeroes in on a problem, formulates a solution, then does the grassroots work necessary to see that solution come to life.

Some of these resources fit the bill perfectly, especially the first one on the list. Others do not include lesson plans at all, but serve such an important and innovative role in social justice education, I thought they were essential to include here.

Anti-Defamation League: Current Events Classroom

The ADL's Current Events Classroom is a collection of lesson plans that use current events as a springboard. For example, What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?, a lesson for high school students, has students watch the video of the South Carolina police officer who flipped a student out of her chair. The rest of the lesson has students study and discuss the impact of zero-tolerance policies in schools, statistics on the connection between school suspensions and the juvenile justice system, and their own school discipline policy. The end of the lesson offers students a choice of next steps for taking action on this issue.

Most of the lessons in the collection are written for middle and high school students on a wide range of topics including anti-Muslim bigotry, the refugee crisis, homelessness, cyberbullying, and gender stereotypes. The longer I look at this collection, the more impressed I am with it. Definitely worth a look.

Update: Since publishing this post, a few readers have pointed out that some of ADL's other website content (separate from this curriculum) takes a strong stance on issues relating to Israel and may offend some users. I still feel that this curriculum contains incredibly valuable lessons on very recent events that you won't find anywhere else, but this reinforces my second and third points above: Know your audience, and read through the materials carefully. For more details on this issue, please read the comments below.

Teaching Tolerance: Classroom Resources

This award-winning organization comes up most often any time social justice teaching is discussed. There's lots to explore on their site, including the Classroom Resources section, which is loaded with lesson plans and other resources teachers can use for free in their classrooms. One of these lessons is Confronting Unjust Practices, where students learn about the anti-segregation actions taken by the Freedom Riders and the attack on one of these buses in Anniston, Alabama (pictured above).

Other lessons from this library include What is Ageism?, Unequal Unemployment, and What Makes a Family? Lessons are available for elementary, middle, and high school students.

DoSomething.org

No lesson plans here: DoSomething.org is an outstanding organization whose goal is to support the work of young people who want to make a difference in their world. Students browse through a big list of campaigns, public education and activism projects students can launch right in their own communities, and choose one or more that they'd like to participate in. Once they have finished a campaign, students submit a photo or video to prove they completed the required steps. This entry makes them eligible to win prizes, including scholarships. Currently, only U.S. students are eligible for these scholarships, but DoSomething.org is expanding into other countries as well.

Although this site will not help you do any direct instruction about social justice, it provides incredible opportunities for students to actively participate in social justice projects. Most campaigns are just right for high school students, and some would be appropriate for middle schoolers as well. Some topics may be considered risque, so review the content before introducing it to students.

On a related note, DoSomething.org is the organization where Katia Gomez, the college student who started her own school in Honduras (featured in the first Cult of Pedagogy documentary last year), got her start. One more bit of trivia that totally doesn't matter but might if you are a Melrose Place fan: DoSomething.org was co-founded by 90's heartthrob Andrew Shue. Squeee!!

The Global Oneness Project

The Global Oneness Project offers a beautiful collection of multicultural films, photo essays, and articles that "explore cultural, social, and environmental issues with a humanistic lens." Many of the featured stories are paired with a lesson plan for high school or college classrooms, aligned with Common Core and national standards.

One such pairing starts with the film Amar, which follows a young Indian boy living in a high-poverty neighborhood through a typical day that includes rising before dawn to do one of his two jobs and attending school. The accompanying lesson plan is called A Day in the Life, which has students examine the film and other resources related to the economic situation in India.

The films are truly stunning. This collection doesn't include explicit teachings in any kind of civics or grassroots activism, but it will provide students with a deep understanding of lives completely unlike their own. And that kind of empathy is one of the most important building blocks for any kind of social justice action.

Pushing the Edge: Social Justice Resources Collection

Educator Greg Curran's podcast covers a range of educational topics, but quite a few episodes circle around issues of social justice. Recently, he curated these resources into a Social Justice Resources Collection. These episodes will be mainly useful for teachers to educate themselves about social justice education: what complications and questions come up, helpful do's and don'ts, and why it's worth it. He interviews practicing teachers and administrators who are walking the walk with social justice teaching. Listening to them will give you a template from which to build your own practice.

Here's an example of one episode, where Curran interviews Nakisha Hobbs, principal of the Village Leadership Academy, a k-8 social justice school in Chicago.

GLSEN: Educator Resources

For teachers who want to include consideration of LGBT issues in their study of social justice, a great source for materials is GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. offers a nice collection of educator guides and lesson plans.

Here are a few examples: The ThinkB4YouSpeak Guide for Educators includes lesson plans, resources, and tips for teachers for addressing anti-LGBT language in the 6-12 classroom. Unheard Voices is a collection of audio interviews with "individuals who bore witness to or helped shape LGBT history in some way." And the Day of Silence Guide shows educators how to run a Day of Silence awareness campaign in their schools.

Educational Video Center

I love this idea: The Educational Video Center teaches students the skills of documentary filmmaking, telling important stories in the name of social justice. Although the EVC holds after-school workshops only for students in New York City, they do offer professional development for teachers anywhere who want to learn how to teach these skills to their own students.

Alumni of the EVC have created documentaries on everything from criminal justice to domestic violence to mental health. You can view a collection of trailers for student-created documentaries here.

The Two Dollar Challenge

The Two Dollar Challenge is a challenge issued to people who want to make an impact on poverty. The challenge is simple: For 5 days, live on just $2 per day, publicizing the complexities of global poverty and helping to raise funds for a partner organization.

What's most striking about this organization is their emphasis on cultivating a deep respect for people affected by poverty and raising participants' awareness of their own privilege. One look at the project's code of conduct shows just how serious they are about that mission: "At all times participants must respect those nearby who are truly in need. If at any time those taking the Challenge are using resources which are valuable for indigent residents in the area this action must be re-evaluated."

Further Reading

Stirring Up Justice
Laurel Schmidt, Education Leadership, May 2009
Explores the value and process of teaching students about activism. Offers a template for how to engage students in authentic conversations about difficult issues, ask themselves what they can do about social justice issues, consider ways they have already acted in the past, study how other kids and young adults have successfully solved problems, and participate in their own social justice projects.

Turning Current Events Into Social Justice Teaching
Jinnie Spiegler, Edutopia, January 6, 2016
Spiegler, the curriculum director for the Anti-Defamation League (the first resource in this post) offers advice on teaching social justice topics in a way that's both sensitive and productive.

Educolor Resources
Educolor, an organization dedicated to an equitable, just education for everyone, maintains this list of books, movies, articles, and websites that will educate teachers and students on issues of social justice, especially as it pertains to educational equity.

The Best Teacher Resources Sites for Social Justice
Larry Ferlazzo, Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day, July 1, 2008
A big list of resources related to social justice education.
What Are Your Favorite Social Justice Resources?
This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you have a resource you like to use for teaching about social justice, please share it in the comments below. ♦

Keep in touch.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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A Collection of Resources for Teaching Social Justice

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Ask teachers to describe the impact they hope to have on their students, and most will eventually say something along these lines: I want my students to grow into responsible citizens. I want my students to participate in society in an active, productive way. And maybe: I want my students to change the world.

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Everyone has biased, big and small. The worst thing we can do is ignore them. The more self aware we are the more we can adjust our behavior and overall understanding of our surroundings.

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28 COMMON RACIST ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS

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odinsblog:(By Jona Olsson) Below is a list of 28 common racist attitudes and behaviors that indicate a detour or wrong turn into white guilt, denial or defensiveness. Each is followed by a statement that is a reality check and consequence for harboring such attitudes.1.

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"WHAT DO YOU REALLY REALLY WANT FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN?

In 2015 world leaders promised to put girls and women first when they signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, fix climate change and tackle inequalities.

Girls and women are disproportionately  affected by these challenges and are key to building resilient communities to withstand them.

That’s why we need to ensure World Leaders and the Secretary General of the United Nations listen to the voices of girls and women and put them first in policies and plans.

2016 is our chance to use our collective power and tell world leaders what we really really want for girls and women.

If you make the noise, we’ll get your message to world leaders at the UN in September.
The Global Goals will only ever be achieved if governments, businesses, communities and   YOU invest in girls and women."

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In 2015, world leaders agreed to 17 Global Goals (officially known as the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs). It's now five years on, and we have more work than ever to do. These goals have the power to create a better world by 2030, by ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change.

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"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy..."

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Pointing out how people respond when oppressed or marginalized speak out/want more. 

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Pointing out how people respond when oppressed or marginalized speak out/want more. 

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Important to recognize how to respect the pain of others to ensure our response is supportive and not dismissive.

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Comprehensive policy reform:

"We can live in a world where the police don't kill people
by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability."

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Campaign Zero is a comprehensive platform of policy solutions to end police violence in America.

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Nikki Giovanni

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What Dark-Skinned People Will Never Tell You

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What Dark-Skinned People Will Never Tell You

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What Dark-Skinned People Will Never Tell You

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Write/Share Something...

I'm kind of numb right now (and also uncharacteristically at a loss for words) so I'm posting other people's thoughts that align with mine - for now...
-A

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Daily Evening Prayer: Rite Two

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or
weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who
sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless
the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the
joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.

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Tips for Talking With and Helping Children and Youth Cope After a Disaster or Traumatic Event: A Guide for Parents, Caregivers, and Teachers

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Tips for Talking With and Helping Children and Youth Cope After a Disaster or Traumatic Event: A Guide for Parents, Caregivers, and Teachers

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Talking to Our Children About Racism & Diversity

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Talking to Our Children About Racism & Diversity

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Of Dogs and Lizards:A Parable of Privilege

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Of Dogs and Lizards:A Parable of Privilege