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Sesame Street: The Names Song | #ComingTogether

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14 Antiracist Books for Kids and Teens Recommended by BIPOC Teachers and Librarians

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We asked librarians and teachers—all Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)—to share books that they’ve found can help kids understand race and racism.

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We need to name whiteness, in order to move toward antiracism.

For too long, white educators have relied on people of color to make change to a relentlessly racist school system. Racial equity will not come until white educators recognize their role in supporting racist policies and practices, and take responsibility for dismantling them.

Learning and Teaching While White is an accessible guide to help white educators, leaders, students, and parents develop an explicit, skills-based antiracist practice. Through their own experiences working with school communities, and the strategies and tools they have developed, Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi share how white educators can gain greater consciousness of their own white racial identity; analyze the role of whiteness in their school systems; rethink pedagogical approaches and curricular topics; address the role of white parents in the pursuit of racial literacy and equity; and much more. Their book will empower white educators to be part of creating a more equitable educational system for all students.

About the Author

Elizabeth Denevi is an educator, diversity consultant, and cofounder of the popular professional development site Teaching While White. As Director of the Eastern Educational Resource Collaborative, Dr. Denevi has worked with educational institutions across the country to promote equity and diversity pedagogy. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Jenna Chandler-Ward is an educator, diversity consultant, and cofounder of the popular professional development site Teaching While White. With over two decades of experience, she has been an educator in non-profits, schools, and colleges working with students from kindergarten to adult learners. Jenna was also a founder and co-director of the Multicultural Teaching Institute, which produces workshops and a conference for educators on issues of equity and inclusion. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Howard C. Stevenson

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I

Preparing for Action-Reflection, Reframing, and New Understandings

1 Foggy Mirrors

2 Talking About Race Means Talking About Whiteness

3 Analyzing How Whiteness Operates as a System in Our Schools

Part II

Steps for Action-Antiracist Strategies for Educational Communities

4 Locating Ourselves Within Whiteness

5 Rooting and Shifting: Rethinking Pedagogical Approaches and Curricular Topics

6 Assessment and Feedback

7 Developing an Antiracist Leadership Practice

8 The Role of White Parents in the Pursuit of Racial Literacy and Equity

Afterword

Appendix A: The Costs of Racism to White People

Appendix B: White Antiracist Activists

Appendix C: Cycle of Oppression

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Learning and Teaching While White: Antiracist Strategies for School Communities|Paperback

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We need to name whiteness, in order to move toward antiracism. For too long, white educators have relied on people of color to make change to a relentlessly racist school system. Racial equity will not come until white educators recognize their role in supporting racist...

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TL;DR:

Matthew R. Kay and Jennifer Orr's book, "We're Gonna Keep on Talking," focuses on leading meaningful race conversations in elementary classrooms.

This post emphasizes the importance of fostering important mindsets like understanding that race discussions are ongoing and cannot be a one-time conversation.

The book also highlights co-creating discussions with students, building their discussion skills, providing effective prompts for student-led discussions about race, and offers numerous examples and practical insights for educators.

"We're Gonna Keep On Talking" Reflections

I loved Matthew R. Kay's book, and as an Not Light But Fire, instructional coach for teachers in all parts of the K-12 continuum, I deeply appreciate his latest book with Jennifer Orr, We're Gonna Keep on Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom. If you are a teacher or instructional leader interested in fostering student-led discussion about race in your school or district, I highly recommend this book. (Honestly, despite the elementary focus, I think there's a lot of value in this one for high school educators as well.)

If you are a teacher or instructional leader interested in fostering student-led discussion about race in your school or district, I highly recommend this book. Click To Tweet

Important Mindsets

There were lots of important mindset ideas in this book. One that was particularly helpful for me is that each conversation is not and cannot be conversation about race by which students learn and understand everything they need to know. A recommendation they offer for supporting extended learning is "threading" conversations about race throughout the year, connecting across time-including the present-and various content areas.

The idea is to develop rich understandings by sequencing conversations. This may mean looking at the same issue from different angles. I love planning units around this idea by using a "case study" section within each unit. In elementary classes, embedded opportunities to talk about race include holidays and book selections (both class texts and independent reading choices).

Trust is a critical requirement for facilitating student-led discussions about race. Kay and Orr list three areas where trust is required: trusting young students to engage in race conversations; trusting the process of conversation; and trusting ourselves to jump in when necessary.

To this last point, one of the largest challenges for me in facilitating student-led conversations is knowing when to talk and when not to talk. Relatedly, Kay shares that students and families should know that when we talk about race in class, "they will be loved, listened to, and to a developmentally appropriate degree, challenged " (p. 53) Taking time to co-create class agreements is central to making sure this happens.

Co-Creating with Students

Conversations about race are excellent opportunities to engage in student inquiry routines. Some of the sample conversations in the second half of the book closely mirrored the 3-part inquiry cycle present in DESE's Investigating History curriculum : Launch the Question, Investigate Sources, Put It Together. In my experience, basing conversations on student interests and questions typically generates more engaged, high-quality conversation. The authors offer the idea of inviting students to share topics or questions for discussion and then asking the class to vote on one to discuss.

As students share, teachers can chart student ideas. Both authors share examples of what this has looked like in their classes. When students have had time to grapple with ideas inside the classroom, the authors encourage teachers to offer opportunities for students to share their ideas beyond the classroom. Both of these ideas-co-creating an anchor chart and connecting students with authentic audiences-emphasize the importance of students' ideas.

For teachers who like to plan in advance, co-creation can be a challenge. Preceding the sample conversations at the end of Not Light But Fire and We're Gonna Keep on Talking , the authors explain these chapters are "composite conversations" as they facilitated the topic-specific discussions with multiple groups of students. I appreciate this approach, as it shows teachers that it's possible to repeat the same types of conversations while recognizing that different groups of students will respond differently and take the conversation in different directions. (Tangents are okay!) Teachers, too, are constantly evolving and learning, so our responses to the same situations may change over time, leading the conversation in new directions.

Build Each Student's Discussion Skills

Listening is an important skill students need to be successful in all conversations in school and outside of school. Educators will need to intentionally help students build up their listening muscles, and this book offers several ways to do that. They categorize listening skills into listening patiently-offering strategies for young students to hold onto what they want to say-and listening actively. They highlight interactive read-alouds in the elementary classroom as regular opportunities to practice listening in class conversations.

Another piece of building student's skillset is the reality that students prefer different formats of conversation. Some thrive in whole-class conversations, others in small groups. Some want to think through their ideas with a partner first, and others prefer silent time to think and write before sharing aloud. (There are many examples of these formats and specific prompts and questions for each of these types of conversations in the book!)

How to Prompt Student-Led Discussion

Prompts that begin conversations about race should encourage students to question and critically analyze ideas. The wording of a prompt is important. For example, the authors share including language such as "Why do you think?" helps students understand there's no right answer, so there may be less fear of responding incorrectly. I found the authors' point that prompts may vary based on students' prior knowledge and experience to be insightful. They suggest that as students have more background knowledge, the prompts may look less like providing students with information and more like preparing students for a challenge.

Orr shares several specific examples of prompts she has used in her elementary classes. She often uses broad prompts like notice and wonder to begin and she seeks opportunities for students wondering aloud to pose their questions to the class. Similarly, Orr's students may organically offer classmates a sentence starter, which happens when students mirror the first several words of a previous student's response to a question.

Small Group Conversations

In small group conversations, she may prompt all groups to think about an idea she overheard in one group. Speaking to her preference for broad prompts, she writes, "I knew that I could narrow the scope if we didn't get there naturally from a broader start. It's often worth it to see if the conversation can be sparked by a student comment, so that students can feel more ownership of the thread" (p. 166).

Orr also reflects on a list of more specific questions she has posed to her class, sharing, "My wording wasn't super kid friendly, a choice I had made deliberately. I had no intention of oversimplifying this discussion because I underestimated my students. Underestimating my students is something I work to remain vigilant about because it is easy to slip up" (p. 134).

The authors suggest prompts to close conversations be "deliberately positive, encouraging, or reassuring" (p. 56). How we close conversations about race, Kay tells us, impacts how the conversation is remembered and how likely participants are to engage in conversations about race again.

[scroll down to keep reading]

Tons of Examples

This book contains many examples of teacher reflections, student comments, elementary books to prompt conversation, and topic and question ideas. There's an example of a family newsletter Orr sends to her students' caretakers (p. 42). Here are a few more specific examples I loved.

To develop students' celebration of mistakes as part of learning, teach students that mistakes help our brain grow. You may say to a student who just made a mistake, "Can you feel your brain growing? You're getting new synapses right now!" (p. 40).

Responding to a student who doesn't have the same background information or lived experience as another student in the class, but remains curious, Orr has said, "Mason, thank you for sharing that question. We may not always understand each other in our conversations. Asking for more information can be really important, but it isn't always easy. Sometimes you might worry you won't look very smart or that you'll hurt someone's feelings if you don't understand. It's a risk, and I'm so glad you took that risk right now because I am sure Nala has more to share" (p. 137).

Final Thoughts

A final piece I enjoyed about the structure of the book was Matthew Kay's "upon further reflection" sections throughout the book, in which he adds thoughts to points he made in . Not only were his additional thoughts helpful, but in writing these sections he thoughtfully models what it looks like to be in an ongoing cycle of discussion and Not Light But Fire reflection, a practice we'd like our students and ourselves to embrace both in the classroom and in life!

Kay ends We're Gonna Keep On Talking with a sentiment that, as a high school educator, I whole-heartedly agree with, so it seems fitting to use it to end this article as well. He writes, "Secondary educators are able to dream big, design ambitiously, and teach tough stuff with confidence because elementary teachers have set solid foundations for our students" (p. 175). Thank you, elementary educators for taking on this challenging and necessary work.

About Lindsay Lyons

Lindsay Lyons is an educational consultant who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership.

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TL;DR: Matthew R. Kay and Jennifer Orr's book, "We're Gonna Keep on Talking," focuses on leading meaningful race conversations in elementary classrooms. This post emphasizes the importance of fostering important mindsets like understanding that race discussions are ongoing and cannot be a one-time conversation.

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Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom

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Matthew R. Kay is a proud product of Philadelphia's public schools and a founding teacher at Science Leadership Academy.

He believes that any teacher who is willing to put in the hard work of reflection can, through the practice of discrete skills, lead meaningful race conversations. Driven by this conviction, he is passionate about designing professional development that teachers find valuable.

Matthew lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Cait, and his beautiful daughters, Adia Sherrill and Bennu Jane.

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Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom

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This is the official site of Matthew R. Kay, the author of Not Light, but Fire (2018). Here find a collection of his articles in Educational Leadership Magazine, videos, podcast interviews, and reviews of the book.

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Gholdy Muhammad has written a new book and agreed to talk to me about Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning.
Muhammad is a professor of curriculum and instruction with a focus on literacy, language, and culture. She has served as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, school district administrator, curriculum director, and school board president. You can read the interview we did about her previous book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework. LF: Unearthing Joy provides a host of practical ideas on how to implement the ideas you wrote about in your previous book, Cultivating Genius, while stressing the importance of bringing joy into classrooms. We teachers, our students, and their families can certainly use as much joy as possible in this era of conservative attacks on literature for young people, social-emotional learning, and culturally responsive education. Can you talk about what led you to approach some of today's education challenges with a focus on the idea of "joy"? And, can you share a few ideas of what they might actually look like in the classroom?
Muhammad: As I continue to teach young people, preservice teachers, and scholars, while working with school leaders, I find that we need joy more than ever. Teachers often tell me their hearts are overwhelmed and stressed. The pandemic exacerbated the need for joy. Also, as you said, there are ongoing attacks on literature and inclusive, humanizing curriculum. These are all reasons we need joy as I define it in the book. Joy should be the ultimate goal of teaching and learning. When I began to speak with educators about joy, they often responded, "Yes!" and "Finally!" They were ready.

Many of them had been doing joyful work for a long time-after all, joy is the reason many of us entered education in the first place-but they wanted it to be more formalized in terms of standards, evaluations, and curriculum.

Then there were those educators who thought joy was important for early-childhood and elementary students only. I then thought, Well, what about students beyond elementary school? Don't they need joy? And what about adults? Don't we need to embrace, practice, and rely on joy in our lives? Certainly! We have a growing number of suicides and mental health issues among young people today. Teaching them skills in decontextualized ways, while ignoring identity, intellect, criticality, and joy, is not enough to stop that growth.

In the book, I discuss historical ways of conceptualizing joy. I define joy as the ancestors defined it. I found that, for centuries, Black people have defined joy as something more than having fun or celebrating but as a sustained effort to recognize and honor the beauty of and within the Earth. To the ancestors, joy was art and aesthetics. It was teaching our children to name the beauty within themselves and within humanity. Joy meant coming together for advocacy and problem solving to make the world better. Joy was wellness, healing, and justice. The ancestors needed joy then, and we all need it now.

In the book, I suggest making joy a learning goal, or pursuit, to be taught and assessed. Joy can infuse our relationship building with students, as we check in on their hearts and on their wellness. It emerges when we integrate more art, poetry, and music into our instruction and when we create learning experiences that encourage students to have fun and problem solve, with their voices (and perspectives) centered.
LF: So much of your book challenges the deficit thinking that seems to dominate the education narrative-the blaming of our students and their families (and, often, of teachers) for challenges to academic achievement. Instead, you argue that those challenges are systemic and changes need to be made to the system. Can you share two or three examples of situations where we tend to blame students when we should be focusing elsewhere? And then, what shifting that focus might look like in practical terms for practicing teachers?
Muhammad: First, let's look at tests that typically screen for students' reading and math proficiencies, such as the NAEP exam or state tests. In 2022, NAEP data showed that 17 percent of Black 4th graders were "proficient" or "advanced" in reading. Seventeen percent. We typically report data in that student-facing way instead of reporting what's really going on: As a nation, our educational system has failed 83 percent of Black children, the group we fail the most often. How, then, are we creating policy, curriculum, standards, and assessments that are inclusive of Black youth and responsive to their genius and educational needs? We're not. Instead, we believe it is the student who needs help and intervention-not the curriculum, not the test, not the system.

Another example relates to students' behavior. I've found in my research that when Black girls don't follow school rules or respond well to the curriculum, those in charge call them defiant. Those in charge fail to listen to them and make them feel safe and loved within the classroom-especially at schools without many Black teachers. They don't typically ask, Was our policy written to respond to the genius and joy of Black girls?

Both examples suggest that we need to take a hard look at learning standards, curriculum, policies, evaluations, teacher education, practice, assessments, and the whole educational system. In this country, we have the genius and the tools to rewrite that system so that all students can ascend to reach their highest potential. We educators must be cognizant of the history that has shaped the system we have today, so we do not perpetuate deficit thinking about children or inflict deficit practices on them.
LF: Your books are unique among professional books because of the time you take to look to history for lessons on what we need to do for schools today. Can you share three historical lessons that stand out to you as being especially useful?
Muhammad: Yes, Black history contains many teachings and affordances that help us to advance the genius and joy of our children and educators. I provide several examples in the books, and here's a preview.

Lesson 1: Our Black ancestors centered introspection and self-examination. I found a beautiful and unique 19 th-century artifact that captured how our ancestors spoke to the importance of recognizing one's own "excellencies," biases, and challenges. They knew the importance of beginning with one's mind and heart before moving toward engaging others. It was a beautiful and very important lesson that we should look at ourselves and question our intentions and actions before teaching children or engaging families or colleagues.

Lesson 2: Our Black ancestors claimed and reclaimed their joy. It did not matter that the world was cruel or unfair or unloving because they had each other. They centered their creativity, their arts, their music, their language, their abolition, their poetry, their love, and their collaborative efforts to make the world better. It's a beautiful lesson for us today. No matter what, remember your joy. Remember what matters. Remember your light and all your north stars in life.

Lesson 3: Our Black ancestors practiced collectivism and collaboration. In Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy, I explain how Dr. Cynthia Dillard calls attention to the importance of (re)membering-going back and back again to excellence in our Black past to teach us how to advance education today. Being in community was an important practice. The ancestors knew that transformation could not happen in isolation. It could not happen in a climate of individualism and competition. That is a great lesson for educators today. How can we collectively write policy, mandates, standards, and curriculum? How can we find time for teachers to work together to build their practice? These questions are vital for moving toward equity and excellence in education.

I can't wait for educators to take in the details of this beautiful history and the beautiful lessons it holds!
LF: What recommendations do you have for a teacher who wants to begin implementing the CHRE (culturally and historically responsive education) perspectives and strategies you write about?
Muhammad: Study the System and Curriculum. The first thing that educators can do is study the system in which they are employed, which includes evaluating the curriculum that they are given, ideally using the evaluation tool in Unearthing Joy. If they have not been given a curriculum, they need to understand the process of teaching and learning that is expected of them to learn if their genius and ideologies align with it.

Collect Texts. The second thing I would suggest is for teachers to think about the types of texts they want to use in their practice and why. I want teachers to consider texts that are responsive to the histories, identities, literacies, and liberation of students. I enjoy collecting teachable texts that support my students' learning across the five pursuits-identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. When I find a poem, article, story, video, Ted Talk or anything that seems teachable, I stow it away in my "curriculum vault" until I need it to write a new and exciting lesson, unit, or entire curriculum.

Engage in the Self-Work. The last thing they can do right away is self-work. I encourage teachers to ask themselves, How are the five pursuits already showing up in my personal and professional lives? I find that this question is easier to answer among teachers who are living a life of justice and joy. Those teachers can more easily translate the pursuits into the classroom. In the book, I provide questions for teachers to ask themselves. I also provide assessment tools that enable them to collect data on their students' identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. When was the last time we collected data on student joy? That data can then be used to inform teachers' practices.
LF: If they use certain ideas in your books, some educators might be accused of teaching "critical race theory" and reprimanded, attacked, or even fired, even though your ideas have nothing to do with CRT. What advice do you offer those educators?
Muhammad: It is devastating to think that, after all the work, pain, sacrifice, and labor of our ancestors-after all our ancestors have given to this county-we continue to live in a world where a teacher can be fired for teaching about Black joy and justice. Clearly, those that push hateful policies don't recognize Black ancestral genius or teachings. So how far have we really come? And how far do we need to go?

Throughout history, there have been people who work to uphold anti-Blackness and who have written policies to sustain oppressive practices in schools. Banning critical race theory is nothing new under the beautiful sun that provides light to the Earth.

We must keep in mind that some teachers and administrators are attacked just for showing up to school Black. I have colleagues and friends who go to work with their dark skin, natural hair, and all the other characteristics that make them beautifully Black, only to be judged, criticized, and harassed. Such attacks were common long before people learned the three words critical race theory.

And sadly, many who denounce critical race theory have never read about it or studied the research behind it. They have never developed culturally responsive curriculum nor taught children. Nor have they listened to and trusted the voices of diverse students. And they may have never experienced racial, gender, or sexual violence. See, I find that when we experience hurt, harm, or pain because of identity, we may enter a space of humanity, empathy, and openness. So, some speak on hateful things without living in the world with it-without deeply knowing it.

What's beautiful about the HILL Model, my instructional framework for CHRE, which is described in Unearthing Joy, is that it can make us all better. And the five pursuits offer a nice balance of theoretical perspectives in education. This is one way to know you have a strong framework in education-when it does not adhere to a single theory. I'll give you an example. Most reading programs are grounded in cognitive theory only. They contain no explicit extensions to children's lives or the world around them. Such programs teach only skills. When we teach collectively the pursuits of identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy, we embrace multiple theoretical perspectives such as cognitive theory, sociocultural theory, social constructivism, critical theory, and feminist theory.

Before I suggest what educators who are harmed should do, I must suggest what those who are inflicting harm should do. They should do some serious work to restore love in their hearts. I suggest they read deeply about theory, the genius and history of Blackness, and the benefits of joy. I suggest they take a course on the HILL Model and curriculum writing. This is why I address leadership in Unearthing Joy and include tools for creating school policy, teacher evaluations, and so many other responsibilities of administrators. It is my hope that school boards can use and recommend those tools as part of their leadership.

My hope for teachers is for them to be in schools where their intellect, genius, and cultures are nurtured and watered-not shut down. I advise teachers to rely on their village to lift them, keep them, and support them during these tumultuous times we are living in.
LF: What are the three or so takeaways you hope readers get from Unearthing Joy?
Muhammad: I hope readers will recognize that the book is a practical guide designed to show them how to apply the five pursuits in teaching and learning. Curriculum can be very violent, rote, prescriptive, and unresponsive to the cultural lives of our youth and the social times we are living in. And sometimes it can be very basic. So, I also want this book to be a guide to rejuvenating curriculum and instructional practices. I want readers to know what curriculum is, beyond a packaged set of materials that's handed to us. I want readers to know that curriculum can be the world around us, curriculum can be storytelling, and curriculum can be the legacies we leave for our children. Curriculum can be healing. And most important, curriculum can be joy. This book helps readers to rethink curriculum and expands the possibilities for curriculum. Unearthing Joy builds on the ideas in Cultivating Genius, guiding educators toward the type of curriculum we want to see in the world.

Second, I want readers to know that joy is a serious, rigorous pursuit in education. Joy is not just about having fun and being oblivious to truth and justice. Joy is truth- and justice-oriented. When we disrupt misrepresentation and injustice, we invite joy in. Justice and joy have a serious and important relationship. There is no joy without justice. Joy also balances criticality-when we are fighting for justice and building a better world, joy and beauty can then enter our lives.

Third, I want readers to understand that the types of children we wish to cultivate and develop are possible. The purpose of schools is not just to prepare students for state exams, college, and careers. We want so much more for them. We want joy for them. We want them to know themselves. We want them to be problem solvers, knowledge seekers, empathic and curious. We want them to have consciousness, social awareness, and criticality. We want them to have intellect. Essentially, I want readers to walk away from the book with the word possibility dancing in their heads. Schools can be more purposeful and help prepare youth for the fullness of their lives.

I also want teachers to understand that this critical CHRE work begins with the self. Sometimes, it feels like the self is the only thing we can control in the educational system. We may not be able to control policies, but we can control how we think, how we teach, and how we love. In Unearthing Joy, I include a chapter on what it means to unearth the self and engage in the self-work, exploring the realms of our hearts and our souls-considering our excellencies as well as our challenges. I challenge educators to think about ideologies that serve children and those that do not. Before we get to advancing our practices, I want us to do the necessary self-work.

I want readers to go to art-to music, to poetry, to literary writings and other creative writings and texts-to solve problems in education. It is not just researchers and scholars who teach us; artists do, too. I kept this in mind as I was writing this book.

Finally, I want teachers to know that I love and appreciate them. I feel in community with them and I recognize the joy that they need to teach well. Teachers bring so much joy to classrooms when they practice with excellence, using culturally responsive methods. They bring so much joy into the lives of children. Teachers deserve joy. I'll say that again. Teachers deserve joy. And our leaders deserve it as well! They deserve to walk into schools where they feel safe, where they feel loved, where they are not discriminated against, where they are not pushed out, and where they are not mistreated. I want teachers to know that they deserve schools that serve as spaces of healing and wellness.
LF: Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wish I had?
Muhammad: Writing this book was an act of love. I felt excitement and urgency in my entire body as I penned each word. I also felt the ancestors beside me as I wrote, which is why I frequently use the collective "we." I listened to the ancestors and followed their directions as I unpacked justice, genius, and joy. I used the strategy of layering text, which I wrote about in Cultivating Genius. Each chapter has layers of music, poetry, quotations, and artwork. I am grateful that creative artist Pharrell Williams penned a beautiful foreword. There are even coloring pages that cap off each chapter. The layered playlists of songs at the beginning of each chapter are intended to be played softly in the background while reading to extend the text's meaning. My goal is for readers to experience a full embodiment of joy as they read.

The ancestors would always center joy, healing, and wellness in their lives, no matter the time, context, or oppression they faced. They taught me that joy enables us to be resilient when adversity, racism, or disappointment confronts us. Joy was their goal. So it must be our goal, too, to sustain who we are and advance the state of education. Joy is what the ancestors have fought for their entire lives, and it is what we need to unearth today.

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Gholdy Muhammad Champions 'Unearthing Joy' in Her New Book (Opinion)

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The esteemed educator explains the importance of bringing joy into the classroom and incorporating it into the curriculum.

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When Nina Simone sang the uplifting lyrics of her song "Young, Gifted and Black" in 1970, she invited her listeners into a powerful way of re-envisioning Black excellence in themselves and Black people around them. But even half a century later, there are a host of barriers that continue to undermine the flourishing of Black excellence in educational settings.

What does it mean for Black youth to cultivate intellectual excellence in a society that disavows their intelligence and their capability? What does it look like to disrupt these patterns and empower Black students in meaningful ways?

On Thursday, July 15th, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad addressed the Facing History community about her work in these realms. Dr. Muhammad is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy at Georgia State University and author of the best-selling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

In her book, she explores how literacy came to be regarded as a critically important lever of social and political transformation within the Black community, and its continuing importance today. To contemporary educators, she asks:

What is missing from the ways we structure education today?

Why have school leaders and policy makers been unable to accelerate learning?

What is absent from the curricular standards and frameworks needed for holistic development and robust literacy?

What can we learn from history (particularly Black excellence) to refashion curriculum and instruction today?

Why are school leaders still mandating curricular frameworks that were not explicitly designed for students of color?

Muhammad concludes that what we need are frameworks developed by people of color that are designed to meet the needs of students of color. Her book, Cultivating Genius, was written to do just that and reimagines learning standards for literacy education.

Muhammad's framework of Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) draws substantial inspiration from 19th-century Black literary societies through which freed Blacks leveraged literacy to advance the abolition of slavery. Muhammad's HRL framework identifies the following learning goals:

(1) identity development; (2) skill development; (3) intellectual development; and (4) criticality, by which she means the "capacity to read, write, and think in the context of understanding power, privilege, and oppression." For those new to the concept of criticality and what role it can play in the classroom, Muhammad argues that "[a]s long as oppression is present in the world, young people need pedagogy that nurtures criticality."

Cultivating Genius argues that when education is delivered at this nexus where identity development, skill development, intellectual development, and criticality meet and are actively nurtured, we cultivate genius in the young people we serve.

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Dr. Gholdy Muhammad on Cultivating Genius

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Facing History shares on Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's work which explores how literacy came to be regarded as a critically important lever of social and political transformation within the Black community.

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Introduction

Chapter 1: Naming It All
Why Do We Need to Take This Approach in the Classroom? Values of Social Justice Teaching Traits of Textured Teaching Bias in Teaching Racialized Imaginations A Radical Teaching Stance
Context Is Important

Chapter 2: Student Driven and Community Centered
The Identity Work The Land Work Community Centered Classroom Community Classroom Texts and Libraries
Culture and Behavior Work Cautions and Challenges
Adding a Layer of Texture

Chapter 3: Interdisciplinary
Demystify and Destigmatize
Discussions and Conversations
Build Background and Research
Supplement and Think Critically
Collaborating with Colleagues
Synthesizing and Debriefing with Students
Cautions and Challenges
Adding a Layer of Texture

Chapter 4: Experiential
The Community as a Resource
Creating Experiences for Students
Bringing the Text to Life
Sensitivity and Intentionality
An Example from My Class
Experiencing Truth xx Cautions and Challenges
Adding a Layer of Texture

Chapter 5: Flexible

Strategizing for Flexibility
Strategy #1: Being Flexible with Students
Strategy #2: Being Flexible with Processing Sheets
Strategy #3: Being Flexible with Assessments
Strategy #4: Being Flexible with Grading
Strategy #5: Including Out-of-School Literacies
Assessments and Learning Challenges
Cautions and Challenges
Adding a Layer of Texture

Chapter 6: Conclusion: Textured
If Only My Teachers Had Known
A Tool for You: Unit Template
The Texture We Already Have
It's Time

"Lorena Escota Germán walks us through a framework that is realistic, wholistic, liberating, and necessary! Textured Teaching is THE book every teacher should read. Not only does the book guide us into meeting our students where they are and learning who they are, it also helps us [the educators] to grow and become the teachers we are meant to be. Centering education in love, community, justice, truth, and knowledge, Germán pushes us to go beyond ourselves and to be present and to open our hearts to the possibilities of justice centered learning." --Tiffany Jewell, author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller, This Book Is Anti-Racist

"Textured Teaching is a combination of affirmation, culturally relevant practices, culturally sustaining teaching, and liberating pedagogies. It is love. It is truth-telling. It is nuanced. It is hopeful. It is necessary in its stance and commitment to dismantle harmful schooling practices through pedagogical restoration, equity, and justice. In fact, it is Lorena Escoto Germán's commitment to anti-oppressive and anti-racist teaching which is felt on every single page of this book, that should encourage us to reimagine teaching as a Project in Humanization that positions teachers as learning partners alongside students. What a beautiful text. What a layered teaching framework. What a textured book. Read it and be left inspired!" --Valerie Kinloch, Renée and Richard Goldman Dean & Professor, School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh

"As this country becomes more divided, this book helps educators step into the liberation work with both feet. Germán has written the teaching book that will hopefully push teachers and their classrooms to more justice-centered practices and orientations." --José Luis Vilson, Executive Director of #Educolor, NYC math educator, and author of This Is Not a Test

"The craft of teaching is both science and art, but textured teaching suggests that it also wisdom and discovery. The wealth of this approach, subtle in its implication, transformative in its intent, is found at the fertile intersection of where profound education work sits in the lives of youth, to equally empower, enhance, and sustain them while fostering conditions that promise they will grow." --David E. Kirkland, Executive Director, NYU Metro Center and Professor of Urban Education, New York University

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With Culturally Sustaining Practice as its foundation, Textured Teaching shares lesson design strategies that build traditional literacy skills while supporting

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The Identity Consious Educator by Liza Talusan

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The Identity Consious Educator by Liza Talusan

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Dr. Talusan's book The Identity Conscious Educator: Building habits and skills for a more inclusive school is available at Solution Tree Press or wherever books are sold. Dr. Talusan highly recommends purchasing though locally owned and independent stores and sites such as www.bookshop.org

Learn powerful, practical strategies for creating an inclusive school community. The Identity-Conscious Educator provides a framework for building awareness and understanding of five identity categories: race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Connect with vignettes and personal stories from the author that illuminate how to address identity topics in your personal and professional life. Then, develop skills in engaging in meaningful interactions with students and peers.

Discover how identity affects both personal and professional lives.

Review a framework for building habits and skills of identity-conscious teaching and learning.

Build knowledge of five different identity categories and experiences-race, social class, sexual orientation, gender, and disability-and then act for positive change.

Reflect with end-of-chapter questions.

Review practical, research-based strategies, and activities for having difficult conversations and creating more inclusive communities.

Is your community reading The Identity Conscious Educator? Contact Liza for a book discussion, presentation, or facilitation through the contact tab above.

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The Identity Conscious Educator - Liza Talusan, PhD

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Dr. Talusan's book The Identity Conscious Educator: Building habits and skills for a more inclusive school is available at Solution Tree Press or wherever books are sold. Dr. Talusan highly recommends purchasing though locally owned and independent stores and sites such as www.bookshop.org Learn powerful, practical strategies for creating an inclusive school community.

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Foreword by Terrence J. Roberts, PhD.

A Letter to Readers

Acknowledgments

An Introduction to Social Comprehension and Strategies to Prepare You for the Work Ahead
Chapter 1: Exploring Our Identities
Lesson: Affirming Our Identities: Identity Webs
We introduce the elements of our own identities (such as sister, athlete, bilingual, reader) and look for connections to or wonders about the identities of others.

Lesson: Placing Ourselves in the World: Stories of Our Names
Using a mentor text, we write the stories of how we got our names, how our names make us feel, and our experiences with our names.

Lesson: Journeying into Our Family Histories: "Where I'm From" Poems
We use the structure of a "Where I'm From" poem to share our family histories, storied objects, and moments.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 2: Listening with Love
Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 3: Being Candid
Lesson: Seeing Our Own Bias: Drawing Activity
We learn about how bias works, and we use an activity to help us see some of our own bias and brainstorm how we can confront it.

Lesson: Understanding Microaggressions: Poem Analysis
We analyze examples of microaggressions to understand what they are and how they affect people, and we look for microaggressions in our own lives.

Lesson: Refusing to Let Others' Biases Define Us: Identity Statements
We assert who we are with confidence. We recall labels others have tried to put on us, reject those labels, and choose how we define who we are.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 4: Becoming Better Informed
Lesson: Understanding How Our Identity Affects Us: Our News
We identify what is happening in our world-personal events, news stories, media-and consider how our identity shapes what we give our attention to.

Lesson: Moving Beyond Our Initial Thinking: Mini-Inquiries
We use a mini-inquiry to learn more about a topic and examine how new information changes our perspective.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 5: Finding Humanity in Ourselves and in Others
Lesson: Broadening Our Ideas About Who We Are Responsible To and For: Our Universe of Obligation
We consider who we feel responsibility to and why. We also consider how that responsibility can change in certain situations.

Lesson: Understanding Others' Perspectives: Intent Versus Impact
We work to understand two sides of a divisive issue by listening to both perspectives.
Chapter 6: Facing Crisis Together
Suggested Resource Stacks

References and Inspiration

This book is based on the idea that we can develop skills and habits to help us comprehend social issues and participate in relevant, transparent conversations. Social comprehension, like academic comprehension, is how we make meaning from and mediate our relationship with the world. We understand that the meaning making, or socialization, is learned, not inherited. Each chapter in this book includes lessons and/or practical help for students to learn and engage in a targeted social comprehension concept. Our thinking will change often as we practice being more socially literate citizens of the world, so we allow for and model the same for our students as we construct comprehension and cultivate our empathy together. The "At First I Thought . . . Now I Think" journal page in this introduction gives you and your students a tool to reflect on how the experiences in the lessons are affecting your outlook. In the work of social comprehension, we want to be as transparent as possible and make our thinking visible.

The final chapter of the book addresses how we, as educators, can continually refine our own approach to this work. If we are going to be on the front lines of helping children make sense of the news they bring to school and the curriculum the world keeps handing them, we must have a strong foundation of social comprehension in place. If we can commit to approaching this work as the lead learner, teaching with curiosity and modeling vulnerability rather than rigid certainty, we can build habitats of trust where kids (and adults) participate in a learning discussion, and where expression, identity, and social literacy matter.

- Introduction

A sense of urgency for pedagogy rooted in empathy and humanity is palpable in communities around the world. But how can teachers actualize such instruction and make it accessible to students? Where is the professional development teachers yearn for to facilitate important, and at times, challenging conversations? Being the Change is the resource every educator needs right now! Against a socio-politically charged backdrop where tensions run high, Sara is a beacon of light who offers practical, compassionate guidance that makes it possible to do the work of social comprehension. The journey to accomplishing this isn't linear; it is messy, tangled, circuitous. But Sara provides a pathway for teachers and our students. She offers a sustained, clear voice that reminds us of why this work is necessary and how it can look in our classrooms. Being the Change is invaluable to all educators as we work to empower our students as change-makers who positively influence the world.

- Sonja Cherry-Paul

****

Sara Ahmed is the ultimate upstander; she cares enough to confront. Her gentle and wise voice is a model for how to be in this tumultuous age. She shares text sets that ask big questions and resist simplistic answers. She invites teachers and students to address tensions in today's classrooms and examine bias in their thinking. Being the Change offers practical tools for building a classroom community that is inclusive, candid, and caring. This book is a treasure.

- Penny Kittle

****

What an incredibly powerful, practical, beautiful book. As I read I could not help but think how this book has the potential to radically change conversations in classrooms (and larger communities) around compassion, listening, empathy, and knowing. It is books like these that heal. It is hope and possibility and humanity within these covers.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I could give is that as I read, the teacher in me itched to get out of this room and into the presence of kids- to experience these lessons in real time, to hear children's stories, to dig into this work because for the first time I feel capable. This book is a roadmap with an entry point all of us can access and guidance through the most challenging places we could go. I don't feel afraid of what could happen, I feel energized about what Sara has taught me I can help happen.

I could not help but think of the million and one ways I could use Sara's thinking and teaching, to engage in this work whole heartedly from the moment children step through the doors.

- Kristi Mraz

****

In her book, Being the Change, Sara K. Ahmed offers us not only the roadmap of how to create and maintain components of meaningful social change within our instruction but also the necessary tools for us to navigate the hard conversations we invite in and those we have not had the courage to have...yet. By centering her book on developing the identity of the very children we teach, she gives us invaluable tools to navigate the hard topics that are constantly surrounding our learning community. While she writes in her book that there is no magical formula for making the world a better place, within the pages of this book and in her willingness to help us grow not just as educators but as human beings with her impactful lesson ideas, she has given us something near magic. A resource to be used in every school, this book will leave a trail of change for a better world in its wake if we let it.

- Pernille Ripp

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Being the Change is based on the idea that people can develop skills and habits to serve them in the comprehension of social issues. Sara K. Ahmed identifies

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Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves

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Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves

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Louise Derman-Sparks, Julie Olsen Edwards, Catherine M. Goins

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Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, Second Edition

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This classic resource, now expanded and updated, is your guide to building a strong anti-bias program, including learning to know yourself.

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Explore stories of belonging from people across America and learn how you can make others feel welcome.

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Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation | CBC Radio | CBC

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https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/responding-to-bias-incidents-guide_0.pdf

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https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing

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What does it take to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes? "Deep canvassing," a relatively new technique, is showing promise - and is backed by rigorous testing from researchers and activists in the field.

One such activist is Vivian Topping, who decided, along with other LGBTQ activists and allies, to try deep canvassing in Massachusetts in 2018, when transgender rights were on the ballot.

Massachusetts voters could choose to keep or throw out a law that banned discrimination based on gender identity. Topping, who's nonbinary, and others, went door to door. If they met a voter who wanted to get rid of the law, they wouldn't call them out for prejudice. Instead, they did something more radical: They listened, nonjudgmentally, and began a conversation.

It's not easy to confront people whose votes would seek to hurt you, and then try to change their minds. "I came out two years ago now, and one of the hardest things for me has been talking with folks who don't understand [gender identity], and not immediately writing someone off because they don't immediately get it," Topping says.

Topping calls this "giving them grace." It's a powerful idea: "Giving grace ... means being able to hear someone say something that can be hurtful, and trying to think about how to have a real conversation and connect with them."

Massachusetts voters chose to protect trans rights, and Topping believes deep canvassing helped. "This tactic is the only thing that has been proven to work on nondiscrimination, so without it we wouldn't have been able to win," they say.

Giving grace. Listening to a political opponent's concerns. Finding common humanity. In 2020, these seem like radical propositions. But when it comes to changing minds, they work.

New research tells us changing minds with deep canvassing is not impossible; it's just very hard. The payoffs are small and incremental, but they are real.

A 2016 study in Science proved it was possible. And now, a new peer-reviewed study - a series of three placebo-controlled field experiments soon to be published in American Political Science Review - replicates the findings and gives us new insights into the conditions for lasting opinion change and reductions in prejudice.

The new research shows that if you want to change someone's mind, you need to have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen. It's not about calling people out or labeling them fill-in-the-blank-phobic. Which makes it feel like a big departure from a lot of the current political dialogue.

"I think in today's world, many communities have a call-out culture," says David Broockman, a UC Berkeley political scientist who has run these experiments with Josh Kalla, a political scientist at Yale University. "Twitter is obviously full of the notion that what we should do is condemn those who disagree with us. What we can now say experimentally, the key to the success of these conversations is doing the exact opposite of that."

Deep canvassing, explained

Over the past few years, deep canvassing has been adopted by some progressive activist groups looking to not only change minds when it comes to policies on immigration and LGBTQ rights, but also to reduce prejudice toward these groups.

In 2016, Broockman and Kalla showed that a 10-minute "deep canvass" conversation could reduce transgender prejudice for at least three months (you might recall this study was a redo of a previous experiment, from a separate team of researchers, which was retracted due to falsified data).

Topping and dozens of other canvassers were a part of that 2016 effort. It was an important study: Not only has social science found very few strategies that work, in experiments, to change minds on issues of prejudice, but even fewer tests of those strategies have occurred in the real world.

Typically, the conversations begin with the canvasser asking the voter for their opinion on a topic, like abortion access, immigration, or LGBTQ rights. Canvassers (who may or may not be members of the impacted community) listen nonjudgmentally. They don't say if they are pleased or hurt by the response. They are supposed "to appear genuinely interested in hearing the subject ruminate on the question," as Broockman and Kalla's latest study instructions read.

The canvassers then ask if the voters know anyone in the affected community, and ask if they relate to the person's story. If they don't, and even if they do, they're asked a question like, "When was a time someone showed you compassion when you really needed it?" to get them to reflect on their experience when they might have felt something similar to the people in the marginalized community.

The canvassers also share their own stories: about being an immigrant, about being a member of the LGBTQ community, or about just knowing people who are. (You can read the full deep canvassing script here on page 47.)

It's a type of conversation that's closer to what a psychotherapist might have with a patient than a typical political argument. (One clinical therapist I showed it to said it sounded a bit like " motivational interviewing," a technique used to help clients work through ambivalent feelings.) It's not about listing facts or calling people out on their prejudicial views. It's about sharing and listening, all the while nudging people to be analytical and think about their shared humanity with marginalized groups.

It's also quite a departure from standard political canvassing. Typically, in a political canvass, an activist might list a bunch of facts or statistics about why the voter should support their cause. Not so with deep canvassing.

Instead of pelting voters with facts, "we ask open-ended questions and then we listen," Dave Fleischer, the LGBTQ rights organizer who developed the technique, told me in 2016. "And then we continue to ask open-ended questions based on what they just told us." The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusion themselves, not when someone "bitch-slaps you with a statistic," Fleischer said. It is stories, not facts, that are most compelling to people when they're changing their minds.

Here's a 2015 video example of deep canvassing. It's of a real voter and a canvasser from the Leadership Lab, a program of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which spearheaded this canvassing method after losing the 2008 Proposition 8 ballot initiative in California. The woman in the video starts off ambivalent on transgender issues. But through deep canvassing, the activist is able to turn her around.

Specifically, the canvasser asks the voter to recall a time when he or she was discriminated against. Toward the end of the conversation, the canvasser nudges the voter into thinking about how that experience can relate to the plight of transgender people. The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusions on their own.

In the video above, notice how the voter starts to come around on the issue when the canvasser asks if she's ever been on the receiving end of discrimination. She talks about being picked on at work and feeling different. He responds by telling his story of being discriminated against for being gay. It's a real heart-to-heart between strangers.

And in that moment, he points out that a transgender nondiscrimination law would help people who feel discriminated against at school or work.

"Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense," she says.

The video ends like this. "I would totally vote in favor," the woman says of a transgender protection law. "It's only right. Let a person be who they are."

Testing deep canvassing in the real world

In the new study, Kalla and Broockman put deep canvassing through a more rigorous test. Namely: It's larger, and it targets more issues, both trans rights and policies protective of undocumented immigrants.

The new research also tries to identify the secret ingredient that makes deep canvassing work, and whether versions of it that occur over the phone or through video prompts can be useful as well. (These methods may make it easier to scale up in a bigger campaign.)

The first of the three experiments was pretty much a replication of the 2016 study, but on the topic of rights for undocumented immigrants.

In it, canvassers in three areas - central Tennessee; Fresno, California; and Orange County, California - went door to door and interacted with 2,374 voters in these communities during the runup to the 2018 midterm elections.

"All three places are experiencing demographic change, with a growing and diversifying population of immigrant residents," says Kim Serrano, the messaging research project manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center. "Tennessee and the Central Valley have been the sites of large-scale workplace raids by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in recent years," she says, "and various cities in Orange County have attempted to 'opt out' of the California Values Act." That's a state law that limits the collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement.

The experiment, like all the ones in the study, was run a bit like a drug trial: The voters were randomly assigned (before the canvassers even knocked on their doors) to receive either the full deep canvassing conversation treatment, a watered-down version where the voters and canvassers don't exchange personal stories, or a "placebo condition," where voters were engaged in a conversation that had nothing to do with immigration. The voters were followed up with by survey one week, one month, and several months after being contacted by the canvassers.

After the canvassing, 29 percent of the people in the placebo condition said they strongly supported policies inclusive of undocumented immigrants. In the full-conversation condition, 33 percent were in support. The effect was durable, too: Three to six months after the conversation, voters who shared their feelings with canvassers in this manner also reported less prejudice toward undocumented immigrants.

The watered-down intervention without the two-way exchange didn't move anyone to support undocumented immigrants. That's a new finding.

"Now we can show experimentally that when you take away the two-way nature of the conversation, the effects go away," Broockman says. It's this "nonjudgmental exchanging of narratives" that Broockman and Kalla think is the key ingredient in how deep canvassing works.

Keep in mind the media environment the canvassers were working in. Immigration - particularly that of asylum seekers - loomed over the 2018 elections. In the runup, conservative news outlets were blaring headlines about a scary immigrant "caravan" marching north through Mexico to the US southern border. President Trump called it " an invasion," apparently hoping that by raising xenophobic, dehumanizing fears about nonwhite immigrants, as he had in 2016, he'd help his party win seats in Congress.

In this graph, Broockman and Kalla break down how the canvassing moved the needle on particular questions: whether the government should provide attorneys for undocumented immigrants in legal proceedings; whether the US should grant legal status to people who were brought to the US illegally as children; whether they support deporting all undocumented immigrants; and whether undocumented immigrants should live in fear of daily deportation.

Broockman points out that this graph shows the impacts of deep canvassing among all people who came to the door to answer the canvasser's questions. It includes those who immediately shut the door in the canvasser's face. "The numbers get a bit bigger when you just focus on people who actually entered into the conversation," he says. Among those who started the conversation, there was a 7 percentage point increase for granting legal status to people brought to the US as children, he says, for example.

"This is not just a story of pushing on an open door and taking people who are already Democrats and they just needed a small push," Broockman adds. "Even as Trump was talking about the caravan, we see that Republicans in our study are moving."

And like the 2016 study, Broockman and Kalla found it didn't matter who the canvassers were: They could be members of the impacted communities, or just allies. Both types of canvassers could instigate change.

Why and when does deep canvassing work?

The two other experiments in the study targeted transphobia. In these, researchers included conditions to see whether the conversations could work if conducted over the phone (they did, but it was slightly less effective). In another condition, the canvassers didn't share their own story, but instead played a video of someone experiencing prejudice and then based the conversation around that. That also worked.

It's worth noting that some of the results were less strong than those Broockman and Kalla reported in their 2016 paper.

The impacts these conversations had on feelings of prejudice, Broockman admits, are about a third as strong. "When working with new groups, new staff, on a new issue and at bigger scale, I think it's natural to expect smaller effects," he says. (It's hard, he adds, to directly compare the two papers, though, since the 2016 effort focused a bit more on combating prejudice, and this one more so on policy.)

Emile Bruneau, a neuroscientist who studies intergroup conflict at the University of Pennsylvania and was not involved in the canvassing experiments, tells me in an email it is "so promising to see an intervention, any intervention, that has a lasting effect on big social issues."

What's missing here, she says, is a theoretical understanding for whythe change is occurring. "Without that theoretical understanding, it's difficult to generalize and use the approach in other settings," Bruneau says.

It does seem as though the two-way nature of the conversations is essential for the canvassing technique to work. But why? Broockman and Kalla aren't completely sure. Their main hypothesis is that it works because it's not threatening. People are resistant to changing their mind during an argument, the hypothesis goes, because it threatens their self-image. Sharing narratives gets around that: The persuasion happens because in talking about themselves, the voters realize a more tolerant attitude is consistent with their self-image.

Broockman says they didn't set out to find the exact mechanism. "That is just not what we are trying to do here," he says. Social science experiments are usually conducted on college campuses, in a lab, in contrived scenarios. There's plenty of work that offers some possible mechanisms by which opinions change. But this work isn't about that. "One way you could think about our study is as an effort to try to ... use the insights of lab studies in real-world settings," he says.

(Also worth noting: Deep canvassing has only been tested with progressive causes. Could it be used to wage conservative culture wars? Possibly. Or for issues like the acceptance of genetically modified foods? That's not known.)

There's also the question: Is it worth the effort?

The truth is, there's not much out there in scientific literature on what can change a voter's mind.

In 2018, Kalla and Broockman published a meta-analysis of 49 experiments that were designed to test whether voters are persuadable by conventional means: phone calls, television ads, traditional canvassing, and so on. In aggregate, it turns out these tactics don't work at all.

The effects of most efforts to change people's minds on an issue, if successful at all, tend to fade over time. The impact of television ads, in particular, can fade in just a week. Deep canvassing, it appears from the research, has an effect that can last for several months.

"These deep conversations, I suspect, may be more cost-effective in the long run because the impacts are durable," Serrano says.

And while the effects may be small, only moving opinion a handful of percentage points among those canvassed may be worth it, too. "I'm a campaign person; you'd do anything for 3.5 points," says Fran Hutchins, the deputy director of the Equality Federation who worked on deep canvassing efforts reported in the new study. "Think of any of our recent elections - nobody is winning these things by 10 or 20 points. It always comes down to just a few points."

Do we need more of these conversations in our lives?

There's a smaller finding nestled in Broockman and Kalla's new paper, one that might not make headlines but is worth thinking about.

In the experiment on immigration, Broockman and Kalla found that 78 percent of all the people who came to the door when the canvasser rang ended up staying for the entire conversation. And 75 percent of the people who start the conversations with the canvassers share a story about their own lives.

"Those basic numbers tell you something about just how willing most Americans are to have an open conversation with a stranger about these ostensibly divisive issues," Broockman says.

It's a reminder that our political opponents aren't always as rigid or ideologically severe as they appear in our minds. In his work, Bruneau finds that political partisans have a skewed view of how they think their opponents think of them. Which is to say: Republicans assume Democrats dislike them more than they actually do, and vice versa. And it's this meta-perception, Bruneau finds, that then fuels ongoing conflict and dehumanization.

The activists and scientists I spoke to for this story all agree that you can't change everyone's minds.

Topping says, in their experience, deep canvassing works best on people who might be concerned about an issue like transgender people in bathrooms but have never really talked through their feelings. That's likely a lot of people.

In the age of Trump, there's a compelling push to call things what they are. When we see racist behavior, we should call it racist and not be euphemistic by calling it "racially charged." Arguably, there's a time and place for calling people out, particularly when it comes to powerful, influential people. But maybe not when it comes to our neighbors.

Broockman says this research can at least lend ordinary people a new script when dealing with people in their lives who hold prejudicial opinions. That's refreshing and useful. These conversations aren't arguments. In a way, they may be a form of public therapy - for all sides involved.

"This kind of conversation helps me talk to family members who aren't totally there yet" on accepting their identity, Topping says. "It has taught me patience, and taught me to see people from the most positive view that I can."
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What does it take to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes? "Deep canvassing," a relatively new technique, is showing promise - and is backed by rigorous testing from researchers and activists in the field.

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Edutopia: Using Films to Teach Social Justice

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Edutopia: Using Films to Teach Social Justice

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https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-films-teach-social-justice-issues

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Using Films to Explore Social Justice Issues

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Lesson plans for Ava DuVernay’s films and television series guide students to explore social justice issues in the classroom.

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https://www.readbrightly.com/how-talk-young-children-skin-color/?ref=PRH965329999A03&linkid=PRH965329999A03&cdi=79262FE6F37697DCE0534FD66B0A70BE&template_id=28153&aid=randohouseinc39419-20

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From his studies in psychology and child development, Ron Grady knows how implicit ideas and associations influence children's thoughts about the world and themselves. He created What Does Brown Mean to You? as a way to encourage children of color to see the beauty of their skin in their families, community, and the world around them.

The main character, Benny, is a self-confident, lively, and joyous young boy. Throughout the story, he notices the beautiful brown things around him, from coffee and fuzzy blankets to his dog and his family's skin color.

Here, Grady shares some tips on engaging young children to see, notice, and talk about our differences in a way that embraces that diversity and bonds us as a community.

Engaging children in serious conversations is something grown-ups often find puzzling. Very often, especially with the things that bring us pause or the issues we know are fraught with tension, grown-ups can spend serious amounts of time wondering about the best, ideal, or right ways to talk to children about them. How will children respond? How will we field their questions? How do we protect them or shield them from painful, complex realities? How do we help them navigate things we aren't sure of ourselves?

While there is no precise answer to any of these, a heartening reality is that these conversations don't have to be serious, intense, groundbreaking, or fraught with tension. Children are already noticing, wondering about, and thinking about the things that we adults think are serious. This is no different with skin color and racial identity - or our attitudes about them.

Imagine the way a child looks at the world. With eyes wide with wonder, a mind open to new ideas, and a heart that sees the best intentions in others. Children's wide eyes, open minds, and loving hearts are also savvy - a critical part of children's lives involves navigating and figuring out a complex world.

So, given this knowledge, how can we create positive, sensitive, and meaningful conversations with our little ones about race, skin color, and what it all means?
1. Move past our own discomfort.
While it's true that children notice things and pick up on many of the messages we send, we can take heart in two things:

First, children's ideas are malleable. They are learning and can re-learn, re-frame, and revise their understanding of any negative messages they may have received in the same way we can

Second, it's helpful to remember that while children notice things, they don't always do so with the same set of lenses that adults do. Children do not always bring the feelings of negativity, discomfort, and tension to a subject that adults do. (Think about if you've ever heard a child use a word in mixed company that left you feeling a little embarrassed). This means that we can often venture into this territory without fear.

2. Speak affirmingly and positively.
Build up children - and yourself! When we speak positively about ourselves, our experiences, how we look, how we feel, and how we move through the world, we model for children what it means to look at ourselves and be proud!
3. Bring in narratives that center our experiences in the rich diversity in which they occur.
This one is key! Bringing in experiences that showcase the broad diversity of individuals with brown and black skin is so important. Presenting Benny's day as slice-of-life adventures was a conscious decision to celebrate the expansiveness of Black and brown childhoods. I wanted to show Benny doing the things that children of all colors love.
4. Explore ideas through multiple mediums.
Conversations don't always happen with words, teaching isn't always unidirectional, and complex concepts don't have to be - and can't be - figured out in a single setting. Some ways you might invite children to think about skin tone and race in an emergent way are:

Invite children to create portraits of themselves and those they love.

Discuss ways to create hair texture using crayons or colored pencils.

Mix paints to approximate skin color.

Make models of meaningful individuals, etc.

If there are any parting words I can leave you with, I'd love for you to remember that you can do this-you can do this! You don't have to be perfect; You don't have to have all the answers, and you don't have to do it right the first time - teach your children to love themselves, love others, and love the skin they're in!

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How to Talk to Young Children About Skin Color | Brightly

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From his studies in psychology and child development, Ron Grady knows how implicit ideas and associations influence children's thoughts about the world and themselves. He created What Does Brown Mean to You? as a way to encourage children of color to see the beauty of their skin in their families, community, and the world around them.

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https://time.com/5859214/james-baldwin-racism/

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James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We've Been Here Before

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James Baldwin's work teaches us about the missed opportunities of the past. We can't afford to fail this time.

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http://www.nysed.gov/video/equity-excellence-and-access

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The Board of Regents and NYSED are committed to making New York's schools warm and welcoming places for all students. In this video, New York students explain that learning becomes possible - and joyful - when they are seen, heard, and valued for who they are.

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https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/NNCW-Anti-Slur%20%281%29.pdf

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https://www.antiracisted.org/learn

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Join The Accountability Network! If you are feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, or uninspired, join our network of accountability partners committed to creating the world all students deserve.

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Clint Smith Crash Course Black American History

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Clint Smith Crash Course Black American History

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https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ

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Over the course of 51 episodes, we're going to learn about Black American History. Clint Smith will teach you about the experience of Black people in America...

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https://danawilliams2.tripod.com/aaarg/churchill.pdf

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http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/main/indigenous-native-american-mascot-memo.pdf

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https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/growing-racism

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In a letter to her daughter, Lisa Delpit reflects on how racism has shaped her worldview and her hopes and fears for her child.

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Because the issue of immigration is a hot topic right now, it makes sense that immigration and education should also be at the forefront of peoples' minds. In these conversations there are often arguments or opinions presented that embrace racist ideology and American exceptionalism all while...

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https://www.ted.com/talks/the_n_word_in_the_classroom

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Centered around one of the most divisive words in the English language, this talk highlights the way in which the N-word presents itself, and is presented, in the classroom. With her personal experiences as a foundation, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor discusses how we are able to reshape education around the N-word by using our own points of encounter to frame the conversation, and facilitate productive discussion.

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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eyesontheprize/?_ga=2.168285409.1934646045.1673274738-410483626.1673274738

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Film Description

Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today. Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is the most critically acclaimed documentary on civil rights in America.

Eyes on the Prize recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people - young and old, male and female, northern and southern - who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality - in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans.

Through contemporary interviews and historical footage, Eyes on the Prize traces the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act; from early acts of individual courage through the flowering of a mass movement and its eventual split into factions. Julian Bond, political leader and civil rights activist, narrates.

The driving force behind Eyes on the Prize and Blackside, Henry Hampton (1940-1998) won numerous awards for this landmark series including the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton, the Peabody Award, and Academy Award nominations. He set out to share his vision of what he called "the remarkable human drama that was the Civil Rights Movement" through the Eyes on the Prizedocumentary and a book of the same title by Juan Williams. In recent years, a number of key figures who appear in the films (including the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott; Coretta Scott King, wife of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and an activist in her own right; Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and George Wallace, the 1960s Alabama governor who resisted integration) have died, making this record of their testimony all the more valuable.

Programs in the series:

Awakenings (1954-1956)
Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

Fighting Back (1957-1962)
States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts - and integration is carried out.

Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)
Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South. "Freedom Riders" also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

No Easy Walk (1961-1963)
The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King's leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi: Is This America? (1963-1964)
Mississippi's grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three activists are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

Bridge to Freedom (1965)
A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

The Time Has Come (1964-66)
After a decade-long cry for justice, a new sound is heard in the civil rights movement: the insistent call for power. Malcolm X takes an eloquent nationalism to urban streets as a younger generation of black leaders listens. In the South, Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) move from "Freedom Now!" to "Black Power!" as the fabric of the traditional movement changes.

Two Societies (1965-68)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come north to help Chicago's civil rights leaders in their nonviolent struggle against segregated housing. Their efforts pit them against Chicago's powerful mayor, Richard Daley. When a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods draws violence, King and Daley negotiate with mixed results. In Detroit, a police raid in a black neighborhood sparks an urban uprising that lasts five days, leaving 43 people dead. The Kerner Commission finds that America is becoming "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission, ignores the report.

Power! (1966-68)
The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City's teachers' union.

Power! (1966-68)
The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City's teachers' union.

The Promised Land (1967-68)
Martin Luther King stakes out new ground for himself and the rapidly fragmenting civil rights movement. One year before his death, he publicly opposes the war in Vietnam. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) embarks on an ambitious Poor People's Campaign. In the midst of political organizing, King detours to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he is assassinated. King's death and the failure of his final campaign mark the end of a major stream of the movement.

Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-72)
A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America. World heavyweight champion Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, a minister of Islam who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of this prominent black institution. Black elected officials and community activists organize the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to create a unified black response to growing repression against the movement.

A Nation of Law? (1968-71)
Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-80)
In the 1970s, antidiscrimination legal rights gained in past decades by the civil rights movement are put to the test. In Boston, some whites violently resist a federal court school desegregation order. Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, proves that affirmative action can work, but the Bakke Supreme Court case challenges that policy.

Back to the Movement (1979-mid 80s)
Power and powerlessness. Miami's black community - pummeled by urban renewal, a lack of jobs, and police harassment - explodes in rioting. But in Chicago, an unprecedented grassroots movement triumphs. Frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city's Democratic political machine, reformers install Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.

Martin Luther King stakes out new ground for himself and the rapidly fragmenting civil rights movement. One year before his death, he publicly opposes the war in Vietnam. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) embarks on an ambitious Poor People's Campaign. In the midst of political organizing, King detours to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he is assassinated. King's death and the failure of his final campaign mark the end of a major stream of the movement.

Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-72)
A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America. World heavyweight champion Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, a minister of Islam who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of this prominent black institution. Black elected officials and community activists organize the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to create a unified black response to growing repression against the movement.

A Nation of Law? (1968-71)
Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-80)
In the 1970s, antidiscrimination legal rights gained in past decades by the civil rights movement are put to the test. In Boston, some whites violently resist a federal court school desegregation order. Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, proves that affirmative action can work, but the Bakke Supreme Court case challenges that policy.

Back to the Movement (1979-mid 80s)
Power and powerlessness. Miami's black community - pummeled by urban renewal, a lack of jobs, and police harassment - explodes in rioting. But in Chicago, an unprecedented grassroots movement triumphs. Frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city's Democratic political machine, reformers install Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.

Credits

The landmark series Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside and first broadcast in 1987, is a special presentation of the award-winning PBS history series, American Experience.
Access the complete program credits here
Awakenings (1954-1956)
Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

Fighting Back (1957-1962)
States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts - and integration is carried out.

Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)
Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-insspread across the South. "Freedom Riders" also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

No Easy Walk (1961-1963)
The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King's leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi: Is This America? (1963-1964)
Mississippi's grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three of them are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

Bridge to Freedom (1965)
A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

The Time Has Come (1964-66)
After a decade-long cry for justice, a new sound is heard in the civil rights movement: the insistent call for power. Malcolm X takes an eloquent nationalism to urban streets as a younger generation of black leaders listens. In the South, Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) move from "Freedom Now!" to "Black Power!" as the fabric of the traditional movement changes.

Two Societies (1965-68)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come north to help Chicago's civil rights leaders in their nonviolent struggle against segregated housing. Their efforts pit them against Chicago's powerful mayor, Richard Daley. When a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods draws violence, King and Daley negotiate with mixed results. In Detroit, a police raid in a black neighborhood sparks an urban uprising that lasts five days, leaving 43 people dead. The Kerner Commission finds that America is becoming "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission, ignores the report.

Power! (1966-68)
The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City's teachers' union.

The Promised Land (1967-68)
Martin Luther King stakes out new ground for himself and the rapidly fragmenting civil rights movement. One year before his death, he publicly opposes the war in Vietnam. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) embarks on an ambitious Poor People's Campaign. In the midst of political organizing, King detours to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he is assassinated. King's death and the failure of his final campaign mark the end of a major stream of the movement.

Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-72)
A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America. World heavyweight champion Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, a minister of Islam who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of this prominent black institution. Black elected officials and community activists organize the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to create a unified black response to growing repression against the movement.

A Nation of Law? (1968-71)
Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-80)
In the 1970s, antidiscrimination legal rights gained in past decades by the civil rights movement are put to the test. In Boston, some whites violently resist a federal court school desegregation order. Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, proves that affirmative action can work, but the Bakke Supreme Court case challenges that policy.

Back to the Movement (1979-mid 80s)
Power and powerlessness. Miami's black community - pummelled by urban renewal, a lack of jobs, and police harassment - explodes in rioting. But in Chicago, an unprecedented grassroots movement triumphs. Frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city's Democratic political machine, reformers install Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.

Transcript

The landmark series Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside and first broadcast in 1987, is a special presentation of the award-winning PBS history series, American Experience.
Access the complete program transcripts here
Awakenings (1954-1956)
Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

Fighting Back (1957-1962)
States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts - and integration is carried out.

Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)
Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-insspread across the South. "Freedom Riders" also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

No Easy Walk (1961-1963)
The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King's leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi: Is This America? (1963-1964)
Mississippi's grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three of them are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

Bridge to Freedom (1965)
A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

The Time Has Come (1964-66)
After a decade-long cry for justice, a new sound is heard in the civil rights movement: the insistent call for power. Malcolm X takes an eloquent nationalism to urban streets as a younger generation of black leaders listens. In the South, Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) move from "Freedom Now!" to "Black Power!" as the fabric of the traditional movement changes.

Two Societies (1965-68)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come north to help Chicago's civil rights leaders in their nonviolent struggle against segregated housing. Their efforts pit them against Chicago's powerful mayor, Richard Daley. When a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods draws violence, King and Daley negotiate with mixed results. In Detroit, a police raid in a black neighborhood sparks an urban uprising that lasts five days, leaving 43 people dead. The Kerner Commission finds that America is becoming "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission, ignores the report.

Power! (1966-68)
The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City's teachers' union.

The Promised Land (1967-68)
Martin Luther King stakes out new ground for himself and the rapidly fragmenting civil rights movement. One year before his death, he publicly opposes the war in Vietnam. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) embarks on an ambitious Poor People's Campaign. In the midst of political organizing, King detours to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he is assassinated. King's death and the failure of his final campaign mark the end of a major stream of the movement.

Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-72)
A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America. World heavyweight champion Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, a minister of Islam who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of this prominent black institution. Black elected officials and community activists organize the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to create a unified black response to growing repression against the movement.

A Nation of Law? (1968-71)
Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-80)
In the 1970s, antidiscrimination legal rights gained in past decades by the civil rights movement are put to the test. In Boston, some whites violently resist a federal court school desegregation order. Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, proves that affirmative action can work, but the Bakke Supreme Court case challenges that policy.

Back to the Movement (1979-mid 80s)
Power and powerlessness. Miami's black community - pummelled by urban renewal, a lack of jobs, and police harassment - explodes in rioting. But in Chicago, an unprecedented grassroots movement triumphs. Frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city's Democratic political machine, reformers install Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.

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Eyes on the Prize | American Experience | PBS

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Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

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https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/teaching-the-n-word/

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My students-black, white, Latina/o, Vietnamese, and CambodianÑall sighed and rolled their eyes in unison when I asked them to write about the n-word. This was not the first time that a middle-aged, white English teacher in sensible shoes tried to get down and dirty over a sensitive subject.

It was the first day of my unit on Fences, August Wilson's play about an African American family in 1940s Pittsburgh. Fences was always a favorite with my 10th and 11th graders, but I wanted the class to discuss the use of the n-word before we read and performed the play.

One boy in the back of the room mimicked falling on a sharpened pencil to a chorus of giggles. But eventually the students, all 10th graders, got into the warm-up, and wrote more quietly and longer than usual.

"So, what do you know?" I asked after 10 minutes.

"It was used to describe black people," one student began in a singsong.

"It's a derogatory word for black people," someone suggested. Derogatory was a new word from a previous unit, and it was encouraging to hear a student using it. This was progress.

"It's a bad word," another student said.

"No." José picked his head up from his desk. "It was only bad a long time ago, until rappers started to use it."

"It's not such a big deal anymore, Ms. Kenney." Meredith yawned over a SpongeBob doodle she was drawing on the cover of her spiral.

Thus began our n-word talk, a discussion I have repeated with almost every English class for the past 12 years. Many high school teachers like me, white and middle class, approach the topic with trepidation. I can still remember how my own English teacher, Mrs. Kleeg, addressed the n-word only once, while we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird in 8th grade, and then only after James Parker, the class clown and aspiring pain in Mrs. Kleeg's butt, raised his hand and asked her what it meant and how to pronounce it. "That word . . . well . . ." Mrs. Kleeg blushed and clutched her pearls. "It's not a very nice word for Negroes. I don't suppose I really know the pronunciation."

I probably would have stumbled down Mrs. Kleeg's path when I began my teaching career in the Portland, Oregon, public schools if it hadn't been for a local controversy surrounding the teaching of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Several African American students at a mostly white high school objected to the novel, specifically because of the use of the n-word. But even as a novice teacher, I wondered whether the problem in this case was the use of the n-word itself in Huckleberry Finn, or the way many teachers handle it.

I made a commitment to teach my students about the n-word at least once a year. At first, I taught the lesson to avoid offending and marginalizing my African American students, who made up less than 10 percent of the student population. However, over the years, the reaction I got from many of my students convinced me that this was a lesson every student needed to learn.

Meredith's response to the n-word discussion was typical. "I don't know why we have to talk about this, Ms. Kenney. We have a black president now, and things aren't racist anymore." Because I can still remember a time when I was as youthful, optimistic, and sheltered as Meredith and many of my other white students, I spent a few seconds mentally composing a response that would question her attitude without hurting her feelings. "I agree that things have changed a lot, Meredith, but some people might disagree with the idea that our culture is no longer racist. Why don't we have a closer look at the history of the n-word, and then find out what some modern writers and your classmates think?"

We watched the first 30 minutes of "Awakenings," the first episode of Eyes on the Prize, a documentary that uses images and stories from U.S. history to tell the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. I chose this episode because it provides good historical background for Fences, and also because I wanted my students to see the connection between the use of the n-word in the United States and centuries of slavery, violence, and poverty, as well as resistance. The images are disturbing at times-graphic still photographs of lynchings, the famous close-up of Emmett Till, not much younger than my students, his head half blown away by a shotgun, his features warped and bloated after his body was dumped in a river by men old enough to be his father. In the section describing the murderers' trial, the students learned that African American reporters were forced to sit together around a card table in the courtroom, and that an African American congressman was nearly denied access to the proceedings because the police didn't believe a "nigger congressman" could exist.

Then it was time to gather evidence to prepare for discussion over the use of the word in modern U.S. culture, a problematic step for me as a white teacher. Previous failures, when I relied on my own faulty knowledge and point of view to teach this issue, showed the importance of introducing African American voices. Students of all races should be exposed to the spectrum of African American opinion on the evolving use of the n-word. They need to be aware of the current debates among African Americans from all walks of life-students, poets, entertainers, lawyers, teachers, activists, and academics. So, the next day I introduced some film clips to gather evidence.

I began by showing a CNN report, "Funeral for the N-Word," which highlights a symbolic funeral that the NAACP conducted for the n-word in Detroit in 2010. Then I told the class: "Take out a piece of paper. Draw two columns to take some notes while we listen to a televised debate between an African American scholar, Michael Eric Dyson, and an author and CNN reporter, Roland Martin, over the use and ownership of the n-word. Write one name at the top of each column and listen carefully to each side of their debate."

Because Dyson and Martin speak quickly and use words my students are unfamiliar with, I needed to stop the video often to help discuss and paraphrase the debate, demonstrate my own note-taking under a document camera, and give students time to take their own notes. For example, I prompted: "Dyson claims that 'white people just got upset. They now have a word they can't use. We took the meaning of the term away from them . . . we use it as a term of endearment.' What do you think he meant?"

"That black people changed the word somehow?" Lynn, a Vietnamese student, suggested.

"He meant that black people turned the word into something that couldn't hurt them," Tre'Vaughn, an African American student, explained. "We just use it as a way to show affection."

We continued our discussion and note-taking as Martin described his experiences growing up with the n-word and ultimately rejecting it, despite "hearing it at the park, all over the place, it became ingrained . . . it became accepted."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I guess it means that when you hear a word a lot, you just start using it."

We also listened to an elderly Maya Angelou scold rappers Snoop Dogg and Kanye West for throwing around the n-word so lightly in their music. "The vulgarity that comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth or an Asian mouth is still vulgarity . . . it's all the same." Angelou's take on the n-word got added to the bank of opinions and vocabulary. I also showed a discussion between Oprah Winfrey and Jay Z. Winfrey took Angelou's side as Jay Z echoed Dyson's opinion that black people "have taken the power out of the word." I also asked students to listen to Richard Sherman, the star defensive back for the Seattle Seahawks football team, explain to reporters that the word "thug" many applied to him after his televised blowup following the NFC championship game was just a more socially acceptable form of the n-word.

By now, the listening was over. Kids generally don't like it when some old lady messes with their music, famous poet or not, and more than a few of them were nodding at Jay Z, bristling at Winfrey and Angelou's suggestion that rap should be censored, and getting worked up over the Sherman controversy. Three distinct points of view emerged from the discussion: Some kids thought it was OK to use the n-word; some thought it was never OK; some-the majority of the class, in fact-thought it was OK for some people to use the n-word, but maybe only some of the time. But there was no time to discuss it further since our 90 minutes was up.

The next day, I asked students who shared the same opinions to get together in groups and stake out territories in different parts of the room. "We are going to have a quick conversation about the n-word. To prepare, take five minutes to pool your notes and evidence, and discuss in your group where you stand on the use of the n-word in our society. Use the language and ideas you heard in the Angelou and Winfrey clips, the Sherman press conference, and the debate between Dyson and Martin."

After the groups talked among themselves, I opened the larger discussion: "I want everybody to speak but class norms still apply, so no interrupting, no put-downs, and, for now, please do not use the actual word."

Everyone had an opinion, and no one was shy about expressing it:

"You should never use the word," Meredith said, in a big change from her initial position. "It makes black people remember bad times."

"How do you know? We're not all the same. Anyway, a lot of black people use it all the time," Marcus, an African American student, insisted. "You can't tell us not to use it. It's a term of endearment, like that guy in the tape said. We took the word back."

"Yeah, we took it back, like Jay Z said," Tre'Vaughn said. "We took the power out of the word. Mike Dyson said: 'If we can't make the n-word our own, it's like the white people won. Now only black people can say it.'"

"Context matters. It's not such an easy question to answer. It depends on who you're hanging out with," Lynn insisted. "Even white or Asian people can sometimes say it around black people if they're all good friends."

"White people can say it. Technically, we have free speech in this country," Jason, a white student with a flaming red fauxhawk, insisted.

"Then how come you don't say it?" asked Meredith.

"'Cause I'd get my ass beat."

"You can say it around me," Marcus said. He and Jason exchanged high fives.

"Not all black people like it," argued John, an African American student. "My grandma says not to use it. She thinks it's vulgar, like that old lady said on the YouTube thing."

"Let's all say it together!" Jason, class clown and aspiring pain in my butt, suggested.

"You better not." This was the first time Danisha, an African American student, had spoken up. "Mike Dyson said white people can't use it. So don't use it." She glowered at the two boys from her desk. Danisha excelled at questioning, and sometimes sabotaging, my lessons. I was secretly pleased that she had intervened. If she hadn't, I would have done it myself.

I sent the students back to their desks to write a brief persuasive essay on the use of the n-word in modern U.S. culture. We had already practiced using evidence to make persuasive arguments, and before they began, we brainstormed a list of essay criteria on the board. They wrote for 40 minutes.

I finished the period by asking my students to briefly share the "hottest" parts of their essays. (As I did during the discussion, I asked them to refrain from reading the n-word out loud if they used it in their essays.) Even though I always enjoy student writing, this time, I was blown away by their ability to weave their own stories and experiences into solid and well-developed arguments using the evidence they gathered.

Some students, like Gloria, a Latina student, thought that the n-word should disappear. "According to Oprah, the word is ugly and hurtful to a generation that fought and fought to get rid of the word so that people would stop thinking about them differently and labeling them that way."

Mya objected to the use of the word in rap lyrics: "Jay Z said that blacks took the power out of the word and turned it into a term of endearment. Maybe that's true for him, but not all African Americans. I for one know I hate it when rappers use the n-word in their music."

Other students came out in favor of Dyson and Jay Z's opinion that African Americans have taken the word back and changed the meaning. Esmeralda, a Latina student: "Black hip-hop and rap artists reclaimed the word that kept their ancestors and parents prisoner and gave it their own meaning. These days, the n-word has replaced 'friend' and 'buddy.' There is no longer any malice in the word." Danielle, an African American girl, agreed and added that "most black people say 'nigga' out of love, not out of hate. There is a song that continuously says 'nigga,' but they are talking about being good friends and never turning their backs on each other."

Jonathan, an Asian student, quibbled with the focus on semantics: "Words are words. The power behind them is from the person saying them. According to Jay Z, the word is not the problem, racism is the problem." Another student referred to the Sherman press conference: "Richard Sherman made me think that we need to deal with racism instead of words. If you ban the n-word, racist people will only come up with a new word like 'thug.' "

Marquandre, an African American student, had this to say: "Although I disagree with using the n-word in rap, I don't disagree with using the word completely. I think the n-word should be another word for 'brotha' when we are speaking to a fellow black citizen, not the joke that it has become. I just think the use of the word should have a deeper meaning on the surface than what it has been made out to be."

Some of the most heartfelt and personal arguments came from students of mixed races, including Cindy. "Being part black puts me in a confusing position. Many blacks think that only black people can say it. But can I say it? I don't feel like I am 'worthy' of saying it, in fear of being viewed as a racist. Overall, my relationship with the word is like my room's lightbulb flickering on and off."

It was finally time to discuss the best way to handle the n-word as we read and performed Fences. I explained to my students that, although it was important to see and discuss the n-word in an historical context, we would refrain from using it in class or reading it out loud when we were performing the play.

"Wait a minute." Danisha measured her words out slowly. "Are you seriously telling me that I can't say nigger?" She looked around in a silent appeal to Marcus, who shrugged his shoulders. "Did you hear that white lady say we can't say nigger? What happened to taking the word back?"

"She just doesn't want us to say it in class."

"Oh, shut up, nigger." She tossed her braids, and the class dissolved into snickers as, once again, Danisha pulled my lesson out from under me like a tablecloth trick.

But her point was clear and hit home: "Who the hell are you, white lady, to tell a black student not to say the n-word?"

I managed to stop my hands from groping, Mrs. Kleeg-style, for an imaginary string of pearls. "Yeah, sure, I'm white, and that makes me feel a little awkward teaching a lesson like this. Plus, like Oprah, I'm older, and I was around when that word was only a derogatory term.

"I'm not telling you to never say the word, but I am trying to point out the difficulty of using, even reading out loud, such a sensitive word in a classroom. And as you just heard in all of these marvelous essays, there are a lot of different opinions on how the n-word should be used. Marcus, you say you'd be OK hearing your white friend use the n-word, but some kids don't want to hear it at all. Others only want to hear it in certain contexts. I'm willing to bet that no one would want to hear it from me. Anybody?"

The Ferris Bueller allusion almost never gets the laughs I hope it will, but I couldn't help but try. At least no one disagreed.

"Now, I would never dream of telling a black student not to say the n-word outside of my class, but while we are all here, I have to help create a safe environment for all of us, and these discussions are part of that. So, can we make this agreement about the use of the n-word in class?"

A few heads nodded. The discussion faded as the kids opened their copies of Fences for the first time, and the room filled with the sound of voices arguing over who was going to read the parts out loud. Maybe no one but me noticed, but as we settled into Act I, the atmosphere gradually relaxed and lightened, the same way it does when you open a window and let some air into a hot and stuffy room.

Resources

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A white high school teacher prepares her students to read August Wilson's Fences by leading an exploration of the n-word.

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https://medium.com/foundation-of-african-americans-for-civic/why-all-white-people-have-racist-tendencies-2e0169c93d70

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Why All White People Have Racist Tendencies

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Ignorance and Inaction Is Your Racist Tendency

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https://sites.prh.com/pyrbooklists?ref=PRHC21797C83FE6&linkid=PRHC21797C83FE6&cdi=379EEAA6F3726A01E0534FD66B0A8D98&template_id=27143&aid=randohouseinc8169-20

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To help you discover, curate, and plan, we've created thematic booklists for readers grades PreK-12. These interactive booklists allow you to download the PDF, click the book covers to find out more about each book along with any available educator and library resources.

Click the links below to download and explore.

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To help you discover, curate, and plan, we've created thematic booklists for readers grades PreK-12. These interactive booklists allow you to download the PDF, click the book covers to find out more about each book along with any available educator and library resources.

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https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15302120/new-study-reveals-the-anticrt-agenda-is-really-about-denying-racism-and-revising-history

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New Study Reveals the Anti-CRT Agenda is Really about Denying Racism and Revising History

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The existence of white privilege and systemic racism is not a matter of opinion or perspective. It is a clear and undeniable fact that has been demonstrated by research and lived experience.

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https://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nikole-hannah-jones-and-ta-nehisi-coates-on-the/id1548604447?i=1000530493907

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You've heard plenty by now about the fights over teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. But behind those skirmishes is something deeper: A fight over the story we tell about America. Why that fight has so gripped our national discourse is the question of this podcast: What changes when a country's sense of its own history changes? What changes when who gets to tell that story changes? What are the stakes here, and why now?

My guests for this conversation need little introduction. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist for the New York Times Magazine where she led the 1619 Project, and, before that, did incredible work on racial inequality in the American education system. Ta- Nehisi Coates is the author of books including "Between the World and Me" and "The Water Dancer," essays including "The Case for Reparations," and, for Marvel Comics, "Captain America" and "Black Panther." Each of them has won more prestigious awards for their work than I could possibly list here, and both will be taking faculty positions at Howard University.

We discuss the 1619 Project, whether patriotism can coexist with shame and regret, the political power of American exceptionalism, the cracked foundations of American democracy, how journalism is and should be taught, our relationships to Twitter, what journalists can learn from children and much more.

Nikole Hannah-Jones book recommendations:

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B Du Bois

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Ta-Nehisi Coates book recommendations:

Postwar by Tony Judt

Avengers of the New World by Laurent Dubois

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

"The Ezra Klein Show" is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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nikole hannah-jones and ta-nehisi coates on the fight over u.s. history

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‎The Ezra Klein Show: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Fight Over U.S. History on Apple Podcasts

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You've heard plenty by now about the fights over teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. But behind those skirmishes is something deeper: A fight over the story we tell about America. Why that fight has so gripped our national discourse is the question of this podcast: What changes when...

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https://johnraible.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/revised-2009-checklist-for-allies.pdf

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1aTLsS69Y

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How Do You Handle a Racist Joke? | Decoded | MTV News

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Anti-Bias Education for Young Students Dr/ Louise Derman Sparks

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Anti-Bias Education for Young Students Dr/ Louise Derman Sparks

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https://www.antibiasleadersece.com/the-film-reflecting-on-anti-bias-education-in-action/

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The film, Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years (48 minutes), produced by Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo, features vignettes of anti-bias strategies in early childhood classrooms interspersed with teachers reflecting on their practice. Debbie and John partnered with filmmaker Filiz Efe McKinney of Brave Sprout Productions to create a film that shifts the focus away from the talking heads of experts and on to the voices of teachers committed to equity on a daily basis. By taking viewers into diverse early childhood classrooms, the film seeks to demonstrate the importance of teacher reflection on identity, context, and practice in anti-bias education and provides a much-needed resource for teacher education and professional development.

The film has received numerous awards including the Silver Prize for Documentary Feature (2021) in the Social Justice Film Festival and a nomination for Northwest Regional Emmy® (2022) in the category of diversity, equity, and inclusion - long form content.

The film can be streamed at the screen image above at no charge for professional development and educational purposes. Please review information about the use of the film. The film has closed captions in English, Spanish, and Chinese (simplified characters) which can be turned on by clicking on the CC button to the bottom right of the screen. A Guidebook (available in Spanish and English) provides additional background and resources, and poses provocations and questions for reflection about each vignette in the film. The Official Trailer (3 minutes) is available for promotional purposes.

There is no "one way" to implement anti-bias education. The four anti-bias goals help guide the work. This approach involves critical thinking and a deep understanding of the complexity of the issues and the context of your community. The film is a provocation to generate dialogue about how to bring this approach into your practice.

Louise Derman-Sparks is the film's senior advisor. The film's theoretical and research framework is based on her co-authored books, Anti-Bias Education for Our Children and Ourselves (with Julie Olsen-Edwards and Catherin Goins ) and Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change (with Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo).

Read the latest news about the film
See Awards and Festivals

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Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Film: Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTvU7uUgjUI

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Cracking the Codes: Joy DeGruy, A Trip to the Grocery Store

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https://whiteawake.org/themes-and-resources/political-education-resources-for-study-training/

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Below are significant resources that can provide a foundational understanding of the themes listed. Note that some resources are listed in more than one place. As much as possible, we've ordered resources such that shorter items precede longer items. Neither the themes, nor lists of resources, are meant to be exhaustive. Self education is a lifelong journey. Guidance on how to incorporate different themes and resources into a group experience can be found on our Guiding Group Work and Sample Curriculum pages, and is also available through consultation

Understanding Racism and White Supremacy

Whiteness and Class

Historical Grief and Trauma

European Roots & Patterns

Decolonization

Collective Liberation

The Perils of "Helping" Across Cultures

Building Accountable Relationships with Communities of Color

Racial Caucusing

Racial Identity Development

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Political Education: Resources for Study & Training - White Awake

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Below are significant resources that can provide a foundational understanding of the themes listed. Note that some resources are listed in more than one place. As much as possible, we've ordered resources such that shorter items precede longer items. Neither the themes, nor lists of resources, are meant to be exhaustive.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/learning/lesson-plans/25-mini-films-for-exploring-race-bias-and-identity-with-students.html

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26 Mini-Films for Exploring Race, Bias and Identity With Students (Published 2017)

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To help teachers make the most of these films, we also provide a grab-bag of teaching ideas, related readings and student activities.

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Learning for Justice Anti Bias Framework

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Learning for Justice Anti Bias Framework

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https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/general/TT%20anti%20bias%20framework%20pamphlet_final.pdf

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Watch Colin in Black & White | Netflix Official Site

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Colin Kaepernick narrates this drama series recounting his formative years navigating race, class and culture while aspiring for greatness. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Gloria Ladson -Billings CRT What is it really?

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Gloria Ladson -Billings CRT What is it really?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gloria Ladson-Billings - Critical Race Theory

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Racial Justice | Sesame Street in Communities

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Here are resources to build resilience, empathy, curiosity, and thoughtfulness in young children as they prepare for the task of building a better world by standing up, standing tall, and standing together.

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How to Hold Whiteness Responsibly | How To Make Love.™

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Applications for the next cohort close in: 100% of former cohort members recommend this course. This experience is designed to help you actively disrupt white supremacy conditioning in your own life so that you: see injustice and the effects of white supremacy in your life and in the lives of others more clearly and directly.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Never Aired: Profile on James Baldwin ABC’s 20/20, 1979

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The following 1979 profile of James Baldwin was never aired. 

Sylvia Chase: Writer, interviewer, Narrator.

Joseph Lovett: Producer, Director

Richard O’Regan: Associate Producer

Robert Leacock, Jr. : Cinematographer
Michael Lonsdale: Sound
Editor: Dina Boogaard.

Supervising Producer: Karen Lerner

(http://www.acloserlook.org)

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Be Antiracist imagines what an antiracist society might look like and how we all can play an active role in building one. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist, the book that spurred a nationwide conversation redefining what it means to be antiracist, and in this podcast, he guides listeners how they can identify and reject the racist systems hiding behind racial inequity and injustice. Alongside notable guests, Dr. Kendi continues his journey towards building a just and equitable world and proposes how we can all help create it with him.

Chat About Be Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Be Antiracist imagines what an antiracist society might look like and how we all can play an active role in building one. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist, the book that spurred a nationwide conversation redefining what it means to be antiracist, and in this podcast, he guides listeners how they can identify and reject the racist systems hiding behind racial inequity and injustice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The film, Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years (48 minutes), produced by Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo, features vignettes of anti-bias strategies in early childhood classrooms interspersed with teachers reflecting on their practice. Debbie and John partnered with filmmaker Filiz Efe McKinney of Brave Sprout Productions to create a film that shifts the focus away from the talking heads of experts and on to the voices of teachers committed to equity on a daily basis. By taking viewers into diverse early childhood classrooms, the film seeks to demonstrate the importance of teacher reflection on identity, context, and practice in anti-bias education and provides a much-needed resource for teacher education and professional development.

The film has received numerous awards including the Silver Prize for Documentary Feature (2021) in the Social Justice Film Festival and a nomination for Northwest Regional Emmy® (2022) in the category of diversity, equity, and inclusion - long form content.

The film can be streamed at the screen image above at no charge for professional development and educational purposes. Please review information about the use of the film. The film has closed captions in English, Spanish, and Chinese (simplified characters) which can be turned on by clicking on the CC button to the bottom right of the screen. A Guidebook (available in Spanish and English) provides additional background and resources, and poses provocations and questions for reflection about each vignette in the film. The Official Trailer (3 minutes) is available for promotional purposes.

There is no "one way" to implement anti-bias education. The four anti-bias goals help guide the work. This approach involves critical thinking and a deep understanding of the complexity of the issues and the context of your community. The film is a provocation to generate dialogue about how to bring this approach into your practice.

Louise Derman-Sparks is the film's senior advisor. The film's theoretical and research framework is based on her co-authored books, Anti-Bias Education for Our Children and Ourselves (with Julie Olsen-Edwards and Catherin Goins ) and Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change (with Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo).

Read the latest news about the film
See Awards and Festivals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Film: Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years

# data[].attributes.body
Tim Wise

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Consider, for a second, the picture above. Think about the sign held by the protester in this photo - taken at a Black Lives Matter rally last year - and ask yourself: what is its purpose? For whom is it being displayed?

Is it aimed at the law enforcement officials whose racially-disproportionate use of force this person is ostensibly there to protest? Clearly not.

Is it aimed at the lawmakers to whom its carrier might direct their petition for redress of Black grievance, as they fight to shift funding from policing to more preventative public safety mechanisms? Again, no.

There is only one audience for whom these acts of self-deprecation are intended. Those who made signs like this and carried them - and they were commonplace at last year's demonstrations - did so for the eyes of Black people. And they did so because, for some reason, they have decided that opening a confessional vein and acknowledging their ignorance is "doing the work," or at least displaying the humility necessary to begin the doing of it.

So we get signs like this, or folks who publicly announce their desire to be quiet and just listen to Black people for a while, even though broadcasting your plan to be quiet is sort of a violation of said plan. And even though it somewhat complicates the whole "White Silence is Violence" thing. But hey, at least it's deferential or something to that effect.

I'm going to say some things now - I suspect I already have - which might get me in trouble with certain corners of the anti-racist community. But as someone immersed in this movement for more than 30 years, and having searched high and low while yet failing to locate even a solitary fuck I might manage to give before saying it, here goes:
This self-flagellating bullshit has to stop.
Seriously, this cowering, let-me-apologize-for-taking-up-space-on-the-planet silliness isn't what Black folks have told us anti-racist allyship looks like. Just like it isn't Black folks-at least not any significant number of them - who demand we raise our fists at some outdoor cafe to show how down we are as they pass by in protest or who encourage berating those who don't do as instructed. It's primarily white wanna-be-radicals who do that kind of thing, caught up in a never-ending spiral of racial misanthropy, from which they seek deliverance in as much performative rage as is humanly possible.

Perhaps it will come as a shock to some, but most Black people have little interest in hearing us apologize for our ignorance or run down a checklist of our privileges and whine about how that list makes us feel. Black people know this shit isn't personal, it's business, by which I mean, they know the difference between white people and whiteness as a social concept - and which of these is the real problem. It's what Dick Gregory was getting at when he used to say white is not a kind of person, but a state of mind.

White people might think the big problems are our own fragility, our unwillingness to check our privilege, and our implicit biases. Black folks tend to know better. They realize that however real these things are, the primary issue is an edifice of inequity built on a crooked foundation of unjust history. That structure is then upheld by a scaffolding of everyday institutional practices that perpetuate racial unfairness irrespective of the goodness of white individuals within those institutions. From old boy's networks that exclude them from job opportunities to standardized tests absent standardized resources to a law enforcement structure rooted in protecting the haves and controlling the have-nots, it is these systems that injure. Yes, people run systems, but systems shape people - and misshape them.

On one level, I get it. When you first discover the injustices of the world and come to see that those have, in various ways, elevated you and others like you, it is nothing if not human to experience guilt. That we go to that place, at least initially, is a sign of our conscience working as it should. But while guilt may be a decent vacation destination on the road to real allyship, it's a pretty lousy place to construct one's permanent home.

After all, the goal of shame, as any therapist can tell you, is to be released. And what better way to excise it than by simply running from the thing causing its presence? In which case, a push for allyship that rests its hopes on white people fighting for justice because injustice makes us feel shitty about ourselves is destined to fail. After a while, whites whose anti-racism has been marinated in shame will seek release from that emotion. And there are only two ways to obtain it: either by falling away quietly from the fight or by turning decisively against those we decide to blame for making us feel that way - namely, persons who are still in the struggle.

If we remain stuck in guilt and self-deprecation, we will withdraw from engaging with our people about the issue of racism. Our hostility to white supremacy and the oppressive logic of whiteness will bleed over into contempt for persons called white, in a way that will weaken our ability and even desire to build with them. You cannot organize people you despise. And the work of white anti-racists is to organize our people, not with woke-scolding lectures borrowed from some grad school seminar, but with heartfelt explorations of the cost of injustice to us all and the society we share.

We need less guilt and shame and more indignation; indignation at a society that promised us liberty and justice for all as a national birthright and yet defaulted on that promise from day one, thereby diminishing the lives we all could have by marginalizing some while elevating others.

And this calls forth an additional problem with the sign in the photo above: by suggesting whites are standing "with" Black people, we signal that racism is their problem, but one that we are willing to help them with anyway. It is a sentiment dripping with the language of charity as much as genuine solidarity. If whites saw racial inequity and injustice as evils that damage the entire society (including us), we would think of this matter differently, and no doubt more productively. We would be standing not simply to save others or for their benefit but also on our own behalf.

Those white anti-racists in history who made meaningful contributions to the struggle against enslavement and segregation did not ask permission to engage their consciences. They did not lose sleep worrying about whether sharing their thoughts on racial injustice with colleagues, friends, and family might "re-center" their white voices. And they certainly didn't waste valuable time debating whether to call themselves allies or co-conspirators or accomplices or whatever the hell someone thinks is a better, "less problematic" term. They just did the work. Because they understood their lives, or at least their souls, depended on it. And because labels are nouns, of which we have plenty, while what we lack are verbs.

John Brown didn't apologize for being white or even for what whiteness had come to mean in America. He and his comrades fought to abolish its most sinister iteration because they felt a responsibility to do so, not guilt for enslavement's existence. Bob and Dottie Zellner, Virginia Foster Durr, Anne and Carl Braden, and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, among others, neither wallowed in shame for the reality of anti-Black oppression nor felt the need to discuss how stupid they were for not having recognized it from the time they emerged from the womb. They simply fought to change it as moral equals, unwilling to be defined by the strictures of their society.

Yes, these folks took direction from Black people - those leading the movement and organizing its strategies. But today, in a movement that seeks to be largely leaderless, waiting for directions can become an excuse for inaction. To whom are you looking? Which author? Which influencer? Which voices? It is one thing to say "listen to Black people," but quite another to specify which Black people you're speaking of, and why, since there are 42 million of them in this country, they don't all agree, and they are most definitely not all on Twitter.

Sometimes you just have to take a risk and do something, even if it hasn't been pre-approved by whatever local leaders of color you look to for guidance. Accountability is important, but when it becomes a recipe for paralysis, it is useless - a term of radical art with no artists around to apply it to the canvas of real life. So, struggle with your people - with our people - not out of shame or guilt but out of a sincere belief that persons called white can do better and be better because deep down, we are better than what this society has wrought from us.

Folks of color need us to love ourselves enough to believe that we, too, deserve a better society and that we have something meaningful to gain from a more just nation. Because they know how impossible justice will be until that love is present in our lives. As James Baldwin tried to explain over a half-century ago:

White people...have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this...the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

As for that sign carrier above and others like them, please remember that our ignorance is not something about which we should beat ourselves up. It is the society that structured our obliviousness, after all. It was the schools that subsidized it and rewarded it. That's a system problem. Treat it as such.

I know it's hard, and I have struggled with it too. But it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that we must strive to be soft on people (including ourselves) and hard on systems. The system deserves to be battered. But people need to be bettered. And we won't be unless we care enough about ourselves to find a new way of living in this skin; and unless we believe that we are worthy of that new and better way of life.

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Consider, for a second, the picture above. Think about the sign held by the protester in this photo - taken at a Black Lives Matter rally last year - and ask yourself: what is its purpose? For whom is it being displayed?

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Culturally Responsive Education - eTeachNY

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Integrating Culturally Responsive Sustaining Education (CRSE) These resources aim to support educators in implementing the New York State Education Department's CR-S framework in remote and hybrid learning environments.

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What White Colleagues Need to Understand

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White supremacy doesn't stop at the teachers' lounge door.

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Amazing poetry by Hiwot Adilow at Brave New Voices 2012

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YouthSpeaks - Letter to my Future White Son

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Anti-Marginalization Curriculum

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Emancipated Curriculum Buffalo City School District

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Emancipated Curriculum Buffalo City School District

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Implicit Bias Training 1 hour

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It's Here! Dr. Marks' Hidden Bias of Good People TV Special (Scripps Media). Will be posted for a limited time. Dr. Marks describes the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to implicit bias What is Implicit Bias? Broadly speaking, implicit bia s is a p reference for or against a social group that a person may be unaware of and thus cannot consciously control.

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WORLD Channel, in partnership with PBS' Independent Lens, presents a new animated musical series about America's reckoning with race and injustice. The History Of White People In America takes the audience on a journey through American history, starting in the 17th century, and in particular looks at how the crafting of the idea of the white race - of whiteness - helped shape the nation's history, designating other groups for subjugation and having wide-ranging ramifications on social class and life experience that exist to this day.

Episode One, "How America Invented Race," explores how the white "race" was invented by rich Virginians in 1676 in the aftermath of a populous rebellion of impoverished, indentured, and enslaved Africans and Europeans now known as Bacon's Rebellion.

I spoke with producer/writer Jon Halperin and animator Ed Bell to learn more about how they created this series and developed its unique visual style.
How did you decide on these specific moments in history for the series?
Ed Bell and Jon Halperin: Each episode in the series illuminates a crucial moment in the American story where "American" and "white" were conflated. This is about the struggle to make "American" mean more than "white." We have twelve more episodes in the series. In the series, we will bring the history up to the present moment - this incredible moment, which could be white people's great awakening to the nation's racial sins.
This line from the episode is so powerful: "How skin became color, color became race, and race became power." Who benefits from not teaching the origins and creation of race and racism in America?
Ed and Jon: The History of White People in America will reveal who we are as a nation and how we got to this moment of crisis - of the 400-year transmogrification of skin color into an economic, political and social caste system with whiteness at the top of the pecking order. Race as we know it in America was invented by wealthy colonialists - of European background - as a means of social and economic control. They divided poor people by skin color. The wealthy benefited from this division, then and now.

Building on more than 30 years of scholarship on the creation and evolution of racial categories and identity in the United States, we explore the combination of ideologies, laws, policies, scientific theories, and even "racial performances" that created what we now understand as "white" and "non-white." Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Catholics: until recently in our history, none of these groups were considered white by law, custom, or culture. Whiteness has always been an ever-shifting notion. What does it mean in America to be non-white today? What will need to change in our country for Black and brown people to have the power of "white"?
This animation style is so unique in how it brings together movement, color, and text to tell a story set to incredible music. How did you develop that style, and what artistic inspiration did you pull from? Why was animation fitting to tell this specific story?
Ed and Jon: We are attempting to communicate some of our own cognitive dissonance with being animation artists in this culture. Animation dares to go to those uncomfortable places we all need to deal with. We dare to use animation to lift an audience out of the shameful ignorance of our own culture.

Ed: The visual universe of The History of White People in America is born from the visual media that the creators grew up with. As an African American boy I lived for comics, manga, games, New Yorker covers and animated features. At the same time as I was forming an identity as an artist - an artist in a world that keeps telling me I'm a second-class citizen.

Most media placed me in a pretty bleak place in the world: Stamped from the beginning as "less-than," despite my people proving our excellence in every area of American life. Stamped, in part, by powerfulvisual propaganda throughout the 20th century. But some of that same media pointed me to profound truths that opened my heart and increased my empathy. So this is what the artist does with their life conditions - we use the existing tropes to express our pain and passion.

Drew Takahashi [the series' animator and editor] and I are students of 20th century illustration, graphic design and animation. We see it in all its glory and ugliness, and make it our own. These forms of media had everything to do with how the current culture views people, both inside and outside the "normal" world of affluent white life. So we make them colors on our digital palette and paint the picture the historians plugged us into.
Is there anything else you want the audience to think about as they watch the series?
Ed and Jon: Since before the Revolution, "American" has equaled "white." Enslaved African people understood this. Indigenous people knew this. And wealthy "white" landowners made sure that each new wave of immigrants knew it too. For America to fulfill its greatest ideals - justice and equality for all - "American" has to be more than a code word for "white."

Those early ideas, which were codified into laws, led to generational acceptance of a false hierarchy, an illusion of superiority and inferiority. If there's to be a reckoning for America, it starts with breaking that illusion. We know that the public always benefits from confronting the hardest truths about our way of life. In the case of the Black filmmakers on our team, this confrontation with hard truths will be the difference between being allowed to live or die at the hands of police. It's urgent that we face the issues at the heart of injustice.
Episodes two and three will premiere here and on WORLD Channel's YouTube page on Tuesday, July 7 and Wednesday, July 8 at 3pm.

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The History Of White People In America, Episode One: How America Invented Race

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WORLD Channel, in partnership with PBS' Independent Lens, presents a new animated musical series about America's reckoning with race and injustice. The History Of White People In America takes the audience on a journey through American history, starting in the 17th century, and in particular looks...

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Online store for Courageous Conversation merchandise.

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At the table - both metaphorically and literally, we work, nourish, celebrate, strategize, grieve, grow, learn, and fight, together and alone.

The AntiRacist Table was created in response to the Racial Reckoning in America, as a way to bring AntiRacism into daily life as a daily practice. Educating Americans about African American history and the Black experience, along with rehumanizing Black people and motivating action to help create an AntiRacist America are our goals.

Ultimately, the choice is up to you-What awaits you is allyship, abolition, co-conspiratorship, and the dismantling of racism in yourself, your family, your community, your school, and your workplace.

Welcome to our table. Changemakers and forces for good unite!

Join The AntiRacist Table

30 Day Challenge!

Take a stand for humanity! Do you want to be part of the solution? Learn how to be an AntiRacist with our FREE 30 Day Challenge. The journey to cultivating a life committed to being AntiRacist is a lifelong pursuit that starts and ends with you. AntiRacism is an intentional daily practice that requires willpower, truth, love, and patience.

The AntiRacist Table 30 Day Challenge is specifically curated to educate, to help people face and get past shame, anger, and blame, and to develop empathy-all key elements of creating an AntiRacist America.

During the Challenge you will have opportunities to cultivate mindfulness and daily practices centered around equality, justice, and humanity as you integrate The AntiRacist Table Core Principles into your life. Engaging and interactive, the daily lessons infuse videos, readings, reflection, meditation, and other disciplines.

The Challenge will push you to unlearn, reflect, self-educate, and develop awareness of existing oppression, racial beliefs, biases, and privileges.

Register now to be part of our Challenge.

Your first day's lesson will arrive in your inbox tomorrow.

*NEW* The AntiRacist Table 30 Day Challenge Resource Ebook

By popular demand-we've compiled your favorite AntiRacist Mindfulness Practices and Communication Practices into a handy downloadable PDF! And because we strive to provide you with helpful tools we've included a few new ones. To make incorporating AntiRacism into your life as a daily practice a little easier, PURCHASE our handy and OPTIONAL Resource Ebook today.

Are you new to The AntiRacist Table and not a Challenge participant yet? You're sure to find our Resource Ebook and our Challenge to be well worth your time.

Testimonials
"Have you compiled these anti-racist mindfulness meditations in a way that they can be downloaded, or perhaps purchased? They are really wonderful, and would be helpful to have for the long haul. Thank you so much for this amazing course."

"Thank your for this. The challenge was such an anchor for me this summer-I really appreciated every day and missed the assignments once it was complete. So this is a real gift."

"Thank you for making this available!!"

THE ANTIRACIST TABLE

CORE PRINCIPLES

Intention - Set and live in the intention to cultivate an AntiRacist America and take action that dismantles racist policies.

AntiRacist - Create AntiRacist policies and engage in the world as an AntiRacist.

Individuality - See individuals as individuals- positive or negative qualities of the individual are not attributed to all.

Equality - Hold all groups of people-race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, age, and any intersectionality, as equal.

Empathy - Cultivate empathy by rehumanizing the dehumanized.

Courage - Put courage, compassion, and vulnerability over comfort.

Allies - Recruit and support partners committed to AntiRacist work.

Humanity - Take actions that support humanity.

Love - Choose love and healing over fear and oppression

Educate - Educate yourself and honor the history of others

Flowers for the Table
Flowers for the Table is an affinity space for Blacks by Blacks to nourish and rejuvenate our minds, bodies, and souls. This space is dedicated to the health and well-being of Black people. You will find joy and beauty here as you look after your well-being. We honor and celebrate Black culture by highlighting Black excellence. Join us at the Table for empowerment, joy, and inspiration.

Nurture the Narrative
Nurture the Narrative is a community space that provides tools to help you incorporate AntiRacism into your daily life as a daily practice. This is a space for education and re-education centered around being an AntiRacist. Spotlighting the importance and power of knowledge, this is a place for positive mirroring where affirming content will amplify our voices. Our Lessons of the Hour will feature short Black history segments as well as a book club on the seminal books, How to be an Antiracist and White Fragility .

We strive to support Black people in the work of healing from racial trauma, daily racial abuse, discrimination, and violence against Black people.

The work of being an AntiRacist will not be completed in one day, one year, or even one decade. We recognize that this work is difficult-the only way out is in, the only way through is through.

ABOUT US

We are the great-great-granddaughters of Caroline and Allen, who were born enslaved in the state of Alabama. We are the daughters of a Black man who grew up in segregation. We are the mothers of Black sons and daughter. This work is deeply personal to us. We feel and hear the call. It echoes at our very core. As Maya Angelou said, we are "the dream and the hope of the slave." We carry their legacy and the fight for human rights today.

We are activists and supporters of people in their quest to be the changemakers we need to create a just world for our collective future.

Kirsten is an attorney and a student of nonviolence communication (NVC), right speech, conflict resolution, and meditation. Her undergraduate degree is in African American Studies and English, and in addition to her JD, she holds an LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Lynn is an educator who is passionate about teaching young children and supporting families, work that she has done for over ten years. In addition to her Undergraduate degree in Fine Arts she has her MAT in Early Childhood Education.

The AntiRacist Table brings AntiRacism into daily life as a daily practice. Our 30 Day AntiRacist Challenge teaches people how to be an everyday AntiRacist. We support and empower people who want to help make America AntiRacist.With education and awareness, we work to reclaim Black humanity. At the Table, we are a voice for social justice through activism. We embrace emotion and use mindfulness, nonviolent communication (NVC), and right speech. Stand with and stand up for humanity at The AntiRacist Table!

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Help create an AntiRacist America- The AntiRacist Table

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At the table - both metaphorically and literally, we work, nourish, celebrate, strategize, grieve, grow, learn, and fight, together and alone. The AntiRacist Table was created in response to the Racial Reckoning in America, as a way to bring AntiRacism into daily life as a daily practice.

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Robin DiAngelo explores the challenges in discussing race with white Americans.

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Use with your BOE, Dept. Heads, Grade Level Reps, Leadership Teams

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Abolitionist Teaching Network

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Introducing: Nice White Parents (Published 2020)

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

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Skip to main content

A Framework for Anti-Bias Education

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

Divided into four domains-identity, diversity, justice and action (IDJA)-the standards recognize that, in today's diverse classrooms, students need knowledge and skills related to both prejudice-reduction and collective action. Together, these domains represent a continuum of engagement in anti-bias, multicultural and social justice education. The IDJA domains are based on Louise Derman-Sparks' four goals for anti-bias education in early childhood.

Each of the IDJA domains has learning outcomes and school-based scenarios organized by grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12.

Download the Standards

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The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K-12 instruction, providing a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable.

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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis, thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest racial inequities and systemic oppression that continues to disproportionately impact Black Americans. Across northern New York, communities are seeking ways to engage in the national movement for racial equity and transformational justice.

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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis, thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest racial inequities and systemic oppression that continues to disproportionately impact Black Americans. Across northern New York, communities are seeking ways to engage in the national movement for racial equity and transformational justice.

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Protests and Rebellions are as old as the United States. When the status quo becomes unbearable to enough people, uprisings pressure those in power to make changes that bring us closer to the Land-of-the-Free promise. We've pulled together a reminder that we are in a long struggle that did not begin with this moment and will not end with this moment. Below are resources to inspire us and remind us whose shoulders we stand on and whose sacrifices we are honoring as we continue to educate and activate to demand a more just and humane world. Commit to using one of our suggested resources a day, for 21 days in a row, to deepen your connection to the legacy of protest and rebellion in the name of justice.
SONGS ARTICLES
Your Silence Is a Knee on My Neck , by Natasha Cloud, The Players Tribune
The biggest marches and protests in American history, by Leanna Garfield and Zoë Ettinger Business Insider
MLK's 'I Have a Dream' Speech Was Also About Police Brutality, by Aura Bogado, Colorlines
1969 Alcatraz takeover 'changed the whole course of history', by Nicole Lapin and Jason Hanna, CNN
1969 Stonewall Riots - Origins, Timeline & Leaders, by History.com editors
Talking to Kids About Protesting: 5 Things I Want My Kids to Know, by We Stories
(1964) Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet", by BlackPast
LISTEN
The History Of Protests In Los Angeles: What Has Changed Since The Rodney King Riots (7 minutes)
How '80s AIDS Activist Group ACT UP Changed The Face Of Medicine (7 minutes)
Standing Rock and beyond (52 minutes)
Letter From Birmingham Jail (55 minutes)
No Meekness Here: Meet Rosa Parks, 'Lifelong Freedom Fighter', (4 minutes)
The Leesburg Stockade Girls, A forgotten part of the Civil Rights Movement (3 Min)
WATCH
I Am Not Your Negro - Future of America , James Baldwin (2 minutes)
How to overcome apathy and find your power, Dolores Huerta (13 minutes)
Colin Kaepernick explains why he won't stand during National Anthem (18 minutes)
MLK: Riots are the Voice of the Unheard (5 minutes)
Nick Cannon's Stand for What (4 minutes)
Nick Cannon's I Can't Breathe Again (3 minutes)
An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter (16 minutes)
Fannie Lou Hamer's 1964 Testimon y (9 minutes)
DO

Learn how to be an Anti-Racist and name your commitment to learn to friends, family, and on your social media posts

Follow the suggested leaders below

Find out who your local racial justice organizers are and donate funds

Donate to bail funds anytime protests rise up

Attend local protests or pull a group together to organize one in your town .

Talk, post, share with those in your circle what you are learning about the history of racial injustice and the 400-year-old movement to demand and create justice

Notice your comfort level with protest and rebellion, especially when they include fire, looting, and violence. If you are uncomfortable, why? What causes more discomfort for you: the status quo or the protest seeking to disrupt and advance beyond the status quo?

Take care of yourself, this is a marathon, not a sprint

Convey to all in your circle that the point of racial justice is not to hate on white people, it's to create a more loving and humane world for ALL.

Convey to all in your circle that all lives won't matter until Black and brown lives matter as much as white lives historically have.

FOLLOW For each of the below we recommend going to the website and from there linking to the social media platforms each person/organization uses. The Movement For Black Lives African American Policy Forum Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) From Privilege to Progress The Privilege Institute

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21-Day Racial Equity Challenge - Protest and Rebellion

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Protests and Rebellions are as old as the United States. When the status quo becomes unbearable to enough people, uprisings pressure those in power to make changes that bring us closer to the Land-of-the-Free promise. We've pulled together a reminder ...

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All students deserve to see their stories reflected in the books they read. When you fill your classroom library with a rich variety of inclusive titles that represent your students and their experiences, along with books depicting situations that they never see or hear about in their everyday lives, you help every reader feel welcome and accepted. You also teach your students to celebrate the differences that make each of us unique.

Why It's Important to Evaluate Your Books Regularly

Building an inclusive classroom library takes time, thought and effort. It's important to regularly evaluate the books you offer and remove outdated titles and books that feature stereotypical representations. It's also important to incorporate recently published titles and introduce a wider variety of experiences and perspectives whenever possible. In addition, if your student population changes yearly or you move to a new school, re-examining and refreshing your classroom library is an effective way to ensure your books reflect your current student population.

General Things to Look for as You Evaluate

When analyzing your current books and choosing new books to add, it's important to consider many different types of diversity, including:

Gender
Race
Ethnicities
Sexual orientation
Abilities and disabilities
Socioeconomic status
Global perspectives
Incidental diversity
Inclusive images

With so much to consider, you might feel overwhelmed. Where should you start? What types of books are you missing? How do you know what titles to add?
6 Essential Tips for Organizing Your Classroom Library

Booksource helps educators across the country fill their classroom libraries with books that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. We have created several free tools and resources that can help you, too.

Analyzing Your Library with Booksource Classroom

We feel our job is to make your day-to-day easier. That's why we created Booksource Classroom, a freeonline tool that can help you organize, manage and analyze your classroom library. One of its greatest features, LibraryLens, can be instrumental in auditing your classroom library.

LibraryLens automatically evaluates the books in your classroom library, identifies gaps and suggests the right titles to fill those gaps. This means you can perform a digital diversity audit on your own classroom library!

If you're interested in making your classroom library more diverse, my fav teacher Instagram shared an awesome resouce that will help you figure out where your gaps are! So excited for my summer project with @Booksource pic.twitter.com/PciLOXVCUK
- Maria Castillo (@rocketsinsixth) June 19, 2020

To get started, use these directions to create an account and create your library.

Head to the left toolbar and click "LibraryLens" to access our audit feature. You'll see sections denoting the following:

Achievements-things you're already doing right
Suggestions-ways to improve your library
Issues-items that need immediate attention

Here, you can learn valuable information like what percentage of your titles feature general diversity, as well as more categorical statistics like the number of books in your library that feature:

Diverse authors/illustrators
African American characters
Asian American characters
Latin American characters
Native American characters
Middle Eastern characters
Immigrant experiences
Refugee experiences
International authors
International characters
Jewish history and culture
People who identify as LGBTQ+
Women's history
Autism spectrum
Physical disabilities
Neurodiversity and neurodivergence

We will even suggest some new titles to help enhance your library!

If you're still not convinced, here are some more reasons you should create a Booksource Classroom account.

Filling in the Gaps

Now that you know the categories of your classroom library that could use some added representation, it's time to fill in those gaps. Luckily, we not only have the tools to analyze your library, but the books to fill it!

Click any of the images below to browse diverse and inclusive book collections carefully curated by our Collection Development experts to ensure your students feel represented and excited about reading.

More Resources
Inclusive Classroom Library Checklist
What if you haven't created your free Booksource Classroom account yet and would like to complete a classroom library audit? You can download and print our Inclusive Classroom Library Checklist for an easy non-digital way to evaluate your classroom library for gaps in representation and identify the types of books you need to add.
Easy PD Webinar Series
This three-part webinar series can help you build an inclusive classroom library and positive classroom community where all readers feel seen, heard and understood. View Parts 1, 2 and 3 to gain practical strategies for evaluating, crafting and teaching with a diverse and inclusive classroom library.

Part 1: What Is a Diverse & Inclusive Classroom Library?
In this short, introductory webinar, we explain diverse and inclusive classroom libraries, why they are essential and what sets them apart from traditional classroom libraries.

Part 2: How to Craft Your Diverse & Inclusive Classroom Library
Learn how to analyze your student population and identify gaps in representation in your existing classroom library.

Part 3: Using Diverse & Inclusive Texts in Your Classroom
Once you evaluate your library, it's time to fill the gaps! Learn how to select the diverse books you need and then integrate them into read alouds, independent reading, reading workshop and other lessons to build a positive and inclusive community.
Webinar: Discover New & Exciting Diverse Books for Your Classroom Library
This webinar features book talks on titles and series like Yasmin, Sadiq and Redwood & Ponytail, along with tips for selecting books that reflect a variety of ethnicities, family structures, life experiences and more.

Note: The webinar was recorded in June 2019 and features books and series that were recently published or coming soon at that time.)

30 New & Exciting Diverse Books That Are Perfect for Classroom Libraries

If you need diverse books but aren't sure which titles to select, this list of title recommendations for grades K-2, grades 3-5, grades 6-8 and grades 9-12 can help.
What other tools do you use to analyze your classroom library? How often do you refresh? Tell us in the comments section below!

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How to Analyze Your Classroom Library for Diversity

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All students deserve to see their stories reflected in the books they read. When you fill your classroom library with a rich variety of inclusive titles that represent your students and their experiences, along with books depicting situations that they never see or hear about in their everyday lives, you

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'We the People' - the three most misunderstood words in US history | Mark Charles | TEDxTysons

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When white supremacy wears us down to the point of ineffectiveness, white supremacy wins. Because white supremacy thrives when we deny humanity, ours and others', tending to our human needs is vital. And, using the oxygen mask on the airplane analogy, we can hardly care for our collective humanity if we don't first pay attention to our own. Joy, positive energy, clarity, deep relationships, and resilience not only feel good, they are powerful forms of resistance. Though it can feel counterintuitive to take time for self-care when the world around us is in crisis and many of us have zero time for self-care, understanding and practicing self-care is not only "allowed," it is required of us. Activism is a marathon, not a sprint. We hope the below resources will help you stay physically and spiritually nourished so you can step up and stay in the intergenerational struggle for liberation.

How does one use this document? Decide how much time you have to spend on this challenge daily, and do as much as you can each day. There are more resources here than you probably have time for. The important thing is that you do work every day for 21 days. That's how we build sustained habits.

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Start with the "TAKE A BREATH" items below for immediate relief.

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READ

LISTEN

The SafeWordSociety podcast : SafeWordSociety is heralded for archiving the authentic narratives of QTPOC+ as a social justice initiative for public broadcasting and social networks...The hosts' mission is to create a safe space for versatility and self-definition while uplifting the stories of those that are too often muted.

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WHERE DID THE IMAGES ON THIS PAGE COME FROM?
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Curated by Eddie Moore, Jr., Debby Irving, Tilda Kapuya, Director of Equity & Community at San Francisco University High School, and June Christian. When white supremacy wears us down to the point of ineffectiveness, white supremacy wins. Because white supremacy ...

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Not Slavery and Civil Rights... everyday life

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There is danger in a single story: Rich, multifaceted cultures, communities, and individuals are flattened into a monolith. Likewise, the Black experience is not defined by suffering. In A Burst of Light: and Other Essays, Audre Lorde wrote, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." When living in an oppressive society that protects and upholds white supremacy, joy can be a radical act, a reclamation of autonomy. These picture books, with their exuberant illustrations and positive prose, offer portraits of Black joy, within and beyond the African diaspora.

Mo Jackson joins the neighborhood football team. However, no one expects him to play well. Then one special play saves the game, and Mo wins it for his team.

Mo Jackson is a little kid with a big love for baseball. Unfortunately, he is smaller and younger than the rest of the players on his team. Yet Mo defies expectations; he gets a home run and wins the big game.

This charming story has many funny and relatable moments for sports lovers and underdogs, and shows the power of practicing and having the support of family, caring adults, teammates, and friends.

Barnes's rhythmic text describes the experience of a young African American boy as he gets a "fresh cut" and how a trip to the barbershop changes the way he feels about the world and in turn how the world perceives him.

Joyful and empowering, this picture book celebrates the first day of kindergarten.

A little African American girl eagerly awaits her grandma Mimi's arrival, because when Grandma comes, there is always a treasure in her purse!

As a boy and his father take a walk through the city, they revisit some of their special experiences together, including dressing up like syrup and waffles for Halloween, and pretending to be statues in the park.

Young Rocket, an admirer of astronaut Mae Jemison, never stops telling others to "Look up!" Rocket is preparing herself to be the "greatest astronaut, star catcher, space walker who has ever lived."

A beloved grandmother and granddaughter prepare a bubbling pot of Freedom Soup, which celebrates Haiti's liberation. This book is a start-to-finish celebration of family, history, and culture.

A wonderful slice-of-life tale about family support, Black hair, and embracing individuality.

Jabari has completed his swim lessons and is ready to jump off a diving board. His story will help assuage the fears kids experience when faced with a new and daunting adventure.

Parker Looks Up: An Extraordinary Moment by Parker Curry & Jessica Curry. illus. by Brittany Jackson. Aladdin. ISBN 9781534451865.

Based on a true story, this book follows Parker, a young African American girl, as she visits the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, with family and friends.

A family of four, which includes a dark-skinned mother, son, and daughter, and a light-skinned father, eat dinner sitting on the floor in front of a roaring fireplace while the snow quietly deepens outside the window. This warmhearted story of family and community, filled with goodwill and hope, will have children wishing for a snow day.

An inquisitive young boy named CJ and his nana travel through their urban neighborhood. This lovely narrative highlights topics such as urban life, volunteerism, and thankfulness, with people of color as the main characters.

Filled with heartfelt homespun sentiment, Derby's picture book is an homage to imagination and familial love.

Young Macy stands proudly in front of her seated classmates and states: "I'm going to tell you all about my family's hair!" A sweet exploration of family and expressing love through hair care rituals.

This refreshingly original story follows Kameeka, who is determined to beat the neighborhood competition and become the Hula-Hoopin' Queen of 139th Street.

Sophie's grandfather lives in her house, and while his mobility is restricted, his tender feelings for his granddaughter know no bounds. An appealing story about a dynamic intergenerational relationship.

Young Julián lives with his abuela and is obsessed with mermaids. His grandmother takes Julián to a mermaid festival, where he finds a newfound community.

This simple but charming tale depicts a girl who is determined to photograph an elusive fox.

This fun book by Bob Marley's first-born daughter, Cedella, pairs her father's beloved song with images that explore the ups and downs of a child's typical day.

Leo (of Lola Reads to Leo fame) loves the water. Hearson's colorful acrylic illustrations are as fun and playful as McQuinn's text.

Leo loves to go to Baby Time at the local library. There, he and his young peers participate in all kinds of baby-friendly activities with their caregivers and with each other.

Lola and her daddy go to the library every Saturday to pick out books. An engaging depiction of a child's enthusiasm for being read to.

Lola loves her book of garden poems. She and her mother look at flowers in books at the library, and she chooses her favorites.

Ava cherishes the one day each week she gets to spend with her working mother. A story that weaves mindfulness, appreciation of family time, and the lesson that parents are human, into a gorgeously produced package.

In her apartment on the top floor, Omu (Igbo for queen) makes a tasty, thick red stew for her dinner. A memorable tale of community and the unexpected rewards of sharing.

Collier's characteristic watercolor-and-collage masterpieces bring joy and gravity to Perkins's inspirational poem.

Carter wants a puppy, but when he receives a truck instead he doesn't let it stop him for a moment. A sweet story that depicts the limitless wonder of imagination.

A joyful tribute to, for, and of Black children everywhere.

A smiley, brown-skinned brother and sister narrate this tale, which follows their beloved dachshund, Rosie, as she goes about her busy day.

A fun and lively read-aloud about a budding fashionista named Mary.

A young girl discovers a world of exuberant rhythm in her neighborhood.

A handsome and helpful primer on self-reflection for Black and brown children.

A boy spends the summer with his grandmother in her apartment in Spanish Harlem listening to her records. A book that celebrates and brings light to the Afro-Latinx experience.

An Afro-Latino boy searches for his missing stuffed toy. Velasquez's warm oil paintings illuminate in obvious and not-so-obvious ways the family's love of music, literature, and their African roots.

This charming summer tale of creativity and discovery features a young boy and his father at the beach.

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37 Picture Books That Celebrate #BlackJoy | Summer Reading 2020

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There is danger in a single story: Rich, multifaceted cultures, communities, and individuals are flattened into a monolith. Likewise, the Black experience is not defined by suffering. In A Burst of Light: and Other Essays, Audre Lorde wrote, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

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15 Kid-Friendly Movies That Can Help Build a Conversation About Race and Racism

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Talking to your kids about race is essential, but difficult. If you want to start a dialogue about racial prejudice, these 15 kid-friendly movies about race may help.

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Emmanuel Acho

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Emmanuel Acho

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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The other night during story time with my preschooler, I read Floyd Cooper's Juneteenth for Mazie. The book is a bit too advanced for a 3-year-old, but she was fascinated by the illustrations nonetheless. Reading this book got me thinking about Juneteenth and what I learned about it, including when I learned about it: It wasn't in school. How fantastic that there are books on the subject out there for young readers-but what about the kids whose parents aren't choosing those books?

I have found that many people, including many adults, don't know about Juneteenth at all. The name combines the words June and nineteenth, the day in 1865 when enslaved Texans in Galveston were informed that slavery was over. This anniversary is celebrated in many communities across the United States, but clearly this day deserves more attention. The emancipation story most people in the United States learn centers around President AbrahamLincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed enslaved people as Union troops occupied parts of the South later in the Civil War. (Constitutionally speaking, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.) Learning the history of Juneteenth can help illustrate the complexity of this time in our history.

On that summer day in 1865-a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and over two months after General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox-Major General Gordon Granger, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of Texas, delivered the news to perhaps the very last enslaved people to learn they were free. After reading from General Order Number 3 that "all slaves are free," Major General Granger continued, "This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor."

Absolute equality. While a few million enslaved folks had learned at various times over the previous couple of years that they were free-and no doubt rejoiced at the news-this day was different. As the last to learn of their absolute equality with their former masters, these enslaved men, women and children were major characters in the end of one story filled with longstanding oppression and the beginning of a powerful new story filled with the hope for equality. This watershed moment, between the two stories, has been missing from our collective understanding of this country's history and presents a fuller picture of freedom. It's no wonder that these newly freed people met the announcement with cheers, shouts and celebrations-celebrations that have continued every year since.

Yet, as we all know, the promise of absolute equality was not realized with emancipation and remains elusive; oppression lingers in many of our institutions. But Juneteenth was and still is worthy of celebration and remembrance. Through children's books, through the annual celebrations that began with formerly enslaved Texans and through our classroom teaching, we should all have Juneteenth on our radar. It should be part of our collective knowledge of freedom struggles in this country so that today's youth can continue the fight to ensure that the promise of absolute equality is realized.
Bell is a writer and associate editor for Teaching Tolerance.

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

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Bettina Love vividly explains the difference between allies and co-conspirators in the fight for justice.

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Clip Of We Want to Do More Than Survive This clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN. Bettina Love vividly explains the difference between allies and co-conspirators in the fight for justice. Report Video Issue Javascript must be enabled in order to access C-SPAN videos.

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Lead video producer: Tawanda Scott Sambou

Craft editor: Janelle Gonzalez

Graphics: Melody Shih, Shane Csontos-Popko, Rob Chriqui, Padraic Driscoll, Jonathan Reyes

Video producers: Claudia Morales, Gabe Ramirez, Jeremy Moorhead, Bryce Urbany, Deb Brunswick, Tsering Bista, Jacqueline Rose

Voice over: Larry Meriweather

Senior video producer: Jacque Smith

Web development: Sean O'Key

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In "The Souls of Black Folk," W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the first time he realized his skin color made him different. We asked celebrities, CNN anchors and reporters, and others to tell us when they first realized that being black affected how people treated them.

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Tools & resources to help organizers, students, parents, & educators make schools more culturally responsive.

TALK TO ME ABOUT CRE

The following documents highlight core values, principles, vision, and talking points about culturally responsive education. They are intended to help the community gain a deeper understanding of CRE in practice. You can download and share them.

Culturally Responsive Education One Pager
A one-page document that makes it easy to introduce almost anyone to Culturally Responsive Education.

START YOUR CRE WORK & CAMPAIGN
Race Forward's H.E.A.L. Together Toolkit
This toolkit is a resource for organizing campaigns around educational equity and honest, fair education.

Questions for Planning a CRE/ Ethnic Studies Campaign
This document offers questions to think about in planning a campaign for culturally responsive education or Ethnic Studies.

Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecards
This tool helps evaluate the books in English Language Arts and STEAM curricula for cultural responsiveness.

MAPPING CRE & ETHNIC STUDIES

The Ethnic Studies Legislation Database below highlights victories for legislation across the country that supports Ethnic Studies and CRE. It also includes historical and present-day fights, schools, and districts that have implemented Ethnic Studies and CRE.

Click on the points on the map to learn more about the efforts of grassroots groups, in partnership with elected officials, to fight for CRE. You can click on the square icon on the top left to filter the map by legislation category. For in-depth information of each of these pieces, visit the drive here.

We want the creation and maintenance of this database to be a collaborative effort with communities. If you know of any Ethnic, Indigenous, or LGBTQ+ Studies efforts that aren't included here, please help us add them by emailing us at nyu- ejroc@nyu.edu

CREATING RELATIONSHIP CENTERED SCHOOLS

Transforming relationships within schools is key to tackling issues of equity and implementing CRE. Californians for Justice has been working to implement relationship centered schools (RCS) in California. They provide key tools and resources here.

Student Learning Walks
A tool for students to observe classrooms for what they want to see created and changed

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Resources - Culturally Responsive Education Hub

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Tools & resources to help organizers, students, parents, & educators make schools more culturally responsive. The following documents highlight core values, principles, vision, and talking points about culturally responsive education. They are intended to help the community gain a deeper understanding of CRE in practice. You can download and share them.

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"Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class" poem by Clint Smith

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Since Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012, we have seen a renewed investment from white people in our community who want tools to help gain a foothold in their struggles to understand the ways that racism and white supremacy opperate in their minds, their families, and the larger world. The most recent police killings have renewed the urgency of the struggle in the minds of many white people and we are getting lots of calls and requests for help. Below is a list which is designed to meet a broad variety of reader's needs and experiences. Some of these books, like The Charleston Syllabus address our contemporary moment, some like Waking Up White, How I Shed My Skin, and White Like Me, are first person accounts of how individual white people came to understand themselves as white and to desire an end to white supremacy. These are books we recommend which are all currently in print and available online from us 24/7 or in our store at 1189 Euclid Ave. NE Atlanta, GA 30307. (404) 524-0304. We also released a book list for teens and children, which you can find here. There is no time for inaction. We have all the tools we need. Only white people can end white supremacy.

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Understanding and Dismantling Racism: A Booklist for White Readers

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Since Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012, we have seen a renewed investment from white people in our community who want tools to help gain a foothold in their struggles to understand the ways that racism and white supremacy opperate in their minds, their families, and the larger world.

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People pray near a George Floyd memorial site George Floyd. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

I am 10 and watching my grandfather's back stiffen and shrink as an officer pulls us over on the way home from the mall. I am 16, facedown on the hood of a cruiser in Ewing, N.J. I am 22 and sitting in the back of a car at night with my palms pressed against the driver's seat headrest in an empty lot off a feeder road outside Houston as two officers shine flashlights into our eyes. I am 36 in a Main Line Philadelphia neighborhood, crying in my car when an officer taps my window because someone in a nearby house has called about me. I am 42 and watching the news of George Floyd, the latest racial killing, unspool across TV and social media. And as I watch, I am 10, 16, 22, 36 all over again, all at once.

I am also experiencing another time loop, though. Once again, as the latest racial travesty pierces our collective consciousness, I watch many of my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties they played out after Trayvon, Eric, Sandra, Korryn, Botham, Breonna. They are savvy, practiced consumers of Meaningful Things: They've listened to "Serial" and become expert critics of our broken criminal justice system after just one season. They've watched "Insecure" and can suddenly imagine life as Molly or Issa. They've shared the preordained "amplifying" social media post that just reads "This," followed by a link to something profound from a black voice.

This is all to say that when things get real - really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive - my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.

What they do is never enough. This isn't the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it's the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they've personally caused. Black people live and die every day under the burdens of a racism more insidious than the current virus that's also disproportionately killing us. And yet white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress. Theirs is still a world of signs and signaling, where actions like joining book clubs - often based in some "meaningfully curated" readings that are probably easy to name: " White Fragility," " How to Be an Anti-Racist," " Between the World and Me," maybe even " All About Love " - take precedence.

White people are speaking up at protests. How do we know they mean what they say?

But those actions are fraught: Book clubs, for instance, are comfortable gatherings of friends who are unlikely to nudge one another to the places of discomfort that these books, at their best, demand. Who wants to damage a relationship over something as abstract and removed as racism? Learning about new perspectives and the ideas underlying them is great; wanting to discuss them among friends in safe spaces is understandable. But outside the window are people marching to the beat of a different drum.

Social media has become the marketplace for these kinds of performances. It's where people write long posts about the need to examine white privilege, to "name white supremacy," and to either proudly denounce family members or call them in to conversations. And yes, there are the virtual book clubs with names like " Anti-Racism Book Club," "White People Reading Book Club" or "Combating Whiteness Book Club." It's all impossible to miss, thanks to the way the algorithms of my feeds leap to attention when American racism is at its highest. Sometimes I'm even tagged, texted or invited to join in. On more than one occasion, I've been asked to attend discussions with earnest titles along the lines of "White People Townhall" or "We Need to Talk About Race" or "Combating Whiteness." On other occasions, I've been solicited for resources ("trying to build a resource list for white allies to read so tagging some people who might have suggestions").

Because I've been here before, I know what happens next. In a handful of Sundays, my social media feeds will no longer have my white allies "This"-ing, or unpacking their whiteness or privilege, or nudging their kids to put down their tablets and march. Their book clubs will do what all book clubs do: devolve into routine reschedulings and cancellations; turn into collective apologies for not doing the reading or meta-conversations about what everyone should pretend to read next; finally become occasional opportunities to catch up over wine. It is hard and harmful to know that all of this keeps them in a comfortable place, even if doing just a little feels like a reach when the Race Alarms are sounded.

I'm your black friend, but I won't educate you on racism. That's on you.

Right now, many of my black friends are also experiencing the temporary phenomenon of the Outreach: a surge of "checking in" texts and emails, gifts, meals, and private DMs giving - and sometimes even seeking in the same message - support.

This is the racial ouroboros our country finds itself locked in, as black Americans relive an endless loop of injustice and white Americans keep revisiting the same performance, a Broadway show that never closes, just goes on hiatus now and then. This is our own racial ouroboros. The chaos we see now stems in part from the chaos foisted upon us for generations. The injustice we protest isn't rooted in just police killings; it lives also within housing and school choices; social and professional networks; the defunding of nonwhite organizations; the demotion and firing of black employees; the microaggressions and slights that happen at dinner parties, restaurants, cafes and concerts.

I'd like to think that well-meaning, invested white people are really gathering to talk about books to instruct themselves on how they can do more and do better, but it's hard to believe that that's really what most of them are working toward. You've had access to instruction about black humanity, freedom, mobility, happiness and health since we were brought here. It stretches as far back as slave songs and Phillis Wheatley poems and carries through Black Lives Matter activism. You've had your chance to say "This," over and over again. Now act.

Police killing black people is a pandemic, too

The right acknowledgment of black justice, humanity, freedom and happiness won't be found in your book clubs, protest signs, chalk talks or organizational statements. It will be found in your earnest willingness to dismantle systems that stand in our way - be they at your job, in your social network, your neighborhood associations, your family or your home. It's not just about amplifying our voices, it's about investing in them and in our businesses, education, political representation, power, housing and art. It starts, also, with reflection on the harm you've probably caused in a black person's life. It may have happened when you were 10, 16, 22, 36 or 42. Comforting as it may be to read and discuss the big questions about race and justice and America, making up for past wrongs means starting with the fact that you've done wrong in the past, perhaps without realizing it at the time: in the old workplace, neighborhood, classroom, softball field. Maybe even the book club.

I am at a beer garden in Fishtown when the Trayvon Martin murder case reaches its conclusion. I am home in bed, curled like a question mark, crying over the news that Philando Castile has just been shot in front of his partner and their child. Freddie Gray is dead and I am standing in the district office of the Camden City School District, mourning with black co-workers. And I am all these things at once again when I watch my white colleagues, friends, acquaintances and long-ago classmates reopen this time loop. Still learning how to be allies yet never making amends to us.

The confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening. To be told to step up, no step back, read, no listen, protest, don't protest, check on black friends, leave us alone, ask for help or do the work - it probably feels contradictory at times. And yet, you'll figure it out. Black people have been similarly exhausted making the case for jobs, freedom, happiness, justice, equality and the like. It's made us dizzy, but we've managed to find the means to walk straight.

On my stroll to my voting place on Election Day in early June, I rounded a corner of City Hall and saw not only two dozen armed National Guard troops but a black woman slow-riding her bike in wide, dreary circles that created a miniature ouroboros, bringing her closer and closer to the fenced line of soldiers that drew me in, too. As she completed her first arc, I was able to read the sign taped to the handlebars. In red, white and blue letters it read, "No YOU do better."

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Perspective | When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs

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I am 10 and watching my grandfather's back stiffen and shrink as an officer pulls us over on the way home from the mall. I am 16, facedown on the hood of a cruiser in Ewing, N.J.

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Tools to help educate yourself and your family on systemic racism in America and help put current events into context. These are not isolated incidents but are part of along legacy of oppression. If you don't understand the past, you won't understand the present.

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Pursuing deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together. A nonprofit media and public life initiative.