According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 72 percent of Californians identify as white. Many of the state’s schools are bound to be filled with mostly white classrooms, led by mostly white teaching staffs. How can these schools, and the communities that house them, hold productive dialogs about race? The Anti-Defamation League offers seven strategies to guide
Frann Wageneck, the assistant superintendent of Student Services at the Santa Barbara Unified School District, set out to conquer the silent beast. Shedding the stigma around depression by integrating social-emotional learning into schools became her mission. The number of teen suicide attempts began to drop once the district rolled out the Signs of Suicide (SOS)
Black teens experience over five incidences of discrimination daily — mainly online. According to a Rutgers University study, the experience of daily racial discrimination can lead to negative mental health effects, The study, published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, examined how often black teens experience racial discrimination each day – either personally or
By Laura Cathcart Robbins, Studio City, CA The first time someone called me the N-word, I was about 10 years old, and my friends and I were at Paragon Park in Boston. The roller coaster operator took one look at my five friends and me and proclaimed loudly, “Hey, it must be watermelon day! Look
Alisa Flowers’ 9-year-old daughter logged on to her laptop Wednesday, May 27 — two days after George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer — to retrieve her distance-learning assignments from Corona’s Lincoln Fundamental Elementary School. The African American fourth grader opened an email to find expletives and a racial epithet aimed
The documentary “13th” begins with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point or another in their lives. Premiering recently at the New York Film Festival, “13th” is the first documentary to open the festival in its 54 year history. Director Ava DuVernay ’s takes an unflinching,
If you’re white, you may not think of yourself as racist. Maybe you hardly think about race at all. But Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, says white people need to think about how they fit into racist systems if they want to be anti-racist. She calls for a more nuanced and informed understanding
Educating the mind without educating the heart, is no education at all. – Aristotle Over the past several days, thousands of people across the country and across the globe have gathered in protest in response to the death of George Floyd and the countless souls lost to the scourge of systemic racism. Our nation is
At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the education department has been considering how to dismantle racism for the last decade, even before the museum’s doors opened in 2016. Most recently, they launched a web portal dedicated to “Talking About Race.” The museum decided to share it with the public at
SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance outreach program provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners—who work with children from kindergarten through high school. These resources include classroom lessons, webinars, grants, podcasts, policy guides and much more. The program emphasizes anti-bias and social justice. The anti-bias approach encourages children and young people to challenge prejudice and
