06/05/2020
THANK YOU, Heidi Lamar.
"White teacher friends - let’s do better. Let’s do more. Let's make mistakes and call each other out and do more.
When the topic of racial injustice comes up in the ece classroom, the “solutions” we often first jump to are story books, baby dolls, and talking about skin color. This is a great place to start - story books can give us the words to use around topics that give us discomfort. Baby dolls can increase representation in our classroom materials. Celebrating the different shades of skin color in your classroom is a fun way to recognize beauty in everyone around you. However, if these are our only strategies, I worry they can fall somewhere between ineffective and damaging.
With story books, it can be easy to fall into the habit of talking about injustice in a historical context only. Even if we read books about the present time, if we’re reading “A is for Activist” alongside “Moo, baa, La La La,” we need to explicitly talk about “real and pretend.” We need to talk to children about the author’s intention and why these books were written. This can be simple y’all - “I think Sandra Boynton wrote this book to make us laugh about something silly,” “I think Innosanto Nagaro wrote this book to show us ways we can be helpers for people who are being treated unfairly.”
Talk about racism in books that you have not purchased for your anti-bias curriculum. Do you have any idea how many children’s books include examples of tokenism? Take a read through your library and see, and then talk to your students about it as you read. Share your feelings.
Baby dolls are not real people. Having baby dolls with different color skin does not automatically teach about culture, diversity, tolerance, and injustice. Having “diverse” babies can give you information - how do your students approach them, play with them, talk about them? Don’t throw them in the classroom and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Put them in the classroom and be ready to start your work - observe, intervene, reflect.
When we celebrate different skin colors, we must not stop at celebrating the beauty and diversity in the classroom. We need to commit to using “explicit, proactive language about race.” For so many of us raised with the colorblind curriculum, talking about race with children is uncomfortable. Friendly reminder: acknowledging the existence of race does not make you racist. Talk to white children about what it means to be white. Talk to them about how this gives them unfair privilege. Talk to them while they’re young so that they can face these realities matter-of-factly. Maybe they can skip the whole white guilt thing and jump straight into action.
This should be the curriculum year round - not a unit, not something that kicks in when a tragedy occurs or a child shocks us. Reading through the stories in this list has sparked some new ideas for me. Please share other resources."
In honor of Raising Race Conscious Children’s 100th post, this list lifts a quote from each and every blog post to date, modeling language that has actually been used in a conversation with a child regarding race (and other identity-markers...
