Embrace Race

This New York Times best-selling book is a guide for families, educators, and communities to raise their children to be able and active anti-racist allies.

With a foreword by Tim Wise, Raising White Kids is for families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums.

These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be "colorblind"? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation?

Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways?

While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. Raising White Kids steps into that void.

"Most white Americans didn't get from our own families the concrete teaching and modeling we needed to be active in the work of racial justice ourselves, let alone to feel equipped now to talk about race with and teach anti-racism to our children. There is so much we need to learn and it's urgent that we do so. But the good news is: we can," says Jennifer Harvey.

In this heartfelt and universal story, a mother and daughter look forward to their special Saturday routine together every single week. But this Saturday, one thing after another goes wrong--ruining storytime, salon time, picnic time, and the puppet show they'd been looking forward to going to all week. Mom is nearing a meltdown...until her loving daughter reminds her that being together is the most important thing of all.

Author-artist Oge Mora's highly anticipated follow up to Caldecott Honor Thank You, Omu! features the same magnificently radiant artwork and celebration of sharing so beloved in her debut picture book.

This picture book is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the momentous Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in, when four college students staged a peaceful protest that became a defining moment in the struggle for racial equality and the growing civil rights movement.

Andrea Davis Pinkney uses poetic, powerful prose to tell the story of these four young men, who followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words of peaceful protest and dared to sit at the whites only Woolworth's lunch counter. Brian Pinkney embraces a new artistic style, creating expressive paintings filled with emotion that mirror the hope, strength, and determination that fueled the dreams of not only these four young men, but also countless others.

Sandy: I turned to Sounder recently because I was sorting out the kerfuffle raised when a white author wrote the story of a Mexican woman fleeing a drug cartel in her hometown, desperately trying to migrate to America: The kerfuffle-causing book is American Dirt (which I've hard is fabulous, despite the kerfuffle).  I remembered that a white man wrote Sounder, the story of an unnamed black boy in the deep south in the 1920's. The boy is left to care for his mother, younger sisters and brother (and a coon hound named Sounder) after his sharecropper father is cruelly arrested right in front of him, and sent to serve 10 years of hard prison labor; all for stealing a ham.  This book is so good and stands up so well 50 years later that I sat unmoving until I finished it a few hours after I started. I wrote all over its pages, at first to mark how the author, William H. Armstrong, managed the dialect of its rural, southern and black main characters but eventually I asterisked and underlined much more and in pure awe.

What a story, what a writer. If you can manage to get your family to all read it, it would make for a memorable discussion and I’d even say your book group should pick it (in either scenario I highly recommend the link below for background).  Though it’s dubbed a children's classic - every grown up I've recommended Sounder to in the last 8 weeks has come away changed and moved. Regarding a white author writing in black characters' voices and telling their tale, Armstrong set a great example when he wrote this timeless message in his Author's Note upon Sounder's publication in 1969:

"Fifty years ago I learned to read at a round table in the center of a large, sweet-smelling, steam-softened kitchen. My teacher was a gray-haired black man who taught the one-room Negro school several miles away from where we lived in the Green Hill district of the county. He worked for my father after school and in the summer. There were no radios or television sets, so when our lessons were finished he told us stories. His stories came from Aesop, the Old Testament, Homer, and history.

There was a lasting, magnificent intoxication about the man that has remained after half a century. There was seldom a preacher at the white-washed, clapboard Baptist church in the Green Hill district, so he came often to our white man's church and sat alone in the balcony. Sometimes the minister would call on this eloquent, humble man to lead the congregation in prayer. He would move quietly to the foot of the balcony steps, pray and then return to where he sat alone, for no other black people ever came to join him.

He had come to our community from farther south, already old when he came. He talked little, or not at all, about his past. But one night at the great center table after he had told the story of Argus, the faithful dog of Odysseus, he told the story of Sounder, a coon dog.  It is the black man's story, not mine. It was not from Aesop, the Old Testament, or Homer. It was history - his history.

That world of long ago has almost totally changed. The church balcony is gone. The table is gone from the kitchen. But the story remains."

Now that's classy. No matter your age, origin or color – when you’re great you’re great.  https://www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/activities/migrated-files-in-body/sounder-bookfile.pdf

* I won't mention its title because I really didn't care for it, for a few reasons, and I don’t like to speak ill of someone’s hard work so publicly.

Before the universe was formed, before time and space existed, there was . . . nothing. But then . . . BANG! Stars caught fire and burned so long that they exploded, flinging stardust everywhere. And the ash of those stars turned into planets. Into our Earth. And into us. In a poetic text, Marion Dane Bauer takes readers from the trillionth of a second when our universe was born to the singularities that became each one of us, while vivid illustrations by Ekua Holmes capture the void before the Big Bang and the ensuing life that burst across galaxies. A seamless blend of science and art, this picture book reveals the composition of our world and beyond -- and how we are all the stuff of stars.