Our Children Need to Know These Words and Actions Are Racist - Name It

Dear Parents,

While I want to say last night’s presidential debate left me speechless, I will not give Donald Trump the satisfaction.  I will speak. I will act. I will stand up.  The first post in my social media feed this morning mirrored the rant I was having late into the evening.

Donald Trump is racist.  Donald Trump is unacceptable.  These actions happening on a national stage is abhorrent.

In my last Dear Parent’s post, I wrote,

On this Mother’s Day, I find myself thinking about a question posed to me this week in a talk by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, “How can I be more human?  How can my practices be more humanizing?”  She encouraged us to interrogate the world as we would a text. This interrogation includes oneself – our actions, our language, and the stories we tell.  The stories we choose to tell.  The stories we share with our children.  The ways we help our children understand when practices are not humanizing and how our actions can work towards change.

Now is the time to act.

Our children need to know these words are racist.  We have the power to disrupt the narrative, tell different stories, and help our children interrogate the world.  No child is too young to begin a conversation about practices that are humanizing.  If we stay quiet, choose to do nothing, we must accept that no action is the action we are choosing.  We have the power to choose our actions, our language, and the stories we tell.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”   Here are some short texts to inspire conversation and action.  Stories, true and fictional, that show our children that we have the power to act and an obligation to use those actions to make a better world.  Our children are listening. Don’t let the words of a racist, misogynistic, hateful leader be the language and the narrative they hear.

These are just a start … not even close to a comprehensive list. I apologize that my need for urgency caused many texts to be left off this list.  I thought it was better to start acting today, so this is what I have today.  I will add, revise, and rethink this list as I talk with, listen to, and learn from colleagues, abolitionist educators, and children’s literature scholars. 

This is what I am doing right now.