Is a child ever too young to learn about race? We’re sharing an episode from Learning for Justice’s Teaching Hard History podcast today that answers that question with a resounding no. One of our summer interns, Jaden González, brought us the episode and joins to discuss it, along with his own racial identity development as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York City with a multiracial family.
Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law unveiled institutionalized racial segregation and its lingering impacts on our country. The ways that we are segregated today were caused by intentional governmental policies, and we have yet to redress the harm caused. Richard’s daughter Leah, joined him to write Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. They both join us to talk about the books and role we all have to play in creating the true multiracial democracy we are striving for.
As our country becomes increasingly racially diverse and socioeconomically unequal, schools are often the first public institutions addressing those changes. Dr. Erica Turner has studied how district level leaders have dealt with this, and wrote about it in her book, Suddenly Diverse, How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality. She joins us to share some of what she found.
Gentrification sucks . . . yet change is inevitable. We’re joined today by Young Adult author, Jade Adia, whose first novel, There Goes The Neighborhood takes place in a fictional neighborhood in South LA being wracked by gentrification. We discuss Jade’s personal story and how it led to her writing this novel, and we discuss ways of getting involved and finding connection in our neighborhoods.
John Blake has been writing about race and religion as a reporter for over 25 years, and over those years he has come to discover that facts don’t change people, relationships do. His relationship with his mother and her sister, his father’s relationships on the decks of a Merchant Marine ship, the multi-racial community he formed through church – these relationships across difference are what led to changes in racial attitudes for his relatives and for himself. He chronicles it all in his memoir, More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew, and he joins us to talk about it.