Undoing the myth of White=beauty: Reading Snow White to my daughter
by Sachi Feris A friend had been staying in our apartment while we were on vacation and left some Disney-version fairytale books from her Spanish class for my then-two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Among them, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” which my…
“Who lived here before?”: Brooklyn’s changing skyline
by Sachi Feris My daughter has picked up many a book (from my children’s book collection that preceded her birth) that was too long or complicated for her present age and insisted that I read it to her. One such…
“People decide for themselves how they want to identify” or dismantling the gender binary with my children
by Sachi Feris The other day I overheard my mom reading a board book of “first words” to my eight-month-old son. On the first fold of the book, she read: “girl” and then “boy.” “When we read,” I told my…
What’s tone got to do with it? (when you’re talking about race and other issues of justice)
by Sachi Feris The other day my dad was visiting and I overheard an exchange between him and my daughter around the brushing of her teeth. My dad kept turning the water off, impressing upon my daughter the importance of…
Staceyann and Zuri Chin’s Living Room Protests: A conversation with Staceyann
by Sachi Feris Performance artist Staceyann Chin and her four-year-old daughter, Zuri, have been modeling powerful conversations about positive racial identity, gender identity, children’s rights, human rights, and many other important topics over the past year. These conversations are child-centric,…