by Sachi Feris In Raising Race Conscious Children’s interactive workshops, participants practice explicitly naming race. I have gotten a lot of questions about the utility of using the words “Black” and “White” as part of the strategy to name race…
by Sachi Feris More than ten years ago, I was teaching at a progressive, independent school and my best pal/colleague, a White woman named Sara, approached me quietly, saying: “Something just happened that I need your feedback on.” “What happened?”…
by Sachi Feris When I was little, my parents had friends with a daughter named Emily who had suffered brain damage during childbirth. As a result, Emily could not sit up or talk. I remember, when we visited, feeling uncomfortable…
by Sachi Feris On a trip to Walgreens, my daughter found some Doc McStuffins stickers—a Disney television series featuring an African-American girl who wants to be a doctor. I had purchased Doc McStuffins playing cards for my daughter a few…
by Sachi Feris As a teacher in various New York City private schools, I always felt uncomfortable about the endless drives for “charity” intended to “help other people.” Rarely, were students helped to see these “others” as real people with…
Raising Race Conscious Children is honored to have partnered with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) to create this Mother’s Day Action Toolkit. Below, you will find book suggestions and talking points/questions you can ask your children as you take action for racial justice on Mother’s Day.
During the weeks after the Michael Brown and Eric Garner non-indictments, various White friends asked me whether I thought they should be talking about these issues with their school-aged children. My daughter was just two-and-a-half at the time and I was not talking about it with her…but to my friends with four and five-year-olds, I answered unequivocally “yes.”
A friend of the family gave my daughter the book “Madeline” by Ludwig Bemelmans along with a Madeline doll. We looked at the Madeline doll together and noted that she has red hair. As we opened the book and started to read, we looked for Madeline but couldn’t find her at first. We then realized that she has blonde hair on some pages and red hair on other pages.
My daughter has been playing with her vintage Fisher Price people on a daily basis since she was about a year old.
In one routine game, she puts the “children” (who are slightly shorter) in a circle and sings the “goodbye song.” Then, each“adult” (a slightly taller figure) picks a child up from school. When she first started playing this game, she would assign adults to children randomly, almost never putting them in the same pairs, and with no consideration to their physical appearances. The only thing she was emphatic about was that every child had to be paired with one adult.
As a born and bred New Yorker, I expect an occasional terrible experience with a stranger. My worst stranger story involves a White man who spit in my on 5th avenue. So it isn’t always about race…but sometimes it is.
Last winter, I was sitting on the steps in the lobby of an apartment building in my neighborhood, trying to get my one-and-a-half-year-old to put on her shoes. I had just gotten her to sit down and was forcing her feet into the shoes and fastening the Velcro when a Black man entered the building and commented “Stairs are not for sitting.”
