 A strategy I will always sort of go to is to make the material relevant to the students, to make them understand how you might be reading an 18th century African American poet, but she's talking about issues that are still prevalent today, issues that still matter today in the African American community, and then I might show a clip from a movie or I might bring in lyrics from a song, or I'll reference an artist who I know a lot of the students really like. And that both breaks that teacher-student barrier a bit where I'm coming to them, this is stuff that matters to you, but I'm also showing them how the literature we're looking at and the writers that we're looking at, those concerns are still relevant. And when students are able to see that what we're studying in the classroom is actually still very relevant politically or aesthetically in their current day, they get more comfortable talking about it. They also feel like they have some authority in thinking about the literature we're looking at. And so I would tell people who are starting out to really, to expect the tension, to expect race to be difficult to talk about, and to do what they can to make the material relevant to the students in the classroom by showing them how it's still actively at stake in their own, during their own time. There's an educator at University of Pittsburgh, he's sort of looking at how professors across the country are engaging with questions of race and racism and social justice. And what he's finding is that it's a very difficult subject to teach, there's a lot of resistance. So I feel like one of the things that I would tell someone who's starting out is to sort of expect that, to expect resistance, because it's such a taboo subject matter sometimes, and yet it's everywhere. In my intro to African American literature class, I have a sort of a creative project at the very end of the quarter that's a multimedia project, it's called The Mashup. And what students do is they pick a theme like police brutality or racial violence, something that's come up in the literature. And I have them mine the internet and the library for different representations of that theme, whether they be like a film clip, a painting, a poem. And I have them put these different excerpts from the different media together into a mashup, like a collage. And so their theme is sort of being looked at from these different forms of media. And that helps them to understand, oh, look, I can put Frederick Douglass's introduction to his slave narrative in conversation with a public enemy song, or a part of a public enemy song from the 1990s. And suddenly these two cultural texts that are hundreds of years apart are having this amazing conversation. And that's a way that students are able to see the relevance of something we're reading that might be from the past or from a different culture that they don't identify with or whatever. But when they're asked to sort of put it in conversation with another text, fruitful things emerge. And that's a really good way to bring it to their world. They love that.