 I'm Mel Hauser. I use she, they are pronouns and I'm the executive director here at All Brains Belong and this is Brain Club. I'm gonna share screen and get us oriented. So tonight we are thrilled to be joined by a guest presenter, Christy Colon Brown who I will tell you more about in just a few minutes but first by way of introduction as those who are here know Brain Club our weekly community conversation about everyday brain life. This is our educational space to educate the community about neurodiversity and all topics related to inclusive community. Just as a reminder, this is for education purposes only. This is not medical or mental health advice. All forms of participation are okay here at Brain Club. As many of you have figured out you can have your video on or off and even if it's on, we don't expect anything of you. We certainly don't expect you to look at the camera. So please feel free to move, walk, fidget, stim, eat, all the things and everyone is welcome here at Brain Club and all communication is welcome. So you can unmute and use mouth words, you can type in the chat box, however you're most comfortable communicating. And in addition to affirming all aspects of identity really important for us to protect the group's collective access needs and give lots of space for others to participate in their own way. And if you are uncomfortable for any reason you can send a direct message either to me or to Lizzie, our education progress writer. Lizzie, can you wave or you in a place that you can wave? Amazing, thank you. All right, okay, so we talked about, we talked about the whole thing about there might be little ears who might be listening off-screen and so just being aware of language and of course giving respect and space for all participants. All right, last bit of access, closed captioning is enabled, you just have to toggle it on if you'd like to use it. So depending on your version of Zoom, you might see the live transcript closed captioning icon but if you don't look for the more dot, dot, dot and choose show subtitles and do the same hide subtitles if you wanna turn them off. And the chat box will be going as always and so you're looking for the speech bubble icon on your Zoom toolbar and that's the chat box. All right, so our July 2023 theme this month has been re-imagining community and so tonight we continue this conversation. Tonight's spring club is sponsored by the Vermont Department of Health. All right, so how does tonight's topic fit into our ongoing conversation about inclusion, right? So inclusion is perceived belonging. When there are people in our community who do not feel that they belong, we do not have an inclusive community, right? So zooming out to think about all of the different ways in which society doesn't do a good job of this and what is our role in that and doing it differently? And we've been speaking for the past several weeks specifically about the intersectional experience is all the different aspects of identity that are stigmatized, marginalized, other and how acknowledging and talking about all of these topics. We can't talk about neurodivergence in a vacuum. We have to talk about all of the different aspects of identity and so we continue our conversation. So I am thrilled to introduce Chrissy Calon-Brant who is an educator, mom and lifelong learner. She served as both a classroom teacher and a school administrator. She's passionate about teaching and learning and the power of honest education to aid in the creation of new more just worlds for all. Chrissy has facilitated workshops about a book that she has co-authored that we speak about regularly here at Brain Club, Parenting for Social Justice. And so Chrissy has facilitated workshops about the book as well as student affinity groups, educator conversation groups and various professional learning workshops for education professionals. Chrissy's a mom of three, including an almost one year old and enjoys reading to her children and introducing them to new and fantastical worlds. Chrissy has a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College and a Master's of Education from Hunter College where I also attended. She lives in Vermont with her family. All right, Chrissy, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Awesome. Thanks everybody for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I feel very grateful and honored. And what a small world. I can talk about Hunter later. It's like, I love when that happens. It's like, awesome. I'm gonna share my screen. Ooh, I haven't done Zoom in a while. Why is it gets like showing the iPhone? I don't even have an iPhone. I don't know what's open. Oh, oh no. Technology, this is what goes on. This, I apologize. I allow the app to record the words of your screen. Sure, why isn't it? It's not letting me click this. Oh, no, wait, I have to make changes. Okay, I apologize. It's been a very long, I've been on Zoom. I think you're going to have to share my presentation with you because it's going to force me to log out and log back in. Oh, no, no. Later to that, and I'm just going to quickly share this with you and we'll just bear with us. We'll make it work. Amazing. Yeah. Is that coming by email? How will that be coming? How about I send it by email? That sounds great. I'm going to open my email. All right, I definitely just heard a little ant that was crawling from me. There you go. Okay, we'll go with that. All right. Easier than you're starting. That was the smoothest transition ever. That just came together. All right, we're in business. All right. I think, Steve, I understand the question, but that's not the settings of Zoom that we have. At any given time, any of you could just start sharing screen, please don't do that. But all right, so, all right, hang on a second. So I'm in here. I don't know what would happen. You guys can give feedback about, if I share screen while still spotlighting Chrissy, what happens? I've never done that before. Can you still see my screen? All right, fantastic. We're in business. Great. Bunny, I don't see it. No. Oh, no. Well, in case that hasn't been... Oh, here, no, I see it. Awesome. But it disappeared. I don't know what I clicked. Okay, I see it. I'm going to, I can't see anyone else. So I'll rely on maybe some communication if someone's raising a hand or using an emoji or something because I can only see the screen. If I make it tiny, I don't know what's happening. If you go, I mean, it's totally fine. We can watch the screen for you, but if you want to see some of the screen, I wonder, do you, can you, do you see anything that looks like a grid, like that you can change your setting to be a gallery view? Yeah, swap, swap shared screen with video, I get. And then when I do that, I don't know. Hide thumbnail, show active speaker video. Nope, that's me. How about, is there so your grid? I see the grid. Show grid, sure, all right. So if you have something called view, view should be like maybe in the upper right. Yeah, I stopped screen share cat so that I could see what Chrissy could see. So view, and then you have a choice of speaker, gallery or immersive, gallery would let you keep seeing the people, even when I share screen. Share screen, audio options, video option. I don't have a view. It's up, it's not on the toolbar, it's up, like upper right, it might be. Maybe that just happened. No, I still only see the shared screen. Your screen, I don't see people. Okay, well, I think we have to, should we go with that for now? Unless... If you're all right doing with that and then Sarah, do you want to be in charge of identifying if someone's raising their hand or trying to get our attention? Sure. That would be helpful. Amazing. We're gonna work with this, we're flexible, we're gonna make this work. Yep. So it's great to be here. I'm Chrissy Colobrat, I am the co-author, one of the co-authors for Parenting for Social Justice, they're a whole group of us. And I wanna take it just a quick moment to name and honor Angela Burgfield, who was the lead author and the kind of visionary of the book. Angela passed away, I would say almost two years ago now. And so I like to always name her and call her into the space with us. She's a powerful presence. I feel honor that she's part of kind of our ancestor world now and always invite you to bring in any ancestors that you wanna bring with you to this moment, to be here by your side as we talk and learn together. I'm really excited about this. And so let's dive in. Sometimes I get the, we can stay here for a second. Sometimes I get the question of like, why parenting for social justice? And I think, and it's, you know, we sort of talk about this in the opening of the book, but this is not just for parents. It's for any of us who have a relationship with children. I happen to be a mom of three, as was mentioned before, but before that I was a teacher and I continue to teach actually, I am a teacher. And, you know, you might be an aunt or an uncle or you might just be a neighbor or a grandparent or a friend of a young person, but there's so much power in the way that we work with care for parents, lead young people for creating a more just world. And so this topic was really inspiring to me when Angela came to me to talk about it. And we started by leading some workshops together. I think if you spend some time with children, you know they are like born free and just ready for the world. They see injustice. I think about my three-year-old. He knows when something is unfair. And justice is really important to him. Same with my eight-year-old, but who now kind of starts to see the ways in which the world is unjust. And we can talk about that. They're very curious. I think they ask really honest questions, really plain questions about the world around them. And I love that about children because I think it opens up a lot of opportunity for adults to kind of talk to them about the world, but it's also just, I think shows how sort of wide and awake they are. And yet our world is not totally wonderful, right? It is unjust. And I think that's because we learned that. Beverly Tatum writes about how it's in the air, we breathe bias and injustice. My previous job, I used to say all the time to our kind of head of our upper school who kind of started his role thinking like, I'm totally, I have no bias, he would say all the time. And I said, if you're breathing, you're biased. So I think it's important for us to remember that we swim in it, we live in it. And being intentional and intentionally talking and thinking about these topics will help us kind of unravel that and unlearn it, but kids learn it and they learn it from us. And so I invite you to take a moment and I can't see you. So we'll work with this, but to think about maybe something that you learned as a kid or a child, perhaps you learned it from an adult explicitly or implicitly about the world that you had to unlearn once you sort of became aware. And I'll tell a quick story to kind of help make that real. I learned as a kid from my mom implicitly and explicitly that folks experiencing homelessness were dangerous when we would be in the train station and there would be lots of folks asking for money and who clearly were experiencing homelessness. My mom would sort of get very afraid and say things like, don't look at them and you have to be really careful and they're very unsafe. And so I learned as a kid that folks experiencing homelessness were somehow dangerous and unsafe. And I had to unlearn that as an adult once I sort of became more aware and was able to have conversations with various people and actually was able to do some work in college and volunteering, I realized that there are a host of reasons why people experience homelessness and that not everyone is dangerous or unsafe and the majority of people are not, right? And that there's deeper and more nuanced things happening. But I learned that from my mom. I think if she could turn back the clock she probably would teach me something different, right? But she probably learned that in some way. So I invite you to think about, is there something you could drop it in the chat or even just raise your hand like, yeah, there's something you don't have to talk about it but can you think of something that you learned as a child that you had to unlearn later? Any hands raised, anything in the chat, anything going on? I can't see anything. This is funny. I think if I click. So I can just say that I put in the chat so many things. I have to unlearn so many things. And so the story you just shared like that's how that exact story I was taught that too and lots of related concepts. Yeah, yeah. And I think if you spend some time you might come up with all kinds of things that you learned that you're now like, oh, I'm unlearning that. And so I think it's really important to sort of uncover these things about ourselves so that we can teach our children something different about the world around them. We can skip to the next page or slide. Before I do, I'm just gonna also share that there's a couple of comments in the chat. So Linda was taught that Western culture is the best. And Cynthia shared socioeconomic does not equal intelligence. And Kat says I was taught that only a select few people were quote living right and that my family was of course that number. Oh yeah, all good ones. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for sharing and being vulnerable. Yes, these are all and I can relate to lots of these. I think these are all kind of some of them sort of cultural values, some of them very kind of Western views of the world, but we've learned all kinds of things that influence how we operate, how we move through the world and the kinds of lessons that we inadvertently again either intentionally or unintentionally pass on to the children in our lives, whether they are our own or others. Any other comments before we move on? Shall we go on? So I'd love to start with just, again, you can drop it in the chat or share out loud why you came to this conversation. And I want us to hold on to that because we're gonna come back to that at the end of this, but why did you come to this conversation? Why is this topic important to you? Why are you here? And I asked that question because this is hard work, building an inclusive community, sort of reimagining the world to be a more just place is hard. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult. Having these conversations with kids can be really scary. It's hard work. And so I think it's really important to have the why am I doing this kind of at the forefront of my mind? And I invite you to think about your why. Why does this topic particularly matter to you? And again, if there's anything in the chat, I'm happy to hear it or if anyone wants to speak out loud about your why. If you don't fit into society. Thank you for sharing. There's a comment in the chat from Kat. My kid is pushing me forward. They are amazing. Yeah. Oh yeah. They have a tendency to do that, don't they? I always, you know, I think about, I look around, I think about my own experience and I look at my three kiddos and I think I want a different world for them, right? And I want them to move through the world freer than I moved through the world as a kid. And then I move now and then I can't, in order for that to happen, I need to do some hard work and I need to not give up and I need to face the challenges and the hard things and face them with compassion for myself and for all of us who live in this world. But that's my biggest motivation is my three kiddos. I want something different. And I believe that that's possible. I do believe another world is possible, but not without the hard work that I put in. I was having a great conversation with my kid this morning about climate change, you know? And I said like, I'm gonna go before probably the worst of this unravels. And it's gonna be your generation and future generations who will come up with these solutions. And so I'm so glad you're asking these hard questions and that you're thinking about this because it really matters. It was really, he was asking, it was beyond my scientific knowledge actually. I had to turn to my husband, the science teacher and be like, so why is that happening? That's a great question. Like I need your help in here. It was great, but kids will push us, right? And I love that, that's my why for sure. So let me talk a little bit about parenting for social justice. This book is not a prescription. It's not like do these seven things and your kids will be wonderful. It's not, it's not that. And that was very intentional. As we talked about this book, it really was a, what are the things that we are trying as parents? What's working? What are the, you know, each of us came to this with like, for me, it really was conversations about race were critical for me. They felt very important. Not that we aren't having and weren't having conversations about ability, conversations about disability, conversations about gender justice, but that the race part was sort of really visceral for me and I wanted to have it. And I was, you know, I'm raising mixed race children. And so that felt really important to have a conversation about from the beginning. So we wrote in conversation actually, that, you know, once Angela sort of proposed the idea, we actually wrote in conversations. She shared her story. I typed back mine and it became that the whole chapter was written as a conversation between the two of us in its first and early drafts. We really imagine that folks will use this book in a community of practice, that parents, caregivers, teachers will get together and work through the book as a workbook, right? There are lots of questions or moments in the book that ask questions about your own reflections. We'll do some of that today that provide lots of resources like here are some great picture books. There's even a playlist, which I love that was Angela's like idea one day. She was like, do you have songs you can listen to with your kid? I'm like, yes, you know, there are certain songs we listened to at the time he was a student at a predominantly white into very wealthy independent school. There were a set of songs we listened to every morning for him to remember like who he was and where he was going and like who he wanted to be in the world. And so we even have a playlist. So there are lots of resources in this book. And I kind of invite you to explore them if you can get the book at your local library. If they don't have it, you can request that they get it as well as at a bookstore. So the hope is that folks will work through this book kind of at your own pace, but in a community and that you'll talk it out and find ways to really be in conversation with other folks who care for kids as well as with your kids themselves. I don't know if we are on slides but we can move to slide. I can't see anything. We can move to slide three. Between the two of us, I can't see numbers. So I've got a slide. You contain multitudes. Okay, oh great. So go back. This is fun. Let's go back right here. So the book, I just wanted to kind of mention that these are the sort of justice topics explicitly talked about in the book. I'm the co-author of the racial justice topic. There's a section on economic justice, disability justice and gender justice. There are other chapters in the book kind of about what is social justice and what is parenting for social justice. And then a great chapter just about collective liberation. Like we're all in this together. And so how do we think about kind of all of us, our intersectional identities and all of us sort of working together for justice because it's so easy to fall into the trap of like my injustice is harder than your injustice, right? That can happen kind of what sometimes is coined oppression Olympics. But that's how we don't get what we want, right? That's how we don't get our liberated world is by sort of dividing our resources. Really thinking about how do we collectively liberate all of us? Cause we all have something to gain. We're all intersectional beings which we're gonna talk a little bit about. Like I said, there are lots of resources each chapter is full of resources. There's an appendix of resources. There's even if you go to the parenting for justice, parenting for social justice website. There's an additional appendix and lots of other materials there. So I invite you to do that. So while there are discrete topics, the intersectionality is important and clear and comes through. And I know you've been talking about that and maybe you've done an exercise like this but we're gonna try a little something. So if you'll go to the next slide you do contain multitudes. And what I think I'm gonna do cause it'll help me is actually open my slides on my computer just so I can better direct you. There we go. So I invite you whether it's kind of just in your head or on a piece of paper or whatever works for you typing in another screen to think about kind of your many identities. How do you identify? How do you identify racially? What would you say your socioeconomic class is now? Maybe as a kid, how you identify sex and gender and or whichever feels more comfortable. Think about all your social identities, religion, ability, disability, the ones that sort of come to mind. I invite you to kind of think about and name all of those. So I'll give you a couple of moments to do that. Just sort of think about maybe two or three that are at the forefront that maybe take up space in your brain. Sometimes I do this activity as like a brain and sort of drawing. How much space are these things taking up for you? And you don't have to share. You can just take a moment to think about that and maybe give us a thumbs up. Like, I've got two or three I can work with in my head or written down or just ready for the next part. And someone can let me know if we've got some thumbs up or if we need more time. Take a little more time. Think about your identities. So there's just a question in the chat, just looking for a rephrase. So the questions are those on the slide about how you identify. Yeah, we can start with just how do you identify? What are some of your identities? How might you, what would you say about your race? Or do you identify as having a religion or maybe you're just identifying as spiritual? Are there socioeconomic class distinctions that you name about yourself? Is that clarifying? We don't even have to get to the other questions yet. Okay, all right, we got some thumbs up. Okay, so now as you think about those and I will illustrate with an example for myself if that help is helpful in a minute. Think about which ones of those maybe you experienced some privilege around. You know, maybe you're granted a little more access. Maybe you're respected a little more. Maybe you're just granted some privileges that you don't even have to think about around those identities. And I'll just name for myself. For example, I grew up and I don't identify this way anymore but I grew up in a Christian household, right? My holidays, school days were closed, right? I didn't have to think about that. We, the things that I celebrated at home reflected in the materials in my classroom. I didn't have to think about it. I didn't feel left out. I felt like I belonged, right? I love that kind of framing of belonging. Which of your identities really help you feel like you belong in kind of our greater culture? At the same time, right? I, again, I was co-wrote that racial justice chapter. I identify as a woman of color, right? And while there are communities where I feel a sense of belonging, there are plenty of places where I do not feel like I belong where I don't even feel safe, right? Those are places where I do not experience privilege. I'm in a heterosexual marriage, right? I have a lot of privilege there. My husband and I talk about this all the time. I do not have to worry that he can't see me in the hospital should something happen. We are privileged in that way. So take a moment to think about your identities and where you experience privilege. And also where you do not, where you might have experienced oppression because of your identity. And I'll stop talking for a minute so you can think. And then invite if anybody wants to share and then we'll talk about kind of our connection to why this might exercise is helpful. So if there's anyone who wants to share in the chat or out loud, something that sort of came up for you as you did this exercise, like, I realize, oh yeah, I do have some privileges here. Or, oh yeah, this is something that really does feel like I don't have privilege. I can read out from the chat. Sure. Kat says, three out of five identities have changed for me in the past four years. And it's been challenging to build a new sense of self even though it's a more authentic identity to move away from predominant identities creates a loss of privilege. And I see how I identified in those ways to be safe. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. A powerful realization. Thank you for sharing. Yeah. And as a comment, privilege is too often interpreted as something that makes you a bad person. But that's not what that means, it just is. Yeah. Someone else shares, lifelong I've identified as female and did not like being limited and compared to males. And it's interesting that in college, when a women's group, another member identified me as androgynous and said I had the strength of both. Yeah. So again, like, and of course, you know, moving away even from the gender binary and the limitations that come from there. I would say, Chrissy, I would just share that amongst the all brains belong community. There's a lot of late identified neurodivergent people who are only now as adults sometimes in their, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even older for the first time learning that there are aspects of their identity that connect disability for the first time. And there are, it can be a very, very complicated appraisal of like, well, there were some privileges associated with not knowing this because of the way society treats those with these labels. And then the, of course, the downsides of internalized ableism and, you know, all the mental health aspects of masking and all kinds of things. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Thank you so much for sharing. And that's, you know, so one of the things that I think is as we think about kind of working with young people, working with children is that it's so critical to do this reflection ourselves, right? We will inadvertently teach the things that we are, that we have internalized and taught. And so as we, I think it's, you know, like I said, I did a lot of work with educators and do a lot of work with educators. I often talk about it's, teachers always want to get right to the kids, right? Parents too, like, how do I do this with my kid? How do I get my kid to do this? How do I get my kid to see this? But if we don't do this sort of like unraveling and hard internal work ourselves, right? Kind of coming to these realizations, sort of recognizing how complicated identity is, how fluid parts of our identities can be, how they change over time, right? If we're not doing some of this work, it will be a lot harder for us to kind of authentically and in sort of liberating ways do this work with our children. And so that's why in the book, you'll find that there are so many questions directed at the adult, right? And then sort of examples of how we might have these same conversations with kids. So a conversation about intersectionality can be really powerful with kids. And my biggest tip is to go with their age appropriate, right? Like I can have a conversation with my eight-year-old about like, who are you and how do you see yourself? Like one of the earliest conversations I had with my eight-year-old was about race. And it really was very simple. And I tell this story in the book. He was looking, we were lying in bed. He was like four. And he said, you know, mom, my skin is not like your skin. And my boys are all kind of white passing, right? They are blonde, they have green eyes, their skin is very light, right? Their dad is white. And so I said, yeah, our skin is different. It's like called, it's melanin, right? Immediately I could explain, right? This is what it is, it's melanin. And he was like, oh, but our hair is the same. We both have curly hair. And we just started to play, we played this game daily. It became really fascinating for him. Like our noses are shaped the same, but our skin color is different. And so that was our very early kind of four-year-old conversation about race. And I could say some people might call mommy's skin black even though it's, and he would be like, it's not black, like a crayon, you know? He had something to compare it to. And to this day he will say like, his skin is sandy, right? He didn't like the words black and white, but I said, some people will look at you and think that boy is white. And you may not feel that way. You get to choose actually kind of the neat part about having different races. So my advice is really, as you uncover these things about yourself is to then have these conversations sort of age appropriately with the young people in your life. Can start by just the simple like investigating of how they see themselves. That can begin, and my son and I have had, my eight-year-old and I have had some great conversations about what does it mean for him to be a boy? What does that mean? And they're very sweet and very lovely. But I just, I start with a lot of questions. And so I invite you kind of to start from that sort of intersectional place of like, who are you and what does it mean to you to be that? Or who are we and what do we celebrate, right? If it's a conversation around maybe religious values and what does that mean? And how might that be different than our neighbor or a friend in school? And how might we also be the same? I think sort of doing the dual work of like, all humans are looking for ways to kind of connect to their greater world in spirituality and we all do it differently, right? We all have these common needs and we all meet them differently. So that it's both sort of the ways in which we're different and the ways in which we're the same. And there are some great picture books that can help with that conversation. I am conscious that one of my things is I'm terrible with time management. And so I think what I will do is kind of share a little excerpt from the book, which I think could just be interesting. And then we'll go from there. I wanna make sure that I leave space if you have questions or comments. Is there any other comments before we move on that folks want to share about their intersectionality and sort of realizations around ways we've been privileged or not? I wanna make sure I hear anyone else. I can read out from the chat, Kristen shares two areas where I experienced some relative and less obvious privilege or in my sexuality being queer but being married to a straight man and in my disability, which is type one diabetes that is often not highly visible. There's also a comment from Steve. Identity does become more fluid when you connect with your neurodivergence. And there's lots of follow-up comments about that relating to the earlier comment about late identified neurodivergence. Kim shares, I realize I had a lot of privilege being able to pass as neurotypical for most of my life but I'm also coming to understand how much stigma and exclusion I faced for being neurodivergent even without a diagnosis. And it's a wild realization to see my life this way at this point. Thank you all for sharing. I feel like there's so many, I wanna keep talking. There's also fascinating and learning more and I appreciate the vulnerability. And I think one of the things I've worked with little kids all the way through high school kids. And I think one of the things that it's really powerful about working particularly with high school students is that there's so much more freedom and conversation than I experienced as a high schooler around neurodivergence in particular. Like kids are really have a lot more language I have found than we had when I was in high school and I think that that's really interesting. And thus I find that I have found them when I've worked with young people in high schoolers that they create great spaces of belonging because they have just way more words and language and there's a more of a kind of openness. And while I think social media is terrible most of the time, I actually credit a lot of that to the ways in which kids who feel like they don't belong, like they don't have a place, like they're not typical in their like a living community, find community online and then develop language and then recognize the ways in which they can create spaces of belonging. So there's a lot of power in talking with our kids and giving them language because I do believe that they then translate that to their actual communities. So I'll read a little excerpt. The way that the book works is it generally and chapter generally starts with some stories. And so I'll share a little bit from kind of my story which opens the chapter. And yeah, I will do that. I will share a little bit of my story. So I'm gonna skip around a little bit but the baby of five children, I grew up in a housing project in Down Neck Norck the ironbound section of Norck. I was raised by a village in a single parent home to a fiercely Puerto Rican mother. I am 17 years younger than my oldest sibling and by the time I was a school age, my mother was well aware of the disparity between the schools available in our neighborhood and those in wider districts. The search for an adequate education began. From the time I was very young, I can remember being coached to lie about our address. My mother would find a friend, a colleague, a confidant use her address and promptly send me to schools with wider classmates, better books and programs and cleaner facilities. When the commute would get too difficult or someone would start lurking around our fake address, she would begin the search for a new confidant and new school again. Inevitably I was discovered to be out of district and my mom would work two jobs or sacrifice minor luxuries in order to pay for a Catholic school tuition until she found another way to get me into a quality public school. At the entry interviews for Catholic schools, I heard things like, we don't want any trouble here, our kids are good, we do our work here. These comments came with each move despite the fact that I love school and rose to the top of the class wherever I found myself. I worked hard because my hard work was all I could use to prove I was worthy of the education we were stealing. When I asked my mom today why she chose that particular path to access education, she says, the school near us was bad, you were smart, you deserved better. I grew up in a world where I learned to interpret better as white. No one ever explicitly said that better was white, but everywhere I looked, this was the case. Every school out of district left me as the only one or two children of color in the room. Every white friend I made lived in what I perceived as a nicer home, had nicer clothes, they took vacations, these families own small businesses, had access to these schools that I snuck into and their families pitied me. That feeling was palpable and ever present. Growing up when someone would say I was black, my mom instructed me to respond, no, I'm tan and too young to understand what was being communicated in this statement, I proudly corrected peers, teachers and even family members. I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. Let's fast forward, my mother's pursuit of a better education leads us to an access program that eventually leads me to a small independent boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island. The shock was massive. Now it was clear, white was better. My peers lived lives I had never encountered, not even on TV. They had chauffeurs, they played sports I've never seen, they traveled to worlds I only learned about and they seemed to ease in this foreign place. They moved through spaces with a kind of untouchability that I had never experienced before. Even my peers of color seemed to come from families that owned homes that took vacations. Although they were black and brown, their lives at least in class markers resembled the lives of the white kids I read about and saw on TV. But it was here, in this tiny boarding school, miles away from anything or anyone familiar that I learned, how beautiful, how resilient, how black, Latina and worthy I was. During these four years, I was confronted with constant microaggressions and assumptions. I was faced with some of the ugliness that lurks beneath the surface of seemingly progressive mindsets. But I had teachers, advisors, mentors who introduced me to W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Beverly Daniel Tatum and Richard Wright. It was here that I first read Zora Neal Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X. It was here that I researched operation bootstrap and made sense of a story I'd heard growing up about our family, about how our family came to the mainland. It was under the guidance of these mentors that I was able to make sense of the messages, misperceptions and structures that had led me to think that white was better. And it was here that I began to unravel this insidious spiderweb of lies. I read those sections because I think a couple of things come out, right? That while race was sort of forefront for me, there were so many other parts of my identity. I was from a single parent home. The class piece was huge. I didn't have the language for it then, but the race part was for me as a kid, what was really starkly different, right? I could see it and I could name it. And then I had internalized messages about class, about hard work, about all of these things, right? That I think it tossed around around class. And that class and race can become so inextricably linked sometimes. But that also this, I read this excerpt because it was an educator, right? It was a lot of educators. It was like three key educators who changed everything and sort of widened the aperture for me. And it comes back for me to the why I do this work. Why I'm in education, it's actually why I taught at those kinds of schools for years and years and years until just last year when I thought, I've given back enough. It's why I taught at independent schools for so long. It's why I teach, right? I do believe that there's so much power, that adults have so much power to help kids make sense of the world around them to build and the end to build a more just world, the world that I really do believe is possible. And so I wanted to share those excerpts because again, I think while the chapter is about race, we can't separate one part of our identity from the others. And I think you've all kind of mentioned that in different ways in your comment like our liberation really is needs to be collective. It needs to be about kind of all the parts of who we are. And we need to make sense of all those parts and tell ourselves kind of stories and allow those stories to evolve as we learn more about the world. And I think if I wanna, if I leave you with anything it is that that the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that we will tell the children in our lives. So continuing to explore our stories, continuing to learn and make sense of stories about identity is really powerful. I'm trying to see where we are in the slides but whatever, I can't. And so I'm just going to ask that you skip slide six, consider your racial identity just for time purposes and move to the what inspires you to show up. So I asked you to think a little bit about the why earlier today. And I'm wondering if anybody has expanded on their why or wants to come back to their why of why this topic why exploring identity, why social justice, why parenting for social justice feels important to you. Again, chat or out loud, open to it all. Or an emoji, just like, it's amazing how good we have become at reading emojis. Anybody thought about that? I think about that a lot. Like emojis can tell- I still struggle. I can't read most of them. Some of them I have no idea. I think I just make it up. Like I think I tell myself a story about the emojis I see but it's amazing that people communicate. I have friends who communicate only in emojis. Sometimes I'm like, I hope I'm understanding this. Tanya has shared in the chat in ways or in many ways what is normal? As in my world, there's nothing normal but I had to find what normal is to me to fit in society in general too. Especially for those like myself who are dealing with an invisible disability that most of us are born with. Thank you, Tanya. Thank you. This is a great question to ask kids. I ask this all the time. I find all kinds of ways to come up with it. What is normal? I love that question. Kids are amazing. I write you to ask the kids in your life this question, what does it mean to be normal or what is normal? Because it really gives you a little window. So often, most kids are like, there is no, like they'll start and then they'll go, wait a minute. But no, I know somebody's in there. I don't think, generally they come to like, I don't think there's a norm. But somehow at some point in our trajectory of life, we internalize some, there's some normal. We've all come to that. And then we feel a sense of like, I don't belong because I don't fit this sense of normal. But little ones, you ask them, they start to speak and then they find themselves like, I don't think there is one. So it's somewhere we learn there's some normal. And so this, I find that just a fascinating question and a way to begin to kind of unravel, right? Unlearn some of what we've learned and help kids make sense of it. So thank you for that. Anything else in the chat? Sarah brought up the children's book, How to Be a Lion. I love that book. And Kristen says, I feel like my white upper middle class self would have found her way to social justice work so much sooner. If my parents have the skills to clue me into the oppressive ways of the world starting at a young age, I feel proud and hopeful to be doing things differently with my own kid. Yeah, related to that, Chrissy, I have a question for you. Do you have any advice for an approach to speaking with young children about the bad ways humans treat other humans? Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, I always, it's like, these are the things I've tried, right? I, one of the things I find, I'm always really conscious of not, and it's hard, right? A conscious of not vilifying people, right? I want my, I want, I know I try to do this and I want my kids to sort of ask the question like why has someone chosen to behave this way? Why? And I want them to be curious about how other people arrived at the place that they've arrived. And so I often, I think I often use books, right? I often use picture books of like, why might have someone treated that this way? Trying to think of recently we were watching, were we watching? Oh my gosh, my three year old is obsessed with the Grinch, even outside of the Christmas. Like we, the Grinch never dies in our house. He's present all year round. And we, there's actually a new, there's like a new Grinch movie that I think is really neat, but it actually sort of tries to tell the story of why the Grinch is like this. And essentially it's like he was a foster kid and he's alone and like he watched Christmas happen and he never got to have Christmas. And it became this great opening of like, is he a bad person or just he just like really hurting inside? Right? Is there something that he learned about this holiday? So I find that trying to kind of ask the question of why is this character treating this other character this way? Why might people, what might somebody have learned? What might somebody have, why it might be a motivation? Can we see the motivation in the book that at least be, I think is the in road to not saying like, these people are just bad. They're just terrible people because I really actually believe that there are very few terrible people out in the world that like we are misinformed or we are hurting or we are, right? We are perpetuating something we've learned. And so I guess my biggest advice is to try to help kind of get the nuance, get down to the what might be the reason and what might be the learning and how can we still approach somebody who does terrible things to someone? How can we still have somewhat of an open heart? It's hard, right? Like I'm going to be the first person to say it's really, really hard. A kind of funny story I'll quickly try. And actually I won't tell that story looking at the time because I want to leave space for you all. But it's hard. And so I think trying to help kids see that people are nuanced, that we learn, we learn, we learn hate, right? We learn how to, we learn to be mean. We learn to hurt other people. And often their means are something that is hurting inside of those folks, right? And so I say to my kid every day when he goes to school or whatever, be kind, be curious and stick up for people. I want him to always stick up for people, right? Like you can't change the person who's being mean, but you can be the person who stands up. You can be the person, even if that's quietly, even if it's that going to that person and saying like, that wasn't really nice, right? So be kind yourself, be curious about why people are the way they are and why the world is the way it is. And then you stand up for people because that's what you have control over. I love that. Hopefully they do it. I don't know. I wonder if, if others have questions for Chrissy. She's going to share a comment from David. This has been so full of clarity and light. David's thanking you. Chrissy, but there's also some like myself, even for others, who's dealt with trauma within the home. Because they, because that's what Noel said earlier, that some of us found out our identities later in life. But then the parents knew, but they did not tell the children as they were growing up. And there's a lot of that in society that we're dealing with a lot of baggage that we did not, we did not get the tools for our parents to learn how the reason why or the behaviors we were doing. Hey, I was just a quiet kid. I was just looking back and didn't say much because I knew that my own mother, there was abuse in my small life. I didn't see any more when I was born with, but then never bothered to tell me to my face or explain nothing to me. But I'm not alone in that. There's others caught the same thing as well. And so I thought I'd just say. Yeah. You know, thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable. I think, you know, one of the things that is true. I think you're very right, right? We've all got wounds and baggage, whether it's like really personal at home or bigger wounds that the world has given us. And I think one of the most important parts and one of the ways that we help build a more just world is that we have to heal. We have to find ways to heal. And the book actually, we share healing practices that we find useful because healing has to be part of the journey, right? We've got to heal the wounds so that we can, we've got to heal those wounds so that we can then not pass them on to our little ones in our lives. And so throughout the book, you'll find that that was really important to Angela was to, to find, to, to for us to share the practices that we found healing. And I try and share those practices in age appropriate ways with my children, right? Like we, I, my son got to go to Puerto Rico, my family's from Puerto Rico to Puerto Rico for the first time last year and we went into the rainforest and like took a moment and just said like, thank you ancestors. It's because you did, you, you were right here and that felt healing, right? We washed ourselves in the river of the, of the, of the rainforest of El Junque. And we, we like imagined our ancestors and we said, thank you. And so really finding things that feel healing, that help repair the wounds, the pain, the pain, the pain, the pain. And so we can, however big or small is important part of the work. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Well, hold on a second. It's okay. I was just saying, I looked like there was maybe a question in the comments now. Oh, thank you. Oh yeah. Sorry. Chris, so one of the things that I do with both of my kids is we have kind of a little altar in our, in our home where I have, you know, pictures of my grandparents that they've never met. I invite them if they're people important to them and their lives, whether they're people in our family that we know, or whether it's like a hero to kind of add to that. And we use that space as a space to just like check in with ourselves to breathe. I do some meditation practices with both of my kids just as around like, I think it's so important. Well, one of the exercises we didn't do was sort of reflecting on something and naming feelings, right? Really naming emotions and then kind of finding some ways to breathe through those emotions. So those are sort of two ways that I, I try to teach my, my, my little guys, I was going to say students, they're not my students. My little guys to kind of take care of themselves. So I think that's so important. One of my favorite healing practices is actually in the chapter. It's, you might be familiar with it. If you're familiar with any kind of Buddhist practices, but it's a practice called touching the earth. Where you sort of read, there's the, the sort of facilitator will read like kind of a thank you or an acknowledgement of an oppressed group, maybe naming some of the sort of famous voices we know from that oppressed group. And then you sort of bow and touch the earth and say, thank you to those ancestors for the, the work that they put in that allows you to be here. And sort of you read through many different oppressed identities and some of the people who, the ancestors who have helped educate all of us around that oppression and just touch the earth around it. It's in the book. I can share with Mel maybe later a link to, to a version of it if folks want to try it. And then Angela has also put in some ancestral healing practices in the chapter as well. So I can, I can share those with, with Mel. But I think finding what works for you is just really important. Thank you. And Steve just has a thank you message in the chat. I appreciate how you wrap all of this together. Thank you. And I agree. I mean, one of the things that I, I most appreciated in reading this book was how seamlessly the intersectionality was woven in that it wasn't just a chapter on racial justice or gender justice, disability justice. I mean, it was all everything. And even as then in, in what you shared when you read, that's, that's, that's how the book is where it's like everything. Cause like you said, you're, you can't separate these things. Yeah. Yeah. We talk about them discreetly kind of out in the world, but they're just not, right? They are. Complete as we all know, complex humans. We're. Layered and nuanced. In early COVID. I had the opportunity to hear. Angela Birkfeld and Jamie Lynn. I'll present at my child's elementary schools, parenting group. And I bought the book right after right away. And I just wanted to share that around that time. I was going to pick up my, my child from preschool. And as I approached the play yard, I saw her physically marginalized, like up against the fence. Not part of the group. And in that moment, I, I just. The urgency of this. This world being so much better than it is right now. Yeah. And I, I, your, your, your book gives me so much hope about what can be. So thank you. Thank you. I agree. It's, I, I find that. I feel like I'm not sure what my kids are hoping. So I like spending time with them. I'm like, I always feel like, okay, I feel better about the future of our world when I'm with children, we, we're going to be okay. If we can just keep, keep you all on the right track, right? Well, thank you. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and, and, and, and everything that you've shared with us today. Thank you all so much for having me and for being vulnerable and and trying out the exercises. I'm really grateful to you all. I feel like I've taken away some learnings here. I've got a great community here, so thank you. All right, everyone. We'll see you next week. Next week is a book chat. Eric Garcia's. All right, we'll see you.