 Welcome to another episode of Critical Conversations, where we talk about heart-topic issues related to American Muslims and other targeted communities. Today we are joined by Melissa Jouro and Andrew Grant-Thomas, who are co-founders of Embrace Race. Embrace Race is a national organization based here in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is made up of a multiracial community of parents, educators, and caregivers who produce and share resources on having conversations, constructive conversations, around race and race relations, in particular with children. Melissa and Andrew, thank you both so much for being here. Thanks for having us. Great for being here. Great. So we I think would like love to begin to sort of hear about your personal respective backgrounds and how it was growing up around race for you. What was your personal experiences around that? Sure. So, Melissa, let's begin with you. Yeah. Yeah. So I grew up in the United States with immigrant parents. My mother's French-Canadian. My father's from Dominique and from the island of Dominica, which is not the Dominican Republic. And we're a mixed-race family. You know, we are a mixed-race family. And I grew up in actually in Springfield in the north end in a Puerto Rican neighborhood and had kind of a mixed race, mixed class, mixed schooling experience. And it was just very aware, I think, people who hang out at the intersections, you know, between sort of cultures or who are both, who are both maybe racially as well. I just saw a lot and experienced a lot and was just very aware that things were different, that there was a racial hierarchy and that people were treated, that it was unjust, and that people were treated differently because of it. And I was also aware of my own privilege as a light-skinned person and how that operated in social situations, depending on whom I was with and where I was and as I became an adult and changed environments. Yeah, it was a shield for me, but was something that I was concerned about and wanted to talk, speak out about pretty early. Sure. And so did you personally have any experiences around race and racism? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, just a feeling of, you know, we had, we had, there are so many experiences, I'm trying to figure out what to tell you, but there's one that I, you know, have told about being, my nickname when I was in elementary school because I went to school, to a Catholic school that was mostly white and we had a little car pool of those of us coming from my neighborhood and my nickname very young among really friends was the N-word and lips. So that was something, you know, that really has helped me, I tell that story because it really, my response to it was quite interesting that it really hurt me and it made me feel less than, but I didn't tell my parents. And why is that? Yeah, because, you know, my parents, because we weren't talking about race per se at home, we were talking about, I certainly had a, you know, great examples of their friendship circles and their, our family was very multi-racial, but it still wasn't something we spoke about, it was more something we thought Americans did, like Americans had this black and white thing and we were sort of watching it and sometimes we were caught up in it, but actually it was more about them and I think my parents didn't understand that and it's a problem, I see a lot of, and talk to a lot of immigrant parents who just say, I don't know what to do, it's so different here that they didn't have the tools, they didn't have the language to give me and they weren't getting it from, and I wasn't getting it from the schools or from Americans because Americans had decided not to talk about it as well. Yeah, so I think the reason I didn't tell them is that I felt really ashamed and embarrassed and I didn't want to bring that on them, I wanted to be, you know, a good kid and this was sort of proof that I wasn't. Wow, absolutely and I feel like I'm an immigrant parent myself and, you know, having grown up in Pakistan and came here as an adult, I also find that, you know, when you come from a, like I came from a Muslim majority country and so you walk the world with a certain amount of confidence. Having been part of the majority, you know, large part of your early life, there's a certain confidence that you have and I feel that sometimes our children who are then born and raised here, sometimes immigrant parents can't completely relate to their experiences growing up as racial or religious minorities and so I think there is that gap that needs to be addressed and so thank you for sharing that. Andrew, what about you, what were your experiences growing up? Well, definitely some resonance, what you just said and certainly a lot of what Melissa said too. So, you know, I was born in Jamaica and when I was seven to this country of Jamaican parents, right, black Jamaican parents, Jamaica is an island that has roughly 90% black identified, right, not to say they aren't race issues and certainly color issues, very definitely class issues, but it's very different or it's a very different setting so for my parents, you know, in the mid-70s to come to the U.S. and to New Haven, Connecticut, which at the time especially had a large black population, a larger white population, lots of class issues and they experienced a lot of stuff, you know, a lot of stuff, which on one hand was, I think, bewildering to them, offensive to them, you know, they, my mom in particular, came from some class privilege, right, in Jamaica, so no, that, you know, the roots of this work for us are very personal as well as professional and then we became parents, but yes, the first, the first sort of pillar of it was established pretty early in childhood. Right, by your own experiences. So then what led you to actually begin embrace race? What was a gap or a need that you were trying to address and also what are some of the resources that you shared, what is the programming that you do? So we discovered early on when we had our own kids, you know, I think having your own kids is such a great window into, you know, it's a moment when you're open again to things that you had stuffed down, experiences that you maybe had looked at but had put in the past and when you see your kids experiencing similar things or being, you know, raising them in a place that still where, you know, whiteness is still supreme, right, in everything in the media, in government and, you know, all of it and not just whiteness, you know, but patriarchy is a huge deal as well, but when you see all that, you sort of go, oh no, what do we do? And so we had a group of friends and some work we were doing at a school in Amherst, our daughter's preschool, and we started with them a race and parenting, just a little group so that we could talk about things and in starting that group we realized that there really weren't resources for parents, you know, we have some professional experience dealing with race and equity issues, but a lot of the articles were really academic and the more general articles in newspapers and that kind of thing were really geared towards families with white children, they weren't really geared towards families with kids in targeted groups, so those were the, that's really how we started, we realized that we needed a place to collect those resources and to have even broader conversations across the U.S. ultimately and even internationally. And so is this an online platform primarily and in what kinds of resources do you share and where can people find these resources for our audience? Yeah so it, we're definitely mostly online, let me come back to that just one moment, I wanted to say a little bit about the gaps, you have a question about gaps and Melissa certainly spoke to some of that, but I think it's really important to appreciate sort of the scope of this, not just our work, embrace race work, but the importance of engaging these issues in a really robust way. So yes, it's about the gap that parents find, parents who know that race and identity matters and want to prepare their children not only to be acted on in the world and respond to that, but to act in the world, right? And that's true of course for children of color as well as white children, so most of the resources available are for educators, right, middle and high school educators, as Melissa said. That are resources, yeah. No no, so most of the resources that were that were already out there, right, most of the organizations doing this work in this space are preparing resources for educators, really not for parents, not for grandparents, not for pediatricians, not for the majority of adults who engage children in some way. So a huge gap, right? Huge gap and also you know for me especially coming out of racial justice work, you know, I've done a lot of research and advocacy around race, I think this is one and there's you know huge amount of really important indispensable work happening and I think a huge gap is here, right? How do we prepare our children? How do we prepare children who can be you know citizens in a multiracial democracy, right? The community members of multiracial democracy needs. So far you know we could be doing a lot better and the challenge will only grow as our demographics change. So do you want to say a bit about the resources? Because you asked the question about resources, I don't want to keep dominating. Yeah, I appreciate what you just said and one of the things that we realize in the research is that oftentimes in the mainstream media things are framed as black and white and in fact if you look at segregation and who our friend groups are you know as parents you know and that has an effect on our kids we're often very segregated as groups of color as well, right? So it's not only as Andrew said we're concerned about how our kids are acted upon but also how they act on people unlike them, right? Because they have different privileges as well and they're able to sort of do harm or to understand better and to know better. So those were the two concerns. So the way that we do that with resources is we have monthly conversations. We try to bring up to sort of create and to curate resources that you know speak to this race and parent parenting issue and we get them from lots of different people because it's such a huge area that we couldn't possibly do it ourselves. So we bring in the expertise, we bring in the experience, we have monthly conversations that anyone can join online, they're free, we create webinars, we're moving to podcasts soon, we have these tip sheets where the experts and people have experienced that come on including ourselves create sort of the takeaways, the best practices, what you do sort of an action guide, what you do in your home with your kids and we are present on social media trying to keep the conversation sort of alive as things come up every day. We post a lot and have discussions about racial issues that are very live and we have a lot of other programming sort of coming up. And you have a really vibrant Facebook page with thousands and thousands of followers and everybody's sharing these amazing, amazing you know articles and just the latest research and all of that is really important so I really encourage our viewers to actually visit your Facebook page and also embracerace.org which is the address for your website which is really amazing. So I'd like to sort of shift gears just a little bit and sort of talk about some of the themes that you actually grapple with and you have pointed out that children notice race even if most adults don't think that they do and that it is our responsibility as parents, as educators to sort of create that space and create opportunities for them to have those conversations around race. So can you give an example of how that can be done and how do you begin to have such a conversation? Sure so let me offer two. So one very generally is with books right at the earliest ages I mean you know there's a lot of work around books as windows and mirrors right mirrors for the child where hopefully the child is able to see themselves and windows into the world of other children that they may not be familiar with. So Melissa mentioned segregation yes social segregation, residential segregation, segregation in school. The point is you know we have 330 million people in this country, however many million children and by and large children grow up with and certainly are in the home with people who look like themselves with other children right so they don't have you know we have you know structured our lives collectively in such a way that they don't have access to each other which makes them much more vulnerable to whatever impressions right there might be out there from their friends from school from Hollywood from whatever the source so now a big so books though are away and frankly a relatively safe way right it's harder to reach out and actually connect with another human being it's harder to sometimes feel like you're taking a chance but you know you can go to the library you can go to the bookstore you can pick up a book for your child and that at least gives a partial right bridge to other communities and hopefully a bridge to seeing yourself in your own possibilities if you're a child sure so you said books and was there another one that you wanted to mention sure there you know and then I mean I then I think about really organic opportunities right because yes as you say children see race all the time they notice what they don't what they don't have is a way of making sense of it yes right and you know Melissa likes to talk about and I love sort of this way of thinking about it that there is a conversation that's happening yeah right all the time right that your child is part of the audience for the question is are you you know as a mom as a dad as a grandparent as a teacher are you going to help them make sense of that right so again they notice patterns they're driving in the car you know let's say in Boston yeah right two hours away very segregated city same is true of Philadelphia Washington DC of New York of any number of places so you drive through neighborhoods and oh I look at the window and all the people here are black yeah right all the people in this neighborhood are white all the kids in my school or in my class in school and otherwise of you know so they notice these patterns you know who's dating whom who's you know on what team and what club who has power who has power when I look on television right who do I see when they pan the Senate floor right so the question so they notice all these things the question is how do they make sense of them yeah that's where the action is that's where we can help absolutely and I also feel I mean especially here in this country and I find that that's very different from how it was in Pakistan that you know there is this you know great emphasis on being very polite in public spaces so if a child is out grocery shopping you know a young child say a three or four year old with their parent and if they notice somebody who looks different from them and if they point to that difference the immediate response of the parent is we'll talk about it later or don't say that and I think that's an immediate sort of conversation squusher right there then lose an opportunity not to maybe then have that conversation but at a later stage back home to have that conversation and talk about those differences and I think Melissa you had once mentioned elsewhere about the need you know just to give children drawing paper and crayons and ask them to draw what they see around the table with children of different races different ethnic backgrounds because that can also be a conversation start yeah yeah well I think that the funny thing about what you say about not mentioning it I remember various times even up through uh as an adult people not knowing my background and saying like are you are you you know just looking at me and trying to figure it out and then saying oh no no forget I remember this in college even a friend was uh forget it an early friend and I what I took from that is oh they don't want to ask me if I'm black like that if there's something wrong if there's something wrong with that you know and so that signals to me oh they think there's something wrong with that and that creates a real schism right so so I think talking about it's important I did it's very it's kind of like talking about races like talking about many other things that you do as a parent and the way is to start very early and to sit on the floor with your kid and ask them what they observe right skin color crayons are a great way to have a conversation and draw each other or draw other people when you're reading books a lot of parents think oh I should just read books yeah and they don't actually realize that the book is a starting point for a conversation the book alone is not going to teach your kid about race right it'll teach them some things but not necessarily what you want them to get out of it because they're using kid logic and they're combining all of this other stuff right they're bringing they're bringing a context to the book yeah so you can do things like talk about very early give them the building black vocabulary of talking about skin color what do you notice oh her skin is a little bit browner than yours this one's a little bit more of a you know vanilla this one's a you know just really having those words and the skin color crayons can actually be the words you use as well yeah remember my daughter coming home early in kindergarten they had all the kids draw each kid this is an amorous it was such a great exercise and ask them interview them the five five similar questions like what do you like to eat and that kind of thing and each kid had to had skin color crayons and had to look at my daughter and say and try to figure out what skin color and she got to decide so she looked and said oh I'm burnt sienna and so everyone drew her in burnt sienna and they really looked at her they really saw her and heard her and she came home and said that and I was really thrilled because the message the teacher didn't have to say it's okay to talk about skin color she just did it they just had that conversation and it was very experiential and it made it very natural for them to have that right and you can do that with books as well like oh what do you notice and if they don't talk about race say or skin color say I notice sure I noticed that they're wearing different color clothes and all these things that you've mentioned but no one's talked about this other thing I noticed their skin color is different do you notice that oh yeah that person did it because sometimes kids need permission because they've learned not to talk not to talk about it we're talking about right so that's that's a the beginning of the conversation yeah right with very young children that's certainly I think the right place to start and you know it's important for us to talk to children about how race operates at at least two levels right so there's a sort of physical stuff the phenotypical stuff and that's where we start and then but the real heart of the matter is why is that why does that matter right and it matters because the visible stuff you know the skin color the hair texture all of this and eye shape all of that is taken by by by all of us to mean something right to signal these invisible things right like oh who's really good at math who's really you know athletic you know who's really good at music at language at leading other people at at following other people right being physically all of these this wide range and and the real challenge I think becomes you know why why do we have that connection right let's talk to our children about why people think that these things you can see signal these things that you can't see and what difference does that make and those connections aren't always very positive oh they're very and that's when it becomes pernicious when that when those differences become pernicious and you actually are touching on a really hugely important thing which is they are both yeah right there's always a flip side right so this is where you know we talk about yes we we often talk about marginalization and people of color as if the whole race story was a people of color story right let's talk about black people let's talk about Latinx people we should do that let's talk about why we believe these things let's talk about you know why our schools work in a way that's systematically disadvantaged those groups of people but the flip side is it advantages some yeah right it's not just about disadvantage and and you know changing things and holding people accountable means seeing that full picture absolutely absolutely and I'd like to sort of continue on this sort of theme about the role of educators and their role instead of facilitating these conversations and Andrew I know that you recently wrote an article in which you mentioned a middle school teacher in Florida who gave her sixth graders in an assignment in which they were asked to consider how they feel about certain groups of people and some of the groups that she mentioned were you know you are your new roommate is a Palestinian and Muslim a group of young black men are walking towards you on the street um you are assigned a lab partner who is a fundamentalist Christian you're sitting next to a young man on an airplane who is an Arab so those were the groups of some of the groups of people that she had mentioned in the assignment there was a huge uproar in the community and there was a lot of outrage by parents who felt that their children should not be grappling with these issues and that teacher was subsequently fired um what do you think of that particular assignment as a way to start a conversation and what do you think about the response of the school administration and sort of firing her yeah so two thoughts I'd love to hear what Melissa thinks about this a couple quick thoughts one is on one hand the subject matter clearly right we are embraced race we're having these conversations all the time trying to support people including ourselves to have them effectively uh so the basic idea of engaging this issue of race ethnicity all those identities right sort of invoked in in the teacher's example that topic that subject that space needs to be explored there is a real question about yeah is this the starting right is there is was there any scaffolding in place you know we're talking about six graders that's 11 12 years old uh certainly if this is literally the first time there's been an explicit conversation around these issues that could be very upsetting children may not know what to do with that information certainly by sixth grade they've learned what we were talking about earlier that you you shouldn't talk about these things that it's taboo it feels wrong uh so if literally that's the first time they're having the conversation probably that's not the place to begin a quick word on the administration and the parents right who many of whom said you know essentially we don't want our children exposed to the stuff yeah that's also deeply problematic right and again this is what we're responding to with embrace race your children are exposed already yeah right not explicitly but nevertheless powerfully uh and and I think this teacher was trying to uh was surely coming from a good place maybe this isn't the the the point of departure that she might have used yeah and if you like you know again sort of talking about this particular teacher and we don't know whether there was some introduction to this whole topic before she went into this exercise and I feel like oftentimes you know as just teachers are feeling like they're ill equipped to handle some of these questions as a muslim parent I was very concerned about how 9-11 was being taught in social studies classes or you know in middle schools and high schools just sort of not knowing whether that would actually perpetuate division or if it was being done in a more sensitive way and I reached out to one of my kids teacher social studies and he said I wish we had the training to be able to grapple with this topic which is huge and he said but we have none and I would love to have that training so that we are able to sort of approach it more sensitively but Melissa would you like to add on to that yeah um I would say that um you can't just throw a kid into the pool and expect them to swim I mean I guess there's that that is debatable because some little babies swim really but I was at the pool with my daughter who had trouble swimming and a little one-year-old just jumped right in and we were we were quite embarrassed but um but usually that analogy holds that um I mean even listening to those examples and thinking about we have a sixth grader who has been having this conversation for so long you know that she would get she would understand that what was being said there and why it's probably you know why there's stereotypes being evoked or that um you do need to talk about in this way um so yeah I part of it is that yeah no one has teachers don't have the training teachers are expected to have the training when in fact a lot of the parents who come in and are complaining and got that teacher fired don't have the training either do you know what I mean they're sort of a it's a context in which we're being in which these are really um have been have become hard issues to talk about because and there's a lot of resistance to talking about it so that's the context in which any brave teacher is trying to teach so I think in part parents we need to and that's part of why we're doing embrace race is it's our responsibility to we can't abdicate our responsibility to you know the schools um and I guess another way going back to our earlier conversation about how to talk to kids about this how to ladder up to these conversations um early when you're talking about phenotype right and valuing and saying oh look at this kid has a pretty brown face or just showing that you value right and that you value difference if that's different for you or whatever difference besides doing that you need to talk about what's fair and what's unfair and kids are really tuned into that whether it's you know so-and-so got an extra cookie like they really feel young kids the unfair fair and you can again with books or with situations that happen in the classroom talk about um you know situations a lot of people will read their race book will be about MLK and and you'll hear about all of the unfairness that MLK and many other people of course were pushing back against and kids learn those lessons very early um and can apply those you know if you're using the language fair unfair can apply those to other situations and just learn to have the conversation what are they feeling what is confusing um what do they think is fair or unfair how would you have you ever been treated differently because you know you look different or because your parents look different or because you live in a different place these are all you know similarities that and differences that we can talk about to build empathy I wonder if I could pull back for a moment yes um just thinking about you know half of public school children in this country right right now are children of color right they're black and Latinx and Asian-american etc that will only grow right the what we're talking about and I just have to sort of emphasize the stakes for folks what we're talking about right how they understand the world how they understand each other will shape has already shaped not with the children but with us right their parents their grandparents the what the criminal justice system looks like what housing markets look like what the economy looks like what the military looks like how it performs all of those things and that will continue to be true right and what in fact will be the the role of people of color will only grow as the number and uh and contributions etc of people of color grow if we do not help these children now that that there would be a class of sixth graders in Florida of all places which incidentally Florida has almost exactly the the um racial demographic profile of the country as a whole oh wow Florida right now is the United States in terms of racial demographics that six graders right would have um you know that might well have been the first sort of explicit exposure in school and clearly judging from the direction of the parents at home you know and that this this teacher might well have not had the support yeah she needed you know to do this you know perhaps better than she did if we don't know enough information the judge is a is is a national tragedy right it is emblematic of what's happening across the country and we are we're paying the consequences right now and we'll continue to pay the consequences so this is not a small parochial issue it's huge and as you said it's going to get bigger as you know the demographic changes that we're experiencing in this country as a whole is that is going to grow you know that's going to become even more critical and you know I was so struck by this recent it wasn't a recent survey it was about from about six years ago and it was done of of young people between the ages of 14 and 24 and they were asked just different questions about race and race relations and 48 percent of them felt that it was wrong to sort of even draw attention to somebody who was different from them even if it was done in a positive way and while 94 percent had seen bias around them only 20 percent were comfortable having a conversation about that because the ones who were not comfortable said that we feel if we have those conversations it's just going to make the situation worse we will offend somebody so how do you then create that space when there is such you know um I don't want to use the word uh this is so much fear and concern around sort of saying the wrong thing if you have this conversation I don't feel like there those there are enough safe spaces where people feel even adults having those conversations where they will be branded either as racist if they say the wrong thing or if they ask the wrong question um so I feel like that it's just I feel like a cultural thing nationally that I see a lot happening and I feel like that also stifles some of these conversations yeah yeah no that's a really great point and I in the school context I wish what had happened in that case with that teacher I wish that parents had come in and said and talked about what upset them and sort of worked elbow to elbow with the teacher and the administration and had a discussion right because those are the those are the hard conversations that we need to have and the big feelings and all that that we are gonna are inevitable when we say we're good we need to talk about this you know it makes all of that um it makes all of that happen so but the yeah the real issue is that if we can't there's sort of an orthodoxy about getting it right and the truth is that Andrew and I don't always get it right I mean I hope that's not surprising especially Melissa really doesn't get it right but really like we we thought about having a show called microaggressions that I've committed you know because we do you know and so we need to have we need to be comfortable enough there's some idea and sometimes people who do this work perpetuate the idea that they have the answer you know that they know how to talk about it it's always wrong to x y z and I think we need to try to try to be less orthodox about those things and really have the conversations and do some work on you live in this country you live in this world you're getting these messages that are racialized all the time and that hierarchize people and make it make us more comfortable than we should be with a lot of stuff that's happening in the US you know why is it okay to give some kids subpar education because they're kids of color you know why is it okay to um imprison some kids at the border why is it a kid to okay to ban kids right so so there's this comfort we have that makes all of us um and I'm not saying we're totally comfortable but we all need to examine sort of our own how we perpetuate you know how we're part of the problem and how we can um ameliorate the problem how we can work against it absolutely examine our own implicit biases I mean the good news is that the the kinds of phenomena kind of developments right kids in cages you know the state of public education all of these things um you know the racial turbulence right that of our times which have become really explicit certainly starting with Obama and you know black lives matter and dream defenders and you know escalating uh under the current administration and that's actually opened up some opportunity for a lot of people right so the first thing we need to do is as they say acknowledge that you have a problem and that we need to talk about it and I do think more and more people we're certainly seeing that in our work more and more people are coming and saying you know what um yeah I was when we literally have a friend here and a white mom middle-aged mom three white children who said you know what I was one of those people when Obama was elected who thought good we're done right this race journey is over and she said my jaw dropped over the next two four eight years of the backlash against right and she said I I want to make sure that my children grow up more informed more thoughtful than I was then I had opportunity to be when I was a kid but I don't know what to do because I can't make sense of it myself right I'm completely bewildered by what's going on that's an opportunity though right and this moment is affording that opportunity and yes we're trying to step into it with more and more people right and it is absolutely a moment of reckoning I think for this entire for all of us and the entire country and yes it's terrible to see the social and political climate that we're living in where you know communities of color are so explicitly targeted not just by segments of society but by people in power by our leadership and and it's so hard to sort of build resilience around that but it has as you said created this opportunity where we do have some space to then have those conversations that all is not well with the world and we really need to do some very hard work and both of you are at the forefront of that here in our community and I'm so grateful for what you provided embrace race I wish we could continue the conversation unfortunately we're out of time but I will encourage our audience to please visit their website embrace race dot org also visit their facebook page you will learn a lot as I have so thank you both so much for joining us I just say very quickly we are huge fans of your work you're clearly critical connections it's doing this work as well having incredibly important conversations thank you I appreciate it I hope we will have lots of opportunities to collaborate as well that would be awesome thank you both so much and until next time this is your host