Reading to End Racism

Posted by Estela Kennen Nov 20, 2006

I spent last Friday participating in my first Reading to End Racism event at a local elementary school. Reading to End Racism is a Boulder, CO nonprofit with national aspirations. The concept is simple – on a given day, volunteers descend on all the classrooms of a specific school, read from a thought-provoking children’s book, and proceed to have a discussion about such hard-hitting issues as racism and discrimination.

When I told someone about it, they asked what grade levels I was talking about. I said every grade level. For instance, I read to a preschool class and a third grade class. Of course, the message is age appropriate – the third graders thought about past legal, institutionalized segregation and current, more subtle forms of self-segregation, while the pre-k class shared a book with the simple and beautiful message that It's Okay To Be Different Afterwards, the preschoolers drew pictures of them and their friends – a rainbow of shades. The third graders had a bigger task – what could they do to end racism. And they had good ideas. Simple ideas, but necessary ones for real change to occur.

I believe that the reading and subsequent discussion made the kids think more carefully about concepts that perhaps they had thought belonged more in the past, or in other places. They found out how it was affecting a classmate. They also realized that people might be mean not intentionally, but out of thoughtlessly following customs. They learned, for instance, that jokes can hurt.

This type of conversation happened in every classroom in a school. In a few months, it will happen in every class at another school. Volunteers share their personal stories as well as the printed word, then facilitate an important discussion. Many people might not think that these discussions need to happen until people are adults, if they happen at all, but by then individuals have built up a lifetime of assumptions, perhaps without even stopping to think about it.

There is, of course, a wrong way to talk to kids about racism – which is why all the volunteers go through training. But we cannot altogether shy away from having the important conversations with our children, who, as a group, may very well have the strongest moral sense of any segment of society. Conversations not just about racism, but also sexism, homophobia, drugs, sex, religion, and all those other often-taboo subjects that are just too critical to have opinions formed with introspection and dialogue.

By the way, the Reading to End Racism program is incredibly fun, too…