Anti-Bias Education at Home

In this virtual session, Britt Hawthorne, an anti-bias/anti-racist educator and mother of two, discusses strategies and tools to help us approach anti-bias education at home. Check out Britt’s honest, thought-provoking presentation in the video below.

Britt Hawthorne (pronouns she/her) is a nationally recognized anti-bias/anti-racist teacher-educator. Britt partners with action-oriented educators, creating classroom environments that are inclusive and equitable for all learners. Her work seeks to move justice from being an idea to the authentic culture. Britt is also the co-creator of the Instagram #antiracistbookclub.

0:00 Katie Mack: Okay, hello everyone, and welcome to Unity Hour. For those of you who may be new to Unity Hour or The Mom Project in general, my name is Katie and I'm on the Community team here at The Mom Project. The Mom Project is committed to building a better workplace for women, moms and caregivers, and we do this by pushing for more equitable career opportunities and supportive workplaces.

You may have noticed that we have taken a few weeks off from our Unity Hour programming, that's because the past few weeks and months and centuries, if we really wanna get into it, have been overwhelming, challenging, heart-breaking, inspiring, enraging, from the devastating impacts of Covid-19 and its disproportionate impact on women and minorities to the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and that doesn't even fully include this week's news cycle...catalyzing collective action against hatred and racism in America. A lot has happened to open people's eyes, minds and hearts in new ways, in recent months.

At The Mom Project, we've been spending a lot of time listening to our community and exploring what we are doing as an organization. While we don't have all the answers we do know that it's our responsibility to make change, to build a better workplace. We are actively working to better prioritize, mobilize and accelerate actions to advance under-represented minorities. We're doing the work and we will report back to you all and everything as we make meaningful progress. As always, we invite each and everyone of you to contribute your voices to this conversation and we’ll provide opportunities to collaborate with you all so please stay tuned for more from us on that front.

We also want to acknowledge one unique thing about The Mom Project community that really leaves us feeling hopeful. We are moms, we are dads, we are caregivers, we are individuals that assume roles that require us to think beyond just ourselves and our own needs. We put others first, we look at things from a perspective outside of our own. That is powerful, and we need to leverage that mindset and mentality to push for racial justice and real change, not just for us, not just for our kids or our family or friends, but for everyone, starting right now. The changes we push for today and the things we fight for now will certainly be felt by us, but even more so by the next generation. and the thing is, we're the ones raising the next generation, from the tiniest infants to young adults who are getting ready to step out into the world on their own.

2:55 Katie Mack: We are the ones they look to and learn from, and that means it is up to us to nurture a future generation that is filled with leaders who are bold and just and fair, and that work starts at home. So to those of you who are here today, Juneteenth, thank you. Joining today’s conversation is an important step forward as we all strive for racial justice. We are thrilled to have Britt Hawthorne here to lead today's session anchored in anti-bias education at home.

Britt is a nationally recognized anti-bias and anti-racist teacher educator. Her work seeks to move justice from being an idea to being the authentic culture. Britt is also the co-creator of the Instagram #AntiRacistBook Club and the mom of two boys. We'll be answering community submitted questions during the last 15 minutes of today's session as time permits and we encourage commitment to listening and learning during today’s session. Thank you all again for being here, and I'm really excited to introduce you all to Britt.

4:02 Britt Hawthorne: Thank you so much Katie I really appreciate the warm introduction and hello to The Mom Project and the wider community. I'm honored to be here. As Katie said, I'm a nationally recognized equity trainer. I work with classroom educators across the country, really seeking to move this idea of what is anti-racist, anti-bias into authentic culture and into action.

Personally, I am the mom of two boys, 13 and 7, and we call them artists, and I homeschool our youngest one as an act of resistance, and our oldest one goes to our local public school. And so we are intentionally creating an anti-bias, anti-racist home, and that's what I'm gonna actually chat with you all about today is how do you prepare a home environment that is in fact intentionally affirming your child’s many identities. That is embracing differences, that is helping them to recognize what is unfair and what is bias, and then also how do we help them to advocate for themselves and for their friends, for their neighbors, either individually or collectively. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen.

5:05 Britt Hawthorne: If y’all wanna just pop in the chat box and in the comments, just a, Hey, where you're calling in from... While I go ahead and share my screen. Today we're going to talk about the four goals of anti-bias education for children. These goals go for children birth through 18, and so it doesn't really end, it doesn't really matter where you have a child on that spectrum. Hopefully, today we'll be able to address your child's particular concerns.

We are gonna focus on understanding the development of racial and ethnic identity, I'm gonna talk a little bit about some other social indicators and the ways that they are being developed in our environment, but this is definitely going to be a race-based conversation because as Katie has already intro’d, we are having a lot of race-based conversations and we have caregivers, families that are reaching out saying, How do I in fact talk to my child about race, and how do I in fact talk to my child about racism, and then we'll talk about some activities to support, and then at the end, we're gonna take some questions from y’all so we can make sure that you leave feeling like I have some next steps of what to do.

Stop & think questions

6:18 Britt Hawthorne: So the first thing I have are some stop and think questions, and they come from a book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves. The authors of the book are Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olson-Edwards, and they are really the creators of the anti-bias education framework. And I love for us just to kind of stop and reflect because often times we wanna do this work for our children, and when we have to really stop to say I'm gonna do this work with my child, meaning that I also have to do the work on myself as well.

So the first question I have is, what is your earliest memory of noticing people with different skin tones, eye shapes hair texture and hair color, and did any adult help you think about racial differences? And so if you feel empowered to put it in the chat box if you want... Maybe you're thinking and you're like, I can't really remember, I can't pinpoint it. Or for some of us, we have a distinct memory and we also oftentimes remember the reaction of the adult in our life and just drop that down and hold on to that for a second.

7:17 Britt Hawthorne: The next question is, What messages did you receive or did you get either directly or indirectly from your family? It could be your faith-based community, media, school, any outside component? What messages did you get about differences? About skin color, about eye shape, hair texture? And know that silence is a message as well. Then our last one is as a child, what did you learn by talking about those differences, and how do you feel talking about them today? I ask these questions because we're gonna get into what the research tells us is that young children, in fact, notice differences very, very early on. And I won’t give you a spoiler just yet about how early on, but very, very early on, they notice differences.

And as they become more verbal with their expression three, four years old, they start to then express these differences because they're curious and they're trying to figure out the world around them, by figuring out other people helps them to figure out who I am, by who I'm not. And oftentimes, when we were young and we mentioned differences, we were either met with silence, we were met with hushed shushes, we were met with someone saying, Sh! We don't talk like that, we're all friends, be nice.

And that we then internalize those feelings of I did something wrong, maybe I was bad or I said something that was bad, we felt guilty, or what we may have learned was what I said was right, but it's not to be said out loud, it's not to be said in public, but maybe just around the dinner table. And so I want you to stop and think if you're an adult in your child's life, do you want to be an adult that helps your young child to think about differences, to accept and embrace differences, to love who they are, and also equally love how someone else shows up in the world as well.

9:14 Britt Hawthorne: To be able to say that I believe you are you, I trust that you are you, I love that you are you, and you have every right to be here in this world sharing space with me too. And so that's the first part of engaging in anti-bias work at home, is you have to be able to say, I wanna be an adult in my child's life that helps them to think about differences in a healthy developmentally appropriate way, but I'm not gonna shy away from it, and most importantly, I don't want my child to leave a conversation feeling guilty or ashamed for really just asking a question. If you wanna know more, again, this book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves is a great book. It is geared towards educators, particularly early childhood preschool educators, but there's a lot of solid information in there if you're into books.

Language

10:04 Britt Hawthorne: The next thing I wanna talk about is a little bit about language. And again, we're gonna really center the conversation around race today, and I notice a lot of times when I have these conversations that race and ethnicity are oftentimes conflated and they are really two different words and they're not synonyms, so we're gonna talk about race first. Race is a social construction. Race is completely made up, it's a political, economic and social construction, and there's no science that backs race, there's no biological differences. So when people say there's only one human race, that really means there's only one human species. We don't have sub-species, there's no one that is inferior to another one at all. Over time, the way that we have categorized race has changed and race is fluid. It's not static in ways that oftentimes we were taught in school. Race is fluid and it depends where you live in the world for how people categorize race. Right now, in the United States, according to the US Census, we have five categories for race. We have black and African-American, we have American Indian and Alaska native, and I do...

11:12 Britt Hawthorne: I've heard from the indigenous community that they do prefer the term Native American or indigenous... But this is the way that the US Census does code it. We have Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander and White. The easiest way for me to describe race is that race is your racialized identity, it's the way you present to the world, but it doesn't always make sense in your heart, and it may not be how you feel... How you want to be identified. Race oftentimes is just an easy way for us to categorize people, for us to make assumptions, and for us to collect data...

Again, that doesn't mean that there's truth or accuracy in race, and the reason why we talk about race is because we do have race-based outcomes in the United States. And then you have ethnicity. Oh, and oftentimes and someone probably in the chat box right now saying, What about Hispanic? And I'm glad someone brought that up. So Hispanic is not considered a race, it's actually considered an ethnicity because you can be of Hispanic descent and be of any racialized category, which is why when you fill out an application, you'll see it will say, Hispanic White or Hispanic Non-White.

12:22 Britt Hawthorne: So they're trying to figure out your ethnicity and your race. So then you have ethnicity and ethnicity is much more real, it's your cultural... National racial group, there's things that overlap, it has to do with your language, your religion, the clothing, the food that you eat, where your ancestors are from. You could have two people of the same race, but of different ethnicity, so you could have two people that have... For instance, are racially black, but one may be African-American or Black-American, and another one maybe is African Caribbean or Afro Latino. And so they don't always match up.

And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So you and your child, in fact, have both. You have a racialized identity and you have an ethnicity... I was just in a conversation with someone the other day, and they had a question, they said, Well, if I'm Italian... What... Where is that? And I said, Well, Italian could be your ethnicity, Italian could be your nationality, what’s stamped on your birth certificate, but Italian is not your racialized identity, you might be White Italian if you present as a White Italian, but you could also be a Black Italian. So it just depends, you have to know your own history, what your birth certificate says, Your family, and what connection you have.

"How Diverse is Your Universe?" Activity

13:45 Britt Hawthorne: So I have a quick activity for us to do, and it's called, How Diverse is your Universe? There's a great book that just came out a couple of months ago, it's called Don't Look Away: Embracing Anti-Bias in our Classrooms, and again, this is a classroom-based book, but they have a very similar activity in here and they call it Lemonheads... and it’s another candy, I forget what it's called. And so in this activity, if you have a sheet of paper or maybe even in your sticky notes on your laptop, we're gonna complete this.

First, I need you to think about what is your racialized identity... Again, going back to those five racialized identities here in the United States, again, if you're somewhere else international and you're joining us, you'll have to find out what are your racialized categories because they're fluid, so you decide what is your racialized identity? For me, I'll use mine as an example. My racialized identity is Black, and so I'm gonna put the Black right here, and then my partner and put his racialized identity, my partner is Black, and then my children is or are...

14:49 Britt Hawthorne: So right now, I'll have you identify your children, and later on we're gonna talk about why it's really important for your children eventually to self-identify how they see themselves, because we all get to self-identify, no one has the right to identify you, but for the purpose of this activity, you can identify your children. And then you start to think, my children's elementary school is predominantly... So think about their peers. My children's teachers are mostly...

And if your children are in early childhood in pre-school, and so there's a lead teacher and an assistant teacher, think about, Is there a racial hierarchy at play even in the classroom? Is there a racial hierarchy in play between the salary teachers and maybe the support staff? So could be bus drivers, sub-Tran drivers, cafeteria workers, crossing guards, and folks who receive benefits and salaries. Most of my children's close friends are, and when we think of close friends, we typically think of the children that are coming into our home that we're having play dates with that we communicate with the families, they have continued relationships. Most of my close friends are... My doctor is... My children's play dates are with children who are...

16:09 Britt Hawthorne: And so play dates are ones that we're going outside of the home instead of coming into the home. People who regularly visit my home are... And my neighbors are... And think about just again, predominantly, so if you're able to count a group of people, we know that they then are a minority within that community. And this is just to give you... To allow you to take stock of how diverse, in fact is your universe, how diverse have you prepared your community to be with your child so that they can in fact embrace differences.

Or are they only having very superficial or artificial relationships with, let's say maybe just through books or through media, through television or something that's more constructed? Let's say if your child goes to a Magnet school or a choice school, and so the school district has really, by design, is trying to create an integrated life... If anyone has any a-has about that one or like... Oh, I hadn't really thought about it. If anyone ever also Googled how integrated is the United States, I think you’ll be quite shocked at the lack of integration we have across the United States.

17:22 Britt Hawthorne: Myself, Again, I'm based in Houston, Texas, and Houston, Texas in one of the most racially and ethnically diversities in the United States, and we're also one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, and you can go into our zoned public schools and see that segregation is very prevalent. So then the next thing I want us to talk a little bit about is just young children, and one fact, are they noticing... Going back to what is your earliest memory of noticing people of different skin tones, eye-shapes hair texture and hair color, and we oftentimes think that young children aren't noticing other people, that somehow people are presenting as either a mirrored image or they're presenting as being transparent or translucent, and we say, children don't see color.

When we know, in fact, we ask very young children all the time to categorize things, we ask them to categorize things by colors, by shapes, we might have them match socks together, we might give them an odd amount of buttons and say, Can you sort these... And we watch how they sort them, we have them sort letters and sounds, so we ask young children all the time, 'cause it's really healthy brain development categorized. So when they see us, they are also categorizing and they're having really healthy brain development and they're noticing they're curious, they're aware and they're absorbing.

18:49 Britt Hawthorne: We know that very young children zero to six, in montessori we would call that the absorbent mind the absorbent stage because they're just... They're like a sponge, they're just absorbing all of these things and they're drawing conclusions either accurately or inaccurately about what they're noticing. The next one is threes and fours. I'm hoping everyone has a chance just to kind of go through... And has a chance to see this. But the next one is threes and fours, again, we have gender and sex identity, there's differences and similarities... Physical difference and similarities. Racial differences and similarities, and cultural differences and similarities. I'll give you all about 15 more seconds just to read through it...

And so what's really important is at three and four, because now they're more verbally expressive and they are... They're wondering and they're curious. This is where now the curiosity comes out and they start to ask questions. They wanna know, Is my skin color going to change... Will it get darker? Will it change to my daddy color or my mommy color, and this is a really great age that we wanna make sure that we are not instilling a sense of guilt or shame in our young children, but we are also responding with curiosity.

If someone says, if your young child says is my skin color going to get darker? And I'm like, you respond with Darker, like what? So really having just that back and forth of trying to help them understand and also you not jumping to assumptions or conclusions and being like, Oh my gosh, my child doesn't like their skin color. That might not be it. Maybe there's someone that they admire that has a darker skin color, or they are literally just curious, like how did I get the skin color?

20:40 Britt Hawthorne: The next one we have is fives. And something else I wanted to mention about skin colors in Anti-Bias Education, and zero to six, we don't have the conversation about racism, we do have the conversation about skin tones. So when a child is about six or seven is when we can start to introduce the conversation around race, because that is a social construct, we also need to give our young children the historical conversation, historical context of how in fact was race created here in the United States?

Again, race was created to divide people, race was created for a social, political and economic advantaged for some and disadvantaged for others, and so a child really needs to be around six or seven before you engage in that conversation. That's not to say though. And again, we're gonna do some research here, I think on my next slide... Nope, not yet. It's not to say though that young children will say things that are inaccurate, they might say something like a very common statement is, maybe you drink too much chocolate milk and that's why you're darker, or maybe God was angry when he made you, and that's why you're darker.

21:56 Britt Hawthorne: And so just because we're not gonna have that hard conversation about racism and what that is, doesn't mean that we can't correct, and we can say actually, their skin color is darker because they have more melanin than you... Everyone has melanin, some have more melanin than others, and your ancestors or your family will tell you how much melanin you're going to have, so we can correct it, we can interrupt it and we can help them draw an accurate conclusion, and a young child is like, Oh, okay, and we can move on from there.

The four goals of anti-bias education

22:28 Britt Hawthorne: So we have four goals of Anti-Bias Education, and so for my families, my parents, my caregivers, these are four goals that we want to try it and instill in our child in our home, but also in their school setting, their faith-based community, any other community that they're a part of... We want our young children to gain a self-awareness, confidence and pride in themselves and self-love. That's the first goal, and we spend the most time right there. The next goal is we want them to embrace and celebrate differences and develop accurate language to understand diversity. From there, we want them to identify unfairness and bias, have language to describe inequity with young children, we use the word unfair and understand that bias hurts.

23:12 Britt Hawthorne: And then our last one is be empowered to advocate against prejudice and bias. Again, these are developed by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olson-Edwards. And this work has been around for, gosh, a handful of... Handful of years now. Really since the 1980s. So now we're gonna talk about, okay, we understand that. How are we gonna make it more practical?

There's this video by Sesame Street, if you’re a Sesame Street fan, put it in the chat box, I'm a huge Sesame Street fan, and they have so many great videos, we're not gonna watch this one today, but this one here, they're talking about skin tone, and you have Elmo who's affirming his fur, and you have Lupita who's affirming her skin tone and saying that she loves her brown skin tone, so we think about... My child has many identities, they have personal identities, which is like their name, their age, their personality, their likes their dislikes, their interests, their hobbies.

They also have social identities, even from a very young age, they have a racialized identity, they have a gender, they have... They possibly will have a religious or spiritual affiliation, you may not have one, but they have a socio-economic status, they have all of these also social identities that we have to also think about how in fact can we make sure our young children have competence and pride in who they are and their family.

We want our young children to embrace and celebrate differences, so we do that by start talking about ourselves, and our young children will start talking about themselves, and when they start talking about themselves, they're gonna also ask their friends about themselves so we get people talking about themselves with each other, and that's how you can share accurate language with one another.

24:57 Britt Hawthorne: We read books. Again, there's Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who coined the term, “windows mirrors and sliding glass doors.” We need books that are windows for ourselves. I think of this book here: Ana and Andrew by Christine Platt. This book is a mirror for my child Cobe who’s seven. He gets to see himself in this book and be affirmed, but this child might be a window for Katie's children. Katie’s children get to watch and read a book that's going to be able to watch somebody else's experience and sliding glass doors is a little bit of both.

It's important now as we read, as we're selecting books that we're also looking at who's the author? Who's profiting? 'Cause this goes into some more of advocating work, but who's profiting off the story? Are they of the said community? Because we know if someone's of the said community, they're more likely to use accurate language, listen to music from different cultures, if you have a Spotify or a Title account, browse through and see how much music from other cultures, again of the said community that you're listening to. Also think about providing dolls and figurines, black people with different skin tones and features in your household.

26:10 Britt Hawthorne: I don't know if I can easily access... I have some materials here, you can purchase these skin tone art supplies, and so there's these faces and they have different skin tones as they read books, they can say, can you draw a picture of the main character? They have also this crinkly hair, if you all can see this crinkly hair, and it's a different hair color, they have colored stickers for different colored eyes, and so again, we're raising awareness, we're giving them language, so it's really important to provide diverse drawing materials to your young children. There is... See if I can grab it here. There's these Skin Tone Crayons that you can purchase that have just an array of skin tone, you can have them match their skin tone, can you find your skin tone... Can you find your friend’s skin tone? Can you find the skin tone of the main character? Here is an example of things that I always recommend, not just educators to have in their classroom, but caregivers can have in their home as well.

27:20 Britt Hawthorne: The next one is identify unfairness and bias, and have language to describe inequity, and understand that bias hurts. Look, 3 to 6-year-olds do an incredible job with calling us out as adults and saying something isn't right, they are truth-tellers, they tell the truth. And so they oftentimes will ask questions, Why do they live underneath the bridge, why do people need money to... Why do people need... help to buy food? They want to know why. The biggest takeaway for this one in anti-bias education is we always system blame instead of person blame.

And I'll give you an example, so why do people live? Why do they live under the bridge was a big question, we had actually from our eight-year-old when we first moved to Houston, and instead of trying to come up with all of these very individual explanations it’s simple as, well, Houston doesn't have enough affordable housing. Houston doesn't invest in affordable housing, and so people can't afford to rent an apartment, to purchase a home. And that way it's going to help us in the next goal of, Okay, what can we do? How can we advocate? Same thing with, why do people need help to buy food? You know what, in Houston, in the state of Texas, we don't have a livable wage.

28:40 Britt Hawthorne: You may live in a community that has a livable wage, but here in Houston, we don't have a livable, and so people have to make tough decisions of how to spend their money. Or why do I have to cut my hair? Is maybe another big question. This one here isn't necessarily a system blame, why do I have to cut my hair? That might have to be a question that you have to ask yourself of, why am I asking my child to cut their hair? And Gosh, am I asking my child to cut their hair because of my own preference, am I asking my child to cut their hair because they're hair is in their eyes and their teacher is complaining that they can't see the board? Am I asking my child to cut their hair because of maintenance?

But some of these we have to really also respond with... I don't know. Can I get back to you on that? Or, Okay, I'm gonna write it down, I'm gonna think about it, I'm gonna set an alarm, and I'm gonna come back to you tomorrow and respond to you. And that is a really big lesson for our young learners to approach this with humility and to be able to say, I'm gonna research that, I'll come back to you.

29:43 Britt Hawthorne: And then the last one is be empowered to advocate against prejudice and injustice, and again, this can be either individually or collectively that they can do it, going back to the last example of, well, Houston doesn't have enough affordable housing, a young child might say, well, why not or what can we do about it? You can say, Well, I can vote for better policies, we can write our Mayor, we can write the City Council, we could support our local community efforts, Habitat for Humanity, people that are building houses. So there's lots of things when we’re system blaming that a young child then can turn around and say, We can help out.

There's thrift stores that offer vouchers for people who recently...recently got a house and so they need help furnishing the house, so we can say, You know what, let's purchase some things, we can donate to the thrift store or we can... If we just received, let's say some new dishware and our dishware before is perfectly fine, Okay, well, let's make sure we're going to donate that to the thrift store because this is a collective action, we're being community. Some other things you can do to make sure that your young children that we're instilling that sense of advocacy, is making sure our young children especially our girls are able to say, Stop it. As caregivers, we also need to model this.

31:00 Britt Hawthorne: This is a big one I see on the playground. When pushing happens, shoving happens, someone's trying to take someone's turn. Making sure our young children know how to say, Please don't take my turn, right, You may go when my turn is done. That's a big one that we worked with with our young one of... When he went to go down the slide, I would notice that girls in particular would try to go in front and other parents would let the girls go in front like, Oh, let the girl go first. And in our household, we don't have that rule. We have the rule of You may go when it is your turn.

And really instilling that sense of, we can all share the slide. Again, pushing is happening, shoving is happening, they're throwing mulch, they're throwing sand because they're having a great time, and they're not trying to cause harm to anyone, they’re literally having a great time. And it's okay then to remind the children, we have a safety rule and have them remind each other, Hey, we don't throw sand because we have a safety rule. And then another... Oftentimes we'll hear Hey, it's Mother's Day or Father's Day actually is coming up here, and I need to figure out what we're doing for Father's Day, but Father’s Day is coming up here, and someone might wanna... and a child might wanna make two Father's Day cards.

32:12 Britt Hawthorne: Maybe they have a step-father, maybe they have a biological father, maybe they have an adopted father, maybe they are a family where they have two dads, whatever reason we have two fathers...in a tone they might say That's not fair. You can't make two Father’s Day cards. And we all get to be different is a great way to respond to advocate against that pre-prejudice that could be developing. And just and continue to encourage our young children to solve a community issue, something that is local happening in your community.

And we've seen that with the beautiful stories coming out of the Black Lives Matter protests and children making posters. We actually just saw one on the way home today in the window, we've seen children going out and they're marching, they're creating their own marches in their neighborhood going around, shouting, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. So, encourage them. Continue to solve a problem together. So just to recap at home, we want our children to have self-love, we want them to be able to embrace differences, we want them to be able to recognize unfairness and advocate against it.

33:28 Britt Hawthorne: Katie, how are we doing on time?

33:33 Katie Mack: We're okay, we have 10 more minutes or we can go a little bit longer if we end up going a little bit over that’s okay. We’re good for now.

What families can do at home

33:41 Britt Hawthorne: Perfect. So some things that families can do at home, this comes from an article from teaching young children to reduce bias, you could Google that article and it’ll pop right up. But some things you can do at home right now today is that you can recognize that we do live in a biased society, we live in a society where many biases exist, and that is not just around race and ethnicity, it's also around language, it's around socio-economic class, it's around gender, it's around ability.

Right now, you can provide multiple messages through books and dolls and toys and wall decorations that are disrupting stereotypes, making sure, going back to that, How Diverse is my Universe, show no bias in friendships, in doctors, teachers and other service providers that you have the opportunity to choose knowing, I understand, especially with the healthcare, sometimes we're locked into a health insurance plan, but be mindful of what is the society, your community that you're preparing and think about the stores where you shop... Katie already had said, it's Juneteenth today.

So intentionally think about... We went to our local black owned coffee shop, and the line was out the door. Think about shopping at black-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, minority-owned businesses as well. Make a firm rule that a person's appearance is never an acceptable reason to tease or reject them, and that goes beyond just what they're wearing, but how they look, how they sound, if they have a different vernacular or dialect in a way, and immediately step in when you hear your child behave in such a way, and notice I said When you hear.

35:18 Britt Hawthorne: Because you will hear, if we're really, really listening, our children have drawn conclusions and they have watched, they have watched teasing happen in media, they've watched teasing happen with other friends, so when you hear it immediately step in and interrupt it, and not just with children, but also with adults as well. Continue to affirm your child's personal and social identities, provide opportunities for them to interact with other children. Thinking about the playground, we have a great playground, we have a few here in Houston...one in particular, it's created specifically for children who have disabilities, disabled children.

And that playground is open to all. So think about ways in which you can have your young children interact and sustain relationships with differences. Respectfully listen to your children, answer their questions, don't ignore, don't change the subject, and also don't make your child feel bad for the way that they're... um asking the question, and a great way to know if you did is just ask them.. How did you feel...How did it make you feel when I responded to your question? Children are truth tellers, they will tell you.

And teach children how to challenge biases about who they are and give them tools to confront those who act biased against them, and I'll give you a quick example of our 13-year-old. When Coronavirus had first hit the United States, I knew in fact that there was going to be...he's in middle school. I knew in fact, there was gonna be a lot of anti-Asian racism that was happening, even though it's a very small population at his school.

36:48 Britt Hawthorne: And so Teaching Tolerance has a great free document called Speak Up at School, and they help educators, but you can help your child. Four ways of how to interrupt, and so I gave them some examples, gave them tools and then we role-played and practiced. How would you interrupt? How would you question... How would you respond to or who would you report to when you hear anti-Asian racism as well. Okay, I know that was a lot and I think we have some questions.

Q&A

37:22 Katie Mack: We sure do. Okay, and actually, Britt, I'll connect back with you to get the names of all the titles that you kind of highlighted during this conversation and we can email that out to everyone after the fact. Perfect...for reading on their own. And then also, are you able to share the slides? I probably should have asked this before. We're getting a lot of questions and just people can... This will be recorded and they could be watched, but for people who wanna maybe do the work and print it out.

37:52 Britt Hawthorne: Yeah, you know what I'll do, is... How about if I share the slides on my platform? And it will be open source. Is that okay? And I'll share the link for where I will share those slides, but I will get to you, Katie, the book recommendations that I made, and also some links to where they can purchase the materials for The Mom Project for easy access. Right.

38:11 Katie Mack: I'm sorry...yeah there's a lot of interest in reading up and obviously…

38:18 Britt Hawthorne: It's a whole new world!

38:19 Katie Mack: Yeah, awesome. Well thank you to the community. You guys submitted a lot of really great questions as part of your RSVPs for today's session, so we'll try to get to as many as we can, there are a lot of them that would require an hour just to get started on the very... the very tip of the iceberg, so we'll get into a couple right now. And I think a lot of people that RSVP’d today seems like they’ve heard of Britt and have been following for a while, but we saw a few questions about how your work...you've spoken a lot about language in the past, can you highlight particular mistakes that you see parents normally doing when it comes to using different words or phrases?

39:05 Britt Hawthorne: Yeah, so some of it I have already touched over... during the presentation, number one mistake oftentimes is the silence is by not actually engaging in any of the language, and the silence is... It speaks volume. And so making sure that you respond in some way, even if you just respond back with curiosity, with a question, or you respond back with humility to say, that was such a good question and I can't wait to tell you the answer tomorrow and follow back up with them. Again, person blaming. When children are having questions, unless you know the said person-specific history and all of the ins and outs, do not try and respond by saying, Well, there are some people and then these people, and then that people, and then maybe that person.

But continued to system blame so that your child, you can then work in goal number four of advocating, how can we fix it? Another one, sometimes there's this hyper-focus on positivity and kindness, and in our household, we're creating what's called a brave space versus a safe space, and in a brave space, that means that we have a hyper-focus on truth and justice. And so knowing that truth is a gift, it's a gift of love, when someone gives you the truth, they care enough about you and to receive that.

40:28 Britt Hawthorne: I think about the difference. I think about going to Chick-fil-A, we are here in Texas, and Chick-fil-A is huge here. And if you've ever been to a Chick-fil-A, you'll know that it is full of kindness there. You go through the drive-through and their like, Welcome to Chick-fil-A, it's a beautiful day, it's 89 degrees and it's just so much kindness. But in the values of the business, it is not justice at all, and so making sure we're always emphasizing is what my child saying the truth? Is it accurate, and is it focused on justice, and if so, we're gonna move through with that.

Be specific about your language, if you're talking about race, say, I'm talking about race people say you know, Oh, I want my child to have diversity or experience diversity, and I'm like, socio-economic diversity, racial diversity, gender diversity. So be really specific. Model asking people, how do you identify? Sometimes like, I don't know how they... Just model. Asking, how do you identify racially? Model asking, could you remind me your pronouns again?

My pronouns are she/her. What are your pronouns? So modeling that one and just honestly, having a sense of curiosity about language and welcoming new words because it just opens our minds and hearts, and language itself is a social construction, so it doesn't have to be fixed, it can be as fluid as we want it to be.

41:53 Katie Mack: Well, really powerful things. And I think you feel like you're doing a good job, but then there's always more that you can be doing to help...

42:05 Britt Hawthorne: Yeah, love that you said that, Katie, because...I’m just...I’m gonna share too... becoming anti-bias, anti-racist is a journey. It is never a destination. And like Katie said, we're all doing great things. And there's always things we can do more. It is a verb, it's something we do. It is not a noun, it's not who I am, but it's who I'm trying to become. And so I love that you said that kinda goes along with even the word ally, and ally is not a noun, it's not something that's static or fixed, but it's something that's dynamic in every decision that I make, I can choose to be an ally or I can choose to be complicit in a situation.

42:52 Katie Mack: So the next question we had was, do you have any advice on preparing our kids to have tough conversations with grandparents, teachers or authority figures who may make racist or revised comments?

43:07 Britt Hawthorne: Yes. Okay, so one big thing is making sure that you have the same working definition of what is racist and biased, and so making sure your family has a definition to be able to identify what in fact is racist. I use the definition from Dave Wellman, racism is a system of advantage where white people are advantaged and people of color are disadvantaged. Again, it puts the onus on systems that's institutionalized and through policies.

A lot of anti-racist folks, and the most commonly accepted definition among anti-racist folks is personal prejudice and the misuse of power. And so it's the way... It's my beliefs, it's my prejudice, and then how I hold power that I'm able to enact those beliefs on one another.

And so the reason why I use the system advantage is because it has to be in order for something to be racist than it has to be in fact, a white person that's enacting their power. It can't be a person of color. So a person of color can't be racist, but they can have discriminatory actions. And this is where I think sometimes we are like, Oh gosh, the language, it's so much. So making sure you have a working definition for what is racism, a working definition for what is bias. Bias and prejudice are synonyms, so you could use those interchangeably.

44:36 Britt Hawthorne: And then once you have that, some ways to...when young children, their first, they're going to play... I'll use the word play. They're trying out that word racist. Particularly around fourth grade on up, you'll start to see young children use the word “that's racist,” that kind of phrase, and they're practicing calling out discrimination and they're also practicing calling out meanness. And so some ways that you can respond, again, I'm sure everyone's gonna guess curiosity right there, and being able to say if it is racist and you believe your child, agree with them.

You know, yes, I agree. Right next to them in front of... Papa, right in front of Nana and be like, I do think that's racist, but really challenge your child to say, How is that prejudice and power, or can you identify who's benefiting from a system or supporting the system? So really support the learner to think critically as they're calling someone out and also ask them What could we do, or what do you wanna see changed? What do you wanna see Papa say differently or do differently?

45:47 Britt Hawthorne: If it's not racist, affirm the learner and saying, I see that, or affirm your child saying, I see you're trying to...you're looking for and your investigating racism, but if it's meanness, you should just say, No, that person's being mean. That just was unkind or that was rude, you know, but what made you think it was racist? Could you tell me more? Could you tell me about a system? Reminding our young children, but also reminding us adults that being called racist is not a slur. It's not a name call, it's not something for you to feel bad about. Being called racist is really identifying a person who has been given the privilege or the immunity and to benefit from... And they're misusing that.

And so if it's meanness, call it meanness. If it is racism or if it's something else, if it's really sexism, say, Oh, it sounds like you're talking about the system of where men are benefiting from the system versus other people... I was gonna say women, but it could also be non-binary folks and what have you... Is a big one. Some other things I wanted to say is going back to my example with Carter. Make a plan. Role play. Practice. It's so hard oftentimes for even adults for us to call each other in, so practice that with our young children, give them tools to interrupt.

47:19 Britt Hawthorne: How do we interrupt a joke if you hear a joke, if you're at around the dinner table and you all got together for monthly birthdays and someone says a racist joke, practice with your child. The way that we interrupt that is by questioning, could you explain that joke to me? And that really kills the joke, like everyone's like... It's not that funny, is it? Make sure you support your child when they are interrupting right there and you just... Kind of what Katie's doing right now.

You just nod, right? And if people don't wanna hear what your child has to say, then amplify what your child is saying and say, You know what, I would like my child to repeat what they're saying. I trust my child, I believe my child... What could we do differently? Focus on not just calling it out, but focus on also the action of, what do we wanna see change?

48:16 Katie Mack: Yep, I think that's important. I think it's great, and I think even a lot of adults are still learning how to be... Hold up. Stop right there. But also what outcomes beyond just that, you know what I mean?

48:30 Britt Hawthorne: Exactly, like what do you wanna see their language change. Did you want an apology? Sometimes it's like we just want it to be known that there's no tolerance, we have zero, zero intolerance in this house that that's not going to live or breathe. A big thing that I try to get across is speaking the truth just means that you're ready to solve the problem. But speaking the truth doesn't mean that you're the cause of it, and someone who pushes back against that just means they're not ready to reckon with the truth.

And so that's really, really powerful. It's just, I'm saying the truth to you, because I'm ready to solve the problem. I didn't create the problem. You maybe didn't create it, but you're definitely perpetuating it, but we could change it.

49:20 Katie Mack: Yeah, that's a really great way to kind of phrase it to people who might otherwise just shut down, so I really... I like that a lot. The next question was, and this is something I'm sure you could go on and on, considering this is your wheelhouse, how can we support anti-racist policies and education? Whole wide world!

49:48 Britt Hawthorne: Yes, this is my wheelhouse! Okay, so how can we support anti-racist policies in education, a really big one is for parents and caregivers, really demand your school and your school district to have anti-bias, anti-racist training for all faculty and staff. So anyone who comes in contact with your child who's going to say Good morning or Have a good day, demand that they will be trained.

And it's really important that it's anti-bias, anti-racist training and not a diversity training, not a multiculturalism training, because those trainings just say We're trying to get people who look different together, but those trainings do not go into inclusion and how do we actually... Once we get people together, how do we make sure everyone feels safe, everyone feels brave, everyone is welcomed, and everybody wants to stay in that space.

So make sure that training is about seeking to build an awareness, and then also that there's some action steps, next steps with that too. You can advocate or you can create a racial justice committee... I'm going to say racial justice because this one is a race-based conversation, but it could be any type of justice committee. You just need a really small group of passionate folks who wanna push policies forward.

51:04 Britt Hawthorne: The justice committee is not the same as the book club. The justice committee is saying, we all acknowledge the fact that we live in a racist, biased society and we all want to be a part of that change. They feel really hot and fired up about it. And so start that committee. Your book club, or your kind of community building can be something else, your community can have a community building... Ask your school if, Hey, can we start a community building group that can focus on folks getting to know each other, reading a book, So You Wanna Talk about Race or Becoming Anti-Racist, or Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

And it can be a place where you do a community pot-luck, of course, when it is safe, not Covid time, but that's where you might have people who are warm or even cold, and I usually call warm people usually are just unconscious and cold people are resistant. That is not who you want on your justice committee, because that means you're only going to work at the pace of your most resistant person, which means... No, work is getting done, right? So vote things that you can do individually, vote to fund public schools.

52:19 Britt Hawthorne: That's a big one. Don't vote to close brown and black schools in your local community. Advocate for school choice instead of zoned schooling, because again, school choice and Magnet schools will allow for integration to happen in your schools. Zoned schooling is gonna allow for the continued segregation that we already have based off what zip code you can afford. Demand that your PTO share their financial resources with other poor schools that are raising less money, again, if you live in a poor school district in a poor ZIP code, and so that means their PTO is going to be able to...their funds are correlated to property. So share your PTO money, donate that, redistribute that to other schools.

You can also think about if your school doesn't have a lot of black teachers, think about ways that you can start a teacher training pipeline with your school district and a fellow HBCU, or if it's a predominantly white institution, their Black Student Union. Again, that's really working to empower black educators, and when we think about the word empowerment, we think of it in two parts. One, I trust you to do the very best you can do, and I will give you the resources you need to do your best.

53:38 Britt Hawthorne: And that itself is empowerment, so if there's fees that are in the way that maybe we could do a T-shirt drive to raise money so that teachers can pay their fees for basic skills or content. But start the conversation with admin, think about ways that parents and caregivers and the community can together come up with a justice committee, also build community, invest in public schools, and think about the ways in which you're voting and how your vote is going to impact the most marginalized.

54:16 Katie Mack: I mean, when you lay it out like that. We all have tools that you could go and leverage right now to make an impact it’s just reframing what you're prioritizing or thinking about, so that's really, really powerful. That kind of rounds up some of the submitted questions we had, We did... I did see one, a couple of interesting questions pop up in the chat just about particularly for maybe some of the younger kids, in terms of starting these anti-racist, anti-bias conversations, how much of current events to pull into those conversations with kids that are maybe on the younger end of the spectrum.

I know you said a little bit like a lot of those more detailed pieces shouldn't come out until six or seven, but there were a lot of questions about that like they're taking their kids to rallies and protests right now, like how to kind of talk about it with their kids.

55:15 Britt Hawthorne: Yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and share just my contact screen, my final slide as I respond to that one, 'cause I know people are gonna hop off soon, but that is a really good question, and so we might go over a couple of minutes on time, but that's a super important question. Number one is, there's no hard or fast rule for that. You have to know your child, you have to know where they're at with their self-esteem, how they're feeling about themselves, how they feel about their identity, you also have to know how sensitive your child, you're young...and when I say young children, I'm talking about children, six and younger ways in which we do talk about...

And I will give my example of how I talked to our seven-year-old about George Floyd is I first showed him a picture of George Floyd in his football uniform. And I said, Do you know who this is? And Cobe said, I don't know. And I said his name was George Floyd. And I said, What can you tell by looking at the picture? And he said, Well, he likes football. I said, He does.

56:09 Britt Hawthorne: And Cobe said, I think he's... I think he's dead. And I said, Why do you think he's dead? And Cobe said, the picture is in black and white, so it must be really old. So, I'm starting, starting to draw some conclusions to where he's at. And I said, Oh well, actually the picture just happened to be in black and white, but he's pretty young. And I said, he likes football, he's actually here from Houston, he went to high school and Third Ward. We've been there before, and he’s like, Okay.

And I said, And I wanna tell you something has happened to him. And Cobe already knew because we have had conversations, and he said, did the police murder him? And I said they did... They did murder him, and so right now what's happening is you have people that are mobilizing and resisting and protesting the brutality in which black men experience from the police. And so I had offered Cobe, if he wanted to, I always offer some type of art. Do you wanna make a card or Do you wanna draw a picture? And he’s like, No, I'm gonna go back to my book, who would win? And we move on from that.

57:09 Britt Hawthorne: So when we do introduce it to young children, we wanna focus on the individual in which the oppression they experience, that we humanize that story as much as possible and we keep the blame on the system. There's nothing in that situation that George Floyd did wrong and quite frankly, in any of the other cases, whether it is Mike Brown or Philando Castile, there's nothing in that situation... Those people did wrong. We continue to blame the system and the ways that the system has failed us and the ways the system can improve. So that's really important.

It is also equally important that you spend the bulk of your time, if you haven't already affirming your child’s identity, start with goals One and Two. Again, so that their first experience... If I'm speaking to a white person right now, and their child has had a limited experience with black folks. We do not want their first experience to be this cycle again of oppression, and we've had this story now for 400 years of the only times we talk about or know about black people is when they are experiencing oppression, it's so important that young children and us as adults, we understand that every single person, black people included, come from a place of power.

58:24 Britt Hawthorne: Before we talk about the oppression in which they experience. So you don't really have to get into any of the hard details, you don't need to get into the details about how he was murdered. We need to identify the unfairness and recognize that that hurt and in George Floyd's case, and the other people that you had mentioned, Nina Pop and Tony McDade, the ultimate hurt with their life. And then how can we in fact advocate and what can we do about it? Hopefully that was helpful to the community, just to understand how to have the conversation and move forward.

59:01 Katie Mack: Amazing, thank you Britt. We so appreciate your time and energy and insight and expertise on all of this. If you can't see it, it's up on the screen, but please support Britt on her Patreon. You can continue to learn there and unlock additional resources. Follow her on social... Yeah this was 60 minutes. I mean, you can't cover that much in this amount of time. So we hope, regardless of where all of you out there that tuned in today, wherever you are in your path, whether anti-racist, anti-bias conversations, were already happening in your home, or if you're just starting to build your path, we hope that this has really helped you to just stay on the path of continuing learning and helping you continue to push for justice.

But yeah, no, thank you. Just a quick housekeeping update that I'm actually going out on maternity leave, so you won't be seeing my face on Unity Hours for a little while here, but you will see Colleen and my colleague Hiba, she actually heads up all of our incredible social, so she’ll be leading these sessions as well, over the course of the next few months. So, as always, we really excited for that, and then just as always, we are here to support all of you.

So please, please, please feel free to reach out to us with any topics you would like to have us cover during these sessions or suggestions of what we could be doing better, people you'd like to hear from, we wanna hear your voices and reflect that into the program, and what we offer here in these sessions, so feel free to drop us an email at Community@TheMomProject.com at any time, and we will certainly respond to you. Again, we're all doing this together. So thank you, and thank you again Britt this was really, really helpful.

1:01:03 Britt Hawthorne: A big thanks to The Mom Project community for having me engaging in the conversation, and thank you all for being here.

1:01:12 Katie Mack: Thanks, Britt, we’ll talk soon.

1:01:12 Britt Hawthorne: Bye, everyone!

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