This cartoon from my childhood serves as a wonderful illustration of privilege.

If you haven’t heard about the South Carolina incident in which a police officer body slammed a student for “not turning off her cell phone”, Google it. It stands as a perfect example of what going wrong in our schools for children of color. It is a jarring example of the drastic disparities in the way we handle discipline for Black and Brown children.

Seeing this video, reminds me we must continually disrupt patterns of institutionalized racism in our world, even in ourselves!

10 questions to for Black families to ensure our culture is valued and visible in all our schools.

No matter how humorous, sensitive, or “angry” we explain ourselves, our voices are more often than not ignored… But if a white person says it… well, then, that’s a different story!

Waking up to the #SayHerName hashtag was a brutal reminder that we cannot sit by while black men and women are murdered by our “justice” system.

Folks around me talk in code words to avoid sounding racist and our schools are more segregated than ever. Why I can’t talk about race with my “friends”.

Educating yourself AND YOUR CHILDREN on dangerous stereotypes like these is the first step in uncovering implicit bias that we have all been exposed to, but it’s NOT ENOUGH. We need to replace negative images of black folks with positive nuanced representations of blacks which show the diversity of the “black experience”.

“For something like 75% of white Americans. It’s very hard to put BLACK and GOOD together.” – Mahzarin Banaji, Experimental Psychologist. This quote is from a new film airing tonight on KQED.

According to “the Academy” the only voices worth hearing are vanilla. Here’s what I’m doing to celebrate more diverse narratives in movies!