The stem of greatness sprouts from the seed of sacrifice.

—Kedar Joshi, Astrologer

As the roots anchor the seed within the soil, a small plant begins to emerge and breaks through. This is the sprout. The sprout is a testament of the successful coalescence of soil, seed, and roots. The sprout is the beginning of recognizable and measurable growth. Some seeds, like peas, radishes, and watermelon, sprout in days, whereas other plants can take years to push through the soil. Artichokes can take over 2 years to show signs of growth and asparagus up to 6. While we still have more growing to do, the sprout indicates that we are, in fact, growing.

Before we share our stories of sprouting, we want to make you aware of something that inevitably stalls growth. We've witnessed this time and time again: the refusal to decenter or reprioritize White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), patriarchal, colonial settler, Manifest Destiny contrived tellings of history. We understand that a skewed, Eurocentric version of history was standardized for consumption in schools. However, we have the opportunity to teach content that is more historically accurate. We've watched parents and teachers resist this opportunity to expand as they've quoted this at us: ​​“History is always written by the winners.”

A quick Google search of this quote revealed that this theory was advanced by Leigh Teabing, who was later found to be unreliable and mentally unbalanced. Teabing surmised that when two or more cultures fight, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history—stories that glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered.

The holes in this winner-takes-all theory are harmful and numerous. First, all intercultural communications and interactions are not necessarily conflict based. Though we are oversaturated in our understanding of colonization, not all people groups felt the need to conquer and dispossess others to survive. Also, recorded historical accounts of African and Indigenous civilizations that existed long before and alongside Europe are available and accessible. Choices have been made to deliberately exclude those lived experiences, contributions, advancements, and culture. Furthermore, prioritizing European and Western conquests, colonization, and contributions as normative behavior reinforces violence as a method of cultural cohabitation. And in doing so, we place a higher value on European and Western people and ideas and render those they exploited and oppressed as a necessary consequence. In other words, education has been used to teach how to esteem White people and how to devalue BIPOC.

As we challenge fixed ideas about history, we inevitably have to deconstruct our racial, cultural, and ethnic identities. While it may cause cognitive dissonance and be painful, deconstructing from harmful norms is good for us. Centering excluded voices and stories is essential to cultivating justice and belonging in all of our spaces. BIPOC contributions, resistance to oppression, liberatory actions, joy, and ordinary daily existence are American history and whose presence must be normalized in the teaching of American history. Remember, diversity only seems alternative within a White supremacy modality. In reality, diversity is quite normal. Learning something new and unlearning something old may cause discomfort. But don't allow a weed of resistance to spring up and choke out your potential.

Lucretia

Because we are an interracial couple, my husband anticipated our children would field many inquiries about their racial identity and experiences. We also understood that we—a Black woman and a White man—would need to give our multiethnic children different tools from the ones given to us to navigate our hyperracialized society.

My husband, Nathan (Nate), was born and raised in the small town of Indianola, Iowa, where he had little lived experience with people who were not White. His father pastored a rural church that literally had corn growing on three sides of the building. After Nate finished elementary school, his family moved to the city of Des Moines, Iowa, where his dad pastored a racially diverse church whose mission was to bridge ethnic, cultural, and denominational divides. Nate says that at the time he didn't know what ethnic or diversity meant.

I, on the other hand, was born and raised in the South in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Desegregation laws had been in place for several years before I was born in a segregated Black hospital in 1971. While my formal life (school and work) was racially integrated, my familiar life (home, neighborhood, and church) remained segregated. Our neighborhood, once predominantly White, went through a period of White flight shortly after we moved in. Moving in and out of spaces that still bore the markings of Jim Crow segregation required me to be well informed about how race/ism works in our lives.

My husband and I met while attending Iowa State University, where I was in graduate school. Our friendship developed as we worked to racially integrate a campus ministry. When we married and anticipated having children, we intentionally had conversations about race, racial and ethnic identity, opportunities for growth, and challenges our multiethnic children might face. Nathan and I developed a lens and framework for how to address and educate them about the fallacy of race as biology and the realities of racism as a social practice. We wanted them to understand the racialized society in which we live while also equipping them to thrive in it and help change it for the better.

Within the loving, just, and belonging space of our family, race did not matter, race did not segregate us, nor did it mandate more opportunities for Nathan and dispossess me. But we did not pretend that we lived in a postracial society. As soon as our first child articulated our skin tones as different, we took time to expand her vocabulary and understanding. As a preschooler, she observed that we are all shades of brown: “Daddy is light brown, mommy is dark brown, and I am medium brown,” she announced.

We expanded her understanding by teaching her about melanin, ancestry, and how skin color reflects her ancestor's geographic origins. Instead of reinforcing and conforming to the Black–White racial binary, we read nonfiction books and stories about skin color as various hues of brown. Later, when she was school-aged, we taught her about race/ism in a way that her young mind could process and understand it. We explained how and why rules were created to sort people into categories, called race, and how races were given abstract names: White, Black (historically, Negro). These race-based rules were established to benefit those racialized as White while unfairly depriving everyone else.

As we educated our children, we did not victimize or demonize people. We taught them to see the racial, social construct—defined by unfair rules—in which we live. Because as a family, we developed literacy, competence, and awareness, it has not been difficult to teach and learn the ugly history of racism or talk about current racism. We did not have one big conversation about race, where we downloaded four hundred years of history in one sitting. Consciousness, inquiry, and learning unfolded over a million small conversations contextualized within the moment. For example, as our daughter read the Addie series books (American Girl), we took the opportunity to expand her understanding of American chattel slavery and its connection to race/ism.

Some time later, as our daughter learned about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists in her kindergarten class, she needed more context to understand the need for their work. At that time, we taught her more about policies and practices that continued to shape advantages for White people and disadvantages for Black people. Two years later, when we began to officially celebrate Loving Day, we introduced her to the Loving story. Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple, were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., but when they returned home to Virginia, where interracial marriage was illegal, they were arrested. When she learned about miscegenation laws, which enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage, our daughter became very upset. She yelled, “It's not fair that race laws say who gets to be born and who does not get to be born!” In that moment, I felt two things. Though my heart broke for her, I felt relieved that she was upset instead of indifferent about injustice. And I was awestruck that at 7 years old, she clearly understood race as a construct that determines lives and livelihood. Without me explicitly telling her, she realized that without the actions of the civil rights movement, she would not exist.

Our commitment to equipping our children with understanding and language came in handy when other families—many of them multiethnic by adoption or by marriage—began asking advice for how to address race. We found that parents were no longer willing to settle for the colorblind approach or oversimplified anecdotes regarding differences in skin color. However, parents did not feel competent and confident about integrating skin tone, phenotype, and race awareness and language into everyday life. “What if I say the wrong thing? I don't want to scar or scare my child,” were the concerns we heard the most.

Because parents were both ready and cautious, I began cultivating a space where we could grow competent, conscious, and confident together. I called our learning community Brownicity to reflect the belonging and justice we wanted to foster. Brownicity is a hybrid word, formed by combining Brown and ethnicity. Brown represents melanin, the pigment we all have in our skin—darker skin tones have more, and lighter skin tones have less. In general, ethnicity is the concept of belonging to a social group that has commonalities. So Brownicity—the word and the agency—holds that though we've been racialized, all humans are a hue of brown. Essentially, as expressed through our tagline, we are many hues but one humanity. This framework set the intention and vision for fostering connection as we grew awareness of and de-aligned with divisive, racist ideas and narratives.

Brownicity launched with meetups attended by parents from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Together we blossomed in our understanding of concepts and practices to help families navigate our racialized society in healthy ways and equip our children to thrive. Our common aspiration, willingness to learn, and commitment to action fortified our just and belonging space. We built community around a shared fundamental understanding of race/ism, a common language, and a mutual assertion to raise socially conscious—as opposed to racially colorblind—families. As we've grown into an official nonprofit education agency, Brownicity's mission is to foster education designed to create a shared understanding of race/ism to inspire a culture of true belonging and justice for all.

But even as a small group of parents and teachers, we gathered to address important practices like how to talk about, take care of, and honor various hair textures. During our Hair Affair event, we learned about and shared our favorite hair products most suitable for our various hair textures. We shared best methods and resources for normalizing conversations about skin tone and race. We also engaged in local learning opportunities like Racial Equity Institute's Dismantling Racism workshop. We attended events like Race—Are We So Different, a traveling exhibition that explores the science, history, and lived experience of race/ism in the United States, and Point Made Learning's I'm Not Racist Am I?, a feature documentary about how this next generation is going to confront racism. Committed to a journey, together we persistently took one action step at a time, one after another.

Our confidence and reach grew. A teacher and parent at our children's school invited me to lead a conversation with parents about how to talk about skin tone and race with our kids. I was amazed at the turnout. Parents showed up, brought their questions, and leaned in. They needed validation and encouragement to counter colorblind ideology, which they knew had deprived them and their children of basic understanding and context. They knew being silent about phenotypic differences and racism was not helpful but needed someone to affirm their intuition. We encouraged parents to start simple, build a foundation of understanding, and then grow from there. It is impossible to do all the work at once. Yes, some seeds, like lettuce, sprout quickly, but growing into antiracism is more like a carrot seed. It starts small and takes time.

Tehia

My family and I were reading a book at bedtime, and my 4-year-old son noticed that the characters in the story had brown skin like him, and he was excited about it. The work my partner and I had been doing to make sure our sons saw their brown skin as positive was paying off. However, I realize that simply repeating something will not be enough to make them proud to be young Black boys. We knew the work we had ahead of us, but it felt good to know that the seeds we planted to affirm their beautiful Blackness were beginning to sprout.

My own sprouting happened over time. Over the years, I became more aware of my Blackness and intentionally focused on it once I arrived at Bethune-Cookman for college. Being around the diversity of Black folks broadened my horizons in many ways. Learning about my history and the history of Bethune-Cookman founder Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune transformed my thoughts and understanding of myself and my people. My classmates were from across the globe—Florida, Georgia, Bahamas, Haiti, New York, Chicago, and of course San Diego. Our experiences—what we thought, how we talked, dressed, and ate—were different, and we appreciated each other for those differences. I realized that Black people are not a monolith.

I majored in elementary education, and after graduation I became a second-grade teacher. During my K–12 experiences, I didn't see myself in the curriculum or in the pedagogical approaches used in the classroom. There was no validation of my Blackness, or in the ways my teachers treated me. Therefore, I wanted to make sure my students had better schooling experiences where they had opportunities to see themselves in what they were learning in an affirming way. I wanted to instill in my students the same racial self-love that I acquired at Bethune-Cookman. While keeping within the required state standards, I tried to focus on Black history as much as possible. We took field trips to Bethune-Cookman, and I had my classmates and other city officials, newscasters, and other community members of color visit my classroom. I wanted my classroom guests to serve as mirrors for my students. They saw and heard from accomplished people who looked like them.

Revered scholar and author Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) shares that literature should be an opportunity for children to experience windows and mirrors in their world—mirrors in which they get to see themselves affirmed and as assets to the world and windows through which they get to see into lives, experiences, and communities that are different from their own. Books and media that are mirrors help children feel seen, heard, and valued. Meanwhile, windows help children broaden their perspectives. As we offer children windows and mirrors, we must be mindful to avoid reinforcing a deficit-oriented perspective of BIPOC characters and lived experiences. We need to provide young people with literature that goes beyond a Eurocentric purview. Instead we must offer windows into the assets, creativity, contributions, resilience, and joy of people in spite of colonization and oppressive systems.

Because I was struggling to find diverse books for my boys, I knew teachers would struggle as well. One of the projects I conducted focused on helping elementary teachers select books that were more racially diverse. I created a rubric for teachers to use as they selected books to use in their school and classroom (see Appendix C). I conducted a series of professional development (PD) sessions with teachers where we dedicated time to explore their school and classroom libraries. We looked at the populations of students who were in their class, moved beyond race, and looked at ethnicity and nationality. I pushed them beyond the category of Asian and explored resources to see that students were Vietnamese and Hmong. We looked to see if children in the classroom were represented in their classroom and school libraries. Were there books that talked about Vietnamese and Hmong families? We looked for the mirrors. Then we looked for the windows. In this PD, children of color needed to see themselves reflected in the literature, and White students needed to see beyond their world.

Mirrors and windows can be offered beyond books and media. Children talk with one another, watch the news, or listen to you engage with other adults. These are teaching opportunities. For example, when you have active shooter drills, fire drills, or dangerous weather drills, children are given an explanation. These drills are meant not to strike fear into children but to prepare them. In the same way, students can explore the legislative debate on firearms in our country and compare and contrast with legislation in other countries. We can help children understand the dialogue around global climate change, how the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged low-income communities, and why we have food drives during the holidays. Along with the what, who, when, and where, our children deserve to know the why. The mirrors and windows we provide for our children allow them to make sense of their world.

A former graduate student of mine, a fifth-grade teacher, offers a great example of how to support sprouting and help students explore and learn from life outside the classroom. There was a controversy in another local school district about what was considered “banned hairstyles.” All the hairstyles that were banned were styles that Black boys and girls would wear. As a Black teacher in a predominantly Black class, she and her students were offended by that district's rules. The teacher turned this display of overt injustice into a lesson. She used the English language arts standards to help students reflect on what the banned hairstyles meant for them, as children who wear the styles listed. The teacher facilitated the conversation so the students could talk about what was happening and came up with ideas to not internalize the school district's racist stance.

* * *

How to Sprout

Start by practicing with your family in your home. Boldly break the skewed and limited boundaries of WASP, European-centered tellings of history (United States or your European-colonized country). Humanize people, stories, and lived experiences of groups who have been traditionally marginalized and oppressed, viewed as complementary, or ignored to prioritize and legitimize Whiteness. Incorporate literature and media that act as mirrors and windows to a diversity of experiences. Remember to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes and single-story narratives. Explore current events to help children understand multiple perspectives, feed their curiosity, sharpen their research skills, and actively participate in society.

Then expand to your friend group. Commit to intentional growth. Identify your local, immediate needs. Our needs were to overcome the casualties of color silencing and shaming, normalize diversity within our common humanity through media and field trips, equip ourselves and our children with a framework to understand our racialized society, and incorporate healthy language to form belonging perspectives. You can do this, too. The influence of your friend group will hopefully extend into your schools, where more parents and teachers can be invited to participate.

Identify like-minded peers, coworkers, and friends who are willing to commit to a learning journey as well. So that no one in the group feels the pressure of being the expert, look to well-designed educational resources like courses, teaching videos, expert-led workshops, and events. Choose well-designed, learning-centered opportunities over the common but less helpful discussion-centered gatherings. Such plenary-type events focus on story and opinion sharing only and usually don't offer the guided instruction or developmental process necessary to sustain growth. While making space to hear and share personal stories is significant, human interest stories, as we call them, cannot serve as your only source of education. Engaging in cross-racial conversations to solve race/ism can be helpful, but attempting to do so void of understanding race as a mechanism is emotionally taxing. Personal stories expressed by individuals or news headlines invoke an emotional response but often offer no historical context and can feed into anecdotal misunderstandings. Feeling pain over injustice is good. However, simply being angry or sorry does not sustain growth or change anything. We have left these types of sessions feeling depleted and discouraged.

As parents and teachers, we know that learning is a holistic process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, understanding, values, attitudes, behaviors, and preferences. And becoming antiracists to cultivate justice and belonging requires us to gain (1) new knowledge and understanding regarding our racialized context and (2) critical thinking skills for analyzing structural injustice, inequity, and unconscious biases. Developmentally designed learning experiences help you build the skills to reach your goals. Pedagogy matters. You wouldn't invite pre-schoolers to engage in calculus. Nor would you send them to a “courageous, community conversation on calculus” event in hopes that they'd master it. In the same way that pedagogy matters in how we teach and learn math, it matters to the same degree, if not more, for supporting our antiracism learning journey. Invest in pedagogically sound educational experiences that support growth and development.

For teachers and administrators, consider the changes that need to occur in your classroom and school policies and practices. Review your staff, student, and parent handbooks. Look for biases that may exist in these documents. Consider who might be privileged and who might be harmed by the policies in place within the school community. Explore school access. Many schools and teachers say they want parent involvement but have predetermined what that involvement looks like or assume that it will look the same for all parents. For example, some families do not have the luxury of attending a school performance, meeting, or teacher conference in the middle of the day. Expectations can be broadened so that parents can connect and contribute in various ways to performances by sewing costumes, building sets, and providing snacks and evening options for meetings and teacher conferences. All parents want what is best for their children. Increasing access to account for varying parent needs is vital.

Reflection and Practice