• Start building cultural awareness through exploration of individual and family identity
  • Learn and practice the use of mirrors, windows, and doors language to relate to others’ experiences
  • Learn how to mix paint to match skin tone
  • Take the opportunity to think about shades of skin in a neutral or positive way
  • Increase comfort level in noticing and talking about skin tones
  • Appreciate and celebrate one’s own unique shade of skin
  • Appreciate different tones within the family
  • Understand there is no biological basis for race
  • Understand that humans made up race and racism
  • Understand that some humans benefited from the ideas of race and racism and some humans were harmed
  • Question our penchant to define our own experiences as “normal” and everything else as “other”
  • Understand that all members of a common group are not the same; membership in a group is only one aspect of a person’s life experience
  • Understand that there are some parts of culture that are visible (surface culture), some that are partially visible (shallow culture), and some that are often invisible (deep culture)
  • Understand that each family has their own unique surface, shallow, and deep cultures, as well as individual self-identify
  • Understand that we don’t know a person’s story by looking at them
  • Become aware of the patterns and stories that our brains automatically generate
  • Introduce the language of assumptions and stereotypes
  • Offer a tangible reminder to look at stories & people from multiple perspectives – the view changes as we move
  • Introduce the implicitly biased idea that “white is normal” and everything else is “other” – build awareness of our white-centered world
  • Introduce and define the language of racist ideas and antiracist ideas
  • Begin to understand how implicit bias, generational wealth gaps, racist laws and the history of chattel slavery led to racial inequities in the United States
  • Learn that enslavement and suffering are not the only narratives of the Black experience, just as there is no single “Black experience”
  • Begin to discover that Black people used joy and resistance to reclaim their humanity