Welcome library professionals +
program leaders
Thinking about offering a race + culture education program in your organization? Explore ideas, considerations, and resources here.
Getting started:
General resources
”We have all been affected by racial and racist thinking since our earliest social encounters.
Thus, none of us are free from misinformation, discomforts, prejudices, or behaviors that reflect the power relationships of racism.”
Louise Derman-Sparks and Patricia G. Ramsey
We love the above quote because it highlights how we are all learners – each of us on our team are still doing the work of antiracism, and will continue to do so for the rest of our lives.
Along with the resources highlighted in the accompanying slides, we also recommend:
- Project READY, a free, grant-funded resource developed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University, and Wake County (NC) Public Schools. Evanston Public Library staff have been exploring and learning from these materials since 2018 as a result of EPL’s Equity Audit.
- Spending some time looking at your community’s history of race and racism. For example, in our city of Evanston, Illinois, even though discrimination in property ownership on the basis of race had been outlawed, many realtors and private property owners in Evanston used redlining to keep Black people out of most neighborhoods. Understanding historical racial inequities is an important part of this work.
- Reading blog posts like this one by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
- Watching or listening to educational materials such as Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TEDTalk Danger of a single story. In this particular talk, she explains the far-reaching effects of lack of representation in books and media.
- Learning how to respond and intervene to harassment through training like this.
“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist.
Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.
And it’s the only way forward.”
Ijeoma Oluo
Information, resources, + learnings
from our pilot cohort of
Dedicated to the Dream
In 2020 and 2021, some of us at Evanston Public Library began talking about how we could serve children and families around race education beyond the ever-important booklist and occasional blog post. Months of planning led to the creation of a multi-session program for families called Dedicated to the Dream.
Our staff invested a lot of time discussing our goals for the program content and experience throughout our planning process. Here are some of the concepts we hoped to bring to families.
Race and culture education is full of challenges. Here are some of the challenges and strategies we anticipated, considered, and encountered that you may as well.
Click through the slides for more detailed information about our planning process, learnings, and challenges.
We opened the group to families with kids in 1st through 4th grades. The materials were intended for families to do together, so if there were siblings that fell outside of that 1st-4th grade range, we welcomed them into the group as well. Based on feedback from participants and our own observations, we believe that the curriculum is best suited for kids in 2nd through 5th grade, but children as young as 3 participated; families altered activities as needed.
Smaller bites:
Ideas + resources for your library
We are sharing our materials in the hope that our investment provides a pathway for your organization to do some of this work. However, we understand that many libraries and organizations may not be able to commit resources to a multi-month program. Or, you may not have the staff or relationships necessary to do this work responsibly (click to read Jessica’s post “What if all the staff in my organization are white?“).
Thankfully, there are many pathways to offering race and culture education to families. Scroll through the slideshow below for “smaller bites” that you might try. We will add to these over time, so be sure to check back later – and we’d love to hear your ideas and experiences as well.
Before you continue: Back in 2020, we set out looking to design a race education-type of program where kids of color could have an opportunity to think about their own skin color in positive, perhaps counter-cultural ways – think “skin positivity.” But upon discussion, we felt that it would be erroneous and detrimental to offer the “skin positivity” experiences without acknowledging and digging deeply into what skin color has come to mean.
In that vein, we hope that you will carefully consider the ways in which you use these materials, and that you will consider how your choices affect the balance of holding these two truths: the truth that each human has infinite value – worthy of celebration, and the truth that we live in a place with a history of racist laws and that there is even today a persistence of racist ideas. We’ve put together a few options for smaller, less resource-heavy programs that we feel respect that balance. We are sure you have your own great ideas as well, and we hope you will share them.
Idea: Introduce concept of mirrors, windows, + doors. In our first workshop, we introduce Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s concept of mirrors, windows, and doors in books and movies. If you’re not familiar, click here for the original article. This genius analogy provides a way for us to interact with each other’s experiences in validating ways and sidesteps the possibility of dismissing other’s experiences and feelings. One cool thing is that one person’s mirror is another person’s window or door.
Small bite: Purchase and display Grant Snider’s “Books Are…” poster. Choose a few of the prompts from Grant’s poster to write on blank posterboards, one prompt per posterboard. Then invite patrons to choose a sticky note and write the title of a book that filled a particular niche in their lives that matches the illustration. Ask them to place their stickies on the appropriate poster. Or, provide printouts or a link to our kid-friendly version of an explanation to mirrors, windows, and doors (poster coming soon!).
What if we simply don’t have the staff to present any of this in our organization?
Our curriculum is available for families to do on their own, so you could advertise the program with our flyer (click for the printable pdf).
If you were able to go one step further than that, you could also provide materials and/or that go with each workshop to execute a “self-guided with help” experience.
