When there were still high school seniors, we're known to go and pre-evulchee, set out to talk with people about race. Not what they'd learned in Black History Month or from TV or textbooks, but their personal experiences. They ended up creating what they call the classroom index. The dynamic duo were speakers at the Ted Women Conference in New Orleans this fall, where we had a chance to talk. Many thanks to Ted Women for their help with this segment. Growing up as two young women of color, race was really part of our lives, right? And I think throughout almost all of our education, early education middle school, first two years of high school, we never talked about race. And then sophomore year after the summer of Eric Garner and Ferguson was the first time that we ever talked about race in school. And I think for the two of us, it just prompted a lot of curiosity. And this feeling like we really, we had these experiences, but we really didn't know anything about race. So we started talking to all these random people in Princeton. We would literally go to NASA Street, the downtown street in Princeton. We'd tap somebody on the shoulder and be like, hey, do you have a story about race to share where two high school students are putting together a collection of stories? And then we put it on our website, PrincetonChoose.org. You'd be surprised by how many people are actually willing to open up to us and have these like deeply intimate conversations about their childhood, how race has played a role in their lives. And we feel like a lot of that has to do with, because people don't have that opportunity otherwise throughout their whole lives. We didn't talk about race until high school. So it's kind of like releasing this burden off of their shoulders. We actually read some books like The K or like Huck Finn, you know, that talked about race and like black people. Or we talked about historical events like slavery, Jim Crow, that also talked about, you know, oppression of black people in America. But I feel like the thing is like, with books, it's like this happened in this fiction world. And with history, it's like this happened decades ago. So none of it's like, this is a problem today, right? Like race today is not really a thing and we never felt that. Right. None of us put in a modern context. So part of the power of our stories we feel like is when you introduce them into the classroom and kids see a face, it could be their neighbor, someone in town they've seen before, someone who works at a store they like to shop in, and they suddenly feel this relevancy. You think we've talked to like over a thousand people, right? And interview them and you think like talking about race, it must be all the same thing, it must get old, but know every single person we talk to, most every single person, there's like a new story, there's new experiences that we've never heard about before. So we're always learning. In Taliqua, Oklahoma, again, we end up in the most random places by just luck, I feel like sometimes. And we interviewed the student, Ayoka. She started talking about her personal experiences. We were completely blown away. She told us that she is one of the youngest speakers of the Cherokee language and how, yeah, in her local area. And how her fluency in Cherokee means so much to her personally because she's a trans woman and the Cherokee language is non-gendered. So she was allowed to move without any obstructions, literally in the language and in the culture of her Cherokee heritage. What we didn't talk about in her talk is another aspect of intersectionality that she's actually the leader of a Catholic organization on her campus and she's talking about religion and how that intersects with gender and sexuality and race and ability in all of these different identities. And so she was talking about what the disappearance of her language is also the disappearance of like that part of her identity, which was like fostered so well in the Cherokee language. When we go and interview all of these people individually and we mull over their experiences and think about it and then the next day we like Google something or do some research on like what their personal experiences mean, how it's significant in a larger picture. Yes, this is a woman we met in Chicago, her name was Lisa and she was just talking about, you know, I remember listening to her story. It was so powerful because she was so emotional, she was talking in tears, you know, not necessarily about her own personal experiences being called the dirty Jew and that kind of thing growing up and her grandfather being a Holocaust survivor and that kind of thing but talking about her own students and how every day she worked with these primarily low income black students who came in with all these different racial realities that she was disconnected from and learning to listen to their experiences, right? We interviewed a white another white teacher in Omaha, Mrs. Busby who was telling us that many of her students don't come back alive to her and she was talking about how she has dedicated herself to this work so strongly because she makes such a difference in the lives of those students by giving them hope and counseling in a person to trust and be comfortable with and I think that's so important and speaks to how we share that story of Lisa because we're trying to point to the idea that, you know, if you have white privilege, you can really, really leverage it for something good and for social justice just like Lisa did. A man named Choi Chi and he was a Japanese internment camp survivor and he was talking about actually solidarity with natives during that time and the experiences with food and how you can't eat the food that he remembers the smells from from the internment camps and it was just really touching. So that was all in one day and so the diverse experiences we're collecting all across the country has really blown us away. I think so much of it has been like, I think in our lives especially during high school we had collected hundreds of stories and we were like, we are at a point of racial literacy but part of it has been realizing that we still have so much to learn and these stories are starting points to learning about like the systemic injustices that exist and I think it's been really interesting to interact with all these people and understand like the nuanced racial realities that exist in our country. Yeah, I think in our chat talk we talked about how racism is this nationwide epidemic that we can't recognize or get rid of and I think that idea about recognition we don't understand who we are yet so we can't tackle the problem in a way that's effective. The whole point of our talk was raising the bar for racial literacy, right? The idea that we don't understand who we are and we need to keep learning. In our book in the first book the classroom index we would take all of these personal stories and literally pull out lines where they're talking about systemic injustices maybe not literally so say we interviewed someone on the street and they're talking about their own personal experience with police brutality. We would back it up with stats in the book to show how it's a larger systemic issue and not just one isolated incident. Once you become racially literate and that includes caring so deeply about the issue that you're compelled to do something about it, then you can take action in your home community and your local communities that every small thing counts the idea that every person no matter what your profession or background is can somehow bring justice, racial justice specifically to the conversation, to the table, to the work and that everybody can leverage their personal skills for the cause of social and racial justice. I think it's really interesting when we started in sophomore year racial literacy was not really a term at all, right? And the focus investing on listening to students of color's experiences was not something popular, it was not something normalized and I think over the past two years not really because of us but because of all the activists in the community. All the students, all the adults, professionals, professors from the university, parents, all of that have really come together and tried to really start learning and listening first. The racial literacy course at our school which has been awesome and it's been a journey for us working with the administration of our school and learning from them and working with them. If you like that segment and want more commentary from me, sign up to become a monthly member on our site and receive exclusive access to extra content just for you. Don't forget to follow us on social media and write to me, Laura L.A. U.R.A. at LauraFlanders.com. Until next week, and Laura Flanders, thanks.