In the Summer of 2020, cities were filled with mass protests which prompted children to question the narratives that racism is a thing of the past or only about interpersonal hate. Children asked, “why are we still protesting racism today?” It is important that we provide white children with a nuanced lens to understand that racism is interwoven into the United States’ history and therefore reproduces racial inequities. It takes active and ongoing work to understand and disrupt racism. In the podcast below, we will learn more about the nuanced definition of racism and how to apply the lens to our understanding of racism.
Summer is coming to an end, and as we head back to school here on the Island of Explained, we’re thinking about the fun times we’ve had with the Experimoth and Bored the Whale. But we’re also thinking about some of the hard issues this summer has raised: news about people being killed because of the color of their skin.
So we’re devoting our fourth, and final, episode of Today, Explained to Kids summer series to systemic racism. We talk with Kennedy Mitchum, a recent college grad who got Merriam-Webster to update its definition of racism; Morgan Givens, a former police officer who now produces his own kids podcast, Flyest Fables; Vox reporter Fabiola Cineas; and 11-year-old Jolia Bossette, who wrote her elementary school graduation speech about Black Lives Matter.