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Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression

This guide aims to provide information to support your reflective and teaching practices about the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racism and anti-oppression resources.

Multi-media resources for children

Materials for Parents or Educators

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🚨It's never too early to talk about race.🚨 "Adults often think they should avoid talking with young children about race or racism because doing so would cause them to notice race or make them racist. In fact, when adults are silent about race or use "colorblind" rhetoric, they actually reinforce racial prejudice in children. Starting at a very young age, children see patterns — who seems to live where; what kinds of homes they see as they ride or walk through different neighborhoods; who is the most desirable character in the movies they watch; who seems to have particular jobs or roles at the doctor's office, at school, at the grocery store; and so on — and try to assign "rules" to explain what they see. Adults' silence about these patterns and the structural racism that causes them, combined with the false but ubiquitous "American Dream" narrative that everyone can achieve anything that they want through hard work, results in children concluding that the patterns they see "must have been caused by meaningful inherent differences between groups." In other words, young children infer that the racial inequities they see are natural and justified. So despite good intentions, when we fail to talk openly with our children about racial inequity in our society, we are in fact contributing to the development of their racial biases, which studies show are already in place.” (Dr. Erin Winkler, 2017) Images by @pretty_good_design, adapted from work by the Children’s Community School. #Parenting #RacialBias #TeachersOfInstagram #AntiRacist

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Resources for Children

We would like to acknowledge the work of Sujei Lugo Vázquez and Alia Jones for compiling a list that includes many of the following books in response to requests for anti-racism resources for children. 

Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Books for Children and Young Adults

Books on Whiteness and White Privilege

Indigenous Rights, Resilience, and Resurgence

How to raise an anti-racist child

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This work by The University of Victoria Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise indicated when material has been used from other sources.