DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Hello. Good afternoon and welcome to one of our first breakouts for the day. I'm so happy to be back with you. I'm really excited about this next session, this discussion.

It fits into our strand reckoning with our racial past. But before we jump in, let me just do a couple of housekeeping items. I wanna first offer a land acknowledgement to say we we grateful acknowledge the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, and to say that we're just so thankful to

be able to host our event here and also to honor the native communities across the nation. So first, to start off with our land acknowledgement. I also wanna make sure that if there's any accommodations that you need or anything that would help you participate in the session, please let us know. You can either use the chat box or Q&A box online, or if you see somebody in a blue t-shirt, please grab us and let us know if there's something that we can do to make this more accessible for you.

We wanna thank our ASL interpreters who are here to help to support our participation today, and also thank you to our sponsors who have contributed to the summit in many different ways over the course of the three days. 

So I think that's all of our housekeeping items. You know, one of our key priorities here at the Smithsonian, we have a strategic plan. It's entitled Our Shared Future. And in that strategic plan, the focus on thinking about how history not only informs our understanding of the past, but we as a Smithsonian Institution and the museum complex that we are really need to think about how we can take that and focus on the present and also our future.

So as part of our Shared Future initiative, we have an initiative that is entitled Reckoning with Our Racial Past. And so today's conversation will really help us think about what are some of the key questions and some of the key issues that are facing us today as a nation related to race, but specifically for educators, how are we having and positioning these conversations about race and how are we grappling with some key issues we're really fortunate to have with, joining us to help moderate this conversation, Maria Blight, who is a reporter for The Washington

Post and she covers national education issues for The Washington Post. She started in the newsroom as a graduate student and a fellow at American University.

She covers the nearly 100,000 K12 public schools across the nation, focusing on policy and cultural shifts that help to shape and inform our educational systems. I'm also pleased to welcome to the stage Dr. Anthea Hartig who is our director of the American

History Museum, our first female director for the National Museum of American History-yes. Joining her is also our esteemed colleague, Dr. Deborah Mack, who is the director of Our Reckoning with Our Racial Past Initiative and also performs multiple hats, multiple duties at the National Museum of the African-American History and Culture. And Dr. Mack will be helping to walk us through the contours of the initiative.

And also another esteemed colleague, Dr. Theo Gonzalves. And we're happy to have Theo here, who is a curator at the National Museum of American History, and will help us to think through brass tacks application for how we take history

and really start to move that into practice and conversation. So please join me in welcoming the panel.

MARIA BLIGHT: Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. You know, one of the things that I was asked to talk about is the Washington Post's motto, which is Democracy dies in darkness, which is very metal, if you ask me. But The Washington Post believes that people with information can be freer, that information can make us free. And in that way, I sort of view what I do and what you all do as educators as serving sort of the same purpose as strengthening our democracy, ultimately, not just getting students to learn facts and figures, but really helping to inform them to be better citizens so that they can participate more fully in our democracy. But I also wanted to move on to the much smarter people to my left.

I wanted to first ask you, the initiative you had is called Reckoning with Our Racial Past. I'm really fascinated by this word reckoning, and I wanted to ask you what the difference is between reckoning and studying and how history advocators can help their students not just study, but reckon with our past. DR DEBORAH L MACK: I think that as we were deliberating what

this initiative, this Pan Smithsonian initiative would be, it was clear to us that while there is an a sense received history that many of our educator colleagues in particular in a sense receive and incorporate into curriculum, we're very aware that you all, like we are, are really reexamining what history is, what these stories are, what the evidence is.

And we are reimagining in many ways what we thought we understood or what we think we know. It's a moving target on one level because the nation as we know it today is not the nation of even 20 years ago, much less 50 years ago. I am the proud grandmother of three, and I'm just astonished at the kinds of critical thinking and questioning that's happening from preschool all the way up.

How the teachers that I see my grandchildren working with and who are served by educators and administrators are being challenged in ways to be confident with who they are, but to understand they're part of a large and continually shifting and changing landscape.

That kind of spirit of investigation and just questioning, being open to change, being open to questions, being open to multiple points of view and different sources of evidence is something that we're hoping that we also reflect in the work that we do, not only here within Smithsonian, but in partnership with all of you. MARIA BLIGHT: And Anthea, I wanted to ask you, we are in this very fraught moment where actually it's hard to say at this moment is fraught or if

it's really just a continuation of something that's been happening for years, which is efforts by state legislatures to reshape what's taught to exclude certain voices, what is the danger of teaching history badly or teaching history in a way that's not inclusive?

And what's an example of something that has happened in the past when someone has perhaps hijacked history or even taught things that weren't true in order to further an agenda?

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: Well, thank you for that big question. I think it's probably on all of our minds and it's an honor to be with you as a child of educators and having the joy of waking up every morning to think about what does it mean to teach in the perhaps the world's largest American history classroom.

If you see the museum as a big classroom and special nod to our educators and especially caricatures here and to Tammany transforming the way in which the Smithsonian conceptualizes education. I'll start maybe, excuse me with your first question about inclusive history.

And I think one of the givens of our world, and especially of and historians world is that teaching through multiple lenses and multiple perspectives helps us get towards the complexities, the messiness. As James Baldwin said, you know the long, large, beautiful, horrible, kind of more horrible and more beautiful than anything has anyone has ever said about American history.

It helps us get there. And we hear from teachers on all levels on how the various modes in which that's being shut down has impacted their teaching, their capacity.

And I think all of us are here today joining Monique and saying that we are here for you to help kind of wade through those waters. And whether it be from journalism to special initiatives, to museum work that were certainly here. I do have one example. I can save it for later. I can share it with you. OK. OK. I don't wanna take too much time. You know, I'm historian's paper. So I'm gonna go to a very contemporary conversation, a very set of very challenging one about just who the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is for, and especially around gender. So the first woman to get a law degree in Illinois was Myra Bradwell.

And she wished one thing, to practice law. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1873, and for the majority, it was written man is or should be women's protector and defender.

The natural, proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently, and fits them for many occasions and occupations in civil life.

So a very wise jurist wrote...

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: When was that?

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: 1873.

In 1873, a very wise jurist wrote this. Speaking of that 1873 case, "The marital relationship during this period of the 1870s, as it was reflected in law was characterized by male dominance. Upon marriage, women suffered what Blackstone termed civil death" as their individual identities

merged into their husbands in the eyes of the law, the married woman by herself was often legally classified with lunatics, idiots and infants".

She went on, "This then is the situation of American women up until too recently, they could not vote, they were excluded from the working world doing a part to their supposed physical and mental inferiority and in part also a nod to white women's moral superiority."

So she goes on, and so the jurists that I'm quoting from 1973 is Sandra Day O'Connor, not one of our more recent female members of the highest bench.

But the very first. And so I picked that one as we were getting ready to speak to all of you and to each other today because the long arc of understanding, especially civil rights, women's rights is such a complicated one. And we can provide touchstones for our students to say what has changed?

What were those assumptions moving in? What did someone like Sandra Day O'Connor, who is a relatively conservative justice in our judicial history, what did she say and think about it? How did she look at her world? And so I think that it really helps us understand the kind of our own historic positionality.

And I think that's critical for students of all ages, right, to help kind of get them into that. And then when we forget or when the different forces we've been battling, whether it be through race or gender or class or ethnicity and identity, kind of come back again, right? They roll back on us like a big stone.

Thank you.

MARIA BLIGHT: Anthea. We were going to talk about an artifact. I don't know if we're able to display it.

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: Yeah, if we could show the... Through the magic of Monique's team.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah. The magic of our production team.

If we could show the two images. There we go. DR ANTHEA M HARTING: So Theo has a PhD and I did get a five in

(UNKNOWN) history. MARIA BLIGHT: You can just come right over. DR ANTHEA M HARTING: Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, I'm thinking about what most young people and what most people, even adults, think about when they think about history, which is they think about really old stuff. They think about going to museums, looking at the Declaration of Independence.

But this is from 2020, and I'm curious to know what you think people don't understand about history and how teachers can use this modern framing to tell students, hey, you have things within your possession that could be historical artifacts. DR THEO GONZALVES: Yeah, well, you're absolutely right, alright.

And it's great to be with you all on this day. I think one of the challenges about teaching history is that oftentimes, it's really so poorly taught because we're taught trivia, we're really taught to memorize certain facts that seem to be disconnected from each other. We don't have a sense of the wholeness of a story.

And then more importantly, we don't have a sense of how we enter into that story, how we are connected to these stories. Instead, we're taught to master certain dates and locations, and it becomes actually trivia, becomes trivial. I'm hoping we can change that. In the museum, one of the tasks that I have as a curator is to collect objects that pertain to Asian Pacific American history. It's not a small task. But in terms of thinking about Asian American history, Pacific Islander history, a few years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic, even before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, the San Francisco Chinatown community put together a rally and a march of a thousand people. This was 11 days before the WHO declared it a pandemic.

A thousand people, imagine this in San Francisco's Chinatown organized around this very simple message, Fight the virus, not the people.

They were anticipating what was going to happen with this coming pandemic.

And it's as if they were armed with the ability of foresight. Truth is, I don't think people really can tell the future.

This, however, was a community that was armed with its sense of its past.

They understood what it meant to be a Chinese American community that was excluded in 1875, in 1882. So when you are with a group of people that understands your history, I think you're very much anchored and equipped to deal with the present moment.

And so I know three years ago seems like a million years ago, but they were equipped to deal with the present moment to say, look, what's gonna happen, it's not just to other Chinese Americans, but they were looking to the rest of the country to say fight the virus, not the people. You can look up this banner online and you'll see that there are students that are holding this up.

They're marching through Chinatown. And I think what young people can realize is that they are connected to a very long and broad history of activism and civil disobedience.

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: You wanna show maybe the next one? DR THEO GONZALVES: Oh, yeah. And it's currently on display at the National Museum of American History.

So if you cross the mall, come visit. DR ANTHEA M HARTING: But and this was a very special day, if I may have wanted to say a little bit about last October and how they held it for you. 

DR THEO GONZALVES: Oh, yeah. Well, we did also have the ability to welcome the members of this Chinatown community to the museum. When we finally got this on display, it's in a display case. It's about 40ft wide.

And they couldn't have been more gracious and humble. One of the leaders of the march actually turned to me and said, thank you for not forgetting us. Well, I felt awkward with that ability to receive that thanks, because in many ways, that is the job of a museum is to pay attention to multiple time periods, not only the present

but the past, and then always with an eye to the future, always with the eye, that there are young people who are gonna carry the banners that we hold up. So I'm very happy that we were able to make these connections, whether it's 1882 to 2020 to 2023 and beyond. MARIA BLIGHT: I think the point you make about students being able to engage with the history on a personal level is a really important one. I'm thinking about the fact that the majority at this point of public school children in the US, 50 million of them are students of color. They're black, Latino, Asian-American, native, does the history that's taught reflect them?

And if not, how can teachers help students engage personally with the history in their own classrooms?

DR THEO GONZALVES: That's a great question. Does it reflect them? DR ANTHEA M HARTING: You guys would know better than we would. We'll speak maybe for the museum.

DR THEO GONZALVES: Yes, you can answer that. DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Can I jump in really quick? DR THEO GONZALVES: Go ahead.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: I think it's a great question.

And I will say, no, it does not reflect them. So one of the things that we know about racism is that it's a systemic process of exclusion, right. And so many people would argue that we're at a point 2023, can't we just stop talking about race, right? We're an American democracy where we value all people. This is what the narrative would say, that we value all people, why focus on racism?

Why focus on systemic racism? Why can't we just talk about the things that people need to do to work hard just to get ahead? Let's not focus on this. I think that the challenge becomes when the history books, when the literature, when art, when science does not reflect the contributions of people of color, there's an erasure of the contributions of people of color. And if we were really to take away all the things that people of color have contributed to the world, to the nation, we would have to take away open heart surgery. We'd have to take away stoplights. We'd have to take away many of the inventions that help us to survive in everyday life.

My question becomes, why can't we talk about the inclusion and contributions of people in a way that honors the past and celebrates the contribution? The example that I like to use is thinking about space travel, right?

Space travel is something that we continue to be inspired by, curious by, and also part of our great American story. And I grew up really hearing the story about Neil Armstrong and Buzz, you know, and these are great stories, great American stories that I also embraced and resonated and saw in these two men aspirations for myself. It wasn't until I was probably 40 years old, 50 years old that I first, not 50 cause I'm 50 now. But I learned about two years ago that if you look at the spacesuit, it was a unique invention. It was scientists from around the world who are trying to come together to think about how can we have humans protected in space- could not come up with an answer.

It was women, white women, white seamstresses who uniquely identified how to create and design a spacesuit that would keep the men protected in space. How come we don't have that story?

It's also black women who were the human calculators that charted the path for the spacecraft to get to space. Why does it take anything away from Neil and Buzz to tell a story about the seamstresses and the calculators? That doesn't take anything away from their story and in fact, enhances the story.

And the challenge that I think we have, there's two things I don't think that most teachers want to be exclusive. They just don't have the history. I didn't know about the seamstresses until two years ago.

They just don't have the context. They don't have the history. They don't have the access to the information. Two, there's a horrible thing that's going across the nation that's having a chilling effect on teachers that's saying that you can't talk about race, you can't talk about gender, you can't talk about gender identity in the classroom or else you'll be fired.

And we have to stop this. We have to stop putting our teachers in a place where they can't teach complete, holistic, accurate, inclusive history. It's just wrong. And no. So to answer your question a very long way, I apologise.

I feel like there's a lot to say. Our curriculum does not reflect the complete totality of the American experience, and that's why Smithsonian resources from the Smithsonian can help to counter some of those things. Sorry, I feel very passionate about this. No, you are the expert on this.

MARIA BLIGHT: I'm curious to know, you mentioned that your granddaughters are learning history in a different way than you learned history. Was there anything that you learned as a child or anything you didn't learn as a child that when you grew up, you were like really mad that you never learned?

I certainly have my own examples, but that come from history things.

Like the seamstresses, are there examples of things that you really wish you had learned about in your history classrooms that you didn't get to learn about until you entered a doctoral program?

DR DEBORAH L MACK: I was thinking about since I'm the oldest person on the stage here...Substantially. It's sort of a mixed response because I grew up attending black, all black, segregated Catholic schools. And I can remember in the fifth grade the one paragraph about African Americans, fifth grade. And it was a paragraph and it was about cotton in Mississippi. And I remember thinking at the same time, I grew up in a segregated South Side of Chicago, all black community, and I completely knew there was a radically different history 'cause I was surrounded by a million black people who had their own businesses, curriculum.

I mean, we had all of these social organizations. We had informal schools, we had living witnesses, we had families.

So you're taught on one level, you know, there's a different reality.

And then in school, in formal school education, of course, my grandchildren tell me this was the dark ages. There's this big gap.

And if anything, it encouraged in me and many people critical thinking because you realize early on, OK, this is not valued. The history of my people, of my family is how you see it is not valued, but that's them.

We have this other reality. It was when I entered actually college at the University of Chicago which is famously described as where fun goes to die. And I'm an anthropologist by training and that's why I went there.

But that's where you realize that, you know, even in anthropology, I realized from my first semester that what I was being taught was not quite, it came from a specific perspective.

And that's where you realize you can begin to understand, OK, I can absorb this and that, but I am not relying or trusting all of that.

I hate to think that young people, you know, first grade, kindergarten, preschool, even middle high school feel that they cannot trust what they are being taught. But in reality, that's much of what happens if you grow up in a community where there's a strong cultural sense of being, cultural practice organizations.

It just really fosters critical thinking. But that's not true of a majority of people.

It's not true for many people who are new Americans, where you may be the only family of your background in the community you end up in.

And that's where I think it becomes also highly problematic.

It's why I became an anthropologist, because even as an African American, I look at African American history and culture with the sort of that third eye because you look at it from the inside, but also from the outside professionally. And I also look at it globally. So I was able to compare the experience of growing up in a segregated United States with

also work in South Africa and other countries. I was aware of colorism very early on.

We were just discussing, our colleague here just came back from Brazil and she was saying great on some levels, but Whoa in others. And I was relating that, I was in Brazil for a professional conference about 15 years ago and where the immigration, when you come in, the immigration forms are identify you by color. This is still true in much of Latin America. And I'm like, you know, black Americans, (UNKNOWN) Negra black.

And the customs officer, when I got to him, he's like, yes. And then he said, Whoa, senora, don't be so hard on yourself.

Morena, you're brown. Because being black and being an academic is an oxymoron in Brazil, it was.

And I happen to know the first black anthropologist who who in Brazilian anthropologists would just come into being five years earlier. But those kinds of experiences could sort of knock you off your feet.

But they also expand how you, I mean, you realize that these are shifting definitions, that you have different identities in different places. So I was like, nope, I'm black.

And he was like, please, it's an insult to be called black in Brazil. It was until very recently.

And experientially it still is highly problematic. So while we are thinking about the US and our national curriculum, Brazilian Americans are here as well and the colorism that goes along with that and the discrimination that goes along with that is also in the United States. And so this is where it becomes very tricky for many populations as to where do I fit,

what do I hide of myself, what do I claim, how do I affiliate?

And I think for it's fundamental to me that educators are aware of this because it informs how you treat not only your colleagues, but how you see children and understand maybe what they're grappling with even more clearly.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Alright. Before we take the next question, I just wanted to encourage the in-person audience.

If you have questions, you should have received a note card. And if you could just please jot down your question and then we'll make sure to get it to Maria. And if you're online, if you have a question, please submit it through the Q&A box and we'll make sure to bring your voice into the space. So I just wanted to do a promo for that.

MARIA BLIGHT: I'm curious if either of you had an experience like that where you realized later on that there were huge gaps in your history education?

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: Yeah, I was very fortunate to have a couple of incredible teachers, one in particular, and I was in AP US history many, many moons ago, and Alta Loma, California. And I know, in fact, last night's panel was so beautiful. Monique, thank you. Again, what teachers, what you all can do to care and to spark imagination and just

to be literally embracing and inclusive of your students and it helped that the class started out in alphabetical order. And it started with Abbott and Costello, which, you know, in the 70s was probably still pretty funny and less funny now. But anyway, he relished in saying Abbott and Costello as he started to call roll.

But this I wanna connect it to the power of primary sources which I know many of you teach with, which enables both critical reading and critical analysis that Dr Mack so importantly mentioned. And then of course, like the Chinatown banner that Theo collected, 'cause what we have, I hope in humility to offer to you and your students is a wealth of primary sources, right?

And especially in an age when material is not trusted or it can be artificially generated kind of the real stuff of history is something obviously, if I read Supreme Court cases to you, you already kind of know me.

But for that teacher to bring in a traveling set of images from the Holocaust and they came in this very important elaborate box and he probably he only got them for like one week at a time. He sought out firsthand documentation of the Holocaust to show us.

The Holocaust for me had been something that as a Catholic American or growing up Catholic-American and history minded, of course, I knew about somewhat. But I will never forget the gap he filled by teaching about especially the American response to the Holocaust, but by literally showing his pictures.

And I'd come back to that moment often in terms of the power of that primary source.

You don't have to necessarily write a year ahead to get a traveling box.

You know, you have, of course, a wealth of online resources which I know is also challenging 'cause there are so many.

But I often think about going back to those sources, right.

And really bringing the power of the past, whether it be through photography or reading an article or seeing an object that I think for me is just a phenomenal pedagogical advantage that we have. And now that millions of objects are digitized, in particular, we need to make them probably better for you and better searchable. But I think that they always come back to that 'cause you too, then have that power to share those primary sources. The Spanish Empire's casta system, which is where Brazil and most many other nations kind of developed and codified Colorism, you know, is now 500 years old.

But it's still a very striking set of images of what you were called by what color you were. So what about with you (UNKNOWN)?

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: What I wish I knew growing up- I'll be brief 'cause I know we're short on time. I wish I knew more about the history of American empire in the Philippines growing up.

That's where my family was originally from.

SPEAKER: Fine too.

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: We are connected in that way, yes.

And I didn't know about that history until later college and certainly in graduate school. I spent the last 32 years building a career as an educator, thinking about the Philippines and its relationship to empire. And as a result, I think if I had learned that as a younger student, I probably would have been able to make these deeper connections with people in Hawaii, in Guam, in the Philippines, in Cuba because that one year of empire of 1898 really changed the face of this country.

And yet it still remains really understudied. Thankfully, we have an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that I hope you can visit.

It'll be up until February, but that exhibit is something that I wish I had when I was a younger student. And it makes those connections palpable, makes them real, and it shows that people were engaged in each other's histories in very dynamic and dramatic ways. I wish I knew that.

So in that absence, I've been chasing that knowledge for the last 32 years.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Right. If I could quickly add on to that, too, I would offer that. I missed a lot during my, K through 12 years.

In terms of Asian American history, there was never introduced Native American Indian history, never introduced or talked about, never learned anything about Latino, Mexican American. I mean, the whole construct was primarily white.

And at times, there was a construct around blackness with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks.

But I never learned about any of the other contributions of people of color in my formal learning at all. So there was a huge absence in every aspect, and women never heard about the contributions of women. So big gaps.

MARIA BLIGHT: So it is time for questions at this point.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah. Ashley's gonna help us with that. She's gonna bring in the questions from the audience and then also from online.

ASHLEY: Can you hear me OK?

Yes, that's great. Alright. So we have some questions from the virtual audience and then we also have some questions from in person.

One question is, what can educators do to help fight misinformation?

And that's really open to anyone, I think, on the panel, including our moderator.

MARIA BLIGHT: Let me start. Oh. It's a really good question. And it's something that the post is also up against.

I think one of the things they can do is to help students learn how to think critically and to do units on media literacy.

There's all kinds of organizations that are working on this now, and I think those kinds of units can help students also think critically about history and about information sources.

I'm really struck by the story you told about learning history both informally and inside the classroom. And I feel like I've had experiences like that where it's helped me realize that no one source of information can tell the full story. And that alone, that aha moment for me has really helped me as a journalist, as a human being. It's helped me be more empathetic. So I think, yeah, like teaching students how to critically analyze information and even sources like The Post, we don't get everything. You know, I was talking about yesterday how sometimes journalists have this make this mistake of being ahistorical. So you can ask students things like what context is missing from this story?

Whose voices are missing? No media outlet is perfect. The Post is maybe close- I'm kidding.

No, we certainly fall short in lots of ways. But yeah, I would encourage you all to maybe even package some sort of media literacy in with how to interpret various sources of information. One of the things I've learned, too, is, you know, I didn't know about the American history of empire in the Philippines. And I didn't realize that very early on, my family, even though we're immigrants, we've been American for a long time. My dad learned for the first time four years ago that his people had a script before the Spanish arrived. He had no idea. He thought everything learned had come from the Spanish.

And that really shapes our sense of identity and pride. And also again, helps our minds be a little more malleable to the idea that no one source of information is gonna include the full stories though. Maybe we'll go to the next question.

ASHLEY: Yes, we have several. So I'll try to be quick. So this question is specifically for Dr Mack. How do I encourage my black students who are descendants of American slaves like myself to use their lineage as empowerment and not shame?

DR DEBORAH L MACK: I guess I find that question interesting because I think that as part of of I mean, depending on where these students are, when you grow up in communities that have a strong African-American presence, one of the things you understand is that this was not, shall we say, voluntary.

It was imposed. And there are all of these institutions and cultural practices etc. I mean, HBCU's, historically black colleges and universities start as many of them start as grade schools and is in fact, explicitly teacher training schools to educate formerly people who have been barred from formal education in all kinds of fields. I'm not sure I even know how to respond to that because on one level, I would think that we're beyond that. But clearly we're not. This was not something that was voluntary.

And much of the history of African-Americans is working their ways out of various levels of second hand citizenship or enslavement. I worked on an exhibition in 1990.

It opened in 1993 at the Field Museum, which was the first one in the country to deal with the slave trade, slavery in the US etc. And we created the word enslaved for that to exactly to precisely deal with that.

At the request of educators, we worked with maybe 70 educators over four years, and many of them were talking about how it was difficult for them to teach what they did not know, what had not been formally.

I mean, remember, there was Alex Haley's book, Roots. That was it. There had never been anything I know, Dark Ages. But again, we really consciously worked with what we had and we had to really work with educators to understand where they were coming from, how they were being trained, how they were trying to communicate and what they had learned in their families. And there was shame based on lack of information.

When that's turned around and people have information on how this actually came to be, they take it and run with it. And so there is no, for many of us, there's no shame associated with that, but a pride on how not only the model of what African Americans have done with that history, but how much it has influenced which African-Americans tend not to know global history in many places around the world.

ASHLEY: This is also for anyone on the panel, what public private partnerships are you most fond of that help supplement the gaps in implementing equitable history education? And how can we as individuals and educators create those partnerships where policies often fail?

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: That's a great one. Well, we're living it. You know, the Smithsonian is one of the largest public private partnership, both with a federal mandate and some federal funding and then privately held, too. So that's a humbling honor.

But I think you can...

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Would you mind talking about the National Youth Summit maybe, and how that is an example of a public private partnership?

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: Oh, I'd love to. I should ask Carrie to talk about it. We're honored to host the National Youth Summit at the museum and virtually in the before times virtually as well. And that is a truly kind of wonderful collaboration where students themselves design and choose the topic, design the the curricula and then Carrie, what are we up to now about?

SPEAKER: This is the 11th year.

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: 11th year.

SPEAKER: And 4,000 students.

DR ANTHEA M HARTING: And 4,000 students and we want to continue to grow that. We'd love for you to Google National Youth Summit. But that's a beautiful example to of certainly, you know, our Smithsonian educators but really you and your students actively participating in conversations that shape. So it's kind of, in a way it's a public public partnership but also receives federal, both federal and private funding. But I think there's probably a lot on the ground. 

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah, we're gotta highlight one tomorrow during our closing keynote, Fender Play Foundation partnered with LA Unified School District during the pandemic to bring instruments to over 17,000, I think students and also free music lessons. And I'd also highlight maybe the teaching tolerance through the Southern Poverty Law Center. There's so many different nonprofit organizations that are collaborating with public schools to bring resources in many different forms. And so I think there's a couple of examples that we can point to. Yeah.

ASHLEY: I regret that we're short on time, but one last question from the audience here, what tangible resources does the Smithsonian have to help students reckon with race in America? And I think that also leads us into our next portion of this panel as well. So I'll leave it there.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah, well, maybe I'll take that and help transition us into the next section of this discussion.

I first wanna just say thank you to Maria for joining us as the moderator for this first part.

Thank you for the work that you're doing at The Washington Post, and thank you for the focus on education. So let's get her applause.

(APPLAUSE)

I'm actually gonna invite Maria to go ahead and exit, and then I'm gonna invite Chanel to come up and join us at the podium. We're actually very excited as part of our collaboration with Google Arts.

We were able to really think about resources. So this last question about resources, one of the things that I think we get a question about most frequently is systemic racism and how do we really start to understand this?

And Google Arts said, we wanna support you in the work that we're doing. And so, Chanel, could you tell us a little bit about why Google decided to support this initiative? And then we'll talk about some videos that we were able to develop and create as resources for educators and preview two of those. But Channel, welcome.

CHANELLE HARDY: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super humbled and honored to be here. I'm the head of civil rights for Google, so I oversee policy programming and partnerships in that space. But most important, I was a fifth grade teacher in a former life here in Washington DC.

And so thank you for all that you do. So I get to be here on behalf of Google Arts and Culture, which is one of the platforms that Google that just really excited me even before I started my career here almost eight years ago now. And wanted to give you just a little bit of context about how Google has been in this space. So one of the first things that I got an opportunity to work on at Google actually was the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which was obviously one of those moments for so many of us that felt like we we never dreamed that something like this would happen in our lifetime. And so we were able to invest our resources as a founding donor. We had an amazing team of Google engineers who actually built a 3D experience that's installed in the museum so that you could look at rare artifacts without touching them and damaging them. And then Google Arts and Culture came in to begin that partnership with the museum to...

SHANNEL: Place exhibits on the platform that students and learners, anyone around the world could experience. And at that point we used Google Cardboard, which was a really low broadband required VR experience. Since then, we've continued to partner with museums and libraries and institutions around the world, and we do regular highlights throughout the year focusing in particular on bipoc experiences like our Black Cultural Institute, Latino Cultural Institute, Asian Pacific American and Native American. And I wanted to note, just in the broader context of our shared prosperity that Google's commitment to diversity and racial equity includes a broader conversation. So, we have deployed more than $500 million in the last several years to support academic institutions, civil rights organizations and bipoc-owned businesses to address racial equity, but also lending our voice where we can make a difference. So, we were one of 70 companies that submitted an amicus before the Supreme Court arguing that it was a business imperative for us to have access to diverse talent through higher education.

So today, growing out of that shared commitment with the Smithsonian to education, diversity and storytelling, we are pleased to support 'The reckoning with our racial past initiative', both with the educational videos that you'll see and a theme page on Google Arts and Culture, which we hope if you've never visited before, it will become a new favourite destination.

You can explore stories and content from across the different Smithsonian institutions, and that's available at goo.gle/oursharedfuture. And as we talked about a little bit, the explainer videos and theme page are just a part of our partnership. We're excited that they're part of this summit and look forward to continuing the conversation. So, thank you for having us.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you, Shannel. And, you know, thank you so much for your support. Google has been such a strong supporter in many aspects for many of our units here at the Smithsonian.

And I'm not sure if many people know this, but the Smithsonian is funded by the federal government about 60%. Fluctuate 60 to 80% of our funding comes from the federal government.

The other resources have to be kind of raised. And so it's partnerships like Google and private donors who really help us close that gap so that we can make sure that all of our resources are freely available to the public. And so it's a really, really important collaboration and partnership.

Part of what Mariah helped to situate is the current context in the nation. We know that there is 18 states across the nation that have passed legislation that would prohibit the teaching of content related to race, gender, gender identity.

And it's interesting 'cause when you look at the legislation itself, it's actually probably the words that we would use to describe things, right? We wanna make sure that the stories are inclusive, that they're told in incomplete, accurate ways. But for some reason, and I know the reason, I know the reason it's having a chilling effect for teachers. And that chilling effect is, can I talk about these things? If I do talk about it, am I gonna be fired? Our parents are going to come and, you know, have some hostility towards me.

And these are communities where you see you know, you see your teacher at the grocery store, you see the board member at church. You are you know, in close community with people. And so it's not just kind of being on a national stage and saying, go do it.

This is like real-life brass tacks repercussions for people as they are making these decisions. And so, Dr Mack, you at 'The reckoning with our racial past initiative' decided to create six videos that talk about race at a time when everybody else is saying don't talk about race. Right? So, talk to us a little bit about why you decided to create these videos. And then also the first video that we're gonna preview and premiere together is about race and policy. And tell us a little bit about that. And then we're gonna watch the video together and then we're gonna come back and talk about it. But first, tell us, why did you create these videos and tell us about the race and policy video. 

DR MACK: Well, 'The reckoning with our racial past initiative' emerged directly from the murder of George Floyd. With that incident and then the immediate follow up of Covid, we here at Smithsonian and with external support, saw that there was a pressing need to make this really not a response per se, but to really reimagine and investigate for us at Smithsonian with all of our partners and for the nation, for who we are designed to serve, how we can deal with this. Race is a fundamental issue historically and even now in the United States, and one that you cannot walk around, talk around et cetera. The murder of George Floyd was directly tied to his being a black man. What we decided to do was to look at what Smithsonian could be doing.

And we are not designed as a racial institute or a place of resolution. But what Smithsonian does have is incredible research and resource capacity. We are in contact with many communities, not all yet, across the nation.

We have incredible museum educators, public programs, staff and curators who are digging into research, looking at evidence, but also who work in construct constantly with a range of stakeholder groups including educators around the nation. And we were being asked to help respond to that need.

Smithsonian is not designed to deal with and in a sense, resolve the issues of race. But we felt there were specific arenas, there are many arenas around race, but there were specific arenas we felt we could make a difference, that we had resources that we felt we could share and learn from partner and peer institutions and organizations around the country. And so, we developed basically what we call 'Our explainer videos' to clarify when we're talking about race and what we're going to deal with. Here is what we mean. Because when you speak about race, it is a multicultural concept, it is a multilingual concept, it is influence about where you are in geography, what your community or family history or identities are, where your families, communities and experiences have been. There's when the press talks about race, it's not understood there's the same thing everywhere. We recognize that early on that was based on research, that was based on conversations with ranges of communities around the country. We also felt that Smithsonian could not define this. And so, what we are doing is explaining what we are talking about. But in the same process, this entire program, this initiative is about communicating with our peer institutions to do this work on the ground with their face-to-face communities. There are places that we can touch, but there are many places we cannot. And we need to learn and listen and understand what specific communities mean by race, what they feel has impacted them. And so, these explainer videos are around five, Oops, six thematic areas that we are investigating. We are doing a lot of our work with peer institutions, especially museums around the country. 

We are amplifying some excellent work that we see happening if we can increase the visibility, the capacity of those institutions. If our museum educators can be working on developing curriculum that serves you better in concert with you, we feel that that is a top priority for the work we should be doing.

So, we are doing community convenings around the country. We will also be in April of 2024 doing a national, well, a training for museums, museum educators, specifically for some 30 museums, bringing three to four staffs to really deal with some of these issues and to also provide resources for their follow up. The majority of museums in the country, in the United States, some 86% have staffs of eight and under. We need to remember that. We have this incredible resource base, we have a research capacity, we have a multidisciplinary range. We're dealing with issues of race around technology and science, as well as history and culture and art. So, the five pillars of our thematic focus are as follows, race and wellness, where we're dealing with race as a public health threat that can have various effects and traumatic effects on the physical, emotional and mental health of individuals, families and communities. Race and wealth is another one of our pillars. Because we know that the race wealth, sorry, the racial wealth gap has a knowable and documentable historical foundation in this country. We're dealing with race and place, which is around the historical and contemporary injustices that have disproportionately exposed communities of colour to toxic environments, to displacement and to violence. Race policy and ethics, and that will be one which you see today and we feel was really important given structurally the environment that we're all in right now is looking at laws, principles and cultural practices that have the guide collective action and influence social norms. Race beyond the US, another which we thought was very important for this group because the demographics of public schools, of schools in general in the United States is not at all what it was 50, 30, 20 years ago. But racial terminologies may change in different national contexts where many of your students are coming from, but racism does exist globally.

And we're going to be addressing some of those issues. Our last and final pillar, race, arts and aesthetics is more, where race is more than individual identification. We're talking about understandings of race and belonging that are publicly constructed and publicly reinforced. This museum in particular is one of the finest examples of seeing that range of representation in multiple arenas being expressed here at Smithsonian. So, we've just recently completed, literally as in the last two weeks, all six of these explainer videos and we're expanding. They're on our website presently and our website is now being populated with all kinds of additional materials. But this is through thanks to Google Arts and Culture, which has supported this effort.

These two most relevant ones we felt for the summit, race, policy and ethics we will show first and then race beyond the United States.

SPEAKER 2: So, let's go ahead and queue up the first one, the race and policy, and we'll watch it together and then we'll come back and talk about it. I just wanna say that this will be available on the website. They're free.

DR MACK: They are free. And they have bibliographies as well as we're now uploading educational resources around them. And that process will continue as well.

SPEAKER 2: OK. Let's go ahead and watch the first one together. DR MACK: These are each approximately three minutes long.

(VIDEO PLAYS)

NARRATOR: Everyone has a racial identity. And for better or worse, whether as loss, principles or a socially.

DR MACK: That's just the prelude.

NARRATOR: Everyone has a racial identity. And for better or worse, whether as loss, principles or socially acceptable practices,

policies and ethics shaped by race guide our everyday lives.

In the United States, we constantly choose from lists of racial categories to identify ourselves.

Racial categorization is a cultural norm and a federal policy.

The United States Office of Management and Budget determines and enforces official racial categories. The decennial census is one of the clearest examples of racial categorization collection, category shift and expand. But since the first count in 1790, every US census has included racial categories.

Racial categories have determined who you can marry, where you could eat, and where you could go to school. Since 1860, racial categorization has defined Chinese as a distinct and separate category.

In the 1927 case, Lum versus Rice, the Supreme Court upheld this racial segregation policy by ruling that Chinese students in Mississippi could not attend white public schools. 20 years later, a lower court in California ruled that the legal segregation of students of Mexican heritage from white students was unconstitutional. At the time, racial segregation policy defined Mexican as white.

In fact, the census did not include a permanent Latino Hispanic category until 1970.

Neither court ruling dismantled racial segregation.

Policies and our understanding of what is right, ethics have changed and evolved over time.

In the 1954, landmark Supreme Court case Brown versus Board of Education, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down the segregation of students in public education on the basis of race. This ruling meant that students of all races could legally attend school together.

Tools like the census and the ways that we use them have changed too. For example, racial data from the census helps identify inequities in our public health system.

Categories of racial identification were created to justify difference. Yet today, although imperfect, they can also help us measure progress towards racial equality.

Join the Smithsonian's Our Shared Future Reckoning with Our Racial Past to better understand what was and create what can be.

(VIDEO ENDS) (APPL AUDS)

SPEAKER 2:

OK. So, just welcome for in-person if you have the note cards, if you have a question, please go ahead and just jot that out. Our volunteers will collect those from you. If you're online, please submit your questions through the Q and A function.

But I'm gonna ask my colleagues to take a little bit of a risk with me. We didn't kind of prepare this, but let's like explore this video together, right?

So, part of what Dr Mack and my team talked about is how might an educator use this video, right? And so, is this something that you would do maybe in a professional learning with your other colleagues? Is this something you would share in the classroom? But let's just talk through this for ourselves and maybe model how we might use this for

ourselves in a professional setting, right? So, let's just say we're in a team meeting and we use this video, right?

So, the first thing that I might ask you as my colleague says, when you watch that video, what was your reaction? What was your gut reaction? So, it could be a word or a phrase.

But what was your initial reaction when you watch that video?

THEO: OK.

First, is a basic question which is, who counts?

SPEAKER 2: Who counts? Tell me more about what that means for you Theo. Who counts?

THEO: Well, it's a question of representation. When we think about the census, it is mandated by the constitution in order to have an enumeration of the population every ten years, which is that the government is supposed to count who is here.

So, it's a very basic question that on the back end determines how resources are gonna be doled out or apportioned properly. But it also is a broader question of like, who gets to do the counting?

How do you get to be counted properly with a constitution that identified people as three fifths? What does it mean to be fully represented? So, I think the very simple question oftentimes are the most troublesome because they can lead you down a very complicated path, which is, what does it mean to actually properly count, to properly then represent people?

SPEAKER 2: And then if we were in a team meeting.

Right? And I might then ask you, is there anything about our environment that would make you question how we're counting or who counts? You don't have to answer that, right? But if I was going to use this, that might be one way that I extend that.

And Thea for you, what did you take away from that video? What resonated for you or?

THEA: Yeah, so I'm just kind of that Rorschach kind of two words. It's complicated, right? That I think it very quickly gets you into the complications around the construction of identity, around the construction of race, which is, as we all know, is socially constructed and upheld.

SPEAKER 2: Do we all know that? You just said a very complex sentence.

THEA: That's true.

SPEAKER 2: Race is socially constructed.

THEA: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: What does that mean? 'Cause we just found out that there's a whole bunch of categories.

THEA: That's right, that we make up. Right? That humans over time, across time for their own, sometimes very cruel and sometimes very uplifting purposes have constructed and that we maintain them. And so I do think that this video, of course, builds on a really remarkable cut now, probably 20, 30 years old, one that raised the power of an illusion. Do you remember that there was a PBS series I used to teach with.

But that kind of how we make race, how we continue to uphold it or defend it, or deny it, or transform it. So, it brought up a lot for me. And I also, of course, loved the inclusion of primary sources.

Right? Of getting you know, kind of they were flashed beautifully before our eyes, but you could tell that there is a richness an archival richness, right? That backs that up.

And I think, for historians and public historians and educators, that that's just so essential.

SPEAKER 2: So, two things and then, Dr Mack, I'm gonna ask you for the same. I know you're more familiar with the videos, but I'm gonna ask you for the same reaction.

So, two things that I wanna carry forward. So, Thea you really helped us think about the aspect of count.

Who counts, who counts? And Thea, you helped us think about the complexity of the notion of a race.

And so there's multiple places where we might go and using this video for. (CROSSTALK) Yes, yes.

Dr Mack, for you, what's your initial reaction as you kind of take in that video.

THEA: I see you worked that for so long.

SPEAKER 2: I know you worked out that, so it might be a different question for you.

DR MACK: But it resonates. I think one of the primary goals was as we began this project and this initiative, as we talked with all kinds of different people, people were all over the place with what their understanding when you say race or racism, or systemic racism, there were all these different perspectives on what it was. And one of the things we had to decide was, what are we going to talk about for our purposes?

Here is what we're going to focus on and here's how we define it and why. Now, there may be other arenas as well, but this was something that we needed to I mean, the Smithsonian does not have an academic degree or a department, or there are no PhDs on race. I mean, we're all using these terms despite the variety of our fields and our backgrounds.

We use it in comparable ways, and we presume we all understand what we're saying even among each other. But that was not so. And we found out that even talking externally, people bring their own experiences and their own understandings of their own learning systems to the concept. So, we clarified in these arenas what we were going to focus on.

It doesn't mean we're limited to that, but it was to provide clarity about here's our operational definition.

It's an operational definition only. I mean, one of the major tools that we're going to be using in training that we'll have next spring is the exhibition on race, are we so different? That was crafted and is still on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

And it has really three different areas. There's the science of race, because many scientists will tell you race doesn't exist biologically. There are these little tweaks, et cetera. But there's a science of race, there's the history of race and racism which is much of what we're talking about. But there's also the lived experience of race which is a third undeniable, you know, arena of practice where we feel visitors can see themselves and yet.

DR DEBORAH L MACK: See these other kinds of learning approaches.

So it's this has been an operational definition for us to clarify what we're going to be going after and focusing on. But we'll be partnering with other organizations that may use it as a baseline, as a spin off for what their focus is.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: So multiple uses, right? So as you're thinking about this from your place, there's different entry points that this video could help to access. First operational definitions, right? So we could use this video in a way to really start off with a pre-activity about what are some of the different ways in which you might define race or think about race or experience race. So have students think through some pre work, show the video and then have that then be a platform or a foundation for operational definitions. Theo offered another way that we might be able to have an entry point into the video, perhaps maybe for middle school students or high school students in a way that ask a broader question about who counts and actually who gets to do the counting. And so again, pre-work around that question, watch the video, then post work around that question, then actually maybe think about in their own space and interaction and spheres of influence, how do they hold a space of kind of influence around who counts? And then Anthea also offered another entry point for us about the complicated nature of race and might even take an opportunity to take the Supreme Court cases that were introduced in the video to use those as markers for primary text. Going back to the court documents, the decision documents to have an expanded conversation.

So multiple ways that these might be used in different settings. Let's queue up the second video, the second video that we're gonna preview today, first, these have never been seen before, so you guys get to see the premiere, the premiere.

The second, Oh, yes, popcorn would have been good. So this video focuses on race beyond the US and we'll do the same thing.

We'll watch the video together, then we'll come back and talk about it. OK, So let's cue that one up.

(VIDEO STARTED PLAYING)

SPEAKER:

The concept of race is not uniquely American. Race and racism exist beyond the United States.

Colonization and human trafficking created racial differences to justify violence and enslavement. Although racial categories and terminologies differ region to region, nation to nation, many of our contemporary ideas about race are rooted in colonial legacies.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, white elites in Latin American countries like Brazil wanted to improve and advance the race.

Policies of whitening actively recruited white European and later Asian immigrants encouraged race mixing to lighten the population and included the violent elimination and segregation of black and indigenous people. Additionally, colorism discrimination that favors people with lighter skin tones is a race related historical legacy that persists today. Studies show that on average, darker skinned people earn less money and by 2027, global sales of skin lighting products are expected to surge to 12.6 billion.

But people everywhere are using public forums to condemn racism and colorism and to promote racial equality, self-love and belonging. Social activism can also help change prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.

In June 2020, people in over 60 countries took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, despite government curfews and risks posed by the Covid 19 pandemic.

They showed solidarity with black Americans and denounced racial injustice in their own countries. Because racism is a persistent global problem, disrupting it requires ongoing collective global action. Join the Smithsonian's Our Shared Future Reckoning with our Racial Past to better understand what was and create what can be.

(VIDEO STOPPED PLAYING)

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: OK, just a reminder, if you have a question that you wanna jot down, please just wave at one of our volunteers will collect it for you. And then if you're joining us online, please just submit your questions through the Q&A and we will make sure to bring that into the space. So I have to say, I feel pretty comfortable talking about race.

I do. That video did make me clutch my pearls a little bit. So I do actually have pearls. So I could do actually have pearls wearing them. So let's talk a little bit about the pre work that one might need to do to be able to use this as a resource. How can I, what do you have available to me that would help me be more comfortable, confident, secure and showing this video and then having a conversation that I feel like I can manage 'cause there's a lot of words in there that I know are gonna be trigger words, right?

Colonization, colorism.

SPEAKER: Human trafficking.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Human trafficking, protest.

Like I'm trying to keep a job. So how do I, what do I start with?

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: I think some of this has to do with being able to tell the story of how the world became smaller through labor migration and colonization.

I mean, if you think about this dividing line in 1492, how the Americas get colonized, the distance between Asia, Africa and the Americas is now formally linked through trade routes in a way that had not been linked before. So it's not just commodities. It's not just copra and cacao and gold and silver, it's also the commodities of human bodies and in the regulation of those commodities. And this is a big task, right.

In the regulation of those commodities, there's also the need to regulate those bodies.

And so that's why the definitions of race constantly get scrambled because they're getting scrambled by the Portuguese empire, the Spanish, the Dutch empires. They're administering now a world that was so disparate and now is really linked by trade routes. Think about the Manila galleon trade that linked Asia to Africa, the Americas that was a trade route that now becomes solidly built from the 1500s to the 1800s.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: So you did something very important. You took away an emotional part of this and said, let's look at this from a lens of trade.

Let's look at this from a lens of trade. And so I think that was an important kind of grounding of a way into a conversation.

Are there resources that you would point me to that helps me have a better historical understanding of that discussion?

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: Sure. Certainly, I mean, the Smithsonian has many artifacts from that time period where those artifacts were taken, accumulated by the Smithsonian, and now we have those as evidence of transatlantic and transpacific trade routes. We also have maps that help to illustrate the connections between Shanghai and Manila, Hawaii and the West Coast. And so I think how disparate even we are in 2023, how long it takes to think about a flight from here to Manila ten, 20 hours easily.

Think about that in terms of how that trade route was linked in terms of months. And what you have is yes, it sounds like it's emptied of emotion.

But I think for people who understand the history of this trade, it's deeply painful.

It's deeply painful and visceral. Is there anything that you would add to that?

ANTHEA M HARTING: Well, it was so eloquently state that thank you, Theo. And this video, as you know, takes a slightly different turn, a different narration and a narrator, a different style, and and certainly I think is filled with with kind of those gut punches, connective understanding. Some for the high school level, some really of the early chapters in our becoming US curriculum at National Museum of American History, National Museum of African-American History and Culture, of course, with the incredible project on the global slave trade.

There's already some great existing resources, but this really beautifully ties them up.

And when you saw that illustrated 17th century looking document of the different customs, that's what I was referring to earlier in my comments. I would think in terms of like kind of the where we are gonna build the onramps to the conversations to your question, Monique, I think one of the key things and backing up further is the cleave that Theo mentioned, especially for world history teachers, you can really have, I think, a quick conversation and powerful one about the differences in empire, especially if you wanna just go a minute before 1492.

1492 for historians is the expulsion of the Islamic empire and the unification of what we know as Spain. We don't talk about the Islamic empire.

Understanding the Islamic empire helps foreground almost all of these conversations. What a dramatic difference that makes.

I was blessed to be in Greece. And you read the guidebooks on Athens and one sentence, Oh, yeah, for 500 years it was part of the Islamic Empire. You're like, whoa, dude, you know, as educators were like, I wanna know about those 500 years.

The Venetians were there for 48 years. You know, bla bla bla. But it's like, tell me about the Islamic Empire and the differences in how they handled humans and how they handled religion and how they handled goods and how they handled land and how they taxed each other? And who who were you able to be under Islam if you were in the Catalan province?

So I do think it's a great way in for this was exactly what you wanted it to be dead, which is a global, a big set of global stories.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah. And Deborah, could you talk to us a little bit about kind of how you guys were thinking about the on ramps for this video?

DR DEBORAH L MACK: I think it was important for us.

One of the things that we discussed and and much of the thematic development of this was done under actually Dr Arianna Curtis, who's one of the curators at the African- American Museum and is actually our Afro-Latino curator.

So she's one of the few curators who, like you, etc. really specializes in investigating these cleavages, these mergers, these are these areas of identity and definition and empire that are not generally in the standard US American landscape. They're both deeply historical and they're extremely contemporary. One of the issues that we were aware of with many educators is that many of these global issues are now in your classroom, not only with your students but with your peers. And if we are not aware of some of these issues of colorism, of empire, of identity, and for many people who are recently arriving in the United States, they are evaluated sometimes by color, by language etc. When you are an outsider and you are trying to navigate all of these differences, the identification, for instance, for many Arab Americans were Arab is no one nationality, ethnicity, language, etc. It just runs the gamut, for instance, and that's true for many different people. That's also true for many people who have been here 12 generations like mine.

It's like, so what are you? It also helps you when you are stepping outside the United States and people go, Oh, you know, I didn't realize you were American.

I thought you were bling, bling bling. Because in many places in the world, people will look for the closest approximation.

They go, you're not exactly from here, but you're from close by. That happens increasingly because so many of us are doing all kinds of travel around the United States in different areas and beyond. When you have an understanding of this, it helps you to understand your own experiences and those of your... I would imagine that...

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: It expands your universe.

DR DEBORAH L MACK: It Expands your universe and it expands.

I also find your flexibility and patience with people. There are people of my generation would go, what do you mean? I'm African American obviously. Not so obviously.

And I think that can be helpful.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: I think we have a couple of questions.

ANTHEA M HARTING: I just thank you, all of you who participated in making the videos for both two entry points through artifacts.

I think those are LeBron's shoes. Great entry point for students, right?

Why does he have equity on the back? You know, it's a great kind of word way into through artifacts.

And just also, thank you for being so again, using skin, lightning creams, etc. which we have in our collection.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: So the objects themselves.

ANTHEA M HARTING: And the girlhood exhibition, if you wanna dive into that, the complexities of of beauty in our complexion. But thank you for just being so honest about colorism, 'cause to your point, we don't talk about it enough. And this is a phenomenal way into interests.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: And we only have five minutes. We can talk about colorism. No, I'm totally kidding. It's such an important topic. I think what you just said, Dr Mack about expanding the conversation, the colorism conversation fits so squarely in that. But I love what you said, Dr Hartig, is that the objects themselves can be an entryway for the conversation, too. So let's go ahead and I wanna make sure we're giving space and time to the questions.

ANTHEA M HARTING: Yep, absolutely.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: And so let's turn to Ashley.

ASHLEY: Great. Thank you. So we have lots of questions, especially flowing in from the virtual audience. I'm gonna try to combine a few to save us some time.

So thank you to Mary, Grace and Candice. Their question combined is how can we help young students understand that their beliefs are the future? And are there any videos or resources for young learners specifically up to age eight as the main audience? How young is too young?

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Well, we do have videos, not these videos for younger learners. Our National Museum of African-American History and Culture has a joyful learning series.

And so we'll make sure to link that in the session content access on the website.

So we do have some resources for younger learners. But the essence of the question actually was help us again with the essence of the question.

ASHLEY: Sure. I think at the core of this question is for learners up to age eight, are there resources available for teachers to be able to use with them specifically? And I think the series that you mentioned from African American history and culture is one. But just if there's any other suggestions or assets that we have.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Any other resources that come to mind for zero to eight?

ANTHEA M HARTING: You know, the focus of the museums is off and on for our younger crowd is in situ, right?

They get to be both in our Spark lab and our Wonder Place. I think that's a great question. I think we need more.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah, well, we will. We have an early learning collaborative and so we will make sure that there are the resources that are identified there. OK. Let's go to the next question.

ASHLEY: Sure. The next question is also kind of a combined question.

Thank you for modeling implementation. Once a teacher, always a teacher. Dr Chism.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: I know. I just can't let go of it.

ASHLEY: What would you recommend to superintendents and boards to uplift teaching about things like global racism in ways that parents and communities can engage with?

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: I'd love for all of us to think about that.

ANTHEA M HARTING: (UNKNOWN) school board.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Yeah, maybe I'll start. And then I'd love for each of you to kind of add on. So I think the first thing about doing this work is that you have to know where you are entering yourself, right? You have to get real with yourself. So what is it that I know?

What is it that I understand? Where might my blind spots be? Where am I willing to be vulnerable?

Where am I sensitive, right. So first start with self. Figure out where you are willing to share with your colleagues, where you are on your own progress and journey 'cause that will help them in relationship to you.

And I think for a leader like a superintendent modeling that is so important.

Nobody expects you to have all of the answers, but people do expect you to create the space to find the answers and the solutions. So I think that would be my first tip for a superintendent.

What would you offer for a leader that's trying to help their culture and their space move forward?

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: Yeah. I think it's helpful for leaders to be able to help to facilitate for their own leaders,

their own personal histories. Especially for teachers, we all need to know where we come from. And there's a fantastic book from many, many years ago by Paula Giddings called Where and When I Enter. It's a black black women activists, but I love the title so much because it resonates with me. All of us need to be able to answer the question where and when do I enter into this history?

And if you haven't done your own genealogy, I hope you do it. I wish Henry Louis Gates would interview me and I get my own book of life and we do the DNA sequencing and I find out that I'm related to Eva Longoria. I don't know whoever, you know what I mean.

But that is a joy because it resets your understanding of your grounding, of your anchoring, right?

And and that allows you to confidently reach out to others.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: That's right.

DR THEODORE GONZALVES: So I would I would say for any leader, it's incumbent for all of our staff to understand where do we really come from? Not in an insulting prime personal way, but in personalized way.

We need to understand really where and when do we enter into this history?

ANTHEA M HARTING: Perfect.

What he said.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: What he said. Dr Mack, you'll have the last word. Take us out.

What would you like to contribute to that?

DR DEBORAH L MACK: I would just hope that actually I feel that many of you have a strong sense of where that hook is for you, that you may see something in these videos and these resources that are an entering point for you that are maybe the easiest place to enter, that you can then build on and collaborate with others to do so. But it is very true that the more you know about your, the more awareness you have about your own self-experience life course in relation to this specific subject matter, it gives you a firmer grounding on reaching out to others, working with others, collaborating with others, whether they are administrators and teachers like yourselves, their families.

I think that when you are aware of these issues, when you are encountering families and children, you in fact more easily see something. It just gives you a little bit more of a nudge to go, maybe there's a little more here than I ever understood before. I hope that this is just one small tool that can help with that.

DR MONIQUE M CHISM: Well, thank you.

Thank you to the panel. Thank you for the videos. Please join me in thanking.

So I just wanna remind us that coming up, I'm gonna mess up the time.

Is it at 3:00? We will have Malik Pancholi joining us, author, activist, actor to talk about centering the voices of Asian Americans. And so please come back and join us. I also just wanna say a very special thank you for the videos.

Again, they are going to be available on our website. They are free and they were created by the Reckoning with our Racial Past initiative.

So thank you for being here. Thank you.