History, Heritage, and Awareness Celebrations
Our approach to anti-racist education is one beyond heroes and holidays (remember our reflections on Black History Month?). In Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks critiques this extractive approach to multiculturalism: “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”
That said, we also know the power of building energy and awareness around an identity, community, or issue throughout an officially acknowledged month. It can also be a way to hold our communities accountable. How can we leverage these months for dialogue and action?
We offer questions and resources for further exploration and honoring of these months.
Earth Month
- How can we illuminate the ways we are connected to, and a part of the earth?
- (Re)connecting to the earth is an anti-racist imperative.
- Braiding Sweetgrass a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Arab American Heritage Month
- What stories are you telling about the 22 countries and varied religions and cultural groups that are a part of the Arab world? What stories are you not telling?
- National Arab American Heritage Month Educator Resources
Autism Awareness Month
- How are the perspectives of people who are #ActuallyAutistic being incorporated into pedagogy and policy?
- Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN), Lauren Melissa Ellzey (@autienelle) • Instagram photos and videos, Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, The Color of Autism Foundation
National Poetry Month
- Are students connecting with poetry as a source and reflection of joy?
- Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation
Sexual Assault Awareness Month
- Is my work truly trauma-informed? What is an abolitionist approach to sexual assault response?
- How am I ensuring my prevention work and consent work is inclusive of people of the global majority, if queer and trans people, of disabled people?
- I Have The Right To
This interview with Cheyenne Taylor Jacobs, a Black writer and filmmaker, about poetry as activism and about gender-based violence, reminds us of the connections and intersections between these acknowledgements and months. Follow her work here.
