Name: 【TED】Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo: What it takes to be racially literate (What it takes to be racially literate | Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo)
Uploaded: 2018-05-30T07:12:56.000Z
Duration: 12 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Priya Vulchi: Four years ago, we really thought we understood racism.

Past perfect

Just like many of you here today, we had experienced and heard stories

about race, about prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping

and we were like, "We get it, racism, we got it, we got it."

Winona Guo: So we decided that we had to listen and learn more.

We talked to as many random people as we could

and collected hundreds of personal stories about race,

stories that revealed how racial injustice is a nationwide epidemic

and now can't seem to recognize or get rid of.

Today, we are here to raise our standards of racial literacy,

to redefine what it means to be racially literate.

WG: We want everywhere across the United States

for our youngest and future generations to grow up equipped

with the tools to understand, navigate and improve

We want us all to imagine the community as a place

where we not only feel proud of our own backgrounds,

but can also invest in others' experiences as if they were our own.

PV: We just graduated from high school this past June.

somebody in or out of the classroom would have helped us understand --

PV: The truth for almost all our classmates is that they don't.

WG: In communities around our country, so many of which are racially divided,

PV: If you don't go searching for an education about race,

PV: Even when we did have conversations about race,

our understanding was always superficial.

an inability to understand each of our experiences,

to fiercely and unapologetically be compassionate beyond lip service.

an inability to understand the larger, systemic ways in which racism operates.

To be fair, race did pop up a few times in school, growing up.

We all defend our social justice education

because we learned about Martin Luther King Jr.

"Yes, slavery, that happened once upon a time,

But what if our teacher introduced a story from the present day,

for example, how Treniya told us in Pittsburgh that --

PV: "My sister was scrolling through Facebook and typed in our last name.

and we found out that his great-great-grandfather owned slaves

and my great-great- great-grandmother was one of them.

We've been living under a white man's name.

If slavery didn't happen, who would I even be?"

because the connection to slavery's lasting legacy today is made clear, right?

Or what would happen is our teacher would throw out these cold statistics.

You've probably seen this one before in news headlines.

more than five times the rate of white people.

He's all I've got, I don't know my mother.

My father's currently being wrongly incarcerated for 12 years.

I've got a daughter, and I try to be that same fatherly figure for her:

always involved in everything she does, it might even be annoying at some points.

But I'm afraid I'll go missing in her life

WG: Throwing out just the statistic, just the facts alone,

can lead to dangerously incomplete understanding of those facts.

It fails to recognize that for many people who don't understand racism

to talk about the pain of white supremacy and oppression,

it's that they don't recognize that that pain exists at all.

They don't recognize the human beings that are being affected,

without understanding how things like unjust laws and biased policing

the disproportionate incarceration rates over time.

the large prison population of native Hawaiians like Kimmy

is heavily influenced by the island's long history

its impact passing down through generations to today.

about people's personal, unique experiences in the classroom.

WG: "I've been working on psychologically reclaiming my place in this city.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo: What it takes to be racially literate (What it takes to be racially literate | Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo)

privilege

recognize

appreciate

native