“Educators can make their classroom more welcoming before their lessons, especially lessons of English literature and history lessons about slavery and segregation. The teacher should pay attention to who’s in their class and try to have some empathy on how it would feel if they were discussing those topics and they were of that race. Let’s say a Black student, when they’re teaching about slavery. They should think about how they, before they even teach the lesson to the kids, empathy goes a long way and if they can put themselves in the student’s shoes that will make the classroom a lot more comfortable for those certain students. ”

“When I was a sophomore at Piner, my teacher had different ways of thinking about things than I did. [My friends and I were making] lighthearted jokes around each other and one asked “do you get a lot of money because of your Native American casino?” My teacher came up to me and I don’t think she was trying to be rude or anything, but she’s like, you know, it seems kinda outdated to me for you guys to be getting money. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked what do you mean by that. The teacher said, well, everything happened so long ago, why are you guys still getting money right now. I was just so awestruck by the fact she asked that.”

“On the off chance the teacher did hear [a racial insult], it would usually lead to what I like to call the tolerance talk — which is where the teacher goes to the whole class and says, Ava experienced racism today. And now we’re going to talk about it and we’re inclusive and we want to make sure everyone feels heard. And I appreciate the sentiment. I appreciate them making it very clear that their classroom was meant to be inclusive. But I’ve noticed that it makes me more uncomfortable than the person who was being racist.”