A Smithsonian museum has a whole portal filled with free resources to help everyone including parents and teachers talk about race
- The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture launched an online portal to help parents, teachers, children, and communities at large talk about race.
- The portal, called Talking About Race, is free to use and can be found on the museum's website.
- Programming includes more than 100 online activities, videos, scholarly articles, and other multimedia resources.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, has launched a free portal, Talking About Race, with resources to help parents, teachers, caregivers, and the general public have conversations about race.
"Since opening the museum, the number one question we are asked is how to talk about race, especially with children," Spencer Crew, interim director of the Smithsonian museum, said in a May press release published on the museum's website.
Crew said that the resources available on the portal are designed to "inform and guide discussions" through the use of videos and role-playing exercises among other activities.
The museum press release said that recent racist incidents across the US led to the portal being released early. It named "an altercation in Central Park" (when a woman called the police on a Central Park bird-watcher) as well as "acts of police brutality resulting in the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd" that have resulted in global protests condemning racism and demanding justice.
A museum representative told Insider that the portal has been in the works for around a year — after several years of conceptualization — and was scheduled to be released in fall 2020 after facing delays as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The team was hoping to make some upgrades and enhance functionality before the portal's release but decided that its recent release date on May 31 was a good time to push out the first phase; according to the museum representative, there are still tweaks and changes to be made.
There are eight subjects that make up the foundation of phase one of the portal: being anti-racist; bias; community building; historical foundations of race; race and racial identity; self-care; social identities and systems of oppression; and whiteness.
The portal itself is a culmination of several other projects and programs the museum is working on, the representative told Insider. All programming and resources are the results of decades worth of research done by the museum's network of educators and historians, featuring the research and teachings of experts and activists including Bishop Desmond Tutu, Ibram X Kendi, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, among many others.