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Most Americans want their children to grow up to be "colorblind" when it comes to race. As a result, many parents, particularly white ones, don't discuss race with their children at all. But research demonstrates that babies as young as six months can recognize racial differences. And as they get older, kids start mentally categorizing people based on their race, whether they've been taught to by their parents or not. In fact, the authors of the book NurtureShock argue that parents' silence on the question may be exacerbating the problem. In the absence of open discussions about the role of race in kids' lives, they draw their own conclusions, some of which would be horrifying to progressive parents.

Fruitvale Station has found a particular resonance with audiences this week. A brief but eloquent scene deftly illustrates the subtleties of white privilege - a reality too seldom portrayed in film and too often ignored by its beneficiaries in life. When Hollywood tackles race directly, it's usually by way of uplifting allegories like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Crash" and "The Help," each of which, in its own way, perpetuates the consoling idea that eradicating racism is simply a matter of purging our negative prejudices. Rarely do films ask audiences to grapple with the deeply embedded, race-based habits that give white Americans an edge in everything from housing to employment, or the positive racial profiling that grants white people countless free passes."

"As we educators enter Black History Month, it's easy to focus our energy on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.-and typically sanitized versions of their radical activism. It's tempting to try to make talking about race as "easy" as possible. However, doing that does a disservice to our students, because then they can't enter conversations about the world around them-whether it's a news story or a music video-with the full story. Delving deeper into untold histories and modern pop culture results in interdisciplinary possibilities that result in and more thoughtful and well-informed discussions about race in America. After our initial discussions about the video and performance (and some quick history lessons about Katrina, New Orleans, segregated swimming pools, and the Black Panthers), I asked students in all of my classes-Composition I, Composition II, Diversity in the Media, and Intro to Film Studies-to complete the following assignment. The results were universally thoughtful and analytical, without the discomfort and anger that was in their voices the day after the Super Bowl performance."

"As McGee notes, Gary's awareness of his own prejudice is a powerful first step, one that people often find difficult to take. No one wants to think of themselves as intolerant. but McGee's point that everyone harbors bias, and the way forward is for us all to confront it in an open and honest way, is crucial. The whole discussion is worth your time. It's a far cry from your average cable news segment, particularly the He Who Smelt It, Dealt It school of race discussion."

"It didn't take long for civic journalism to move from election experiments to deep enterprise work on major issues plaguing communities - race, drugs, education, the economy. Techniques involved listening to how the communities framed their problems and convening conversations about how they might be addressed. Yet major differences emerged between civic journalism and traditional investigative journalism. Unlike traditional investigative journalism, civic journalism's enterprise projects, "didn't have bad guys attached to them," Friedland said. Rather they mined the muddy swamps of tough issues enveloping communities. These projects focused less on measuring the nature of the engagement and instead focused on outcomes. The most systematic and deepest research into civic journalism was undertaken in 2002 by Friedland and PhD student Sandy Nichols. The Pew Center opened its files on 651 civic journalism projects that had applied for funding or for recognition in the Knight-Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism between 1994 and 2001. For months, Nichols read every project and coded them by engagement strategies, outcomes and story frames. You can read the final report or the executive summary. Among its highlights: At least one fifth of all U.S. daily newspapers - 322 of the nation's 1,500 dailies practiced civic journalism during that time. They hailed from 220 cities in all but three states. But, the authors said, the real number, if you included projects that didn't cross the Pew Center's transom, was much higher Newspaper editors asserted that their civic journalism increased public deliberation, civic problem solving, volunteerism and changed public policy.a  96 percent of the civic journalism projects used an "explanatory" story frame to cover public issues instead of a more traditional "conflict" frame, which often reports two opposing viewpoints. "The clear shift to explanatory frames is perhaps one of civ

For some insight on segregation, integration and race relations, NPR's Tavis Smiley talks with a man who has experience in what kids thought back during the days of segregation, and what they think today. Lots of links to other programs and sites here as well.

New research shows that whites in the U.S. believe there are increases in racial bias toward them and public policies that create inequality. Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Abigail Thernstrom deems these claims as 'ridiculous,' and adds that race-based preferences will vanish when all students have leveled playing fields in schools

"Ten years ago, writer Richard Rubin set out to talk to every living American veteran of World War I he could find. It wasn't easy, but he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets, ages 101 to 113, collected their stories and put them in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys. He tells NPR's Melissa Block about the veterans he talked to, and the stories they shared."

""The widespread assumption is that Asian Americans came to the United States very disadvantaged, and they wound up advantaged through extraordinary investments in their children's education," says Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger. But that's not what really happened, he says. Hilger recently used old census records to trace the fortunes of whites, blacks and Asians who were born in California during the early- to mid-20th century. He found that educational gains had little to do with how Asian Americans managed to close the wage gap with whites by the 1970s. Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians."

"Urban-education programs prepare them for imperative contemporary conversations with students."

"Three -- three decades of research reveal that students of color are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, and are punished in harsher ways for the same infractions. They also learn this through the absence of their lives and narratives in the curricula. The Cooperative Children's Book Center did a review of nearly 4,000 books and found that only three percent were about African-Americans. And they further learn this through the lack of teachers that look like them. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 45 percent of our nation's pre-K to high school students were people of color, while only 17 percent of our teachers are. 7:35 Our youth of color pay a profound price when their schooling sends them the message that they must be controlled, that they must leave their identities at home in order to be successful. Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin."

" A new study shows that as people become more intelligent they don't become any less prejudiced, they only change who they are prejudiced towards, with the usual direction going towards those who we see as different from ourselves. In order to study a wide range of biases, and to avoid confusion, the researchers defined prejudice as "'a negative evaluation of a group or of an individual on the basis of group membership" for the purposes of this study.  The study took 5,914 individuals and tested them for their "cognitive ability", determined by their score on the Wordsum test of verbal ability. The subjects were asked of their opinions of certain groups of people such as Christians, Hispanics, or the poor. Those answers were later converted to a zero to 100 scale, with 100 being the most negatively viewed. The study showed that individuals of higher and lower intelligence showed similar levels of prejudice, but not towards the same people. Persons of lower cognitive ability tended to be prejudiced towards "low choice" groups, persons who have little control over the fact that they happen to be a member of that group. More intelligent persons were more prejudiced against "high choice" groups, where the members of that group, hypothetically, had greater ability to opt in or out of membership in that group."

"The surge in demand for its resources comes at a time of transition for Facing History. Since taking over as CEO and president from co-founder Margot Stern Strom in December 2014, Roger Brooks has been working on a five-year strategic plan to vastly expand the program's reach. He wants to employ more interactive digital tools, partner more with complementary organizations, and tap descendants of Holocaust survivors to perpetuate their stories. Facing History has more than 160 staff members in nine offices, as far-flung as San Francisco, Memphis, Toronto, and London. It has trained 48,000 teachers - a number it hopes to raise to 200,000 in five years - and hosts forums, seminars and workshops, both in person and online. Facing History's multimedia-rich website (www.facinghistory.org) offers free access to many of its resources."

"This lesson examines some of the obstacles to equal education that African Americans faced in the 20th century, the segregation that triggered the Civil Rightsmovement, and the different strategies people used to effect change. Students begin by reviewing the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution that guarantee equal rights for all people, specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was used toargue the case for school desegregation in the courts. Next, students work in small groups to study the impact of segregated schools and how individuals and communitiesresponded. Each small group focuses on a specific response or strategy. Finally, students come together to present what they learned, the advantages and disadvantages of thestrategy they examined, and what they might do in that situation and in a similar situation today."

"Much has changed for African-Americans since the 1963 March on Washington (which, recall, was a march for "Jobs and Freedom"), but one thing hasn't: The unemployment rate among blacks is about double that among whites, as it has been for most of the past six decades."

"On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. with that question in mind. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of that march, we're revisiting the articles written by four American icons who helped lead the country toward that historic moment."

A little known example of moral courage after the Birmingham Church Bombing