Photo: Vera Ahiyya
"What I keep saying to teachers is you're going to mess up, it's going to be uncomfortable, but the outcome is so powerful that you would have regretted never saying something sooner," says Vera Ahiyya. The kindergarten teacher from Brooklyn, N.Y., filmed a video of herself talking about racism and protests, and reading the book, "Let's Talk About Race," as a way to engage her 5-year-olds and their parents during recent tumultuous weeks of protests and unrest across the U.S. In 8 days, the video struck a strong chord with over 113,000 views. "You can empower children with words and knowledge in a very simple way, not abstract, because they're not able to take on huge things like institutional racism, but they do know what it means to tell somebody, 'You can't do this,'" Ahiyya added. "If you add in, 'A lot of people weren't able to do this because of their race or because of the way their skin looked,' kids can understand that and they can understand judgment and inequality."
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