[Image description: Raising Luminaries 2020 Good Finds]
For the full archives, you can find those here: All Good Finds Collections.
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Let go of the compulsion to curate and consume the 'best' books. How can you raise socially responsive readers starting with the books you already have?
From the (now archived) Books For Littles Facebook group – a few parent & educator challenges from our group:
“As a parent I face the challenge of critically re-examining the books I read as a child to understand whether they have any place in my family’s bookshelf and what books are better instead.”
“Continuing to develop a diverse library and verifying that I’m choosing appropriate books written by authors of color.”
“I want to be aware of books being recommended for various issues for my 7-yr old.”
Use this workbook to help your kids start thinking about centering & positionality.
What I look for in kid-friendly, kyriarchy-smashing resources.
When we assume there is one right set of books for all folks, we’re assuming we all share that one same (usually white, enabled, etc.) identity. It’s erasive, over-simplifying, and it’s kind of aggravating.
An expanded discussion on how we analyze and interpret kidlit (and how this type of media, in turn, shapes how we move through society),
Your turn!
What strategies have you used to raise critical-thinking kiddos?
Share your ideas, helpful resources, and what you’ve tried. Join the discussion group to add your thoughts, or leave a comment below
How do you want to connect on this topic, and what kinds of tools could we build to help?
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©2025 Ashia Ray of Raising Luminaries™. All rights reserved.
Raising Luminaries is anchored in the land of the Wampanoag & Massachusett People.
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Photographs via Unsplash & Illustrations via Storyset, used with permission.
Sharing this post on social media? Use this description to make it accessible: [Image description: Illustration from ‘When Aidan Became A Brother,’ by Kyle Lukoff & Kaylani Juanita. A young, transgender, multiracial boy wearing a cape, cargo shorts, and bunny slippers. His cape is made from scraps of old dresses his parents gave him that he didn’t feel comfortable in, and one of the patches resembles the trans pride flag. He looks into the distance with pride and determination, holding a stick as a make-believe magical staff.]
I also asked her – What are the three most important things she would tell younger trans people?
Her answers, like her, are gorgeous.
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
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It’s getting too cumbersome to regularly update these posts as I find new books – so I’ll only include the ones the Earthquakes asked to read over and over and over right here. But you can find a deeper, comprehensive list of trans-kid-approved validating, normalizing & destigmatizing stories over here. I’ll be updating it regularly, in our Bookshop list of Kids Books on Transgender Representation & Resilience.
There are a few books I did not include on our full list of positive representation & resilience for trans kids – but which you might see on other websites.
Here’s a quick rundown of examples, and why they didn’t make the cut:
I you find my shenanigans helpful and want to keep this website free & accessible for all – support my work directly so I can keep it up.
But if your resources are limited – first support the Trans Women of Color Collective [TWOCC], a youth-, trans-, BIWOC-led organization elevating the voices and leadership oportunities for trans women of color.
“There is a critical need for trans youth of color led initiatives that cultivate affirming spaces for our communities to engage in healing and restorative justice. We lean in with an intentional response to the trauma our community has endured by leading with the voices and leadership of our youth and young people.” – TWOCC
Support these resources via Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
Sharing this post on social media? Use this description to make it accessible: [Image description: Illustration from ‘Freedom, We Sing, by Amyra León & Molly Mendoza. A mother and her child leads a group community as they strive toward a sunburst filled with the words ‘We are free / WE ARE FREE.”]
Freedom We Sing
Amyra León & Molly Mendoza
Picture book, Best for kiddos & adults ages 3+
Penguin sent me a free copy of Freedom We Sing so I could review it for the Little Feminist Book Club.
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
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Mama tells me
Breath is Freedom
A sweet release
The right to be
When I read this book with the Earthquakes, we talked about what it means, today, to have the right to breathe. We talked about Eric Garner and George Floyd. We talked about the despairing cries of #ICantBreathe and the Black Lives Matter movement.
And we sit with that discomfort, that fear and anxiety, of knowing someone can deny breath from a Black person in this country without consequences – as easily as sending bullets through a sleeping a woman’s door, as easily as kneeling on a son’s neck – and face no consequences for it.
These horrors could send us into a spiral of despair if we don’t take responsibility to re-orient ourselves. In bearing witness, it’s our job to gather the wool of our neurons and sit with it a moment before panicking over the next thing on the news feed. And this poem does it perfectly – a reminder to provide oxygen to our bodies and our brains and celebrate that in this moment, we have that breath, and we can use it to seek liberation.
To sit with discomfort, and hope, without making all of this about us as individuals. To empathize, to acknowledge the obstacles before us, to envision a future of collective compassion. That’s always the first step in making change – to take a breath.
Shortly before I took the Earthquakes outside to read this book, Breonna Taylor’s murderers had been acquitted, and the US President had banned anti-racism education in the federal government. I needed the right story to carry them through this news. I needed an open sky to ground them, and a reminder that we can’t afford to get lost in this despair.
So we walked to a nearby field, under a hazy sky filled with smoke from western wildfires.
I brought them to this space to tell them Breonna’s murderers would face no justice for killing her in her sleep. And that the wealthy white supremacists in our government were doing everything they could to prevent us from learning from our mistakes to prevent more hate, hurt, and violence.
I didn’t realize that the haze would only serve as a reminder of the urgency and futility we’re feeling right now. I didn’t realize how heavily we’d have to rely on the story to dust ourselves off and get into fighting stance.
So we came to this field. We talked about what we’ve learned about Breonna Taylor – the person, not the hashtag. And also – how she’s been forced against her will to take a role as a piece of history – how her personhood and her life has been reduced to a symptom of a violent and broken system.
While the Earthquakes buzzed around me, running and screaming and taking big gulps of freedom through this open field, I found a big wooden plaque describing the history of this place.
I learned that we were standing on the remains of an early almshouse – where inmates (the almshouse’s term, not mine) were held in early precursors to today’s human warehousing. Other than proclaiming that early New England colonists introduced the practice of institutionalizing targeted people, the text gives us little context for the justification for segregating the people who lived, worked, and died in this place from the main population.
Oh ho! But didn’t we learn in elementary school that almshouses, mental institutions, criminal reforms, residential schools – all that stuff is compassionate? As an alternative for eugenics and massacres?
The stories we were told as kids about poorhouses and shelters being the solution to all our icky feelings about targeted folks is just another flavor of hate and oppression. Almshouses, like our modern institutions, focused on isolation, torture, and profit for those in power.
::Clears throat:: To give you a sense of the stuff circling around in my head as I my feet sunk into that ground – If you’re new to:
– and how they all tie together with the warehousing, torture, and neglect of our most vulnerable people: go google those, then come back here.
Or if you’re too overwhelmed to do that right now – let’s think about WHY, in a pre-colonist, pre-captitalist society, the Massachusett tribe who thrived here for thousands of years didn’t need such a thing as an almshouse.
They didn’t need to segregate and warehouse those with chronic illness, mental health conditions, folks with disabilities, older adults, single parents, or anyone whose dignity, labor, and love couldn’t be commodified in service for the GDP.
Again, I know you’re tired – so I’ll spell it out. We only need a place to lock away your ‘undesirables’ if we think some humans are inherently less valuable than others. ‘Cause only a society of assholes warehouses and tortures those most need of our compassion and support.
Okay. Wow. (but not wow, this is a country built on the bones of Indigenous and Black people) – we are here, to talk about freedom and how we’ve stolen it from each other. And we’re apparently doing it on this soil soaked in the tears and pain of imprisoned people.
I really wanted to bring the Earthquakes to a carefree and open space to balance out this conversation. But with the smoke above us, the blood beneath us, and the police sirens wailing past us – hot damn.
I told the kids where we were standing. Connected it to the present-day fight to age in place, the role of for-profit prisons, the Judge Rotenburg center near our home, how we target Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people in the US, and the role we play when we fail to act.
As we read, the Earthquakes asked – what kinds of people were imprisoned here, in this field? Who decided they shouldn’t be free? How many died where we sat? Were any of them, if any – able to find freedom?
And I asked: How did this almshouse transform into the institutions of today? How is our nation built upon the bones of places like this? How do we, as a community fail to seek justice and healing? How can create a new way?
Freedom We Sing is a poem. It’s a poem about Black Futures – acknowledging the past in honesty, creating visions and working toward a good, holistic, free future. Helping kids focus on the here and now – the only place we have the power to work for collective liberation.
Stories of Black futures reject the victim/savior model – that trope of Black people as victims pre-determined to wallow in grief, redemption available only through assimilation, submission, or gripping the ears of a white feminist’s pussy hat.
Futurism isn’t just science fiction. Futurists acknowledge the consequences of history and make space for today.
Today is full of injustice. Today is full of warehousing of our sick, Disabled, and Mad. Today expands segregation, cringes from transformative justice, gentrifies and disbands loving communities, and defunds Black & brown schools. Today leaves no public space for our oldest and youngest generations to be free. Today imprisons immigrants and asylum seekers and rips them from their families. Today builds entire economies and towns around prisons, breeding ripe spaces for abuse and violence, these almshouse incubators, these red-lined spaces, these concentration camps, these private for-profit prisons – for a disease and pandemics to rage.
Black Futurists create kidlit to validate and humanize the experience of Black children. To give them a future worth striving for without erasing the past.
Poems, by their nature, are exclusionary. They’re designed to connect with very specific readers – someone who sees themselves reflected in the poet’s experience. If a poem was for everybody, it wouldn’t feel so satisfying for those who breathe it in and exhale – oh my gosh, I’m not alone.
Poetry is a wink and a nod to those with shared experiences, shared pain, and a shared vision of liberation. When we – as an Asian/white family read Freedom We Sing, we understand the references as outsiders. This book expects non-Black people of color and white folks to keep up. As we’ve said before, we need more of that.
To create a community, you kind of have to define who is not in the community. Can we do that without hate, without fear, without violence and oppression? YUP.
To do good work, targeted people need safe spaces, and we all need brave spaces – to create these, we must allow for locks. And that lock means some folks will never get unrestricted access. Facing exclusion for the very first time, this can be hard for folks at the top of the social hierarchy to accept.
As a light-skinned Asian with racial privilege, there are many other places where I can be free. There are probably references in this book I’ll never catch. We just kind of have to sit with that, when we’re trying to do accomplice work. And that’s okay! As accomplices, we can still do our best, eyes and ears open, listen & amplify, keep showing up and break ourselves open a little bit each day in seeking a collective future of liberation and love.
The book opens with talk of constellations, and the 6-year-old ruminates on this reference, pondering the way-finding scene in his favorite movie, Moana.
Does he know, I ask, that people used those same stars to escape slavery and navigate to freedom?
I wonder then
What Freedom is
Is it a place?
Is It a thought?
Can it be stolen?
Can it be bought?
We study the page with of refugee mothers running to save their children, and how the sky connects us to our ancestry.
We talk about our Irish ancestors – whose indigenous lands were colonized, who were starved out of their own homes while their invaders stockpiled, and how they were eventually forced to the US against their will. We talk about our Chinese ancestors, escaping first famine in China, then violence and racial cleansing in Malaysia.
How did we get free – and who made that possible for us?
We talk about how we are settlers now in a land of Indigenous people who have used their wits and tenacity to survive colonization for five hundred years, now fighting for treaties and land. We talk about what we share, and how we have a responsibility to make this space safe for immigrants and refugees today. What freedom are they seeking, and what role do we play in centering their voices?
We look above at that smoke-filled sky, and talk about climate refugees, climate justice. About our modern slavery system that steals Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Disabled children off the streets, breaks them down through a broken justice system, and forces them to risk their lives fighting fires we caused. We talk about cash bail, and capitalism.
And then we take all those big feelings, and we breathe.
These conversations have to go somewhere. We can’t just read a book for ‘awareness’ and consider our work done. Here are a few ways we transform our family discussions from Freedom, We Sing into action:
This isn’t a one-and-done conversation. We need to bring the conversations started with Freedom, We Sing back to kids from multiple angles.
Author: Amyra León (she/her) is a Black musician, playwright, author, and activist.
Illustrator: Molly Mendoza (she/her) doesn’t have self-identifying info on her website, but her work shows up in Latinx in Publishing in web searches.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by autistic author Corinne Duyvis
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
Penguin sent me a free review copy of several books. Some were meh, some were good. But Freedom, We Sing stood out as AMAZING. Make sure to check it out of your local library to keep it in circulation, and perhaps grab your own copy while supporting local indie bookstores on Bookshop.
Support the Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute first. My kids have two parents to support them – but through the AYOI, we can support and connect with youth to end targeted policing and incarceration.
“Project NIA [the AYOI lead organizer]’s mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based alternatives.
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support Raising Luminaries: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
[Image: Illustration from ‘On The Day You Begin’ written by Jacqueline Woodson &illustrated by Rafael López. A young girl stands on her apartment balcony, cheek resting on her hand, as she looks wistfully outside. Her other hand holds a book, as her little sister sleeps in the bed behind her and a blue bird flies above.]
Picture book, Text is best for kiddos ages 7-10 (Images work for kiddos ages 3-8)
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
Our current school plan leaves us with is a shit-show where the most targeted, overworked folks are grasping for information that’s never coming, while all the folks who designed our new system hire private tutors and bounce.
Now that education systems are finally forced to become more equitable for immunocompromised students and families who don’t have internet access, no one is willing to let go of this urge to replicate ‘normal.’ So instead, we have to settle for... an even less accessible version of education than we had before. We’re all so eager to get back to the agony we’re used to, as it’s the devil we know.
Our city’s plan is: create a segregated hybrid model where some kids have no choice but to go to school (but only for a few hours so quit your job) and some kids have no choice to but stay home (so quit your job). Instead of asking the most most marginalized and targeted, we fell into the lazy trap of listening to those most powerful and loud.
This system is designed to appease parents are rushing to cram all the kids back into school full time – so kids can become vectors of disease. But of course it doesn’t. We don’t have the resources we need to protect teachers and students from infection, but we do have oodles of wealthy folks hiring private at-home tutors and networked pods while the rest of us flounder to cook, work, and comfort kids kids sobbing over broken zoom links.
It’s almost like the goal is to ever-widen that opportunity gap. Our teacher’s organization, disabled and immunocompromised families, and families of color are all asking for us to re-imagine high-quality distance learning so all kids can roll back into school when it’s safe to do so – instead of settling for a hastily tossed together hybrid option that actively segregates students and thins our resources.
Which – let’s be frank? It is. Designing a school system that shoves a handful of students into the ivy leagues, while ushering the rest to insecure contract work for Uber and Amazon warehouses is the goal.
Imagine what a back-to-school rollout would look like if it was designed by boots-on-the-ground educators, with the insight and input of our most targeted and at-risk students.
Like caregivers and educators around the country, I thought it would be best to wait for more information before deciding how to move forward with schooling this year. But no one is willing to admit how long this pandemic will last. So no one can make the decisions they need to move forward.
Would my kids get the teacher we had hoped for – making the agony of distance learning worth it? (We did not.)
Would refusing to participate in school surveys about ‘which side of segregation would you like to be on?’ force the administration to center targeted families or just create a headache for overworked administrators trying to make plans? (No, and yes, a truly lose-lose situation!)
Would opting out of public education entirely for our dream liberation unschooling adventure be a gross exercise in exploiting our privilege, or would opting-in just subject our family to more ableist, confusing work? (Both!)
We’re one week into school. It’s Friday, and even our teachers don’t know what time we’re meeting on Monday. There is no information coming. We’re just gonna have to take a wild guess and deal with the consequences. We saw this coming – because most of the country opened schools way, way, way before us. We should know. But nah. I blame private education profiteers and eugenicists attending Covid 19 parties!
But honestly, this is all of our faults for hoping someone smarter than us would deal with it. It turns out the only folks who had the ability to make their voices heard this summer were the wealthy folks. The ones with strong opinions and yet so many options. Those with private tutors and 4-car-garage learning pods – those kids our school system was already designed to accommodate. Of course they’d advocate for the white savior ideal we never wanted, and then bail while we juggle the fallout.
And now it’s all of our responsibility to deal with white & wealthy flight – defunding public schools as those who fought hardest for stuff we didn’t want opt-out for private school, private tutors, and learning pods.
I spent the previous week setting up the ideal sensory-friendly collaborative learning space – with pillows in just the right spot for a caring dialogue and windows open for a connection to nature. But of course children are agents of chaos and unpredictability. Nothing ever works out the way I plan.
[Image: Best-laid plans! The deschooling discovery room three minutes before our first official ‘class’ (family meeting), lovingly set out with pillows for each of our four family members to sit on and have a reasonable conversation together.]
deschooling discovery room
We have the choice on whether to homeschool or not. Honestly – with our disabilities, the fact that I work from home, and the whole ableist, white supremacist framework that our school system rests on – It would be much, much easier for us to quit school and do self-directed learning at home.
But our hope is to keep the kids enrolled in public school to keep cultivating interdependence within our local community – and to keep our tax dollars funding supplies and payroll for families who don’t have a choice.
Keeping my kids in school makes my life exponentially harder. It means we have to do deschooling to counter the negative messages, bias, and frustration the Earthquakes are picking up from zoom meetings. We’re half a week in and I am floundering.
Do we try to do double-schooling? Do we leave the schools and build an education that is actually accessible for our family? There is no good decision. So we gave the Earthquakes the facts, talked about our hopes and dreams – and put it to a vote
[Image: The Earthquakes in the discovery room, ruminating over their votes. One is hiding underneath a coffee table. Another is lolling on the ground, staring up at the ceiling like a wiggly zombie that needs to pee but refuses to take a bathroom break. The pillows have been confiscated due to recurring battles.]
kids lolling during deschooling
Last week, we gathered for our first formal day of Bumblebee Hollow Deschooling Academy to talk as a family about circumstances, vision, and action. To scaffold our first official meeting, we reviewed the messages in the following books, discussed our options, and decided to vote on how we would move forward.
I had hoped to adjourn this hour of family schooling with us working together to send our mail-in-voter applications, but alas, the room devolved into a pillow fight and demands for snacks before we could get that far.
Facts vs. Opinions vs. Robots
Vote For Our Future!Okay so it turns out that children are complicated human beings with their own agendas and challenges with attention and self-interest.
We did manage to discuss the main point about the impact of our education choices – which is that we are being forced to make uninformed decisions. And our decisions that could do real harm both to us, and our wider community.
Bit we did decide to do as we learned in the books – wait until we have more information to make a decision. We would participate in distance learning for six weeks, and then re-assess based on how much busy-work, condescending low expectations, and ableist compliance grooming we encountered.
Managing the social emotional impact of inequity in the classroomAfter the Earthquakes decided to do distance schooling, I ‘introduced’ them each to the teachers they had been assigned to. One teacher had a cute video about her website that they enjoyed and then got bored and wandered away from. The other teacher had a letter about her vacations, visits with family, and trips to the beach.
Meant for an audience of kids who had no choice but to choose distance learning when their friends are at school. Those who have isolate for various reasons. Kids who haven’t left their homes for over six months.
… So, like every oblivious ‘getting to know you’ back-to-school exercise where rich kids boast about vacations and fancy camps – that was something I had to prepare the kids for. (SERIOUSLY TEACHERS PLEASE STOP TURNING ICEBREAKERS INTO A LIFESTYLE COMPETITION.)
No judgement for folks who have the resources for this kind of thing – but we do not. My kids have been locked in our block since March, with rare excursions outside. They have been begging me to take them to the beach (without a beach house or access to a public restroom – how though?!!?), begging to visit their grandparents who are either managing Covid or at-risk themselves, and as always, begging to travel to places we will never afford. How would we do that?! We don’t have a damn beach house!
Reading a letter to my kids about how their teacher can’t empathize with the isolation and disappointment of this summer is not getting us into the headspace of ‘let’s give this a try.’ And honestly it just makes me want to flip a table?
So I read the letter, while viciously blocking my screen and leaving out the paragraph about all the hopes and dreams my kids wish they could achieve, but others are effortlessly curating on Instagram. And then we read On The Day You Begin.
We talked about:
And then, then we read the paragraph from our teacher. Her adventures paled in comparison with being able to watch soothing Korean cooking shows on youtube together each night. Or being able to influence thousands of kids to work a little harder for abolishing the police, anti-racism, and supporting our neighbors. And I bet those vacation people didn’t save up for years to finally afford a Nintendo Switch, which got ample use each morning. (Satisfying!)
This helped. Unlike all the years when my kids come deflated and sobbing after disclosing their boring-ass summers stuck on our block, we were able to proactively deal with, and empower the kids to see how lucky they are and how much power they hold.
So maybe this 6 weeks of distance schooling, if we work really super duper extra hard – can be transformed into something great?
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support Raising Luminaries: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
But if your resources are limited – support a local classroom through Donors Choose first.
Sharing this post on social media? Use this image description to make it accessible: [Image description: Illustration from ‘We Are Water Protectors’ by Carole Lindstrom & Michaela Goade. A young girl of the Anishinaabe connects with her ancestors through their shared water.]
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
There are too few water books explaining why conserving and protecting our water is terrifyingly urgent. Those that touch on water scarcity and pollution often leave us in despair – with no ideas on how we can take action at the root of the problem.
We Are Water Protectors does not promise answers or closure – Lindstrom invites you to learn more and keep going. It’s full of vibrant, fascinating imagery that haunts just enough to keep us thinking after the book is closed.
I’ve been for something to put in the ‘things we’re not too keen on’ for our overall awesomeness score below. The best I can do is that I have only a shallow understanding of the symbols and significance of each part of the story – but that’s not the book’s fault. Actually, it’s a bonus!
As settlers, our family needed more scaffolding to parse the story. In our first read, the Earthquakes got bored and wandered off. The text and illustrations are packed with imagery of culture & cosmology of the Anishinaabe. The fact that we can’t parse all of it right away speaks to a failure of our education system, of our settler-centrism, of my failure to prepare them for these pages.
I ended up setting aside We Are Water Protectors for a couple weeks and grabbed more concrete books like Oil and Young Water Protectors to provide some background before trying again. After reading those two, the Earthquakes were able to tie concrete harm to the nebulous terror of the black snake in We Are Water Protectors.
Normally I get a little irritated when an author leaves the work of understanding, parsing, and explaining the significance of a story on the shoulders of a grown up. You know what I’m talking about – board books that look cool on a shelf, filled with elitist jargon so over the heads of most adults that it’s clear the author didn’t put effort into understanding the needs or abilities of a young reader. The industry is rampant with kidlit authors who don’t respect kids. Childism!
This, however, is different. We Are Water Protectors is written for children. This story is written for Indigenous children, and holds enough respect for us settlers that they demand we catch up. I LOVE THIS.
The Earthquakes are of distant Anishinaabe heritage through their dad. Assimilation has ripped away any cultural ties or understanding of their Indigenous ancestors beyond names and factoids about their family’s indigeneity.
Stories like this give us an opportunity to talk about why they never inherited Anishinaabe stories and traditions, tying in the ways we settler-colonialists have actively forced Indigenous families through assimilation, sowed internalized racism, promoted tokenism of their own relations, and created an environment targeting Indigenous people with violence, poverty, and generational trauma.
We talk about how so many settler families like ours weaponize Indigenous ancestors against actually Indigenous people today.
We talk about how to acknowledge their connection to our shared history without speaking over Indigenous family who were actually raised within nations and traditions – and face targeting and erasure that we don’t.
We talk about how to decolonize by listening and following Indigenous leadership – which starts with the truth about what was lost, and what we settlers have taken.
We start with seeking situations where we are de-centered and disoriented, because only then can we start to understand how little we know – and the deep need to follow Indigenous leadership in the movement for climate justice.
As we’ll learn from Kelsey Leonard (video below) – it’s time for some of us to re-think our relations to animals, plants, and the elements of our planet. It’s actually not that hard to mobilize ourselves into action if we begin to empathize and connect with what we’ve lost. As Lindstrom points out –
We fight for those who cannot fight for themselves: the winged ones, the crawling ones. The four-legged, the two-legged, the plants, trees, rivers, lakes, the earth. We are all related.
I started writing this before the 2020 wildfires sparked after a months-long drought, ravaging through the west coast, blanketing families at risk of covid complications in smoke. We have billionaires building rockets to Mars, and yet people in Navajo Nation don’t have running water to was their hands through a pandemic. Oil corporations make millions exploiting loopholes while species go extinct due to oil spills.
Honestly – as wildfires rage in a drought, ending water abuse feels too big, and too late. But in the video below, Leonard shows us the path in moving forward. She gives us ways to protect the water that feels so obvious and doable. Could it be this simple to start dismantling colonist supremacy? To transform our relationship with our water, and each other?
I hate watching videos, but this one is really engaging and quite enjoyable to watch. But for those of you for whom videos are inaccessible: here are the main ways we can protect our water:
What we get out of books like We Are Water Protectors is personal. As settlers starting to understand how our presence here continues the harm of colonization – we struggle to understand our role in decolonizing. If we can’t disconnect our feet from this land – how do we change the way our actions relate to it? How do we transform the harm we’ve done and follow indigenous leadership into returning to sustainability and interdependence?
What we got out of it was the missing link between the dry nonfiction and the stories of who we are as one people. The comfort for us, is seeing how the protagonist dons medicine wheel earrings, which represent (among many things) – all people across the world. We are reminded that we are all connected, and we settlers belong in this relationship with the water, too.
These conversations have to go somewhere. We can’t just read a book for ‘awareness’ and consider our work done. Here are a few ways we transform our family discussions from We Are Water Protectors into action:
This isn’t a one-and-done conversation. We need to bring this conversation back to kids from multiple angles. Here are a few more books continue this conversation.
Oh, you betcha!
Author: Carole Lindstrom (she/her), Anishinaabe/Métis, tribally enrolled with the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe.
Illustrator: Michaela Goade (she/her), of Tlingit descent and tribally enrolled with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by autistic author Corinne Duyvis
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
I borrowed a copy of We Are Water Protectors from our local library, (which we support with donations). If you don’t have access to a library, learn how to support your local indie bookstore on Bookshop.
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support Raising Luminaries: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
But if your resources are limited – support Seeding Sovereignty first.
“In a time of climate crisis, Seeding Sovereignty; an Indigenous womxn-led collective, works on behalf of our global community to shift social and environmental paradigms by dismantling colonial institutions and replacing them with Indigenous practices created in synchronicity with the land.”
Anti-Racism For Beginners 203
You can create an anti-racist family manifesto in 15 minutes! And it would be spectacular! In fact – our partner-in-cahoots, Revolutionary Humans has a quick & easy manifesto cut-out kit you can print & enjoy with your family!
Unfortunately our family can’t process stuff that quickly. So for those who need to think slow and dig deep, this series of kid-friendly actions is designed to take less than 20-minutes per day. Or if you have kids who can focus for long stretches at a time, an intensive 2-4 hour chunk all in one go.
Coordinated in partnership with Wee The People, Revolutionary Humans, The Philly Children’s Movement, MassArt’s Center For Art And Community Partnerships, and Raising Luminaries.
In anti-racism work, we tend to look outward about what we can do, about who is affected – and often forget to look inward.
Note for kids with communication challenges – if kids are overwhelmed with processing inner thoughts into outward language, use declarative language, and let them know they are welcome to add their reflections when they are ready to talk.
Which could be days, weeks, or never. We’re aiming to have kids process these thoughts internally, not to have them come up with perfect answers.
Today, we’re going to give kids another simple art project. But first, grown-ups, let’s cover some basics before we dive deeper into this conversation.
So even though white folks created white supremacy, our entire community maintains it. As targets of anti-Blackness, we’ve placed the onus of dismantling racism on Black people to solve. Does that sound fair? Does that even make any damn sense?
As the primary beneficiaries of white supremacy, as the recipients of power, as the folks with the least barriers in the way – it’s a white person’s responsibility to end it.
Why should white folks end it? Many white folks have told me they’re fighting white supremacy to help people of color. NO! We don’t need saviors. Do it for white folks. White supremacy is a lie that separates European descendants from the rest of humanity. It’s a lie that says white folks have to exploit people of color to survive.
Supremacy divides us, and being separated and disconnected from each other hurts. In dismantling white supremacy, we’re not trying to drag white folks down (as if we all live on an imaginary staircase, which is a terrible place to live) – we’re trying to come back home, to find each other. White folks – fight white supremacy in service to your own liberation.
We benefit from anti-Blackness. We leverage colorism & racism against Black folks to paddle our way toward the bait of white acceptance. We are targets of white supremacy, and white supremacy stands on the footing of anti-Blackness. Shoving Black people down to gain a foothold just strengthens white supremacy!
White supremacy divides people of color to weaken us. Supremacy tears us from our white friends, our Black friends, and even our fellow people of color. It rips us from the people we love, without our consent.
The only way to heal our family is to acknowledge our complicity in anti-Blackness, and take action to unite as one people who want to be free – together.
The central pillar of white supremacy is this made-up identity of whiteness. Folks who were rich, powerful, and greedy to stay that way created the definition of whiteness. They drove power to whiteness, decided who had access a white identity, and chose who to use as fuel in elevating white power. And then they sold marginalized white folks and non-Black people of color lie that we could earn our way to equal power if we behaved, worked hard, and examined Blackness as the root of racism.
White people have a very, very serious problem… and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.
We live in an imperfect world – where all of us have different barriers and access to power due to our racial identities. That means we all must take on different responsibilities.
As an Asian person, it’s outside my lane to suggest actions for Black families. So let’s amplify our Black-founded coalition partners Revolutionary Humans & Wee The People as they curate affirmations, opportunities to rest, resist, learn, take action, and affirm the identity of Black children amidst the constant weight of surviving in an anti-Black society.
Meanwhile – us non-Black folks should be using the tools at our disposal to end anti-Blackness.
While the kids do their art-thing, discuss:
*Black anti-racism educators! Center the voices and follow the directions of targeted folks when doing accomplice work. Listen, believe, and honor requests, but don’t just ask your Black friend to guide you – just because they’re Black doesn’t mean they want (or are equipped to) to take on the labor or anti-racism education. As an Asian person – I’m following the lead of Wee The People in our #FamilySummer4BlackLives initiative.
Today – we’re talking with our kids who they are, so in following activities we can identify what resources we have available, and how to use these resources to dismantle racism.
If you haven’t already started talking with your kids about your family’s racial identity, visit Raising The Resistance‘s Discussion Guide For Families: Race, Ethnicity, Nationality & Indigenaity to understand the identities within your family.
Do we believe that Black lives matter? Do we believe that punitive justice targets Black people? Do we believe in defunding the police? Do we believe the school to prison pipeline targets vulnerable kids? Do we believe in abolition?
Name it. Own it.
For more ideas to create your family’s activist identity, check out Revolutionary Humans’ self-affirming cutout set -(and join me in supporting this RH on Patreon so Bellamy can keep creating activist resources for young kids.)
Now that our families are able to affirm who we are, we’re ready to start resourcing – identifying the tools, abilities, and power we have accessible to us in the face of a crisis.
This helps our kids understand why activism isn’t a one-size-fits all check-box of steps. The action we take hinges on what is within our control to mitigate and prevent harm – to ourselves, and to others.
Get creative with this. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that a library card, an autistic hyperfocus on picture books, and two opinionated children who refuse to suffer mediocre books could be weaponized as tools to fight the kyriarchy, but here we are.
We’ve acknowledged who we are, and we’ve also discovered what we have – the unique resources we have available.
Now it’s time to brainstorm actions – what are you capable of doing with the power you have today?
Stay tuned on the Family Summer 4 Black Lives facebook page – we’re currently working on ways to lead non-Black POC & white folks to doing work examining complicity whiteness, while Black families are invited to rest and receive.
Our current plan is to raise funds to purchase copies of Zetta Elliott’s A Place Inside of Me: A poem to heal the heart, and with the direction of Wee The People & Zetta herself, direct it to Black kids navigating trauma, healing, and grief under the weight of living while Black in America.
Following the inspiration from Revolutionary Humans’ Family Summer 4 Black Lives templte prompts, go chalk the walk with your family manifesto. Be sure to support her hard work!
Map it in a chart, scrawl it out in text, draw a mural – let your kids fly with your the affirmations and promises of your new family manifesto.
*Note for our literal-minded friends, it might be a good idea to list a frequency or conditions for your action. Activist burnout is real, and folks of color with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to it. Showing up for 2 city council meetings per year, instead of all city council meetings, is much better than burning out and showing up for none.
Leave a comment – what action is your family taking this summer?
Not on social media? Join us for our FREE summer-long virtual event. Each month, families with young kids will gather for one at-home* collaborative action. SPREAD THE WORD on Facebook and Instagram using the tags #FamilySummer4BlackLives.
Follow & collaborate with our coalition: Wee the People, Revolutionary Humans, MassArt’s Center for Art and Community Partnerships, the Philly Children’s Movement, and Raising Luminaries as we create a 2020 Summer of Action to support anti-racist families in building a better future together.
[Image description: Good Finds July 2020 banner]
For folks who want to quickly cut & paste to create a reading list:
For older teens & grown-ups
This simple graphic novel was juuust basic enough for the 6 year-old, and we’re adding it to our lexicon of books that help kids give AF about our oceans and the environment, but in way that doesn’t send them reeling into despair or nihilism. This is the only engaging book I’ve found that addresses over-fishing, water pollution, and alludes to water rights – without getting all didactic and preachy about it.
Most characters avoid pronouns altogether, but at least one character is uses They/them. There’s an implied pansexual (?) relationship (hard to tell since one person’s gender isn’t referenced, and the other is nonbinary. But it’s definitely not hetero!)
I particularly liked the change of heart of Aunt Mae – who goes from a littering, capitalism-motivated, complex person (a caring who does shitty things!) into recognizing that they’ve made made some mistakes. We see the impact of her choices, and Mae takes responsibility for their actions and takes steps to heal the harm. Which is perfect for teaching kids about transformative justice.
The protagonist, Lana, is multiracial but white presenting with red hair, which is lovely (both her mom and aunt present as ambiguously brown). Both mom and Aunt Mae have big beefy arms which I LOVE SO MUCH.
The protagonist has a single father, and the story suggests he’s not doing a great job. In fact, she finds solace in being cared for only when she visits her aunt. Dad is crappy not because he’s a single father – but because he’s still grieving the loss of his wife. But still – I don’t think we need more books about dads not parenting up to snuff. That’s really my only quibble with the story.
Oh hey check it out – a cute book normalizing physical disabilities (protagonist is a wheelchair user)! The actual story is about a pet lizard friend – and how the lizard can do most of the things the kid does, just differently. “Zibbo is amazing just the way he is.”
Which I guess makes this both normalizing and empowering. Lovely.
Caveat: Antony could have been more mindful with the illustrations – as is typical, the kiddo’s wheelchair looks more like a hospital wheelchair than one meant for every day use.
It’s super basic, so I’m thinking this is best for kids under 6. You can check out the author read aloud here.
This book has been in the colors collection for a while, but I got a keeper copy of this from Little Feminist Book Club. I don’t really know if that counts as skewing my review (because I give these books positive reviews before I get the books and I get the books because I approved them for upcoming book boxes). It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, so let’s just add disclosures to be safe.
Anyway – yay for lovely books normalizing healthy masculinity and gentle brown boys!!! Harpreet chooses his patka (a dastaar, but for younger kiddos) color based on his emotions, which both normalizes and destigmatizes Sikh kiddos, but also empowers boys to acknowledge and communicate their emotions. And he’s explicit – a patka is NOT A HAT. We learn all kinds of good stuff when we move out of the way and let #OwnVoices Sikh authors represent themselves.
R2 enjoyed this for a read at 6, but it was a little bit simple and I do wish there was a touch of humor or mystery to keep kids more engaged. Despite that, it’s solid, and probably best for the 3-6 range.
The Sand Warrior is the first book in the 5 Worlds series, a scifi graphic novel for kiddos. I originally tried it out when Q was 6.5 but it was just too advanced for him, but now that he’s 8, I thought it’d make a great birthday present.
Well golly gosh wow, does it. Q went from a reluctant, screaming-writing-whining reader (we never push reading, but you’d think I’m jabbing him with a hot poker when I had him a 1-word board book and ask if he’d like to read it to me) to the kind of kid who stays in bed all day with his nose in a book
He brings this book with him to meals. He falls asleep on it at night. He does all of his chores and brushes his teeth, with the promise that if he does these things 14 days in a row, we’ll buy him the next book in the series.
The writers are white, with two Asian and one white illustrators. And the overall series, I suspect, is going to dig deeper into tensions on racial coding, but I’m just crossing my fingers it doesn’t turn into white saviorism and another Zootopia.
So far, the Toki, a race of blue-skinned people relegated to manual labor, are the bad guys under control of the Big Bad Guy. Which feels problematic to me. The folks in power (folks who live on Mon Domani) have no word for their race so far. Which feels a lot like white folks acknowledging monolithic groups like Black, Latinx, etc. but clutching their sandstones when we say “white people.” The…Mon Domani-ans(?) live in a colorblind fever dream, where white, Black, and Asiatic-presenting people live in more-or-less harmony with no acknowledgement of humanoid race. Although almost all the folks in power are white.
There are a few plump characters, but nothing radical enough to include in the adipositivity collection.
This was part 1 in the West Meadows Detectives series. I’ve been sitting on this for a year, waiting for time to read it with the 8-year-old. Pandemic benefits – now that it’s so hard to get books out of the library, we have plenty of time for chapter books! The 6-year-old sat through the first chapter and bounced, it’s still too advanced for him.
The neurodivergent kiddo asked if Myron was autistic before the book disclosed it. I LOVE this, and so did he. He actually saw himself in two characters, Hajrah – a South Asian girl who is hyperactive, and Myron, the #BasicWhiteBoyAutisticSavant.
I wish Myron was anything OTHER than a white guy, but unlike many allistic folks who play off the Basic White Boy Autistic Savant (TM), he doesn’t read as cold and robotic. The reason this book gives me hope is that the author consulted with an #ActuallyAutistic adult (Dr. Jason Nolan) – and not just any rando off the street – an Autistic who studies early childhood development. This diligence shows. Myron is a character you can empathize with and admire. He’s someone you’d want to be friends with – not just collect as a diversity token.
The story is short and lovely. The ‘bad guys’ showed compassion and complexity, Hajrah is an exercise in breaking submissiv stereotypes about Asian girls and my little hyperactive auistic loved that he got to identify with BOTH of the characters.
Even though the book is narrated by Myron (again, not ideal) Hajrah pulls her weight and is a full partner, not a sidekick. I’m wondering how much work he truly did to depict Hajrah as more than brown-face, however. While she has the name and the looks – what aspects of her personality are informed by her culture? Cause she reads as white to me. Crossing my fingers this improves in later books.
The one thing that super-bugged me: the author betrays his whiteness by playing into the orientalist ’shifty eyes’ trope. “They were twins with big ears, flat noses, and small eyes. In detective stories, those are called shifty eyes. Characters with shifty eyes cannot be trusted. Ever.”
While the ‘bad guys’ are white, it’s impossible to separate that stereotype of what ’shifty eyes’ means away from the origin of Asians as untrustworthy. And it’s notable how Hajrah is the type of Asian with round eyes who doesn’t fall into that stereotype. So I talked with the kiddo about why people make those assumptions about folks with epicanthic folds and double eyelids.
So talk about that, but despite this – Myron and Hajrah had nothing to ‘overcome’ we just get to them in their glory using their unique talents and neurodivergent cognition to solve a mystery. Although this applies much more to Myron than Hajrah – we don’t really see how her disabilities help them solve the mystery, much more than her willingness to move forward and act without letting Myron overthink things.
Transparency: This is another chicken-and-egg situation, this is another free keeper from Little Feminist Book Club. I should also add that I perceive the illustrator as white (England born & US settler), and I can’t find any biographies or photos of the author, so it’s unlikely this is an #OwnVoices series.
While #1 and #2 in the Mia Mayhem series were a bit slow and clunky, West really finds her footing with his one. This is a nice cohesive chapter book about brushing off past sore losers. The characters don’t magically win over the bully, which is refreshing. Who says it’s always on the target to win over a bully? We’re allowed to drop that nonsense!
But the main theme of the story is on healthy pacing, self-care, resting when we’re exhausted. And in this book, we’ve got a fast and powerful new super-hero friend who uses two running blade prosthesis, which is cool. So I’m gonna add that to our normalizing disability collection – her legs aren’t a big deal, but they aren’t ignored, and after talking about her prosthetic legs, the rest of her role in the book is as a friend, not ‘the disabled character.’
2019 version by Julie Leung – not to be confused with the 2013 book by Ong, Loh, and James, which I admit I haven’t read yet.
We read this alongside my great-uncle’s report of how my multiple generations of our Great (x2-4) Grandfathers came to the US from the same province of Guangdong as Tyrus, also picking up ‘paper names’ in order to thwart racist laws banning us from the US.
Speaking to the erasure of AAPI contributions to US culture, we see how Wong’s work at Disney was influential – and how he got none of the credit and was repeatedly discriminated against as disposable. So many scenes in this book gave us a way to discuss how our family had to jump through loopholes to get here, about Asian American erasure – but also gives us a reflection of how this is STILL HAPPENING for immigrants in detention today.
It’s appropriate for younger kids as the story glosses over how truly horrible the holding prisons our ancestors were detained in, and for how long. But there’s just enough emotional pull – how he had to live without his mother and sister. And that connected, for us, with the fact that my the women and younger sons in our familis, were left behind in Guangdong, where many died of starvation.
It was exciting for the 7-year-old to talk about how Wong’s family is from the same place as ours, to look at the pictures of his mother and sister and how similar they are to our own family photos.
Unfortunately there’s no pinyin equivalent for the few words italicized in Cantonese. Reading this book inspired Q and R2 to sit up late for several nights pouring over Water To Paper, Paint To Sky / The Art of Tyrus Wong to look at how Wong’s influence stretched into many of our favorite movies. Although I suspect most of the interest was in Wong’s naked figure exercises. But he WAS taken with Wong’s kites, which are spectacular.
Transparency! Sterling Publishing sent me a free review copy of this. Which I am glad about because I never would have thought to pick it up otherwise.
I sat on this a while – had to wait until Q was 8 for him to get old enough to get the humor. But POW-BAM-BOOM – he hit 8 (and a pandemic that left us with no library picture book alternatives) and LOVED it. I’ve never had so much fun reading a chapter book out loud. The flow is spectacular. It was really fun for us.
I *think* the author did a good job both de-stigmatizing limb difference in the treatment of this character – while also speaking to her humanity and depth beyond her identity as an adopted person and kid with limb differences. But I haven’t been able to find any feedback from #ActuallyDisabled folks with limb differences. So I am interested to hear your take on it, folks who know more about this than I do.
For a book that treated disability so mindfully, there was a surprising amount of abelist slurs. Such as the repeated use of the word ‘lame’ as a pejorative. Which COME ON – in a book about girl with no arms, this should have given the author like THREE SECONDS OF PAUSE. Plus sanist stuff like ‘crazy’ and ‘psycho’ and suggesting that people with mental health conditions are dangerous. “I didn’t know if something was wrong with him, like he was insane and could attack me at any moment,” Dude, no! That could have been phrased better without playing into stereotypes that folks with mental health conditions are dangerous, rather than disproportionately more likely to be targets of violence. And there is an older character whose dementia is used as a plot point (the doddering old fool / incompetent elder trope).
I point this out because so much of the book treats both physical and mental disability with compassion and respect. So frankly, I’m just confounded that the author and editors would have let his shit through.
Beyond that – the friend with Tourettes is a bit flat, but a great character. And for some reason, there’s a token fat black character (Zion) who has so little impact on the story it feels like he was thrown in as an afterthought. Kind of like the token Black friend in Fish In A Tree. Who wears a shirt that says ‘Flint’ and the author confirmed that this has nothing to do with the water crisis in Flint are you fucking serious here with this oblivious white nonsense? Neither kid’s Blackness has anything to do with his story, their lives, and nor does this Blackness present any additional hurdles to the characters that the white protagonists don’t have to navigate. Whitewashing!
Zion reads as if the author was like ‘let’s break stereotypes about black nerds’ without actually knowing about Black Geekdom. Zion reads as very white – not because his parents are nerds, but because the only thing that the author acknowledges about his blackness is his brown skin. And we could fill another 300 pages on what she was thinking when she named him ‘Zion’ without any reference to the biblical roots, Black Zion, or the racism of Zionism (all the stuff that readers are bound to wonder about), reducing a word with such deep meaning to multiple targeted people into a SciFi reference. (This is that Flint T-shirt all the fuck over again).
Okay – I ranted about the gross parts. But you’ll just have to believe me that despite all this (I mention it just so you’re prepared for it), we really did love this book.
**SPOILER** Although – honestly one day I’d love to read a book where a person is a adopted and that fact does not have any bearing on the big mystery twist at the end. JUST EVEN ONCE PLEASE.
I do like that solving the mystery of her first mother wasn’t a shiny happy ending, But she was allowed to hold complex feelings about it instead of rushing into forgiveness or familial relationship with her blood relatives.
Unicorns 101 – This was a shallow, ridiculous, funny book full of slightly-annoying continuity errors. But it’s about unicorns, so I the bar is low.
R2 is currently in the intense-unicorn-obsession stage. I’m talking wearing a fleece unicorn hooded suit & matching rainbow tutu in 90-degree weather, unicorn birthday cake, don’t-you-dare-talk-shit-about-the-‘orns stage.
So this is one of the better unicorn books out there. I want to show him that I care about him, and he cares about unicorns, so I can pretend to give fuck about imaginary magic horses who poop vegan cheeseburgers or whatever.
The humor is best for 5+, and it’s not gendered the way most unicorn books are, which is refreshing (Cale Atkinson is a steady fave in this house and proof that white men can make good books without being shitty). It’s just ‘facts,’ and visual gags. No story. It’s fun for a read or two, and I haven’t died of boredom with R2’s requests for nightly reads of it.
Mostly it’s just nice to flip through and talk about the silliness together. We’re having fun with it.
Back in May 2019’s Good Finds, we talked about the first book in this universe, What A Truly Cool World.
I this sequel, Irene God & Shaniqua lead the charge in this one, but God is still a compassionate leader who views the women in his life as equals.
I know Christianity just kind of blankets everything (particularly the loud, conservative, bigoted arm), but trust me, this is lovely.
I don’t read these books as ‘This is Christianity and it is what is right and normal,‘ but as ‘Some folks believe in a benevolent god and the universe as intelligently designed,’ the same way we learn about Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Hinduism, etc. It’s just as important to counter the gross bigotry of Christian extremists, the same way we show that there are progressive, inclusive, like-minded folks with the same values as us who hold all kinds of faiths.
Apart from that – this is great for parents explaining why kids need to work out their own nonsense without always dumping their squabbles into the lap of a neutral authority (me. I want less mediating in my life.) So it’s a great book for talking about sibling conflict.
Like its predecessory, this story holds so many good messages. Such as how snakes – animals maligned by humanity, are a beauty within nature, countering assumptions of speciesism. Why they have poison and ways to defend and avoid attack (this book is a gorgeous metaphor or evolution). How the gentle nod to AAVE as the language of supreme beings elevates and celebrates the vernacular.
This book, along with The Worms That Saved The World (transparency – the author sent me a copy for free), are our go-to bedtimereads for when folks in power are moaning about broken windows and property damage in a rebellion to protect human lives.
Have I told you about this yet? In case I haven’t yet – it’s lovely!
Transparency! The author, Daneen A. is a Raising Luminaries Patreon supporter and Rebekah L. sent me a free copy so I could check it out. Aaaalso it features another one of our lovely Patreon supporters, Cindy Wang Brandt of Parenting Forward on the cover. I am so deeply in cahoots with these awesome ladies. Proudly in cahoots!
Again, atheist here – and I love learning about all of these badass disruptors from all different faiths, coming together under a shared value of inclusion, human rights, and making the world better here and now for the humans on this planet.
Through this bios, we see how justice, compassion, and being a badass is not aligned to any specific faith. We’re all connected in this.
I’ve been searching for 101-entry level books that will help folk growing up outside strict rigid doctrines to help us understand how world faiths intertwine, connect, and uphold each other. So we can teach our kids to be not just tolerant, but inclusive and celebratory of each other.
And this book does EXACTLY that.
We’re discussing this over in the Luminary Brain Trust. It’s a lot to process. Lovely and hard.
The followup to Shrill – this is so funny even my white dude partner is reading it. I think this is the first book he’s ever read by a woman.
(Not including JK Rowling, because she’s always been terrible – happily willing to reinforce all the toxic bullshit that makes white dudes feel comfy and superior, retconning as needed to appear inclusive while living as a loud & proud bigot.)
Okay I’ll admit I didn’t finish this. I borrowed it on audio book, and Cherise Boothe is *perfection* but oh on gosh who has ten hours of silence to listen to a book? With the Earthquakes interrupting every three seconds, at that rate, I won’t finish it until the Earthquakes are in high school!
So I’m about 40% through, waiting for it in ebook format so I can read it zippity-zip. But I wanted to tell you about it before I forget because it’s SO GOOD. A bit too old for 8 (he tried to listen, had a hard time following). Probably best for middle-schoolers, teens, and adults.
April B. recommended this fantastic book. It’s a treasure. This is the book you want hanging out in the bathroom for when your racist uncle comes over. Post-pandemic, I guess, when doing things like letting your racist uncle poop in your house won’t spread the plague.
What I’m saying is – it’s an easy, bite-sized read. It’s spectacularly executed. It should be in every classroom.
If you enjoy my loud opinions about books and find it helpful towards the work you’re doing raising kind & courageous kiddos, join me in making quick $15 donation to INCITE!, a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities.
*For those worrid that ‘women & trans people’ kind of implies that trans women don’t fall under the umbrella of ‘women,’ I hear you. This is an #OwnVoices org and it’s how they word it, so I’m gonna follow their lead. There’s a similar issue of semantics with the Autism Women & Nonbinary Network, which is also #OwnVoices & inclusive of nonbinary people who identify as women. So like – until we can coin a good word for non-cis men without centering men, this will have to do.
Follow the Family Summer 4 Black Lives Facebook page for updates on social media, or visit the Raising Luminaries #FamilySummer4BlackLives main page for the full summer schedule.
These events have been Coordinated by Wee The People, Revolutionary Humans, The Philly Children’s Movement, MassArt’s Center For Art And Community Partnerships, and Raising Luminaries.
These family actions are designed to take less than an hour each day, and are primarily created for non-Black and white families.
Today – we’re setting expectations and our intentions for this summer.
Today’s action is designed for non-Black people of color & white families, while Black families rest, resist, and celebrate with Wee The People’s Chalk The Walk Playlist & Reading List.
Today’s action is designed for non-Black people of color & white families, while Black families rest, resist, and celebrate with Wee The People’s Chalk The Walk Playlist & Reading List.
Today’s action is designed to be affirming for Black families and the first step in public advocacy for families of color & white families. Whether Black families choose to keep this poem as an affirmation, or choose to self-advocate with them is up to them. Non-Black families should be mindful of how to proceed with these poems, without heading into saviorism.
Black families may choose to display their poems at home as an affirmation, or share this poem in solidarity with others. For non-Black families, however, this step mandatory.
Via Wee The People:
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Raising Luminaries reduces the workload on overworked caregivers
igniting the next generation of kind & courageous leaders
Raising Luminaries is founded & run by me, Ashia Ray – an Autistic, multiracial (Chinese/Irish) 2nd-generation settler raising two children alongside my partner on the homelands of the Wampanoag and Massachusett people. I support families and educators in raising the next generation of kind & courageous leaders, so we can all smash the kyriarchy together.
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RAISING LUMINARIES
Raising Luminaries creates workshops, training, and educational resources for parents & caregivers igniting the next generation of kind & courageous leaders.
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Raising Luminaries is anchored in the land of the Wampanoag & Massachusett People.
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©2025 Ashia Ray of Raising Luminaries™. All rights reserved.
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Photographs via Unsplash & Illustrations via Storyset, used with permission.
