We are excited to celebrate the launch of EmbraceRace’s new podcast. EmbraceRace joined Proteus Fund as a fiscally sponsored initiative in 2016 and supports parents and caregivers to raise kids who are thoughtful, informed, and brave about race.
Andrew Grant-Thomas and Melissa Giraud co-founded EmbraceRace in response to their experience as social justice workers, educators, and parents who struggled to find the tools they needed to raise multiracial children. Through resources, discussion spaces, and networks, EmbraceRace aims to foster resilience in children of color and nurture cross-racial inclusivity and empathy in all children.
With its new podcast, EmbraceRace brings you the best and latest advice on how to guide kids around race through informative conversations with researchers, practitioners, and community members. In this inaugural season, EmbraceRace explores long-standing myths about race and kids and discusses How Kids ACTUALLY Learn About Race.
The podcast is an extension of the work of EmbraceRace, and Melissa and Andrew host the series. Hear what they have to say about this incredible new resource.
When we started EmbraceRace in early 2016, we didn’t have the resources or capacity to add a podcast to our foundational work of creating and curating resources and community to support caregivers wanting to raise kids with healthy racial attitudes. But early on, we started having webinar conversations with guests, and we saw quickly that there was a substantial and very engaged audience for conversations about race and kids. When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, EmbraceRace had already built up resources and an archive of webinars that many more people started to find. The week of Floyd’s murder, we had 15,000 people register for the two webinars we held. By the end of that year, we had over 70K subscribers to our newsletter.
Even though our webinar numbers remained relatively good, we knew we could reach more people with a podcast. And as we exited the intense COVID time, our subscribers asked for it. They are busy people (often parents of young children) who want to be able to listen to EmbraceRace conversations while making dinner or commuting. We were also all experiencing Zoom fatigue.
We’re definitely in a moment when many podcasts are going under as a lot of money for media jobs has vanished. Even still, this is the perfect time to start a podcast for EmbraceRace! Why? 1) we have a built-in audience (but of course, hope the podcast grows it); 2) we already collaborate a lot to create our resources and as a function of being organizers of adults in the lives of children, so the podcast draws from work we were already doing; and 3) we now have the staff and resources we need to create a lean, seasonal (7 episodes this season), evergreen podcast. The response so far has been great!
Conversations about remedying racial inequities in social justice movements too often leave out the critical lever of children’s racial learning. Raising kids to have healthy racial attitudes is seen as interpersonal work, apart from the work of dismantling systemic and institutional racism. But as social scientists are fond of saying, there are agents and there are social structures. As agents, we are constrained by the inequitable systems we operate in. But we also create and maintain those structures. It follows that to create better structures, we need better agents! At EmbraceRace, we share strategies for raising kids who are inclusive, thoughtful, and brave about race, and we connect the dots between our work as caregivers and the work of creating racially just communities.
With the podcast, we deliver succinct, engaging conversations about how race works and what that means for how we raise kids, how we build schools, how we design policy … how we do all the things to make multiracial democracy possible. The EmbraceRace community of collaborators and travelers concerned and working in the race and kids space is extensive. In the podcast, we will amplify their voices, research, experiences, and best practices. We are inspired by the EmbraceRace community and expect the podcast will inspire people listening and show them that they are part of a larger movement of people working to choose racial and social justice and to support kids, families and communities every day.
