A good way to foster trust among our students and support their racial identity development is to demonstrate cultural humility in our work. In my classroom, I am adamant that names are pronounced correctly. As a history teacher, my students lament some names like "Qin Shi Huangdi" and "Nikita Khrushchev." But we practice them together to validate them all. We have to build community within our classroom walls first and then have that safe, secure learning environment seep into the halls. We can only control our actions, but we can influence others. I also like to remind my students about cultural humility - to think critically about what we consider "normal" or "regular" may not be the same across our varied communities. This has been a long learning process for me. I have even stopped buying "skin-colored" bandaids for my students because not many of my students have skin remotely the same shade as those peach bandages. It is a small, but important nod to cultural humility.
