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I recently served as a reader of scholarship applications. The process included a complex algorithm for inclusion and took several criteria into account, like GPA, test scores, native languages, income level, assets, essays, parental education level and ethnicity. While providing this service, I came face-to-face with a misconception about race and ethnicity: Appearance predicts what language people speak.

When you teach this classic text, are your students surprised by the injustice portrayed in it? This teacher’s students aren’t—not anymore.

When this literature teacher completes a book with her class and hears a student say, “Reading this makes me happy I am an American,” she flips the script.

When I was in fifth grade and new to suburbia, my teacher introduced the concepts of racism, civil rights and fairness. And she began the task of helping 10-years olds—all of us white—learn how to talk about race in constructive ways. I’d moved from a gritty urban neighborhood where whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans lived together rather warily. My parents maintained a chilly silence on the issue of race, although they forbade racial epithets; on the street I heard plenty. In this place, the black kids came mostly from the projects, the Puerto Ricans lived in apartments and the better-off among the white families might have an entire house. I knew that race divided.