With Little Uprisings, Tanya Nixon-Silberg brings play, joy, and hope to racial justice education

Tell me about the name Little Uprisings.

Kids know a lot about what’s fair and what isn’t. If you look at my logo, it’s all about them holding the microphone and us adults getting out of the way, so they’re able to shout the things that they need to shout into the world — but not little in stature.

[Little] Uprisings comes out of [writer] Adrienne Maree Brown’s mantra. She wrote a book called “Emergent Strategy.” She talks a lot about the “small being all”: little movements. It’s not just this one big thing that happens; it’s a lot of different ecosystems working with each other. I think a lot about that.

What inspired you to do this work?

I’ve been doing this work for a very long time. I have a child who’s 10. I realized that I needed to figure out: What’s my stance in the world? How do I teach what’s going on in the world in a way that’s truthful but also generative for them?

I started doing a lot of workshops with the Boston Public Library. One of my first workshops was around: What is racism? How do you talk about racism with Kindergarteners? Because colorblind thinking is not the way that we want to go. We want to be able to actually say the race of a character in a book without someone shushing you. How do we make sure that we are talking with our kids in a way that they understand? They’re [part of] this movement as well. They’re not just empty vessels by which we fill them up. They really have a say, and they should have a say, as to how our world should be operating.

I say this all the time: If I could nominate a kindergartener for president, I would. They have a deep sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. I think it’s revolutionary, the way Kindergarteners think about a lot of different things in the world.

What’s the change that you’re seeking within institutions?

I start from the knowledge, based in history, that schools were developed to make good workers. We move to conformity. We move to: There’s only one right way of thinking. We move to everyone sitting in their seat and being quiet. We move to no joy, no innovation, or anything like that. So schools are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s the institution, but we have the people who are in it.

I don’t know if it’s naive — I don’t think it is — I think it’s just trusting the good in people. People know that this ain’t it! What we’re doing right now is not what we want to be doing. And so I come in, and I’m like, “What are you actually teaching kids?” A lot of times, there are set curriculums made by rich white people to teach Black and brown students. You get the story of America, the sanitized way. Again, this goes against what the people who are teaching it feel, mostly. How do we combat that? I go in and we talk a little bit about: What is the curriculum saying versus what do you want to say?

We can’t just throw out everything. We really do just need to start tweaking it and turning it around. Once we start to think that we have to throw out everything, then no one does anything.

For instance, the story of “The Three Little Pigs” is part of the curriculum. They have it as, the very smart pig built his house of bricks; the not-so-smart pigs built their houses of straw and sticks. Let’s talk a little bit about this, right? It really does laud places by which people build their house of bricks — some parts of America and England. But would it be smart to build your house of bricks, say, in the Congo? How are people ingenious in building their spaces?

So we can take that story, flip it on its head, and make it so that we’re thinking more generatively about people, more generatively about others. Kindergartners can do that. We can be critical of the story and the author in a way that gets kids talking to each other, which also gets away from the idea of white supremacy and conformity. We can get kids thinking about not just their neighborhoods but neighborhoods across the world, how they are built, and how they are ingenious, because they built it for their environment. In a nutshell, that’s what I do. I go into the curriculum and say: Let’s blow it apart. Let’s identify the white supremacy, and then let’s address it in a way that gets us back to our values.

Your programming is all about enjoying play. How can we continue this? I think of little kids, and that’s how they operate. Then, as we get older, we lose that.

Once you start to realize that you can talk about racial justice and joy at the same time, I think it’s a life-changing phenomena for adults. Because we think that if we’re going to talk, we’re going to ace the racial justice test, and we’re going to talk to kids about privilege. We’re going to talk to them about 400 years of oppression. No. It’s too much! It’s too much for me as an adult.

When I talk about gentrification, I bring in Legos. Let’s build the world that we want to see. Let’s build the neighborhoods we want to see and send pictures to the mayor.

Whenever I talk about an injustice, I don’t talk about the injustice first. That’s something I’m slowly teaching teachers to do: Let’s talk about the community first, in its greatness. If you’re going to talk about the Civil Rights Movement: How did people during that time have joy? What’s the music? What’s the art? What’s the dance of those times? You can then talk about the injustice.

When you start at what makes a community great, you can then talk about how the community is under attack, and get people on your side. And then kids go straight to: How do we help?

Start at the joy. What has sustained the people for this time? You’re living in your neighborhood, and it’s amazing. What do you like about your neighborhood? What would you love to put in your neighborhood? Why are neighborhoods important? Did you know that there’s something called gentrification, where people are being pushed out of their neighborhoods?

I think, for racism and Blackness, people never start at Blackness being great. It’s a really important muscle, I think, that most parents — all parents — need to keep practicing. Even me. When I was coming up, that was not the default. Whenever I heard about Black history, it was always struggle and strife, never about how we sustained ourselves and how we found our joy.

What’s your hope going forward for the world in terms of racial justice?

I want to be out of a job. I want my child to come home from school and tell me all the wonderful ways they learned something. I want schooling to be a place of healing and learning and not a place of harm, which it is for a lot of kids. I want to continue to make art that brings people together in very intentional ways.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @kcbaskin.