Individuals who develop racial literacy are able to engage in the necessary personal reflection about their racial beliefs and practices, and teach their students to do the same. Racial literacy in schools includes the ability to read, write about, discuss and interrupt situations and events that are motivated and upheld by racial inequity and bias. Sustaining racial literacy across the life span is possible by engaging in an "Archeology of the Self": an action-oriented process requiring love, humility, reflection, an understanding of history and a commitment to working against racial injustice.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is as an associate professor of English education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is former research associate with the NYU Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and has worked for Business Week, the New York Times and New York University in marketing and promotion positions. Her research interests include racial literacy development in urban teacher education (with a specific focus on the education of Black and Latino males), literacy practices of Black girls, and Black female college reentry students.

Sealey-Ruiz's work has appeared in several top-tier academic journals. She is co-editor of three books including (with Chance W. Lewis and Ivory A. Toldson) Teacher Education and Black Communities: Implications for Access, Equity, and Achievement. At Teachers College, she is founder and faculty sponsor of the Racial Literacy Roundtables where for ten years, national scholars, graduate students and young people facilitate informal conversations around race and other issues involving diversity and teacher education for the Teachers College / Columbia University community. She is also the co-founder of the Teachers College Civic Participation Project, which concerns itself with the educational well-being of young people involved with the juvenile justice and foster care systems in New York.

She and two of her students appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016), a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou.

This event is part of the Race, Inequality and Language in Education (RILE) 2019-20 Speaker Series.