Can I Touch Your Hair?
Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship

For a long time, maybe as long as children’s books have been published in America, there has been an unspoken understanding amongst white parents that when it comes to race, the less said to children the better. White people are particularly attached to the notion that if you don’t mention race, don......more

When students Irene and Charles end up as partners for a poem-writing project, they slowly and bravely begin to explore how the issue of race affects their lives. Irene’s white perspective and Charles’s black perspective are inherent even when they begin by writing about a subject seemingly devoid o......more

A lovely book that gives a nudge to readers about the need to move gently into uncomfortable conversations rather than avoid them completely.......more

A decent tool to start a conversation with kids about race, diversity, microaggressions, etc. It's a cute concept, where the authors, a black man and a white woman, imagine how they might have developed a friendship if they had gone to school together as children. It says it's poetry, but don't let......more