When I first started homeschooling, especially Montessori homeschooling, I kept seeing Britt Hawthorne’s name. Hawthorne, an antiracist facilitator, educator, speaker, and advocate, has written the book everyone needs right now. Raising Antiracist Children: A Practical Parenting Guide is an extremely practical parenting guide. Typically I don’t love parenting books, but this isn’t your typical parenting book.

Hawthorne explores all facets of anti-bias, antiracist (ABAR) work, including working against antisemitism and ableism, with sections on bodies, minds, conscious consumption, and communities, reminding us that parenting work is never done in isolation. Throughout the book, there are exercises for caregivers and families can do to examine their beliefs and thoughts, and to create deeper engagement with the book.

Hawthorne was gracious enough to chat with me on the phone about her book, ABAR work, Montessori, and much more.

I know you’re involved with social justice and Montessori, but was there a specific catalyst for this book? How did it come about?

There wasn’t a real catalyst, but where this book was born out of is, my friend Tiffany Jewell (This Book is Anti-Racist) and I were leading an antiracist parenting course, and after we had maybe three or four hundred caregivers go through that course and Tiffany and I were feeling a bit tired and feeling like we needed to take a break and reset, I said we have to figure out a way to make this way more inclusive and accessible than just you and I.

And I said, why don’t I write an e-book? Tiffany had just finished her book and was like, that sounds like wonderful work for you. So I started writing an e-book, and then I got busy with work, got busy with motherhood, got busy with, you know, just all the things—and so I set it aside.

Then my friend, Christine Platt, who’s the author of The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less, called me up one day and said, Britt, there’s a publisher that’s looking for an antiracist parenting books. But I told them that you were the person to write it, what do you think? So I have a very unusual story of how I got a book deal—really, active community and people making space for others to do work. That’s how this book came to be.

But I will say that my journey into antiracist parenting actually started with me being a teacher. I was a traditional teacher, and I ended up getting a job at a public Montessori school. So I had to go to Montessori training, and when I went to Montessori training, for the first time in my adult life, I had an awakening of my critical consciousness. That was the first time really in my adult life that I had to be so intentional in everything I wanted to do, because the Montessori pedagogy is all about intentionality. It’s about deep self-reflection and helping the child reach their fullest potential. Through that process, I had to really reckon with the ways that I myself, as a teacher, have been an obstacle in the child’s way. So that became really deep reflective work in my life. You’ll ask any Montessorian and we will always tell you it becomes a lifestyle; a way of how we live our life.

Even though the Montessori training was a really powerful and empowering time, it was also deeply embedded in racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Montessori is very white here in the US, but also globally—from a leadership standpoint, it’s very white. So it was also me trying to find my people: like, I can’t be the only one. I was looking for Montessorians of color and that’s how I found Montessorians for Social Justice. They’re focused on how do we identify the systems and structures that are unfair, but also how do we reimagine and cocreate new structures? Getting involved with them was really what jump-started my antiracist journey, which ended up coming into my parenting practice because it ended up being a lifestyle.

It’s funny you mention that because I’ve also noticed the ableism and the homogeneity in many Montessori spaces, even on Instagram.

You sort of answered this, but how did you get into ABAR work?

For anyone who teaches in public schools, the inequities are undeniable, right? You not only experience the inequities that happen before your very eyes, but you also experience inequities on a teacher level of like, what school is getting what resources, how much funding, what supplies and materials—whether it’s schools in your district or schools that are literally ten minutes away, but they’re in a different district.

In education, there’s a huge emphasis on the achievement gap. I came across the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings and her framing of the achievement gap. She said that the achievement gap is not accurate because not only does it put the onus on the students, but also on the teachers, instead of saying it’s an education debt. There’s a debt that society needs to pay back for the decades—if not hundreds of years, depending on what students we’re talking about here—of under-resourcing schools, of divestment of education, or just complete erasure of education. So working in public schools, seeing these systemic inequities that, you know, a song and a dance, and a handshake is not going to fix, right? Having a fun family night once a year off is not going to fix it; going on a couple of field trips is not going to fix it. So that was another reason why I was trying to find what exactly are the issues and then how do we actually fix those issues.

Do you have a writing routine? I mean, this was all done during the pandemic, right?

It was all done during the pandemic and I did not have a great writing routine. Sometimes I would write in the middle of the night, sometimes I would block off times. I went to my friend Laura’s house. She has a guest house that she had bought for her dad to live in, but unfortunately he passed before the guest house was finished. And she really wanted it to be a community space that people could use. So I went there sometimes and I would write. I didn’t have a routine. Being an author is a very new identity for me. I’d never taken a writing class before, and I had a very academic style of writing for college. So writing was very hard for me, especially finding my voice and figuring out how vulnerable I wanted to be.

I remember at one point I was home schooling while I was writing and it was just not working. And the pressure really started, and I ended up sending him to my mother-in-law’s house for six weeks. She was like, what am I supposed to do with him, what do we work on? I told her to get him outside every day, have him help with practical life things, count money, help with laundry, everything like that. I was forever grateful, because that’s how we were able to finish the book, those last six weeks of writing.

 I get it. It’s hard to balance homeschooling, writing, working, and parenting.

It’s hard. Yep. I was working full-time. I travel about twice a month to go to schools and do workshops. And I was also home schooling him. I mean it all worked out, which is wonderful. I had to trust myself and trust the process and trust the universe: children are naturally curious and children are naturally learning, whether we are giving them lessons or not. It may not be the lessons we want them to learn. But they are learning.

How do you think the creative and activist communities can support those who are parents and caregivers?

Gosh, I that’s a really great question. I’m going to have to think on that one more. I’m going to go back to Montessori for Social Justice because that’s where I did a lot of my advocacy work and I just want to highlight how inclusive and accessible that they are as a conference. They have scholarship funds, a sliding scale ticket price, they paired with local organizations to help with affordable housing… they also worked really hard to partner with businesses owned by People of the Global Majority and Indigenous individuals to provide food, which was part of your meal ticket. Children were always welcome and it was seen as part of a collective responsibility, since we were all educators. They made sure spaces were accessible for everyone, including those with strollers. They’d partner with a local Montessori school so that children could go there for childcare if you wanted. We’re doing this work for everyone, so let’s not get lost in the weeds and pretend that any of this is theoretical. That was a big part of it, too.

It’s my personal experience that the intersection of education and ABAR work have always been a welcoming to caregivers and children. I think you can really align yourself with events that fit with your values, and support those spaces instead of those that aren’t welcoming to you and your child. With MSJ conferences, community is at the heart of those spaces. It’s all about how we treat people, right? Children included.

What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer right now?

I’m trying to own the identity of being a writer. I think that’s my biggest struggle, is I still feel resistance towards that identity because I feel like I’m not good enough as a writer yet. And one thing I’ve been trying to do is just practice writing. So every day, I set a timer and I write for fifteen minutes, I try to do prompts, but sometimes it’s diary entries and just creating that structure. I realized that writing is a practice that requires some type of practice. That’s my biggest struggle with being a writer.

My biggest struggle as a parent is, and will always be, finding local community. I have a beautiful network of caregivers around the country. But I don’t have a very strong local network, and I think a part of that is, well, a number of things. First, I’m really seeking parenting partners that also value empathy, compassion, and justice. My children are fifteen and nine and it’s a lot of drop-and-go at this age. I think parenting a teenager is a lot like parenting a toddler. What I mean by that is a lot of toddlers are all about taking risks, like, pushing boundaries and figuring out their world through experiences. I think a teenager is the same way. As a parent, your primary focus is how do I keep my child safe while they’re taking risks?

The thing with teenagers though, is that a lot of their risk-taking is now happening outside of the home. It’s happening outside of your lens and it’s oftentimes happening with friends. When you’re parenting a toddler, you need a support system, to be like, oh my gosh, let me tell you the million reasons why my toddler was upset with me today. And teenagers are also equally upset with us for things. What I’m struggling with is finding other parents of teenagers who want to have a support group, to have conversations about, like, what just happened today?

I get that. It can be really hard.

Yeah, it’s hard to make parent friends. There’s just so many different ways to raise your child. So like, finding folks who are aligned on values—not necessarily actions, but at least values, right?

Exactly. What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?

Okay, I’m reading a novel that’s bringing me a lot of joy and thought; it’s called The Chosen One by Echo Brown. For inspiration, I’m going to say, definitely The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, the young readers edition. I also really, really enjoyed the book We Live For the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. As far as lifestyle goes, The Afrominimalists Guide To Living With Less has been very liberating, in a sense of both mentally liberating and emotionally liberating, of letting go, and letting go with peace.

There’s also the book that I keep in my nightstand, called After the Rain: Gentle Reminders for Healing, Courage, and Self-Love, by Alexandra Elle. I just love it because it’s broken into sections, like change, self-love, time, becoming, identity, healing, comparison… and whenever I notice something like that is showing up, I can just flip to that section and read it to get a better night’s sleep.

Oh, that’s great. Speaking of books, what do you hope people take away from your book?

When people finish reading the book I hope they know that this is just the beginning of antiracist work, and it’s going to require perseverance and commitment. But I also hope they leave with a community, because the book has 15 contributing authors. They have other folks they can lean on. But also as they share, like, “hey, this is the book that I’m reading,” they can say “these are activities that I’m doing.”

What’s on the horizon for you?

I’m really focused on building community around the book, and so I hope I’m going to start the antiracist parenting course back up and that we’re able to have conversations and have support and have strategies around this work. I’m just really focused on going deeper with this text, but also with people, right? Like how do we contextualize the action steps here and there. So that’s pretty exciting. If you go to my website you’ll see the course, it’s “how to raise antiracist children.” We will have different presenters that will come in and talk about what they’re doing in their home. It’s going to be really great.