The curricular resources that New Haven Public School teachers developed as Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute Fellows in 2014 are now online, for non-commercial, educational purposes locally and beyond.

This weekend in Massachusetts, my family visited both the site of the last battle of Shays’ Rebellion (1787) and the W.E.B. Du Bois National Historic Site, where as a young child he lived with his grandparents in the early 1870s.

Last weekend, my wife and I attended a screening of “Firaaq,” a powerful film that Nandita Das – director and actor as well as social activist – made about the 2002 “carnage” (as she characterized it) in the Indian state of Gujarat, where Muslims were massacred after a sectarian dispute and controversial train fire.  The Gujarat government at the time was headed by Narendra Modi, now the Indian prime minister, who was in the U.S. this past week to speak at the UN and meet with President Barack Obama. 

Nandita Das, a 2014 Yale World Fellow, will be speaking in New Haven (6 p.m., Luce Hall) the evening of October 10 about a campaign to counter skin color bias, in India and beyond.  The effort, “Dark Is Beautiful,” has received attention in the U.S. as well as India and elsewhere.

For a preview, see this video.

Racism and skin tone bias are all too common across cultures and continents.  Personally, in the case of India, my wife’s mother has spoken of ugly comments she received from a young age about her skin tone.  Let us hope that messages such as “dark is beautiful” will help advance progress.