When Emily E. Smith became an educator, she went all in. As a fifth-grade teacher, she founded The Hive Society, a classroom all about inspiring children to learn more about their world and themselves by interacting with literature and current events. She had her students watch TED talks, read Rolling Stone, analyze infographics, and even make podcasts.

Beyond the classroom, she created a running club to encourage students to take care of their minds and bodies, and her extraordinary work earned her the 2015 Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing. And in her acceptance speech for the award, she shared the key turning point in her career that made her rethink her approach to teaching students in an urban area with wide racial and ethnic diversity.

“Things changed for me the day when, during a classroom discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I ‘couldn’t understand because I was a white lady.’ I had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I did. The closest I could ever come was empathy.”

So she decided to do something about it

Smith knew that just acknowledging white privilege wasn’t enough. She wanted to move beyond just........

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