Web & App Content

This video features the voices of a diverse group of 12-year-olds from West Side Collaborative Middle School in New York City talking about their experiences with race, racial identity, and racism. The featured students speak about their backgrounds, families, experiences with discrimination and stereotyping, and the confusion, fears, anxieties, and racial injustices they face in their everyday lives. The video is part of a multimedia project called Being 12: The Year Everything Changes, produced by pubic radio station WNYC.

This 2018 advertisement for Google’s Pixel 2 phone features age-defying scenes from 83-year-old Sumiko Iwamuro’s life. The story opens with pictures and clips of Sumiko doing things we may typically associate with an active octogenarian – spending time with friends, exercising in the park, getting her hair done at the salon, and running a small dumpling shop with her brother. As we are shown what she does on Thursdays – listening to vinyl records at home – the background music shifts to techno music, and we see that on Saturdays, she is also a popular DJ in nightclubs across Tokyo. The commercial ends with the narrator stating, “There’s a deeper story behind every picture. Question your lens,” and advertises Google Pixel 2, the “world’s best smartphone camera.”

This BuzzFeed video is part of a series of videos that call out and satirize stereotypes and racial microaggressions, or the everyday, often unintentional, marginalizing interactions racial and ethnic minorities experience in the U.S. Featuring actors Burl Moseley and Chelsea Harris, the video shows the two Black characters turning the tables on a range of White characters to ask them the same kinds of questions and comments that Black and African American people frequently experience in the U.S.

This 2103 advertisement is for GoldieBlox, a toy company that makes engineering toys for girls with the mission of getting girls building. The company was founded by Debbie Sterling, a Stanford University-trained mechanical engineer who wanted to “disrupt the pink aisle” and provide girls with more options for toys beyond dolls and princesses.

This 2014 video addresses the everyday experiences of “What It’s Like to be Ambiguously Ethnic.” The video shows a diverse range of people talking about issues such as the misunderstandings and confused comments and interactions they experience; people trying to place identity categories onto them that they do not identify with; people assuming you can speak different languages; and having to decide what to do when they experience racial or ethnic microaggressions, or the everyday, often unintentional, marginalizing interactions racial and ethnic minorities frequently experience in the U.S.

“I’m Muslim, But I’m Not…” is a BuzzFeed video that addresses Muslim stereotypes by showing a diverse range of young adult Muslims talking about different aspects of their religious, racial, ethnic, national, and gender identities.

“Proud to Be” is an advocacy video that challenges stereotypic and derogatory representations of Native people by presenting diverse and empowering portrayals of Native tribes and communities. The video is part of Change the Mascot, a national campaign to end the use of the racial slur “Redskins” as the team name and mascot for the professional football team in Washington, D.C.

This BuzzFeed video is part of a group of videos that expose and satirize stereotypes and racial microaggressions, or the everyday, often unintentional, marginalizing interactions racial and ethnic minorities experience in the U.S. Focused on Asian American identity and experiences of Asians in the U.S., the video features Eugene Lee Yang, Asian American BuzzFeed writer, producer, and actor showing how microaggressions and stereotypes play out in everyday interactions with diverse colleagues and friends...

This 2015 video from MTV News weekly series Decoded satirically parodies White people “whitesplaining whitesplaining.” Whitesplaining is the term used to describe the act of White people patronizingly explaining or defining to a person of color what should or shouldn’t be racist against people of color. Through a series of interactions between Franchesca Ramsey and a range of White characters interrupting and talking over her and each other, this video shows what “whitesplaining” and White “mansplaining” can look like.

These boys and girls children’s pajamas were sold at Target in 2014. Both have the superhero Superman’s emblem on the chest, but one is black with grey and white stripes and has the words “Future Man of Steel” printed in bold black lettering, whereas the other is light pink with grey stripes and has the message, “I Only Date Heroes” printed in glittery silver lettering...

This 2015 video created by American online news source Huffington Post’s Jessica Samakow and Oliver Noble features a diverse range of girls, teens, young adults, and women delivering the kinds of subtle, often-conflicting, everyday messages women and girls hear about their bodies, emotions, minds, families, careers, and decisions throughout their lifetime.

Above is an excerpt from “You Say Latino,” a comic artist Terry Blas created to define and talk about common confusion around the identity terms “Latino” and “Hispanic.” Emphasizing that the terms are not the same, and therefore not to be used interchangeably, he uses his personal experiences growing up in a bicultural household (his father is from Utah in the U.S., and his mother is from Ameca Meca, Mexico), and traveling through different parts of the U.S. and Mexico to illustrate his points. He explains that “Latino” is about geography and being from Latin America, whereas “Hispanic” is about language, and being from a country whose primary language is Spanish.

This 2015 video shows writer, producer, and comedian Akilah Hughes responding to popular cultural critiques of how women speak, including vocal fry, uptalk, and saying “sorry” and “just.” The satirical video is presented as a newscast in a segment called, “This Shouldn’t Be News,” and Akilah Hughes takes us through a series of ways that women’s speaking patterns are scrutinized, sometimes publically by prominent, influential, successful women, and how this scrutiny and policing does not apply to men’s speaking patterns. She closes the segment by talking about gender income inequality, the historic and systemic privileging of men in corporate culture, and how women are graduating college at a higher rate.

App Content - 1,300+ curricular and professional development resources designed to improve quality learning afterschool.

This section highlights two teachers, Albert and Kate, who created lesson plans based on their explorations through the By Any Media Necessary digital resource. Both teachers at Locke High School in the Watts area of South Los Angeles, Kate teaches 10th grade Language Arts and Albert teaches 11th and 12th grade Economics. As teachers at a high poverty, under-resourced high school run by a corporate charter entity, Kate and Albert often based their conversations in the working group around the particularities of their school environment and the unique obstacles they face when bringing new media into the classroom.

Are you interested in how teachers are using this resource to plan lessons? This section of the project offers an in-depth look at how educators and activists have helped us build on and improve the By Any Media resource for use in learning spaces.

To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a non-profit organization with the mission of “presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and invest directly into treatment and recovery”...

Through computer programming and digital technology workshops, afterschool programs, and summer camps, Black Girls Code (BGC) is a nonprofit organization that aims to “increase the number of women of color in the digital space by empowering girls of color ages 7-17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology.”

Web Resource & Media Archive - Tools, curricular resources, and library of media and civic participation exemplars. Developed with and for educators fostering youth civic engagement in schools, after school programs, and activist networks.

Podcast Curriculum - Learning materials and resources for advancing equity and justice through narrative strategy, entertainment, and culture change.