Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race by Kelly Walters is a collection of personal interviews with design educators of color who teach across the US and Canada.

The following is an excerpt from my interview.

My mother is Brazilian. She came to the United States in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was happening, and was unfamiliar with Blackness in the specifically US context. She had her own experience with being Black and marginalized in her country, so because of how and where I grew up, that conversation was very much a part of my life. I recognize the ways in which I live on the margins of the conversation as well. I’m biracial. My mother is Afro-Brazilian, not African American, but I grew up in a neighborhood that was marginalized and artificially redlined as a Black neighborhood. The conversation around Blackness and marginalization as an African American story is what I grew up with, and so I felt that it needed to be centered in the design space.