You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.

I'm Gregory Warner.

Carolina Ramos was born in Brazil.

She spent her first 11 years living in São Paulo

and then her family moved to Cambridge in Massachusetts

where she started public school in sixth grade.

So much surprised her about her new American school.

Now colorful everything was that there was no grammar class

that they had to call teachers by their last name.

And there were not a lot of white people in my class.

Like it was predominantly people of color.

So I want to say midway through the year,

we were learning about the civil rights movement in the US.

And personally, I had never learned any US history.

A history that the other kids, the American kids,

have been raised on.

She was absorbing for the very first time.

Martin Luther King Jr., the Birmingham Church Bombing,

Jim Crow segregation laws, and Rosa Parks.

So we were learning about Rosa Parks

and my teacher had us do a very strange activity.

We were all sitting in a circle in the classroom.

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