This TED Talk features social entrepreneurs and student activists Winona Gwau and Priya Volchi, recorded live at TED Women 2017.

Four years ago, we really thought we understood racism. Just like many of you here today, we had experienced and heard stories about race,

about prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping, and we were like, we get it.

Racism.

We got it, we got it.

But we weren't even close.

So we decided that we had to listen and learn more.

We talked to as many random people as we could and collected hundreds of personal stories about race,

stories that revealed how racial injustice

is a nationwide epidemic that we ourselves spread

and now can't seem to recognize or get rid of.

We're not there yet.

Today, we are here to raise our standards of racial literacy,

to redefine what it means to be racially literate.

We want everywhere across the United States

for our youngest and future generations to grow up equipped

with the tools to understand, navigate,

and improve a world structured by racial division.

We want us all to imagine the community as a place where we not only feel proud of our own

backgrounds, but can also invest in others' experiences as if they were our own.

We just graduated from high school this past June, and you'd think after 12 years, somebody in

or out of the classroom would have helped us understand.

...