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Two scholars make the case for teaching religious literacy.

Teaching Tolerance director Maureen Costello talks empathy as a means to move forward.

“You can’t sit with us!” I giggled as I, along with the 20 or so other girls in my high school health class, sprawled out on the classroom floor and watched Mean Girls. Gretchen Wieners had just told Regina George she couldn’t sit at their lunch table because she was wearing sweatpants­­. We’d all seen the movie countless times before, but it didn’t matter. The scene was perpetually funny.

A few years ago, a picture from The Roanoke Times became the fodder for emails and blog posts. It spread across the Internet in a matter of days, eventually ending up on late-night network talk shows. It began as part of a simple and obscure local news story about road construction. In the article, a pregnant woman in her 30s wondered what effect the high decibel sounds of jackhammers and earth-moving equipment would have on her unborn child. What made this conjecture so worthy of scorn and mockery?

Costumes and makeup aren’t the only markers for cultural appropriation. Dr. Neal Lester explains the prevalence of—and problems with—“figurative blackface.”