Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi were just two 17-year-olds hoping to change the way students talk about race when they developed the textbook The Classroom Index with the help of Princeton University’s department of African American studies back in 2017. The pair, who are Chinese American and Indian American, respectively, say they were inspired to take action after realizing they didn’t have their first meaningful discussion about race in school until the 10th grade. They wanted to better understand the privilege and oppression that came with their Asian identities, and also how race influenced how they interacted with others.

The attention the textbook garnered led to the pair getting a book deal with Penguin Random House and taking a gap year after high school to travel across the country, hearing from Americans of all ages about how race has impacted their lives. After raising funds via textbook sales, GoFundMe, and cold-emailing corporate sponsors like Airbnb and Greyhound, Winona and Priya traveled to all 50 states before submitting the manuscript for their latest book, Tell Me Who You Are, on the first day they moved into their college dorms. (Winona attends Harvard University, while Priya is a student at Princeton.) All of the profits will go back into initiatives for the pair’s nonprofit organization, Choose.

Teen Vogue recently talked with Winona and Priya about their new book and how they’re hoping their ongoing efforts will change how students are taught about race.

Teen Vogue: What was the overall goal for Tell Me Who You Are?

Winona: We consider the book as a five-years-in-the-making social justice endeavor. The youngest person [we interviewed was] a five-year-old, who told us that their role model was Beyoncé, and the oldest, a Japanese American internment camp survivor whose role model was also Beyoncé. Those fun facts are captured in the book too. We picked 115 of those 500 stories [we captured] to feature in the book and they all are centered around a theme. In the book we give 10 concrete steps for how to share your story. And then we also talk about how the goal here is not to grab the nearest person of color and force them to talk about race. It’s about equipping yourselves first with racial literacy in order to be able to apply that lens to every part of your life [and] doing the work first. [It’s] about self-activating before you can show up as an activist for others.

TV: Cities within a single state aren’t monolithic. How did you decide what cities you should visit?

Priya: We make it clear in our introduction and also when talking about our journey that it reflects not a comprehensive overview of race in America in an academic sense, but our personal journey [and] what it was like meeting these people, purely listening to their stories and capturing them in the pages. We had to find people to host us in almost all 50 states. Once we had people identified to host us, we then looked at, okay, where are they living? What are the historically significant places in that area that we have to visit? How can we have a balance between urban and rural settings? How can we get out of our own kind of spheres of contacts and randomly interview people by just tapping them on the shoulder, which is what we’ve done since we were sophomores in high school five years ago.

TV: Have you two decided what you want to study in college?

Winona: We’re both undecided. I think a part of how we’ve been thinking about college is, of course, we want to directly equip ourselves with the tools to understand racial systems, so taking classes in African American studies and sociology and history, and understanding our own East and South Asian identities as well. But, something else we believe in strongly is that people of any background or interest can be involved in this work. Somebody can study architecture and still apply a racial-literacy lens to that area of interest. Somebody could study astrophysics and apply a racial-literacy lens to their work. No matter what we study, we’re excited to make sure that racial and intersectional literacy is a part of it.

TV: What’s your long-term goal for Choose, your nonprofit?

Priya: We have a team of around 41 educators in a fellowship. We started testing the story-stats model in the book [with them], developing lesson plans around all subject areas. How does the science teacher integrate conversations about race in the classroom? How does an English teacher? [This is for] all grade levels and we’re going to be releasing those lesson plans and developing them further. Our long-term goal as a nonprofit is legislative change [and a] required racial literacy curriculum [in] K-12 curriculums in the United States.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How White People Can Hold Each Other Accountable to Stop Institutional Racism