Workshop Offerings

How do our personal identities impact how we show up in our working relationships? In this workshop, we examine our own racial identity journey and development. We will look at various racial identity models, discussing how we have been socialized by our environment and lived experiences to create our subjective perspectives on race, equity and justice.

We all have implicit bias and we are more likely to do harm when we deny our racial biases. Developing an understanding of the power of implicit bias enables us to develop practices to minimize the impact of our unconscious tendencies to categorize, generalize, stereotype and discriminate. We will examine common microaggressions, and interpersonal racism, and discuss steps for addressing and working to repair harm when it occurs.

It is essential to have a lens of intersectionality in order to further equity and justice. As the founder of the term, Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” This workshop will provide participants with wisdom from multiple non-dominant perspectives.

In this session, we will examine the historical roots of both whiteness and anti-blackness, as well as how they manifest currently. In looking at history such as the Carlisle boarding school, we will discuss the violence connected to forced cultural assimilation in the U.S. We will watch a short video, titled Ethnic Notions, that depicts derogatory images of African-Americans in cartoons and advertisements. We will make connections to how anti-blackness permeates and infects our society presently.

Time and time again, there are lessons to be learned from the distance between someone’s well-meaning intentions, and the impact of that person’s words, actions, and behaviors. This workshop will provide real-life examples for why impact matters more than intentions, with facilitators modeling vulnerability around our own missteps. We will give participants space to delve into harm they have caused, while providing some tools for accountability, and working towards repair.

Working towards antiracism is both personal, internal work, and external facing and collaborative work. We will look at some of the contradictions for white people in this work, before examining why “being not racist” is not good enough. We will learn about Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s recommendations for antiracist work, and discuss Adrienne Maree Brown’s powerful writing that may lead to some generative discomfort. We will examine examples of inspiring freedom fighters historically and presently, before making connections to various issues and lanes at the moment. Participants will have some spaciousness for journal reflection about their own commitments in this work, and we will close by discussing the importance of building community, accountability partners, and deep friendships in this work.

This workshop will provide participants with an overview of the history of white supremacy in the United States. We will examine institutional policies and societal violence that have contributed to the inequity and disenfranchisement for Black people and people of color. We will highlight examples of freedom fighters, historically and presently, who work to dismantle oppressive systems, and who can provide some inspiration and guidance regarding antiracist activism. We will provide participants with tools and strategies for deepening their commitment to visioning and fighting for a multi-racial democracy that benefits us all.