In my talks, workshops and training sessions, I bring together years of scholarly research, facilitation experience and pedagogical expertise. I work with educators (k-16), attorneys, librarians, advertisers, marketers, and lots of lots of tech folks (referrals upon request). I provide curated lectures and workshops based on all three of my books (Generation Mixed with my co-author Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith) as well as my in-process fourth book on Combating Racial Exhaustion. The sessions below, which inform my current book project, can be taken in a series, or individually. Please see a sampling of Interrupting Privilege topics below.
Understanding Race in the U.S.
This session asks participants to grapple with what the concept of “race” really means, particularly in our U.S. concept. Where does it come from? How has it changed? And how are race and racism connected? We examine the fluctuating concept of race over time and within our very moment, provides race theories to make sense of these fluctuations, and ends with an exercise that provides a look into how almost all Americans’ racial identities have shifted over the course of U.S. history.
Community Building Across Difference for Equity
The session guides participants to more fully understand someone’s visible and invisible identities, and to more deeply listen to others’ worldview. We will consider how to move from the experience of exclusionary grouping to the process of critical community building. Participants take part in exercises designed to recognize difference across intersections of identities such as race, gender, and disability; how to hear others through radical listening; and how to identify the way in which theirs and others' identities impact the ways in which they move across the world.
Radical Listening
Truly listening to each other has always been a challenge. While we listen, we battle against the distractions of our beeping phones, our dinging computers, and our own minds leading us in a thousand different directions. One of the directions our minds will inevitably lead us is bias: we hear through our own biased filters, and so we struggle to truly listen to another person’s different point of view. Our biases often tell us that our singular story is the right story or the only story; listening to someone else fully, or fully listening to someone who holds a different experience of race, gender, disability, or sexuality, can interrupt that biased notion. Our biases are often unconscious as well, always there to redirect us to what’s comfortable and familiar without realizing that everyday decisions, big or small, are influenced by our subconscious. Interrupting bias by not just hearing but truly listening to difference, and then using those new listening skills to act against bias, is called radical listening.
The goal of this session is to teach participants how to become radical listeners, those who listen across and against bias for the greater purpose of interrupting bias. The session will address: How do we filter out noise and truly hear each other? How do we learn how to genuinely listen to stories of race, gender, disability, sexuality, when they might be so different from our own, and when they might, in fact, press upon our own biases? How do those of us who hold these stories of difference, the stories that are often hard to tell, figure out how, and when, and in what circumstances to tell our stories? Finally, how has listening to difference shifted in a work-from-home world, when we are all listening to each other in solely mediated and not face-to-face spaces?
Interrupting Structural Privilege
This session asks participants to reflect deeply on their own positions of privilege - and lack thereof - as well as how one group’s privilege shores up another group’s inequality. We connect data about structural inequities to the everyday realities of our own lives. We begin with some grounding information about racism and systems of privilege, including important terminology. Throughout this session participants engage in activities that allow them to consider their own positions in systems of inequality and privilege, and begin imagining what interrupting these systems might entail.
Language, Power, & Privilege
One of the primary ways that humans communicate power is through language. We can honor someone’s identity with the careful use of a chosen gender pronoun; we can just as easily demean another with the flippant use of a despicable racial slur. However, language – and the issues of power that animate how race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and other identity categories function in language - are far more complicated than the simple dictate of, “use this word, don’t use this one.” Such a dictate can leave people scared to ever speak – and we need to speak to each other in honest and open ways in order to dismantle inequities. This session explores these large questions around language, identity, and power, and provides opportunities for participants to work through topics such as fears of saying the wrong words, and frustrations over having to constantly correct others’ language.
Interrupting Microaggressions
Microaggressions are one of the everyday ways that racism is enacted in our society. Ambiguous, insidious, and common, these often commonplace remarks or behaviors sometimes go undetected by the perpetrators and outside observers, while the target is left isolated in deciphering the situation and the ensuing confusion and hurt. This session asks participants to be ready to interrupt microaggressions as perpetrators, observers and targets. Participants must come willing to engage with difficult issues of discrimination and privilege in order to learn the tools that can disrupt cycles of discriminatory behavior. The session begins with an introduction to microaggressions and their impact; we will then move breakout groups for small group discussions. Participants will leave the workshop with tangible tools for interrupting microaggressions.
