Curriculum
To do meaningful equity change work we have a lot of learning and unlearning to do.
Whiteness at Work's curriculum was developed over a decade with hundreds of clients and thousands of participants.
This content works. We say the things, we push folks and ask them to push themselves. We model how to do this work while holding ourselves, and each other accountable and with deep care.
Each module contains video lessons, multiple curated resources, discussion, and activity guides.
Modules & Lessons
Module 1: Orientations
This module will introduce you to everything you need to navigate the portal. We'll help you set up group agreements and debrief strategies for working with this material. You'll gain access to glossaries to help anchor your learning as well as kick-off videos specifically for participants of color and white participants.
Lessons:
- Welcome from your instructors
- Words matter: glossaries
- How to create group agreements
- Showing up: for white participants
- BIPOC joy and resilience: for BIPOC participants
Module 2: Foundations
Foundations is 2.5 hours of the most important training you will ever take. Across seven digestible lessons, we'll dive into shared language and frameworks, identity and power, socialization, and various forms of racial oppression. These trainings will give you and your team the knowledge base to meaningfully invest in racial equity work. It's exactly where we'd start with you IRL!
Lessons:
- Liberatory Consciousness Model: a framework for racial equity and DEI
- Racial Equity and DEI Shared Language
- Race, Ethnicity and Whiteness
- Specific forms of racial oppression: xenophobia, anti-Blackness, Model Minority Myth, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, caste oppression
- Social Identities
- The impact of dominant and non-dominant identities
- Cycle of Socialization
Module 3: Power And White Dominant Culture
This module will teach you what exactly white dominant culture is and how it manifests within your organization.
Key to racial equity work is acknowledging and questioning power dynamics. When we value niceness and traditional hierarchies over questioning power, we’ll never create equitable cultures. This module will give you tools to start talking about how power moves.
Lessons:
- White Dominant Culture
- Power
- What Is Power?
- Forms Of Power
- Pushing Back On Inequitable Uses Of Power
- Cultures Of Nice
- Time Isn't Neutral
- Communicating Across Differences
Module 4: Communicating Across Difference
Our identities, socializations, and organizational roles all impact how we communicate. We'll discuss how to identify microaggressions, tone-policing, and coded language and practice ways to interject when bias and harm occur. This module teaches communication skills, when to call in/out, ways to handle conflict and how to apologize for impact not intent. These are life-changing skills.
Lessons:
- Microaggressions
- Responding to microaggressions
- Tone policing
- Calling in and calling out
- Difficult conversations
- Conflict in the workplace
- Apologizing for impact
- Apologizing in action
Module 5: Cultures of Racial Equity
Building a culture of racial equity takes time, resources, on-going commitment, and behavioral change. It requires deep analysis, informed action, continual feedback, and an openness to accountability. This module is a deep dive into what operationalizing this work looks like. We’ll explore the kind of a long-term journey you and your organization can expect.
Lessons:
- What is a race equity culture
- Operationalizing equity
- What a race equity commitment looks like
- Frameworks for racial equity
- DEI councils
- Global perspectives on race equity and DEI
- Cycle of Liberation
What You Can Expect
+ On-demand racial equity training honed to create systemic change
+ Five modules containing 30 lessons, and over seven hours of training content
+ Easy to navigate learning portal, and access for one full year after purchase
+ New content added through the year
+ Q&A live sessions
+ Comprehensive resource guides
+ Extensive debrief and activity guides
Full course access: $149
Frequently Asked Questions
Nope! Do what works for you! We deliver the trainings at the times listed above for folks who want to participate live.
Everything is recorded and will be available on the portal the next day. You'll have through March 22, 2022 to access the trainings and resources.
No, because all trainings are recorded and made available on-demand! Everything you need will be in the portal -trainings, resources, activities. Your folks can participate anytime between now and 2022.
This program is built to help organizations name and address the ways in which white supremacy manifests in their organizations. We believe that the responsibility of doing this work lies with white folks and people with positional power. We center on racial equity with a focus on white dominant culture and anti-Blackness. A lot of our teaching is aimed at white folks and helping them skill up so that they can cause less harm, be more effective allies and do the work required to organize other white folks.
While we’ll explore frameworks and skill-building that is relevant for everyone, some of the topics and examples might be triggering for People of Color-- we always ask People of Color to care for themselves and place their mental and emotional health over attending our classes.
We center the emotional well-being of people of color in all of our work. We recommend that Whiteness at Work be optional for staff of color. They may want to participate in some modules and not in others. Racial equity change happens at the speed of white comfort—our focus is on white folks doing the real work of change. However, we do feel that there is learning that is helpful for everyone. If you are a person of color and feel like this training is not for you, we encourage you to talk to your managers and colleagues to ask that they support you in finding development classes that might be affinity based and focus on your own learning, reflecting, and processing. If you are a manager, we recommend that you reach out to your staff of color to discuss professional development opportunities.
POC do not have to participate in any breakout groups or share anything they do not want. Ever.
We encourage break out groups to happen via affinity groupings — putting people of color together and white people together when content will be especially emotionally triggering. If your organization can not make that happen, then, we encourage people of color to bow out of participating in breakout groups if they do not feel comfortable. The only people of color whose emotional labor should be relied upon in a training design are the facilitators as we are being paid to do so.
The video instruction for each training is approximately 75 minutes long. We suggest you block 90-minutes so you have a chance to integrate and reflect directly after watching.
Each module is accompanied by a rich set of resources, activities, and debrief questions for you to dig into and explore as a group and individually. The time spent on the activities will vary from person to person and team to team.
Great! We highly recommend you take this course as a team. Inside the course portal, you'll find suggestions on how to engage as a group or organization as a whole. You’ll also have access to activities to do with one another to deepen individual and collective learning and to operationalize the content.
Unfortunately due to the high demand for racial equity practitioners we’re currently not taking on new clients. If you’d like to be notified when our firms are considering new client work, please fill out the form here and we'll be in touch.
Talking about race and racial inequities is hard for most organizations --especially predominately white ones. We hope that you take this opportunity to build up your facilitation skills and embrace that no one is going to do this work perfectly. Many organizations have a few skilled facilitators and mediators already on the team. Inquire if there are trusted folks that would be willing to hold that space and compensate them for their time. You may be able to connect with practitioners in your area who could participate with your team and facilitate debriefs.
In the course portal we have debrief guides and some suggestions on how to structure your conversations.
You'll want to purchase seats for anyone who plans to engage with the material. Anti-racism work is both individual and collective work. One person working alone rarely creates sustainable change in an organization, no matter how committed they are to the work personally.
Individual registration is available for those who are on a personal learning journey. For organizational leaders, we recommend going through this course as a team. That may mean you engage with the material as an entire company, as a department, or other groups within your organization.
You can purchase seats and distribute them when you know more information. Otherwise, you can always purchase more seats as you go along.
You will have access to all trainings, group activities, and resources until June 1, 2022.
Chances are good we've got an answer for you. Please know we're a small team and it could take a day or two for us to reply. Get in touch at info@whitenessatwork.com
