Showing What We Tell: Facilitating Antiracist Education in Cross-Racial Teams

Authors

  • Robin DiAngelo
  • Darlene Flynn Seattle Office for Civil Rights

Abstract

Antiracist education seeks to interrupt relations of racial inequality by educating people to identify, name, and challenge the norms, patterns, traditions, structures, and institutions that keep racism and white supremacy in place. One norm and tradition of racism that antiracist practice seeks to interrupt is unilateral white leadership. This paper is based on an interactive workshop in which participants explore a training approach that both models and deepens antiracism work: facilitating in cross-racial teams. We offer a rationale for cross-racial facilitation and explore common challenges and how to work with them. These challenges include racial pitfalls for white facilitators and facilitators of color. Using an example from our work leading together cross-racially, we illustrate many of the dynamics that a cross-racial team must navigate. We discuss the pre- and postwork that is necessary for successful cross-racial leading from an antiracist perspective and offer tools and techniques for working together as a team and with your group.

Author Biographies

Robin DiAngelo

DiAngelo is an Assistant Professor of Education. Her scholarship seeks to reveal the dynamics of Whiteness and institutional racism in education. Her recent publications include: The production of whiteness in education (Teachers College Record); White fragility (International Journal of Critical Pedagogy); Why can’t we all just be individuals?: Countering the discourse of individualism in anti-racist education (InterActions); My class didn’t trump my race: Using oppression to face privilege (Multicultural Perspectives).

 

Darlene Flynn, Seattle Office for Civil Rights

Flynn works for the City of Seattle Office for Civil Rights, where she provides strategic planning and technical support for the City's Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI). For the last five years she has been the lead staff for the RSJI capacity building efforts, focused on planning and implementing training to support identifying and dismantling institutional racism in City government.

 

How to Cite

DiAngelo, R., & Flynn, D. (2010). Showing What We Tell: Facilitating Antiracist Education in Cross-Racial Teams. Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, 1(1). Retrieved from https://wpcjournal.com/article/view/6269

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2010): Understanding & Dismantling Privilege

Section

Tools & Strategies

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