For organizations who are on a journey toward race equity, what are some first steps?

Since writing about how every meeting should mention race and equity, people reached out to ask a follow-up question: if we agree that it is important to talk about race and equity, what are some first steps to begin to do this?

I want to offer the process of sharing race stories that I learned from the Rise Center for Racial Justice. This process comes from Race Dialogues: A Facilitator’s Guide to Tackling the Elephant in the Classroom.

A couple of caveats:

• These conversations demand building trust and safety, which happens over time. Therefore, this endeavor is part of a longer-term engagement. I am not recommending to have this conversation just one time as part of a one-off meeting or retreat. Rather, it requires ongoing, supporting conversations.

• When guiding multiracial nonprofit teams to do this culture work, I only work as part of a cross-race team. As a white person with white privilege in our society, I don’t have the lived experience to guide a multiracial group on discussion about bias, culture, racism, or microaggressions. In the case of the recent conversation, I designed the conversation based on materials from the Rise Center and led the conversation with my colleague Christal Cherry.

With those guidelines in place, here is the process:

1. Before the session, we asked participants to think about their race stories: what conscious or unconscious messages did they receive about race at different times in their lives?

2. We introduced the activity by clearly explaining how we wanted people to listen – with Active Listening techniques. These include body language affirming the speaker, not stating any judgements about what is said, and also by expressing appreciation for whatever the speaker was willing to share. We reminded participants to not respond by interpreting a story they heard or one-upping/downing the listener: “You think that’s bad, listen to what happened to ME!” We also reminded participants to hold these stories in confidentiality – and, out of respect for the shared, to keep them in the confines of our current conversation (e.g. not, “I can’t believe what you shared last week!”).

3. Christal and I modeled the process ourselves by sharing pieces of our race stories, honestly and vulnerably. We also modeled active, appreciative listening to each other for the group.

4. We sent participants off to share in groups of three, giving each participant four minutes to share.

5. We brought the group back with some debrief questions: What is one new insight that came to you in this exercise? What was surprising to you? Challenging? What are the implications for our organization? What is one next step you’d like to take?

So, what happened? We led a group to take some first steps and begin to make race and racism more visible: Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) participants shared some challenging experience with racism, some of which surprised and saddened other group members. White participants became more aware that we also have a race that impacts how we move in the world and some unspoken assumptions and norms around race.

Sharing race stories is important because it builds shared vocabulary and understanding. What we wanted to do with this group was open a conversation about how the culture of the organization impacted the ways in which BIPOC individuals experienced some challenging past events. This conversation opened a path for a more provocative conversation on White Supremacy Culture, which I’ll share in a future post.

As I write this post, there is a voice saying that this kind of conversation and culture work is such a small, small part of the overwhelming inequality and inequity in front of us. Does it really matter?

And yet, we must draw on relationships across race, privilege and power to keep processes meaningful and honest. As adrienne maree brown reminds us, we need to work at the speed of trust. Or from Jewish tradition, “You are not here to complete the work. But nor are you free to desist from it.”