Course Overview
This course teaches race skills, a necessary and foundational skill set for understanding what race truly is, how it came to be, and how to function effectively in a racially diverse society.
First, it provides participants with a critical understanding of historical, legal, and social psychological factors leading to prejudice, discrimination, and racism within our society. Secondly, and critically, we will consider how the collection of these individual-level processes relate to structural-level racial inequality and systemic racism.
With this foundation, we then introduce race skills, which empower people to effectively engage (and become willing to re-engage) in difficult race-related conversations, leading to anti-racist social action.
Detailed Roadmap
Objectives. After completing this module, participants should be able to:
explain how race is a social construct (i.e., is not a natural human trait, but is instead a system that people have created) that continues to structure life within the United States.
define and identify racism in all of its forms.
These are foundational Race Skills.
Objectives. After completing this module, participants should have the tools for engaging effectively and respectfully in difficult race- related conversations. These tools include, but are not limited to:
Examine race talk by learning about why we avoid it and why we should discuss it.
Learn and apply the elements of effective racial dialogue.
Identify the differences between dialogue, discussion, & debate around race-related topics.
- Co-learn from shared personal experiences of how race operates in different people’s lives.
- practice dialoguing about common narratives about race.
Objectives. After completing this module, participants should have begun developing the tools for effectively interacting with someone of a different race. These tools include, but are not limited to:
Identifying common pitfalls when interacting with someone of a different race (e.g., potential benefits and limits of empathy in interracial interactions, the race skills gap).
Strategies for preventing common pitfalls when interacting with racial outgroup members (e.g., mitigating use of racial stereotypes).
Strategies for managing and confronting racial microaggressions and explicit racial discrimination in the moment and afterward (whether you are the one who has committed or has received the microaggressions).
How to begin healing from racial trauma.
Objectives. After completing this module, participants should be able to:
Identify how race skills are often applied to and used when creating organizational policies and practices
Communicate their thoughts on how these approaches could be applied specifically to Newsela’s own policies and practices.
Here, we encourage people to begin translating their Race Skills into anti-racism policy and action.