Diversity workshops

Sam Smith – A fascinating book by an ex-nun turned activist, Joann Malone’s Awake to Racism, includes a description of her at a DC and a suburban DC high school, where she became involved in diversity workshops beginning in the 1980s:

Here’s how she describes it:

We developed our own version of a workshop I was trained to teach by NCBI (the National Coalition Building Institute). Having experienced many types of racism workshops over the years, I found this one the best for allowing open sharing of stories about real experiences of stereotyping and abuse without finger-pointing and guilt. It allowed everyone, of all ethnicities, religions, genders to celebrate the groups to which they belong, listen to one another’s suffering and learn ways to interrupt racist jokes, slurs and actions, to become an antiracist.

 A few examples:

 They were fascinated by all they learned about one another when they told their own stories of stereotyping and discrimination or simply asked to name “Three things you can’t tell just by looking at me.” As our student leaders became more familiar with the power of their own stories, they might share Hidden Identities like this-“Hi, I’m Noah. Three things you can’t tell just by looking at me-I’m gay, homeless, and a great saxophone player.” Or "Hi, I'm Sabrina. I was born in Cameroon, am here illegally, and have stage three lymphoma." In the Speak-Outs, individuals were given the full attention of the whole group to listen deeply to their experience at length, without comment, just huge support. We eventually learned a great deal about each student’s Hidden Identities, particularly difficult conflicts and the ways in which they had learned to stand up for themselves and become allies to others. Leaders emerged whose lives embodied several identities and became powerful examples of conflict resolution and leadership. One leader was open about his identities as a homeless, bi-sexual child of a drug addict. Another great leader was Indian, heterosexual, a brilliant female student being forced into an arranged marriage with a man she didn’t know rather than go to college.”

 One of the students described some of the effects:

What I tell folks about the Diversity Workshop is that after two days of a workshop, I went away thinking, “Dang, we all have so much in common! We’re all the SAME! We HURT! WE FEEL FEELINGS! Every kid feels alone. And maybe being at a big school on the beltway of D.C. the Diversity Workshop helped me feel less alone.

Here’s a story the Washington Post ran in 1994 on the program.