Talking About Race

From August through October of 2020 we hosted a 7 part learning circle series called “Talking About Race”. The program was based on the web portal of the same name by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Most of the materials were taken from that web portal at https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race.

Kitty Gogins developed our format and the discussion questions and we can’t thank her enough! Many thank you also to the discussion facilitators who also volunteered their time!

For each 90 minute session, we provided a hour of pre-work from the NMAAHC site and other sources that we asked people to review before the sessions. Each session was a small group discussion of the materials based on the discussion questions. Everyone then had an opportunity to make a personal commitment for action in the next week to grow their understanding about race or to develop as an anti-racist. The session closed with a quote to ponder.

We are sharing the materials that we used for our program so that others may use them. Each session stands alone, so you could pick and choose the topics you want to use. The ideas to get participants thinking about possible action steps, the ending quote, and any cartoons used in the sessions can be found here.

If you would like help to create your own community conversations, we recommend that you contact Kitty Goggins at https://kittygogins.com/.