We created Whiteness at Work to help organizations disrupt white dominant culture, repair harm, and build something new.
Are you ready for training that will move the needle?
In order to change the status quo we have to go beyond diversity and implicit bias work, we’ve got to get to the root. This means confronting white supremacy, racism, institutional inequities, and power dynamics.
That requires skills most of us don't have.
It requires shared language, a historical and cultural analysis, a nuanced understanding of our own identities, the ability to have difficult conversations across difference, and the capacity to imagine and create new ways of being.
Whiteness at Work draws on our decades of experience as racial equity practitioners to help you gain those skills.
This program is a one of a kind primer in intersectional race equity work and has jump started real change in hundreds of organizations.
What You Can Expect
+ On-demand racial equity training honed to create systemic change
+ Five modules containing 30 lessons, and over ten hours of training content
+ Easy to navigate learning portal, and access for one full year after purchase
+ New content added through the year
+ Comprehensive resource guides
+ Extensive debrief and activity guides
Full course access: $149
Registration for Whiteness at Work closes on October 1st 2024. Now's the time to join us! Use code "sunset" at check-out to purchase at a reduced rate of $129 per person from now until 10/1/24!
Modules
Each module contains a set of on-demand video lessons ranging from 5-20 minutes in length as well as curated resource, discussion and activity guides.
There's over seven hours of video lessons across the five modules!
This module will introduce you to everything you need to navigate the portal. We'll help you set up group agreements and debrief strategies for working with this material. You'll gain access to glossaries to help anchor your learning as well as kick off videos specifically for participants of color and white participants.
Lessons include:
- Welcome from your instructors
- Words matter: glossaries
- How to create group agreements
- Debrief logistics
- Showing up: for white participants
- BIPOC joy and resilience: for BIPOC participants
Foundations is 2 hours of the most important training you will ever take. These seven lessons will give you and your team the shared language and knowledge base to meaningfully invest in racial equity work. It's exactly where we'd start with you IRL!
Lessons include:
- Liberatory Consciousness model
- Racial equity and DEI shared language
- Race, ethnicity and whiteness
- Specific forms of racial oppression: xenophobia, anti-Blackness, Model Minority Myth, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, caste oppression
- Social identities
- The impact of dominant and non-dominant identities
- Cycle of Socialization
This module will teach you what exactly white dominant culture is and how it manifests within your organization. Key to racial equity work is acknowledging and questioning power dynamics. When we value niceness and traditional hierarchies over questioning power, we’ll never create equitable cultures. This module will give you tools to start talking about how power moves.
Lessons include:
- White dominant culture
- Characteristics of white dominant culture
- Power
- What is power?
- Forms of power
- Pushing back on inequitable uses of power
- Cultures of nice
- Power, time, and the workplace
Our identities, socializations, and organizational roles all impact how we communicate. We'll discuss how to identify microaggressions, tone-policing and coded language and practice ways to interject when bias and harm occur.
This module teaches communication skills, when to call in/out, ways to handle conflict and how to apologize for impact not intent. These are life-changing skills.
Lessons include:
- Microaggressions and bias
- Responding to microaggressions
- Tone policing
- Calling in and calling out
- Difficult conversations
- Conflict in the workplace
- Apologizing for impact
- Apologizing in action
Building a culture of racial equity takes time, resources, on-going commitment, and behavioral change. It requires deep analysis, informed action, continual feedback, and an openness to accountability. This module is a deep dive into what operationalizing this work looks like. We’ll explore the kind of a long-term journey you and your organization can expect.
Lessons include:
- What is a race equity culture
- Operationalizing equity
- What a race equity commitment looks like
- Frameworks for racial equity
- DEI councils
- Global perspectives on race equity and DEI
- Cycle of Liberation
Praise for w@w
I took Whiteness at Work as part of my role as a co-leader of my institution’s diversity council at an organization that is overwhelmingly white. I wanted to understand what unconscious biases I might have, how structural racism and white supremacy manifests in the workplace, and how I can use my position of power to try to help transform my organization to increase racial equity. This program helped me do all of that. One of my biggest takeaways is that we often want to jump right from identifying the problem to taking action, but that there is an important analysis step that cannot be skipped – otherwise we might actually cause more harm.
Briana Pobiner
Smithsonian Institute
The material covered in Whiteness at Work was comprehensive and exhaustive, the real life examples and scenarios made it easier to understand the discussed issues fully and with empathy. The speakers held a welcoming and inclusive space - I learned a lot and challenged many old and often unconscious beliefs rooted in white supremacy. Thanks to the course I feel much better equipped to navigate conversations about race, class, gender etc. at work.
Sara Wilczynska
Software Engineer
Without question, this was the most practical and direct program around creating an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace that I have experienced. As a senior leader for a non-profit who struggles with this daily, I walked away with new and better interpersonal skills and a framework to lead change. Non-profit workplaces are dominated by white culture, though we propose to serve and support communities of color. This series is a must-have for all non-profit leaders. This isn't just about being a great place to work -- it's about being effective in our missions. As nonprofits, there is no mission without equity. Desiree, Ericka, and Jessica taught us in a warm and genuine way, even though they never softened or shied away from the hard truths. This content allowed me to hold up a mirror, examine whiteness personally and as it exists in my organization. And then gave me the skills and information I need to accelerate conversation to action.
Laurie Stradley
Chief Program Officer
Alliance for a Healthier Generation
This training changed me at my core. I thought of myself, being a white, liberal, gay woman that I was beyond reproach and was doing everything I could for my BIPOC friends and community. Boy, was I wrong. I’ve had my eyes opened, I have found my voice, and proved to myself that I am powerful enough to stand up and take action. I will always have more to learn but now I listen with new ears, I see with new eyes and I am committed to the work for the rest of my life.
Thank you for helping me find the way to becoming a better person, a better ally, a better leader, and a better friend.
Jane Berliner
Authentic Talent and Literary Management
Registration for Whiteness at Work closes on October 1st 2024. Now's the time to join us! Use code "sunset" at check-out to purchase at a reduced rate of $129 per person from now until 10/1/24!
Frequently Asked Questions
Absolutely! You can see all 34 lessons here.
Yes! If you participated last year more than half of this content is brand new. Most notably the module on communicating across difference. For a deeper dive on curriculum click here.
This program is built to help organizations name and address the ways in which white supremacy manifests in their organizations. We believe that the responsibility of doing this work lies with white folks and people with positional power. We center on racial equity with a focus on white dominant culture and anti-Blackness. A lot of our teaching is aimed at white folks and helping them skill up so that they can cause less harm, be more effective allies and do the work required to organize other white folks. While we’ll explore frameworks and skill-building that is relevant for everyone, some of the topics and examples might be triggering for People of Color-- we always ask People of Color to care for themselves and place their mental and emotional health over attending our classes.
We center the emotional well-being of people of color in all of our work. We recommend that Whiteness at Work be optional for staff of color. They may want to participate in some modules and not in others. Racial equity change happens at the speed of white comfort—our focus is on white folks doing the real work of change. However, we do feel that there is learning that is helpful for everyone. If you are a person of color and feel like this training is not for you, we encourage you to talk to your managers and colleagues to ask that they support you in finding development classes that might be affinity based and focus on your own learning, reflecting, and processing. If you are a manager, we recommend that you reach out to your staff of color to discuss professional development opportunities.
POC do not have to participate in any breakout groups or share anything they do not want. Ever.
We encourage break out groups to happen via affinity groupings — putting people of color together and white people together when content will be especially emotionally triggering. If your organization can not make that happen, then, we encourage people of color to bow out of participating in breakout groups if they do not feel comfortable. The only people of color whose emotional labor should be relied upon in a training design are the facilitators as we are being paid to do so.
Each module contains roughly 1.5 hours of video instruction with individual lessons running from 5-20 minutes long.
Each module is accompanied by a rich set of resources, activities, and debrief questions for you to dig into and explore as a group and individually. The time spent on the activities will vary from person to person and team to team.
Great! We highly recommend you take this course as a team. Inside the course portal, you'll find suggestions on how to engage as a group or organization as a whole. You’ll also have access to activities to do with one another to deepen individual and collective learning and to operationalize the content.
Unfortunately due to the high demand for racial equity practitioners we’re currently not taking on new clients. If you’d like to be notified when our firms are considering new client work, or for us to recommend colleagues that could be a good match for you please fill out the form here and we'll be in touch.
Talking about race and racial inequities is hard for most organizations --especially predominately white ones. We hope that you take this opportunity to build up your facilitation skills and embrace that no one is going to do this work perfectly. Many organizations have a few skilled facilitators and mediators already on the team. Inquire if there are trusted folks that would be willing to hold that space and compensate them for their time. You may be able to connect with practitioners in your area who could participate with your team and facilitate debriefs.
In the course portal we have debrief guides and some suggestions on how to structure your conversations.
We’ve had entire teams from outside the US participate in Whiteness at Work. Although most of our examples are US-based, the concepts and frameworks of white dominant organizational culture and racial equity resonate around the world --particularly if your organization is US based. The last module contains a specific lesson on doing DEI and racial equity work from a global perspective. If you’re concerned if it’s the right training opportunity for your team, we recommend sending a few folks to participate and decide if it’s right for your organization.
You'll want to purchase seats for anyone who plans to engage with the material. Anti-racism work is both individual and collective work. One person working alone rarely creates sustainable change in an organization, no matter how committed they are to the work personally.
Individual registration is available for those who are on a personal learning journey. For organizational leaders, we recommend going through this course as a team. That may mean you engage with the material as an entire company, as a department, or other groups within your organization.
You can purchase seats and distribute them when you know more information. Otherwise, you can always purchase more seats as you go along.
If you’re ready to do the work, we want you with us. If you’re truly unable to make the financial investment we ask that you take a moment to reflect on what you’re able to contribute. Send us an email at info@whitenessatwork.com with the subject line, Sponsorship, and the amount that you're able to contribute.
If your operating budget allows you to pay the full amount please do so, that way we can fully support folks and organizations who are under-resourced. Between now and October 1st 2024 you can use code: sunset to purchase at the reduced rate of $129pp.
If you have an operating budget that will not allow your staff to participate at the full price send us an email at info@whitenessatwork.com and we'll work together to figure it out.
Once you purchase you will automatically receive an invoice. If you don't see it please search your spam and promo folders. If your organization has payment requirements that do not make it possible to pay online, we can meet your needs. Reach out to info@whitenessatwork.com and our team will assist.
You will have access to all trainings, group activities, and resources until October 1st 2025.
Chances are good we've got an answer for you. Please know we're a small team and it could take a day or two for us to reply. Get in touch at info@whitenessatwork.com
On your personal log-in page you can click on the "transcript" link to pull up a record of your progress. Upon completion this is a printable document you can keep for your records.
Keep in touch for upcoming information
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