Lesson Plan: Understanding How Racism-Evasiveness Shows Up in Your Organization and What You Can Do About It

Lesson Plan 4

This lesson is designed to help students and members of organizations to think about discomfort and silence on racism within their workplaces. Participants should consider the structural, cultural and individual factors that lead to racism-evasiveness. Beeman analyzes the interaction of external macro-level color-blind ideology and internal organizational culture in her study of an interracial non-profit social justice organization. She finds that external public color-blind and liberal discourse on civility interact with action-centered organizational cultures to produce racism-evasive decisions. Even when they had sophisticated understandings of racism, African American, Latiné, and European American activists avoided discussions on racism in favor of a class-centered approach. In preparation for this lesson participants should read Chapter 4.

Discussion Prompts and Workshop Activities

- Do you see connections between your organization and CED/CLA’s avoidance of racism as an issue to be addressed, especially internally?

- Can you imagine or have you experienced situations where there is an uncomfortable silence around an issue? Have you felt a particular discomfort or pressure to be silent on issues of social injustice and/or racism? If so, describe that situation. What happened? Did someone bring up an issue with racism within the organization or in relation to work with the organization? What did the leader do? Was there an awkward silence or discomfort? Did you feel like you wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words? What could have helped the conversation in this situation?

- What change is needed at both the individual and structural level of your organization to allow for more explicit discussion of racism and steps to address it internally and externally?

- Does your organization have policies to protect people who bring forth complaints about discrimination and retaliation? Do you think these policies work well in practice? If yes, how do you know? If not, how would you change them to be more effective?