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Introduction to Racial Justice – IDW 2021 – Wellbeing Morning Series
February 12, 2021 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
In this workshop, we invite participants to engage with us on the challenging and necessary topics of race and racism. This workshop covers several concepts, including what race is, how it is constructed, how racism persists, power and privilege, liberation, colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and more. Participants will learn how to talk about race as both a social construct and a real experience. They will engage with material centred on unpacking racial identities and deconstructing whiteness.
By diving into the ongoing nature of racism, we collaborate with participants to examine systems, bias, micro-aggressions, privilege and power. We encourage a newfound, more in-depth understanding of systemic oppression, how it forms over centuries, police brutality, and why reverse racism can’t be real. We hold space for productive discussions about power and privilege related to race.
So, what does “going forward” look like? Knowledge is power, but informed action is better.
We collaborate with the group to contextualize the issues while encouraging participants to examine their privilege by thinking about ways one’s behaviour can be harmful. Additionally, we help participants differentiate feelings of shame and guilt and develop constructive responses to “call-ins” and “call-outs.” We examine four essential solutions to ending racism in the community: decolonization, co-conspiracy, conscious upgrading, and cultural exclamation.
Anti-Racism and Lessons from Liberation is an immersive and in-depth workshop that exposes our complicity in racist power structures that exist all around us. This workshop is personal and political: an exploration into bias, systemic oppression, language, cultural appropriation and intersectionality. Participants gain a deeper understanding of racism’s manifestations from systems of power to workplace micro-aggressions and, most importantly, gain the skills to speak up and combat racism in their communities.
Participants will take away concrete strategies for embodying anti-racism and expand upon what it means to be the change!
Cicely’s Bio:
Cicely Belle Blain is a Black/mixed, queer femme from London, UK now living on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people. Their ancestry is a mix of Gambian (Wolof), Jamaican and English. At the heart of all their work, Cicely Belle harnesses their passion for justice, liberation and meaningful change via transformative education, always with laughter, and fearlessly in the face of systemic oppression.
They are noted for founding Black Lives Matter Vancouver and subsequently being listed as one Vancouver’s 50 most powerful people by Vancouver Magazine in 2018 and again in 2020, BC Business’s 30 under 30 and one of 150 Black women and non-binary people making change across Canada. They are now the CEO of Cicely Blain Consulting, social justice-informed diversity and inclusion consulting company with over 500 clients across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Cicely Belle is an instructor in Executive Leadership at Simon Fraser University and the author of Burning Sugar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).