timothy corvidae
UNPACKING PRIVILEGE
This family of workshops invite groups to look at the specific ways privilege impacts the way they work together and show up within the communities they work.
The goal of this workshop is for everyone to come out with a greater awareness of their own privilege. Our focus will be on privilege, but this is definitely not to say that we’re all equally privileged. And . . . it is to say that by focusing on our privilege we get the opportunity to feel what it is like to have our privilege addressed.
Here's an example of an unpacking privilege workshop for a particular context:
Examining Whiteness in Social Work (OR Examining Whiteness in a Racialized World)
Social work is a field full of white people. According to a 2006 NASW report, approximately 86% of licensed social workers are white. The field is diversifying, but white culture has had an outsize influence on the culture of the field. A lot of white folks go about life unaware they have a culture, and even less aware of how that culture dominates, appropriates, and/or ignores other cultures. Privilege makes itself hard to see. What do we need to know about whiteness that we don’t? What do we need to be able to notice, that we haven’t been taught to? How can a better understanding of whiteness—our own cultural experiences of it and the social structures that whiteness supports and is supported by—inform our social work practices?
This is an experiential workshop for students and social workers of all racial identities: come to participate in dialogue with each other about the cultural experience and force of whiteness in our lives. You can expect to learn some about group facilitation, too, as we’ll pause occasionally to notice our own group process and to discuss facilitation strategies for nurturing crucial conversations about race and social power.
Goals:
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Introduce and practice the concept of a brave space dialogue, both to establish connections with each other that participants can build on in the future, and to get some practice in the process of co-creating brave space.
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Examine whiteness as an influential force in U.S. culture and in social work as a profession. Raise awareness of whiteness as a personal experience and a system of power. Explore ways that awareness of and ability to draw attention to white culture and white supremacy can open paths to solidarity in both anti-racist and other social work contexts.
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Gain basic introduction to group facilitation.