CCSRE Releases RaceWorks Toolkit

A free online resource for educators, professionals, and community leaders offers new tools for racial literacy.

CCSRE announces the launch of RaceWorks, a free online resource created for educators and instructors teaching racial literacy within and beyond the classroom. The RaceWorks video series and educational toolkit aims to better equip students, working professionals, and community advocates with the knowledge and skills necessary to have informed conversations about race and how race and racism impact our world today.  

 

“We can only begin to confront racism and drive action in support of racial justice when people have the vocabulary and tools needed to engage for positive impact. If we’re going to change how we talk about race, we need easy access to resources and tools that will help reshape how people think about race in the first place,” added Dr. Daniel Murray, Executive Director. “This toolkit is a starting point for helping people learn how race works.”

 

The new multimedia toolkit contains a series of videos, educational activities, discussion topics, and evidence-based frameworks to make critical race studies more accessible for a range of learners and in a range of contexts. 

 

RaceWorks builds on years of research by CCSRE’s faculty affiliates from a range of disciplines and was developed in collaboration with Stanford SPARQ.

 

“Having productive conversations about race is challenging and often emotionally-charged. People come at the issue from different starting points and experiences,” said RaceWorks Project Director and SPARQ Managing Director Dr. MarYam Hamedani. 

 

“The demand for a resource to help people talk and learn about race is high, especially in today’s diverse and often divided social climate. We realized the need for a constructive model for how to both learn and talk about race, from the classroom to the workplace.” 

 

The toolkit presents a research-based model for race conversations in America today, recognizing education as key to developing a strong sense of racial literacy among students, professionals, and community leaders. RaceWorks aims to prepare individuals to have more effective race conversations, allowing them to better navigate through their own communities and the larger world around them.

 

RaceWorks features insights from a number of scholars who are also a part of the project team, including Jennifer DeVere Brody, Faculty Director of CCSRE and Stanford Theater & Performance Studies professor; Paula Moya, former Faculty Director of the Research Institute at CCSRE, Stanford English professor, and co-editor of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century; and Hazel Rose Markus, Stanford Psychology professor, Faculty Co-Director of SPARQ, and co-editor of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor of psychology at Stanford, Faculty Co-Director of SPARQ, and author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, along with Tomás Jiménez, a professor of sociology and expert in immigration and assimilation, are also among the diverse set of scholars featured in the video series. 

 

Backed by the latest scholarship in critical race studies and rooted in the idea that race is not a thing that people have or are, but rather actions that people do, RaceWorks analyzes racial perceptions and biases across topic areas from law enforcement to education, with the ultimate goal of “undoing” racism. Toolkit frameworks can be integrated into academic curricula or can be adapted for professional education opportunities such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness trainings.

 

RaceWorks is free and publicly available.