How to Talk About Race: 3 Critical First Steps

About the Webinar

This is part 1 in a 2-part webinar series. Be sure to explore the second session, How to Have Conversations About Race: Leveraging 4 Key Skills. 

Talking about race is a layered and complex issue. Because of this, it’s easy for people to feel vulnerable, nervous, or even fearful about discussing it. But having these important conversations is essential for creating a truly inclusive work culture. And you can’t make progress on an issue if you can’t discuss it frankly and openly. So how do you talk about race, especially at work? Where do you even start?

Leveraging the same communication skills you would use for any difficult discussion is key, but if you want to know how to talk about race in a meaningful way, there are 3 critical concepts that you must understand before the conversation even starts: trust, identity, and power.

These concepts can help you establish the psychological safety and openness that’s required for everyone to feel heard and respected in a sensitive discussion.  

Join us as Ancella Livers, an EDI expert and author of Leading in Black and White, and Nicole Forward of our coaching practice, discuss how to talk about race. You’ll gain valuable insights about the critical concepts you need to know and learn how to lay the groundwork for talking about race, both in the workplace and beyond.

What You’ll Learn  

In this webinar, you’ll learn more about how to talk about race at work and:

• How psychological safety and trust, social identity, and power play into any discussion about race;
• Ideas for doing your own identity work; and
• The difference between positional power and racial power, and how they intersect in discussions about race.