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SPARQtools Expands With New Racial Literacy Toolkit

RaceWorks is here! Our new toolkit, developed with Stanford CCSRE, is a free online resource created for educators and facilitators teaching racial literacy.

RaceWorks is here! This new toolkit, developed with Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, is a free online resource created for educators and facilitators teaching racial literacy. The video series and educational toolkit aims to better equip students and working professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to have informed conversations on race and how it impacts our world today.

RaceWorks contains a series of videos, educational activities, and evidence-based frameworks to make race studies more accessible and easier to understand for a range of learners. RaceWorks is a project that builds on years of research by scholars at CCSRE, Stanford’s interdisciplinary hub for teaching and research on race and ethnicity.

“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.” 

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. Psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt, Faculty Co-Director of SPARQ and author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, along with Jeanne Tsai, an expert in culture and emotion, Faculty Director of Asian American Studies at CCSRE, and a SPARQ affiliate, are also among the diverse set of scholars featured in the video series. 

The toolkit presents a research-based model for race conversations in America today, recognizing education as key to students and professionals developing a strong sense of racial literacy. 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.

“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. We can only begin to confront racism and drive action in support of racial literacy when people have the vocabulary and tools needed to engage for positive impact,” added Dr. Daniel Murray, Executive Director at CCSRE. “This toolkit is a starting point for helping people learn how race works.”

Backed by the latest scholarship in 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 curriculums, or can be adapted for professional education opportunities such as DEI trainings.

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