What are you willing to do to stop racism and heal our world?
The School for Inclusion + Activism and
The Radical Resilience Institute
each have 30+ years of experience educating people about what it means to be Antiracist.
The year 2020, amidst the pervasive collective trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic, was a year of shattering racial violence, including the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arberry, and George Floyd. It was also a year of unprecedented mobilization against racist violence in the BLM movement and allied movements. All over the U.S., everyday people can see that something in the fabric of the American culture is broken, and a lot of people want to help mend it. We yearn for new, more fruitful ways of confronting the American dilemma of race. Hard Conversations courses are deep dives into what we need to know and remember to make sense of the racialized social tensions that are rocking society right now.
Victor Lee Lewis and Patti Digh invite you to join one of their 5-week intensive courses now. This work is urgent. Together they guide and facilitate an online learning community to develop the knowledge and skills for understanding and undoing racism. We explore how to shift from reacting to social crises to creating positive social change, and how and why to enjoy it, much of the time.
To respond to the urgency of today, we continually update and refine the courses to deliver a learning experience that is intellectually challenging, deeply collaborative, socially supportive, fiercely honest, and inspiring.
This course opened my eyes, heart, and mind to a broadened view of racism……challenging, motivating, interactive, meaningful, life-changing… -Marilyn Hathaway
Who these classes are for:
More than 8,000 people on 5 continents, from diverse racial, class, and cultural backgrounds have joined our learning communities in the past six years alone. They include activists, educators, clergy, high school students, retirees, commissioned military officers, college professors, doctors and nurses, and other everyday people who have taken these intensive learning journeys with us since Patti created the first Hard Conversations cohort in response to the Charleston Church Massacre of 2015.
Racism is a white problem that has a deep and dangerous impact on Black and Indigenous peoples and other people of color (BIPOC). We welcome both white and BIPOC participants to these classes, taking the necessary steps to ensure that the differential emotional labor our BIPOC participants will undertake in the class is never seen as a responsibility, that BIPOC learning needs are met, and that we offer opportunities for BIPOC participants to meet as a group when they would like to.
Hard Conversations: Deep Dive Into Racism and its Undoing (formerly: Introduction to Racism)
Five-week online seminar program with two learning spaces: An online classroom and weekly 90-minute live seminars (via Zoom). Content delivered to your email three times each week for five weeks. The Live Seminar dates and times differ for each Cohort (see registration options below for upcoming cohort dates). Each call is recorded, should you not be able to participate live.
- Week 1: Introduction, Creating our Learning Community
- Week 2: Institutional and Structural Racism: Myths and Facts
- Week 3: On White Privilege and “White Fragility: The use and abuse of ideas
- Week 4: On Color Blindness, Microaggressions, and Cultural Appropriation
- Week 5: On Being an Ally: What Will I Do Next to Help Make Everybody Free?
Hard Conversations: Whiteness, Race, and Social Justice
What does it mean to be White in a racist world?
We will explore this question in a five-week online course/forum. You will receive reading and discussion assignments in your online classroom each week as well as participate in five 90-minute live dialogues. We’ll use seminal films like “Birth of a Nation,” “The Color of Fear,” and “Get Out” to underscore the learning and trace concepts of “whiteness” (and its impact) over time.
- Embodied Learning and Knowing about Racism
- The Social Construction of Race and Whiteness
- The Color of Supremacy and How It Shows Up Daily
- The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness
- Building a Solidarity-Based Action Plan and Joyous Activism
This is an extraordinary course. The videos, writings, and in-depth interviews stretched my understanding of race. But that was just the start. There were rich online exchanges between others in the course and opportunities to talk in breakout groups during our phone sessions. -Alice Lonoff
Your Guides
While each has been doing social justice education for over 30 years, Victor Lee Lewis and Patti Digh started teaching together in 2015 in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre. Together, they have educated tens of thousands of people on the history of racism and the impact of whiteness.
Victor Lee Lewis, MA, is the Founder and Director of the Radical Resilience Institute. He is a nationally-recognized speaker, consultant, trainer, social justice educator, and writer. Victor has conducted seminars, workshops, keynote speeches, and “train the trainer” programs in most of the 50 United States, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Germany. He is best known for his inspiring leadership role in The Color of Fear, an unusually powerful video about racism that received the Golden Apple Award for “Best Social Studies Documentary” of 1995 from the National Educational Media Association. He is co-author, with Hugh Vasquez, of Beyond the Color of Fear, a 4-volume multimedia curriculum for use in classrooms and training programs. Victor has also written a training manual utilizing the Hollywood film, Get Out!, The Get Out Movie Teacher’s Companion, as an on-ramp for classroom discussion. Victor is a Neuro-Linguistic Programing Master (NLP) Practitioner, an NLP Health Practitioner, an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Expert Practitioner/Trainer, a certified NLP hypnotherapist, Advanced Student at Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, and a resilient and thriving trauma survivor.
Patti Digh is the author of eight books on global workforce diversity and living mindfully, including a Fortune magazine “best business book” for the year 2000 and one of five finalists for the “Books for a Better Life” national award in 2008. She was formerly the Vice President of International and Diversity Programs for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest association of human resources professionals. She recently served on the Executive Committee of the ACLU-NC Board of Directors and has served in advising roles on diversity, equity, and inclusion to corporate and nonprofit organization clients such as PepsiCo, Boeing, PBS, the U.S. Postal Service, the American Society of Association Executives, and many others. More information is available on her website: www.pattidigh.com.
I’ve just signed up for my 2nd time for this course. The resources, alone, are worth the price. AND the conversations and perspectives shared are priceless. You will be challenged and stretched by this course. So much has been left out of our history books and by the media. -Elaine Hansen
ALL ARE WELCOME
To the extent you are able, please consider contributing to our work
$250-500
Accomplice
Give aid and comfort to our efforts to create antiracist learning communities.
Your contribution will:
- Support your experts and event producers
- Keep the session accessible and open to all
- Help develop new courses
- Pay for the technology needed to run these courses
- Support our mission to end racism and heal the world through learning.
To give back, we donate 10% of each participant’s fee split equally among the Equal Justice Initiative, Color of Change, and two indigenous land trusts, one in California and one in North Carolina. To make our work accessible, we offer a sliding contribution scale along with group discounts, and indigenous peoples are welcome to attend our classes at no cost.
Groups are Welcomed
Groups of 10+ individuals from one organization will be registered at a contribution rate of $100/per person. Contact info@hardconversations.com for information on how to register as a group.
I was fortunate to be a part of the first version of this class… well worth your time. World class facilitators and instructors, participants interested in real work and growth. -Molly Casteel
ALSO AVAILABLE
ORGANIZATIONAL COACHING: Victor and Patti also offer 1:1 coaching for executives, diversity directors, diversity committee chairs, and others inside organizations who need expert advice on the next steps in their diversity, equity, and inclusion work. In this work, we are available to you when you need us. Inquire at info@hardconversations.com.
DIVERSITY LEADERSHIP COACHING COHORTS: These cohorts meet twice monthly on Zoom with Victor and Patti, bringing real-life issues from their work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, for solutions, next steps, and advice. This is for organizational executives, diversity directors, and others inside corporate, educational, governmental, or nonprofit organizations who are doing DEI work inside the organization. Inquire at info@hardconversations.com for information on when the next cohort will start.
LIBERATION LEARNING LAB: Available on a sliding scale for individuals who want a deeper understanding of liberation theory and practice, this twice-monthly learning lab uses the real-life experiences of participants to explore liberation theory and apply it to the situations brought forward by the participants. We meet twice monthly by Zoom. Inquire at info@hardconversations.com for details.
This course has changed my life. My awareness is expanding with each speaker, book, and article. Thank you for opening space for learning.
-Mazie Yewel