DEI Beyond the White Gaze (Critical DEI Workshop)

$50 recommended

Facilitator: Dahiya | June 26th | 7:00-9:00 PM ET | ONLINE

What is the white gaze? Do we have to address it? And how is circumventing the white gaze central to anti-racist work? In a 1988 interview, Nobel laureate and Black feminist writer Toni Morrison calls attention to the perniciousness of critiques that demand she write for and about white people, saying It is “as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze.” Morrison refused to center the white gaze in her novels, and her refusal has had powerful reverberating effects: decentering the white gaze has become a central pillar of
anti-racist work.

In this Critical DEI workshop, we’ll watch Morrison’s full 1988 interview, and also read excerpts from her path-breaking text, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in order to push ourselves to think and imagine DEI without the white gaze. From this starting point, we’ll examine how whiteness comes up in our daily lives, and what we can do to disrupt it.

The Critical DEI Workshop provides rigorous ongoing DEI training for educators and other professionals interested in foundational diversity work grounded in anti-racist praxis. If you would like your employer to pay for this workshop and need documentation, contact us at nightschoolbar@gmail.com.