{"id":653,"date":"2024-02-21T17:07:07","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T17:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/?p=653"},"modified":"2024-02-21T17:08:16","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T17:08:16","slug":"being-anti-racist-is-relevant-to-everyones-role-reflections-on-race-equality-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/being-anti-racist-is-relevant-to-everyones-role-reflections-on-race-equality-week\/","title":{"rendered":"“Being anti-racist is relevant to everyone’s role”: Reflections on Race Equality Week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I participated in the Race Equality Matters 5-Day Challenge at the start of February. I also encouraged my entire team to do the same and made this easy for them to do by having a dedicated person download the challenges and email them out to the whole team. A daily reminder makes it so much more likely that people will engage. Sometimes that journey of development and reflection just needs a little nudge.  I don\u2019t know how many people from the team participated, it isn\u2019t something I wanted to monitor in a performative way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, I wanted to make it easy for people to engage with an agenda that they might otherwise consider to be for \u201cthe EDI Team\u201d or not related to their job. Being anti-racist is relevant to everyone\u2019s role. But it is not always immediately obvious what it means. And being anti-racist is different to not being racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found the bite-sized resources to be a really clever way to engage with an anti-racist agenda. I mean, who can\u2019t spare five minutes of their day to learn something new about a topic that matters so much?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, the focus of my learning was around\u00a0understanding, recognising and gaining confidence in calling out harmful behaviours<\/strong>\u00a0(these are called microaggressions in the material but we had a useful email exchange within the team about why this is not a good term \u2013 so we agreed to think about them as harmful behaviours).\u00a0 I think the reality is that we will witness harmful behaviours \u2013 be that around race, power or anything else. It\u2019s easy to look at the floor, pretend you haven\u2019t heard it or be a bystander and I expect most of us know a time where we did just that.\u00a0 My personal takeaways were some useful techniques for following up on incidents where I have witnessed harmful behaviours:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Probing questions to the person who made the comment to help them reflect on their behaviour rather than being instantly defensive. We learn more through reflection than attack and defence. So, a simple question \u201cWhat made you say that?\u201d could really start to shift the dial.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Importantly, following up with the person who experienced the harmful behaviour. They will likely be feeling hurt or lonely following the event and it may not be the first of the day, week, or month. So, if we have witnessed harm, we have a duty of care to check on the person and see what we can do to help them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3.  I would encourage all staff who have not already done so to take 20-30 minutes over the next week to review these five-day challenges which can be found at: 5 Day Challenge – Race Equality Matters<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Amanda Silverwood, a member of Miranda\u2019s team commented: \u201cI think it\u2019s really important for managers to expressly give their team permission to spend a part of their working day participating in EDI activities. It shows that you believe that EDI is everyone\u2019s responsibility and that it impacts everyone\u2019s work.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cThe Race Equality Matters 5-day challenge is the perfect activity. It\u2019s low-pressure, accessible and something that everyone can find time to do. It also has meaningful outcomes with practical steps that people can implement immediately such as actively seeking out a book, film or podcast based on a different culture from your own.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Miranda Routledge <\/strong>
    Director of Strategic Planning and Chief of Staff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I participated in the Race Equality Matters 5-Day Challenge at the start of February. I also encouraged my entire team to do the same and made this easy for them to do by having a dedicated person download the challenges and email them out to the whole team. A daily reminder makes it so much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":591,"featured_media":655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"lboro_blog_alternative_thumbnail_image":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-race-equality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/591"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":657,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions\/657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/edi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}