WORKING TO EXTEND ANTI-RACIST EDUCATION

Description

In 2001, a group of five North Carolina Teaching Fellows at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gathered in the basement of Peabody Hall to discuss the plans for a Let’s Talk R.A.C.E. Conference. R.A.C.E. was an acronym for Racial Attitudes and Conversations in Education. These five students, along with the program director, began what became a yearly gathering of educators and students from across the state to discuss issues of race in education. The Let’s Talk R.A.C.E. Conference was last held in 2010.

As former North Carolina Teaching Fellows and facilitators for Let’s Talk R.A.C.E. at UNC-Chapel Hill, the co-founders of we are (working to extend anti-racism education) desired to recreate the conference with a focus on combating systemic racism and other equity issues in education. In 2015, they shared their idea with leadership at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University and the North Carolina Central University School of Education. From those partnerships, the Let’s Talk Racism Conference emerged in 2016.