Tackling Racism: A one-day workshop.
By Pamela Brown.
Kogan Page, 1999.
A4 ringbinder (boxed); 122 pages
£99 plus £2.50 p & p. ISBN 0 7494 3036 2
The author is to be congratulated on not only daring to approach a subject as difficult as this and as threaded with minefields as there are races now trying to co-exist in this country. Even the start of a joke ‘There was an Englishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman and an Irishman …’ is becoming fraught with racist difficulties! But in spite of years of exhortations, the multi-race and –culture problems are still not solved n this country. In some areas of the community these problems are not active, but particularly in the mini-city of the workplace anti-racial and cultural attitudes almost inevitably come to a head from time to time, often with disastrous results.
In areas where large employers need to develop a multi-racial workforce, there are the potential problems of Asian v West Indian, European immigrant v African, etc, and all resented perhaps by a group of Englishmen. The wise employer takes steps to try to introduce a racism policy supported by training, and this involves the difficult attitudinal training.
Many trainers are daunted by such prospects, but this author has drawn together a number of appropriate sessions to produce a one-day workshop giving trainers effective support. The aims of this workshop are to raise awareness of the problem and to give practical advice on how to tackle racism. In these aims she succeeds admirably and has produced guidance that will go a long way to using the travails of the busy trainer.
The resource details a workshop with eight sessions, each session containing the objective, method, extensive facilitator’s note, exercises and handouts. The sessions range from racism terminology; the effect of racism at work; what is happening at the delegates’ places of work; organizational change; racism in the workplace; action to be taken; and evaluation, monitoring and review.
The workshop exercises can be extended, adapted or replaced from a set of nine additional exercises, and for ease of reference, the handouts 1 to 15 are repeated at the end of the resource.
This is a professionally constructed and produced resource pack on a difficult training subject, the material being treated with a humanistic concern. Well recommended.
Leslie Rae
March 2000
