By Linda Jacobson; April 15, 2020 Dive Brief: Being an educator doesn’t mean an individual is naturally less biased toward students of color, but interventions can reduce prejudices, according to a study released Wednesday. In a test of implicit bias — in which respondents match white faces with “good” words and black faces with “bad” words — 77% of teachers demonstrated implicit bias, compared to 77.1% of non-teachers. And to measure explicit bias, the researchers, led by Jordan Starck, a...

By Shawn Ginwright, April 14, 2020 The reports of racial disparities among COVID-19 victims should not surprise us. African Americans and Latinos have typically experienced disproportionate exposure to a range of health issues. For example, African Americans are twice as likely to die of heart disease as their white counterparts. Consider that Latinos are 50% more likely than whites to die of diabetes or liver disease. These issues are not determined by biology, but by a history of policies...

WEBINAR: Thursday, April 16th, 8:30 to 9:30 pm ET What the COVID-19 Crisis Tells Us about Structural Racism Even as COVID-19 leaves its mark across the length and breadth of the United States, we know that some communities are being hit harder than others. The overrepresentation of Black and Brown people among COVID victims in New York City has received lots of attention because of the huge numbers involved, but the pattern repeats itself almost everywhere we have the data to document it.

As you know, anti-Asian and Asian American and xenophobic harassment are on the rise across the U.S. Unfortunately, anti-Asian and Asian American racism and xenophobia is not a new phenomenon. It has been part of our histories for a long time, and we have seen it manifested against different communities in many ways over the years. As the coronavirus pandemic escalates, we have seen more harassment, discrimination, and even violence directed at our communities. The Asian Americans Advancing...

Trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed schools are spreading around the country. But if they don’t start with how schools themselves can induce trauma, they won’t work. By CARRIE GAFFNEY ; ISSUE 62, SUMMER 2019 Increasingly, we are seeing pushes for trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed schools. We know that traumatic stress can have long-term health effects on developing brains and, in response, districts across the United States are acknowledging the role that trauma plays in students’...

I created this document as pre-reading for the Culture of Care conference on Nov. 18th, 2019, but I think it can be a helpful starting place for anyone who is new to ACEs and the movement towards trauma and resiliency-informed care. If you read through the resources, what resonated with you? What was confusing? What was missing? In the future I can reformat it to remove reference to the conference if there is interest in continuing to use or share this.

Note from Mai: This article really got me thinking, as the parent of a preschooler. In work and adult learning spaces, vague group agreements like "be kind" and "respect others" have always struck me as hollow. But I haven't considered the damage those simple rules can have in classrooms, with young children. I really appreciate Bret Turner's deeper exploration of this and hope everyone working with kids (parents, teachers, afterschool program providers, etc.) will apply some of his ideas.

According to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania, the one-time diversity training programs that are common among organizations are not beneficial for remedying bias in the workplace. For their study, the research team asked 10,000 employees if they would volunteer to participant in a workplace training session. Of all the employees, 3,000 participants volunteered. The researchers placed them randomly in one of two one-hour trainings: a diversity training or placebo training that...

Implicit bias has been in the news a lot lately. At the National Equity Project , we think it is an important topic that warrants our attention, but it is critical that any learning about implicit bias includes both clear information about the neuroscience of bias and the context of structural racism that gave rise to and perpetuates inequities and harmful racial biases. As leaders for equity, we have to examine, unpack and mitigate our own biases and dismantle the policies and structures...

The RACE COUNTS project maintains a comprehensive tracking tool of racial disparities across the state in seven key issue areas: Democracy Economic Opportunity Crime & Justice Access to Health Care Healthy Built Environment Education Housing Check out the info on San Mateo County . A few key takeaways: San Mateo is a high performance, high disparity, and less populous county. In San Mateo County, 37% of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders own the homes they live in,...