Session 3: Social Identity

Facilitator Guide > > Session 3: Social Identity

Privilege and prejudice, Expressions of Prejudice, Microaggressions, Stereotypes and Bias

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session participants will:

be able to define privilege and explore how it appears in the world
understand and define prejudice, and the need to acknowledge it within oneself
have explored what happens when prejudice and privilege intersect

Suggested Agenda

:00 Welcome and Opening Question:
- Talk about something that has been on your mind from the news and current events
:15 Grounding Activity/Collective Agreements Review
:20 Activity: Get to Know your Facilitator game
- Choose a facilitator to ask youth questions about you, the facilitator. This should be the facilitator about whom the youth know the least. Without much context or explanation ask youth “How many of you are prejudiced?”. Take note of how many participants say they are prejudiced, with no further explanation. Then explain that you are going to be asking youth to answer questions about you, the facilitator. These questions should help to elicit potential stereotypes, based on facilitator’s identity/ies. Make sure to take note of the answers, and whether they were right or wrong about you. Sample questions Facilitator can ask could include:

- - What do I do in my free time?
  - Who do I date/am I married to?
  - Do I have children?
  - How many siblings do I have?
  - What language(s) do I speak?
  - Where is my family from?
  - What is my favorite food?
  - What is my favorite music?
  - Did I go to college?
  - Do I own a house or property?
- When you finish asking questions, run through your answers, and let the youth know how many questions they got right about you. But that isn’t the real point- the real point is how many ideas they already had in their heads about you and were able to verbalize by answering these questions. The answer to the first question “How many of you are prejudiced?” is that all of us are prejudiced, meaning we pre-judge one another. Some of this is natural and influenced by the number of decisions our brains have to make every day, and some of it is socialized by the messages we receive through media, education, and other systems. These don’t exist separately from the structures we have inherited, many of which are built on white supremacy.
- Debrief questions:

- Where do our ideas about each other come from?
- How does privilege relate to the identities we discussed last week? Are privileged identities the ones we think of the most or the least?
- What is “white culture”? Note: the privileged or dominant culture is often invisible and considered to be the “norm”. Example- many grocery stores have an “ethnic” aisle for all food other than “American” food.
:30 Breakout Rooms- How do discussions of power and privilege factor into the current events we discussed? Youth can choose a room based on a current event they would like to discuss. At time of writing topics included George Floyd’s murder trial, Violence against AAPI, and Kenosha. Ask participants to select a reporter that will report back within the Main Room. Facilitators visit rooms to listen in and answer questions.
:50 Definitions and discussion of how prejudice manifests (Bias, Microaggressions, Stereotypes)
1:20 Final Showcase Brainstorming, Present
- Framing Questions:
  - What work do you want to do?
  - How do you want to present your work?
- Options could include:
  - Power of Youth: Racial Healing Mini-grants– Work with coach in community to submit and present your idea
  - Connect with a local 4-H Staff member to create a 4-H Presentation that takes a deeper dive in to one of the topics we discuss.
    - Create #ActforCHANGE platform/contribute to movement. Workgroups could include:
    - Youth curated resources/logistics
    - Social Media
    - Video/Spoken Word
    - Art Design
  - Dance video message
  - PRYDE’s Suffolk Speaks
  - PRYDE’s Youth Investigators research project- Learn more about social science research, and conduct your own research project
  - Other-cater it to your own program!

1:25 Integrative Closing (within chat box):
- I liked
- I wish
- I wonder

Facilitator’s Section

Sofia’s Field Notes

Created definitions of prejudice, bias, microaggressions, and stereotypes
- Prejudice: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience; a feeling of unfair dislike directed against an individual or a group because of some characteristic
- Bias: a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in an unfair way
- Microaggressions: a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group
  - Ex: complimenting a person born and raised in the US on their English because they are not white
    - Telling a thin person they should eat more
    - Underrepresentation in media
    - Deliberately not using preferred pronouns
  - There are three forms of microaggression: verbal, behavioral, environmental
    - Verbal “you’re so smart for a woman”
    - Behavioral: bartender ignoring a transgender person and instead serving a cisgender person
    - Environmental: a college campus only having buildings named after white people
  - Stereotypes: a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing
    - Model minority myth also a dangerous stereotype

The model minority myth was an extremely interesting topic and we watched this video: Can stereotypes ever be good? – Sheila Marie Orfano and Densho which really opened them up to a more nuanced conversation -> would recommend including this topic specifically

Notes for Youth Advisory

An important concept around privilege- if working with a resistant and predominantly White group is that being White doesn’t mean you have had it easy- other circumstances and identities come in to play here as well (class, sexual orientation etc). But it DOES mean that your life hasn’t been harderbecause of the color of your skin.
Youth Voice is important in thinking of your final showcase. However, most people, including teens, have a hard time deciding when confronted with limitless choices. Facilitators may want to consider coming up with 2 or 3 realistic final showcase options from which youth can choose. Note that plenty of creativity and youth voice is still possible within finite options.

Additional Resources

Limbong, Andrew. Microagressions are a Big Deal. NPR. June 9^th 2020. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872371063/microaggressions-are-a-big-deal-how-to-talk-them-out-and-when-to-walk-away