I had some technical difficulties and we’ve unfortunately lost the first few minutes of Aris Benjamin Winger of Georgia Gwinnett College, who co-facilitated the program in the last post. I remember that he discussed creating a safe space to talk about race and equity and mathematics on campus as well.
Facing the Mirror: Acknowledgement in our Practices
In his talk, Aris called out the audience (in a good way) to acknowledge our own biases and our own fraught histories with racism, sexism, and treating students in a disparate manner.
We don’t get to pick how people show up in front of us. We don’t get to pick our initial reaction to them.
Aris showed us a slide of three different people, a black man, a white man, and a black woman in six different outfits and styling.
“We treat people differently based on how they look,” he said. “We treat people who are white differently from people of color.”