Identity Awareness Training

The teaching staff, for whom I first created and ran this workshop, had 12 people. It was a tiny international school in semi-rural Guatemala on the cusp of a drastic demographic shift, from privileged children of immigrants to indigenous children, relying on scholarships.

Two days after the school year started, I had sent my boss this email. After several more rants to her (in person), and after one colleague had made another cry, (two months after that first email) she asked me to create this training session.

It was the first time I was running a bilingual session, and it felt like I had tried to cover too much in one day. The workbook wasn’t a standalone resource that could be used without guidance, like I’d wanted it to be. But, at least for one day, it made people reflect on their role in the community in terms of their personal identities. And while that wasn’t enough, by any means, it was a start. 

No amount of multicultural experience prevents you from being a perpetrator of oppression and violence if you do not choose to address your privilege and power within your context. Our identities are complex, as are the ways we interact with the others’ identities. While it seems natural that exposure to diverse groups of people makes you a more tolerant, less violent person, the fact of the matter remains that if we want to build liberated, egalitarian communities, we need to actively confront the power dynamics at play in all our interactions.