Details
Thursday, September 12th
9:00 – 11:00 a.m.
Virtual – on Zoom
Presenter
Hugh Vasquez, M.S.W. (he/him/his)
Social Justice Educator
Speak Out Now
About the Workshop
Unconscious bias has come to be recognized as a powerful force that shapes individual actions and institutional policies and practices. We now know unconscious bias plays a role in individual interactions, suspensions from school, jury verdicts, sentencing to prison, job interviews, hiring, police shootings, and policies influencing housing, health care, and more. However, what is less understood and still highly invisible is how our institutional structures perpetuate unconscious bias. 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 inequalities and harmful racial bias. This session will look at three primary mechanisms that produce bias: priming, associations, and assumptions, and create an understanding of actions people can take to counteract negative race associations that lead to negative consequences for people. This highly interactive session will use activities, videos, media images, and provocative discussions to increase understanding of how implicit bias manifests, how it perpetuates, and what people can do to interrupt it with a vision for changing both individuals and systems.
About the Presenter
Hugh Vasquez is one of the country’s top equity and diversity educators and a highly-sought-after consultant to campuses, school districts, and organizations working towards creating healthy multicultural environments. Driven by a deep sense of fairness, equity, and justice, he has emerged as one of the nation’s top leaders in working to create environments where people from all cultures are honored, respected, and valued. Vasquez is well-known for his role in the award-winning documentary film “The Color of Fear” and was also the lead facilitator in the film “Skin Deep,” a documentary on race relations with college students. A renowned and published Author, Vasquez is currently a Senior Associate at the National Equity Project. Previously he was the Executive Director of the San Francisco Education Fund, a non-profit working to bring educational equity to public schools. He is a partner with the Center for Diversity Leadership and founder and former Director of TODOS Institute in Oakland, CA. Hugh has a Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He serves as adjunct faculty at the John F. Kennedy University in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology and has taught courses at New College of California and California Institute of Integral Studies.
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