Working to Create Anti-Racist Spaces: A Practical Guide for White Dominated Social Justice Groups

While institutional change is becoming a greater priority within organizations, most antiracism workshops devote little attention to the structural impacts of the physical spaces that groups use. Accordingly, office areas, meeting spaces, event venues, libraries and social spaces may be neglected in anti-racism work.

This guide has been designed to address questions of race and space within whitedominated activist organizations. It starts from an assumption that confronting racism “means challenging all sorts of cultural ideas that exist not only within us as individuals, but are entrenched in the way we do things, think about the world, and the organizations we are part of” (OPIRG-Peterborough, p 7). The exercises included in this guide are designed to initiate thinking about how physical spaces perpetuate or challenge racism.