The Key Concept Card Deck
Key Concept Cards (Grey): Use this subset of cards to establish a vocabulary of essential terms to process racial encounters. You can also use a Key Concept card or a combination of cards to facilitate a conversation or to analyze and deconstruct a racial encounter.
Key concept cards can be used to anchor a conversation to a specific idea connected to race. They can also be used to name the concepts at play when facilitating an activity or reflection. For example, you can use the Racial Socialization Card to introduce the concept and then share your story of how you were socialized around race.
Or you can introduce the notion of Racial Stress through the cards and then have the group share the things or encounters that cause them Racial Stress. Key Concept cards are a great place to start. For beginners, start with one term and apply it to the world around them. Attaching a specific context is helpful.
Pairing the Racial Socialization and Racial Stress cards is an excellent foundation for a small group exercise:
Introduce the concepts.
Have the facilitator or someone in the group share their Racial Socialization story.
Have the group reflect on their Racial Stress after they heard the story.
Illustrated below is an example of how you can link a series of Key Concept cards together to build a framework for understanding racial encounters. Our Racial Socialization will influence how we see the world (PVEST), which will influence our Racial Stress and potentially our Racial Coping Strategy.
The Silent Agreements we have about how we each define the world around us have the potential to create conflict if we realize that we are each operating from different definitions. The Racial Encounter Zone is where our different racial socializations, PVEST, racial stress, and racial coping strategies come together to produce outcomes like trust, belonging, anxiety, or collaboration. You can also consider this second framework in cyclical terms when these relationships build upon one another. A shift in any part of the framework has the potential to change the outcomes.
