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About RaceTalk LLC
I am Dr. Bedelia Nicola Richards, founder of RaceTalk LLC and an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. RaceTalk LLC workshops reflect the organic synergy between my passion for racial justice, my scholarly interests and expertise, and many years of testing and perfecting innovative and antiracist pedagogical strategies in the classroom. As a race/ethnicity, immigration and
education scholar, I explore the implications of the growing diversity of the U.S. Black population, the role of racism
and classism, and aim to promote critical thinking in regards to how institutions of higher education can better work
for students and faculty from diverse backgrounds and communities.
I initially developed my RaceTalk strategies for my own professional development and survival as a Black woman teaching about race and racism at a predominantly White institution, where students’ resentment and resistance to these conversations created hostile classroom environments and biased end-of-semester reviews of my teaching. I have learned that much of the resistance that marginalized scholars like myself experience in the classroom has much to do with our lack of knowledge and training about the role of emotions in the learning process and how to effectively engage these emotions in productive ways. RaceTalk LLC workshops are designed to provide these skills and more. We now provide a broad range of racial justice tools and strategies that are applicable outside of the classroom and that are transferable to other sectors and institutional spaces.
