Wayne Action for Racial Equality (WARE) completed its eighth annual Anti-Racism Workshop at the end of August this year (2025). The week-long workshop was comprised of three component workshops that were led by WARE’s President, two educators currently teaching in Wayne County schools and a retired teacher/professor from the area. The component workshops were:

• STRUCTURING ANTI-RACISM TEACHING: METHODS FOR INTERRUPTING SYSTEMIC RACISM IN SCHOOLS,
• CULTURAL HUMILITY and
• FACILITATING COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS 

The workshops defined systemic racism, provided a detailed timeline of racism’s 400-year history in American cultural, social, political and institutional life and provided ample time for participants to develop skills to interrupt racism. School staff developed plans to interrupt racism in their classrooms and schools during the Structuring Anti-Racism Teaching workshop. The Cultural Humility and Facilitating Courageous Conversations workshops were available to the general community, which significantly broadened the perspectives shared.

The workshop facilitators have already begun planning the future workshops which will be informed in 2026 by the results of the federal government’s anti-DEI policies, the centennial celebrations of Black History Month, the nation’s 250^th anniversary of its independence from England and recognition of New York’s formal ending of slavery in 1827.

Jim Wood (workshop coordinator)