Speak No Evil Program Offered to UW Personnel, Community

“Speak No Evil,” a male focus group that focuses conversations on race, racism and American society, will be offered to University of Wyoming administrators, faculty and staff, and community members ages 21 and up, beginning next month.

The virtual pilot program, sponsored by UW’s Black Studies Center and Advising Career and Exploratory Studies (ACES), will begin Saturday, April 3, from 11 a.m.-noon, and run every Saturday in April after that, also at the same time.

“From this platform, ‘Speak No Evil’ will engage in broad-ranging weekly conversations that grapple with the complexities surrounding the conditions and determinants of America's current social atmosphere,” says Fredrick Douglass Dixon, director of UW’s Black Studies Center.

“Speak No Evil” represents a safe space for participants to discuss strategies and techniques that challenge and deconstruct harmful paradigms, while creating solutions that address meaningful societal change and progress, Dixon says.

The goal of the program is to provide pathways to “generate rich and open discussions” regarding sensitive subject matter and “encourage in-depth, courageous conversations” that challenge and extend the mainstream dominant discourse on the impact of race and privilege.

Participants who complete the focus group sessions will receive a certificate of completion highlighting social justice activism development from the Black Studies Center.

For more information, or to RSVP to participate in the pilot program, email Benjamin Herdt, a UW ACES academic adviser, at bherdt@uwyo.edu.