Critical Consciousness and Race Consciousness

00:05 Critical consciousness is another concept that's very important in terms of developing shared language.

00:12 And it's also one of those concepts that can be used to help you along the way on the transformational journey.

00:20 And what that is, is advancing surface understanding to deeper understanding of all the concepts.

00:26 We talk about relationships, personal biases, anything and everything related to how do we move forward in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging and thinking about it from a broad sense.

00:38 And when we talk about a surface understanding, a lot of that comes from what? Some of the things I already talked about, our cultural influences, some of the stereotypes that we believe and have bought into because it's human nature, right? It was all we knew before, we got to a point where it was acceptable to have these conversations that before because of the tension it created, we avoided those.

01:02 It wasn't acceptable or allowable in a lot of circumstances.

01:07 So now that we know better as my Maya Angelou says, "We have to do better." So, I advanced from this surface understanding by applying cultural intelligence or CQ to develop that deeper understanding, not only of concepts, relationships, and biases, but of other cultures.

01:24 And just talking to people.

01:26 Basically, and applying that cultural intelligence framework whenever we can.

01:31 Then Race Consciousness.

01:33 Even though I said it's a social construct, we do have to explicitly acknowledge how race influenced racism in social context or in your personal life.

01:46 And we do need to think about all the different things that happened or occurred as a result of assigning race and assigning superiority, no matter what it is.

01:57 In the context of race, in the context of gender, in the context of role assignment, of job titles, or whatever.

02:03 Thinking about all of those hierarchical things, and having a conscious conversation about how all those things affect everything else in our lives, especially in terms of our interactions.

02:17 But we do, race consciousness kind of goes back to thinking about structural racism, and how all of those different isms were born out of structural racism and just be conscious across the board.

02:29 I'll say social consciousness, or human consciousness, and just thinking about things from so many levels and integrating the critical consciousness with that social consciousness so that we can develop that humanitarian type, ethos and the humanitarian thinking, just in the world period, impartiality, and those humanitarian principles that we talked about in one of the previous segments, compassion, service, mercy.

02:59 My favorite one is respect for human life and dignity.

03:03 And if we focus everything starting with that, then all these other things I'm going to say will be easier to achieve.