“You’ve got the door cracked enough that maybe they can’t quite get it closed again”: A qualitative study of trainers’ perceptions of the impacts of a two-day antiracism training

Objective

Diversity training is commonly used by organizations, but evidence of positive impacts is mixed. Antiracism training, which focuses on structural racism, is largely unexamined in the diversity training literature. The Racial Equity Institute (REI) offers a widely implemented antiracism training called Phase 1 which has never been formally evaluated. As a part of larger community-based participatory research partnership, the research team interviewed REI trainers to understand their perceptions of the impacts of the REI training.

Design

We conducted qualitative in-depth interviews (n = 15) with 58 % of REI trainers who lead Phase 1 to understand their views on what participants gain from the workshop. We used thematic qualitative analysis to understand the changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors at the individual and organizational level that trainers hope to achieve, including the factors that influence the impact.

Results

The interviews revealed that REI trainers expected the training to change participants’ knowledge of and attitudes toward structural racism. Trainers anticipated specific but limited individual and collective behaviors to result from the training. The most important anticipated outcome was that participants learn to connect racial disparities to structural root causes.

Conclusions

While the literature on diversity training suggests many possible individual, organization, and outcome-level impacts, REI trainers shared a more limited and consistent set of benefits for how individuals and organizations conceptualize and approach racial inequities. Investigating the perceptions of antiracism trainers is the first step in creating appropriate criteria for evaluating REI Phase 1 and building an evidence-base for antiracism training impacts.