Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Race is lived before it is analyzed. Everyone in the room has a racial location and has learned, somewhere, what it means. This lens treats that knowledge as real knowledge. It is careful work: race surfaces pain, shame, anger, and disagreement, and the facilitator’s job is to make room for that without turning the session into either a confession or a debate about whose experience counts. Start from what the room carries, and let the outside material deepen it rather than override it.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- When and how did you first understand your own race? Who taught you?
- Where have you felt race shape how you were treated, at work, by police, by a landlord, in a store, in school?
- What has your family carried across generations, in wealth or its absence, in land, in debt, in stories?
- Who does the care work, the dangerous work, the invisible work where you live? Who are they?
- Have you been asked to see someone of another race as your enemy or your inferior? Who benefited if you did?
- What has your community built and defended on its own terms?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Oral histories and testimonio
- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (Federal Writers’ Project, Library of Congress). More than 2,300 first-person accounts by formerly enslaved people, with 500 photographs, fully digitized and searchable. The foundational testimony on the lived economy of slavery, shared with the capitalism theme. Free: loc.gov
- Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South (Duke University Center for Documentary Studies). The largest single collection of Jim Crow oral histories in the world, over 1,200 interviews with Black elders across twelve states, with audio and photographs. Free: repository.duke.edu
- Civil Rights History Project (Library of Congress and Smithsonian NMAAHC). Filmed oral-history interviews with movement participants, lawyers, farmers, organizers, and musicians, free on the Library site and its YouTube channel. First-person movement testimony that serves this lens and the historical one. Free: loc.gov
- Freedom Song: Interviews from Eyes on the Prize (American Archive of Public Broadcasting, WGBH). Over 300 raw, unedited interviews filmed for the landmark series Eyes on the Prize, with a curated exhibit, timeline, and map. The testimony behind the documentary, in fuller form. Free: americanarchive.org
- StoryCorps Griot (StoryCorps). Nearly 10,000 recorded interviews with African Americans, archived at the American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian NMAAHC. Everyday testimony of Black life, short enough to play one and discuss. Free: storycorps.org
Film and audio
- I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016, 93 min). Built entirely from James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript and read by Samuel L. Jackson, it renders the emotional and intellectual experience of race in America from the civil rights era into the present. Free with a library card via Kanopy; film page: pbs.org
- Still Processing (Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, 2016 to 2022). Two Black culture critics work out how race, art, work, dating, and the internet feel from the inside, modeling race as lived cultural knowledge. Free: open.spotify.com
Short video
- “Systemic Racism Explained” (act.tv, 2019). Roughly 4 minutes, about 4.6 million views. An animated primer that follows two children to show how disadvantage compounds across housing, schooling, and incarceration. A strong opener for surfacing what the room already knows. youtube.com/watch?v=YrHIQIO_bdQ
A note on method
This is careful terrain. The point is not to rank experiences or to ask anyone to educate the room about their own oppression. It is to establish that the people present already know how race organizes life, and to let that knowledge meet a wider history. A facilitator who names their own racial location and what they are still working out gives the room permission to be honest rather than performative.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Japanese American and Chicana voices are now here through Densho and Anzaldúa; Indigenous testimony is deliberately held for a forthcoming theme on settler colonialism and land. Contributions welcome, especially Filipino, South Asian, and Black immigrant testimony, and voices of the racial order from outside the United States.