Anti Racism Workshop Register now

The Anti-Racism Task Force is pleased to deliver a Workshop for Clergy and Lay Leaders of the Diocese of Montreal.

Friday, October 1 7-9pm and Saturday, October 2 10-noon and 1-3pm 

REGISTER HERE

Please note that Clergy are expected to attend and Lay leaders throughout the Diocese are strongly encouraged to participate.

Confronting the Past, Looking to the Future: The church’s role in creating systemic racism and what can be done about it, led by Dr. Myrna Lashley via Zoom (see speaker bio below)

This interactive, experiential workshop will provide participants with a foundational understanding of the influence of religious interpretations and practices on concepts of race, culture, class, ethnicity, immigration, sexual orientation and gender in the assessment and interventional decisions relative to place and space when interacting with populations representing these categories. From a systemic models perspective, participants will explore the role and influence of the “Church” on cultural and social issues and its intersections with other human identifiers, such as poverty, housing, genders, abilities, and their many intersections. The consciousness of ethnic identity will also be explored as well as the influence of church doctrines on social, governmental and non-governmental systems. The workshop will challenge Western - European ethnocentrism and question movements which suggest that "God is a white supremacist". The effects of this suggestion not only on an individual’s self-perception, but on the perceptions and interactions of others relative to such individuals, will also be explored. 

About The Speaker

photo from Montreal Gazette

Dr. Myrna Lashley holds a Ph.D (thesis title - Informed Proxy Consent: Communication between Surgeons and Surrogates about Pediatric Surgery) in counseling psychology from McGill university. She was an Associate dean at John Abbott College She is also an associate professor in the department of psychiatry of McGill University as well as a researcher and project leader at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research of the Jewish General Hospital. She is an internationally recognized clinical, teaching and, research authority in cultural psychology, and serves as an expert psychological consultant to institutions, including the juvenile justice system. She is also the Chair of the First-Line Psychosocial Science Committee of the Clinical Ethics Committee of CIUSS de centre-ouest-de-l'ile-de-Montréal. She has worked both as a consultant to First Nations and the Jewish communities, and as the Cross Cultural Trainer for the Grievance Committee office of the secretariat for McGill University. She has also conducted training workshops locally, nationally, and internationally and has acted as a consultant to the Brazilian health care system. She was a director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and has also served on the Comité consultatif sur les relations Interculturelles et Interraciales de la Communauté Urbaine de Montréal. From 2008 to 2017 she was the Chair of the Cross Cultural Roundtable on Security. She was the Vice-chair of the board of the École Nationale de Police du Québec from 2004 - 2017. As well as conducting research on police matters, she has also been appointed to the Comité expert en matière de profilage racial of the Service de ploice de la Ville de Montréal and to the Comité-conseil sur l'organisation d'une consultation sur le racisme et la discrimination systémique. She is a consultant to government and non-governmental agencies at the Canadian federal, provincial and municipal levels on issues of equity and inclusivity. In addition to academic publications, she has also authored two training manuals on intercultural issues in the workplace and co-authored book chapters. She has received several awards including the 2015 Woman of Merit Award from the Playmas Montreal

Cultural Association; the Queen Elizabeth II 2012 Diamond Jubilee award; 2006 Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Award for Holocaust studies; the 2004 Martin Luther King legacy award; as well as the 1995 Merit Award for the Kanawake Native survival school.

Her current research focuses on the intersections of culture, terrorism and national security.

She is currently Barbados’s Honorary Consul to Montreal.