Table 2.

Goals, objectives, and strategies

Overarching curriculum components	Strategy
Bridge disconnect between clinical work and contemporary racially charged events.	Draw on contemporary journalism and other media, such as documentaries, Ted Talks, and podcasts; draw upon non-biomedical resources from the humanities and advocacy groups (e.g., Equal Justice Initiative).
Engage in meaningful racial dialogue.	Create space of safety through choice of lecture space and size, lecturer training, timing of lectures, presence of leadership, and lecturer offering individual discussion outside of lecture sessions.
Foster self-reflection and racial consciousness building.	Lecturer models, drawing upon an intersecting axes of privilege, domination, and privilege framework and admitting to her own racism.
Prevent deepening of participants’ racial bias.	Participants encouraged to share their own experiences and beliefs about racism. Race defined as a social and political construct, not a biological one. Honest and explicit language, e.g., racism and white supremacy rather than diversity and inclusion.
Specific learning objectives	Strategy
Understand how racism can shape the manifestation, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness.	Introduce the primary biomedical literature about racial discrimination and health, emphasizing key findings and limitations. Provide explicit definitions of racism using a multi-level model of framework.
Recognize history as a foundation for making sense of racial inequities.	Draw upon award-winning books and authors from the humanities and advocacy resources, such as the Equal Justice Initiative website; emphasize the American Indian genocide and slavery as defining events shaping health disparities in America.
Improve awareness about race and racism.	Provide an evidence-based framework for understanding racism, making visible the racism embedded in American medicine and psychiatry. Describe how these frameworks shape diagnosis and treatment.
Recognize role of policies and systems in maintaining racism.	Shift the focus away from individual intentions and behaviors by instead emphasizing racist policies’ (e.g., The War on Drugs and Jim Crow lynching and terrorism) pivotal role in creating inequity.
Challenges	Strategy/next steps
Participant disengagement and discomfort.	Require that participants put laptops and cell phones away to ensure respect for the gravity of the content. Set the frame and create a space of safety. Teach participants about white fragility and racial defense mechanisms.
Content can be traumatic for URM trainees, amplified by faculty’s lack of knowledge.	Corresponding faculty development. Lecturer should be available to provide supervision and support for URM trainees. Trainees should be allowed to opt out of any traumatizing content or discussions.
Four lectures are limited in their ability to yield more racially equitable clinical practices.	Be forthcoming about the limitations of the content. Emphasize the impactful role of institutional racism. Forthcoming curricular content will articulate antiracist clinical practices.
The lecture content deals broadly with racism and is not specialized enough for child and adolescent psychiatry fellows.	Consider the four lectures a pilot for introducing basic concepts pertaining to racism and white supremacy. Use feedback from pilot effort to innovate new content that is more specialized for child and adolescent psychiatry fellows’ stage of learning.