Kathy Castania, a professional multicultural educator and senior extension associate for the Cornell Migrant Program, conducts a summer workshop at Wells College for the statewide staff of Rural Opportunities Inc. University Photography
"We are all born with an enormous capacity for goodness and we all learn racism and other forms of oppression," says Kathy Castania, a multicultural educator at Cornell. "We cannot be blamed for learning the racism we were taught, yet we have a responsibility to try to identify and interrupt the cycle of oppression."
To help curb racism, prejudice and discrimination such as homophobia and social class and gender oppression, Castania trains educators, health care workers, extension staff, and community and state agency workers throughout New York, but particularly in communities with migrant workers.
"As a society grappling with issues of diversity, we can change legislation but unless you change attitudes, racism won't go away," says Castania, a professional multicultural educator and senior extension associate for the Cornell Migrant Program in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies in the College of Human Ecology.
The goal of her workshops, she says, is to change the "lens" through which people view the world, to help them dismantle the unnatural divisions they have learned and to learn to value cultural differences. "But the issue is complex and some people are hypersensitive or guarded for fear of being attacked, which makes the process of learning and teaching a delicate one that can backfire if not handled carefully," Castania warns.
That's why she conducts the intensive, three-day interactive "Opening Doors: A Personal and Professional Journey" training, which leads participants through a process in a supportive atmosphere of exploring how their learned biases create barriers in their lives and inhibit effective intercultural communication. She also leads a one-day training, "Creating Partnerships: Management for the Future," for administrators and organizations.
Migrants farmworkers, who are predominantly people of color, live with the outcomes of the institutional and individual racism in their communities all the time, Castania says. She seeks to provide a framework in their and other communities to spur change toward a shared vision for creating healthy, diverse communities.
"Prejudice hurts everyone, both members of the privileged group as well as the targets of racism," Castania says. "To move toward constructive action, we need to promote a process of personal emotional healing from past experience with oppression."
Castania estimates she has done more than 50 diversity trainings in the past few years throughout New York.
"I hope to promote intercultural communication that has a healthy approach to diversity, where there is potential for great learning, rather than tension or destructive conflict," says Castania, who recently authored the fact sheet Diversity: What is Diversity? for Cornell Cooperative Extension; she will be publishing The Evolving Language of Diversity this spring.