Common Thread

Source: Spelman College Section, National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) circa 2015-2016

Instructions: 

• In your groups, find one commonality among yourselves. It might be a hobby or a shared interest–like a favorite music genre or food, but it can be any characteristic that you all share. Except race. (Really, the preference would be to choose something that is not visible on our bodies like glasses, hair texture, etc.)

• Then, create a list of and discuss what might be the stereotypical qualities of such people.

• Each group shares with everyone!

Praxis (why + theory):

This exercise can be an effective icebreaker for people who are just meeting each other. Because my perennial objective in any space I am facilitating is to establish a community that cultivates self-awareness, identifying common threads and thinking critically about them must be a regular practice. We not only investigate the interests of those within our group, we also assess external judgments of those interests as we are challenged to inhabit the perspectives of people outside of our group. (E.g. everyone in our group enjoys heavy metal music, so what do others think of Metalheads?)

I enjoy this activity because it can be as silly as it is revelatory, or as intimate as it is liberatory. The depth of the experience is left to the participants within a specific group.