Cherokee Cierra Washington (she/her) is a Cultural Competency Consultant and Subject Matter Expert. Navigating the world as a “Baldwinian abolitionist,” Cherokee has dedicated her personal, academic, and professional paths to reimagining and achieving collective liberation through interdisciplinary avenues rooted in love, care, accountability and empathy. She offers a deep comprehension of the intricacies of intersectional, decolonial work that require us to learn, unlearn, and relearn in community in order to dismantle violently oppressive systems, histories, and structures, while reimagining emancipatory new ones that will set us all free.
Holding a Master’s in sport psychology from McGill University, as well as Bachelor’s degrees in psychology and Honors rhetoric studies from Whitman College, Cherokee’s expertise lies in the areas of cultural competency, anti-racism, intersectionality, identity politics, unpacking anti-Blackness, decolonization, reimagination, Black feminist thought, rhetorical analysis, and more. Additionally, with her background in sport, Cherokee possesses further knowledge grounded in cultural sport psychology and the intersection of maintaining harmonious coach-athlete relationships, implementing cultural competence into coaching praxis and education, sport sociology, and exploring identity politics in sport. Through this interdisciplinary background, Cherokee relies on her voice, knowledge, past experiences as a collegiate athlete and coach of color, as well as lessons from her communities in order to embody liberation as an active agent of change.
Originally from Los Angeles, California, Cherokee has lived between the United States, Canada, and France by which she has been able to pursue cross-cultural EDI work in European and North American geopolitical contexts. Although she engages in EDI with an American positionality, Cherokee seeks to better understand international sociocultural politics and issues to better integrate a global perspective into her facilitation and consulting approaches. Using thoughtful questioning, radical empathy, and courageous truth-telling, Cherokee invites folks to decipher what cultural competency means to them and actively engage with ideas and means of collective liberation.
