Allyship

An active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group. See also: Performative Allyship

Source: The Anti-Oppression Network

African-American

Anti-Racism | Antiracism

Racial designation referring to Black people born in the United States and descended from victims of the African Slave Trade. This term does not include immigrants to America and their descendants who were also victims of the slave trade, i.e. people from the Caribbean, South and Central America, Africa, or Europe. African-Americans can be also be referred to as Foundational Black people.

Anti-Racism is defined as the work of actively opposing racism by advocating for changes in political, economic, and social life. Anti-racism tends to be an individualized approach, and set up in opposition to individual racist behaviors and impacts.

Source: “How To Be An Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi

Anti-Racist | Antiracist

An anti-racist is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing antiracist ideas. This includes the expression of ideas that racial groups are equals and do not need developing, and supporting policies that reduce racial inequity.

Source: “How To Be An Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi

Bigotry

Intolerant prejudice that glorifies one’s own group and denigrates members of other groups.

National Conference for Community and Justice, St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program.

Centering Blackness

Considering the Black experience as unique and foundational to shaping America’s economic and social policies:

• Centering Blackness demands that we create and design policies and practices that intentionally lift up and protect Black people.

• Anti-blackness doesn’t only impact Black people; it holds back and harms all Americans and necessitates collective healing.

• Centering Blackness allows for a completely different worldview to emerge, free from the constraints of white supremacy and patriarchy.

Source: Insight Center

Colonization

Colonization can be defined as some form of invasion, dispossession, and subjugation of a people. The invasion need not be military; it can begin—or continue—as geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban, or industrial encroachments. The result of such incursion is the dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants. This is often legalized after the fact. The long-term result of such massive dispossession is institutionalized inequality. The colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized.

Ongoing and legacy colonialism impact power relations in most of the world today. For example, white supremacy as a philosophy was developed largely to justify European colonial exploitation of the Global South (including enslaving African peoples, extracting resources from much of Asia and Latin America, and enshrining cultural norms of whiteness as desirable both in colonizing and colonizer nations).

Source: Racial Equity Tools

Cultural Appropriation

Theft of cultural elements—including symbols, art, language, customs, etc.—for one’s own use, commodification, or profit, often without understanding, acknowledgement,or respect for its value in the original culture. Results from the assumption of a dominant (i.e. white) culture’s right to take other cultural elements. Source: Colors of Resistance

The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society. Source: PBS

Cultural Racism

Cultural racism refers to representations, messages and stories conveying the idea that behaviors and values associated with white people or “whiteness” are automatically “better” or more “normal” than those associated with other racially defined groups. Cultural racism shows up in advertising, movies, history books, definitions of patriotism, and in policies and laws. Cultural racism is also a powerful force in maintaining systems of internalized supremacy and internalized racism. It does that by influencing collective beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior, what is seen as beautiful, and the value placed on various forms of expression. All of these cultural norms and values in the U.S. have explicitly or implicitly racialized ideals and assumptions (for example, what “nude” means as a color, which facial features and body types are considered beautiful, which child-rearing practices are considered appropriate.)

Source: Racial Equity Tools

Discrimination

1. The unequal treatment of members of various groups based on race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion and other categories.

2. [In the United States] the law makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. The law also makes it illegal to retaliate against a person because the person complained about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit. The law also requires that employers reasonably accommodate applicants’ and employees’ sincerely held religious practices, unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the operation of the employer’s business.

Source:
1. Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti-Racism Initiative
2. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Enslaved

When identifying victims of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Intra-American Slave Trade, it is most appropriate to use the terms enslaved persons or enslaved people. They were human beings with lives, families and loved ones, and experiences before they were kidnapped, enslaved, and sold. Slaves were property stripped of identity. Using the word enslaved reminds us that these were people who did not choose to become enslaved. These individuals are due the respect denied to them in their lifetime.

Enslaver

It is important to identify the responsibility placed upon a person who has enslaved others. Using enslaver or person who has enslaved others reminds us that these individuals chose their actions. It was not an accident. Chattel slavery was deliberate, carefully considered and planned out in exacting detail.

Implicit Bias

Cultural racism refers to representations, messages and stories conveying the idea that behaviors and values associated with white people or “whiteness” are automatically “better” or more “normal” than those associated with other racially defined groups. Cultural racism shows up in advertising, movies, history books, definitions of patriotism, and in policies and laws. Cultural racism is also a powerful force in maintaining systems of internalized supremacy and internalized racism. It does that by influencing collective beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior, what is seen as beautiful, and the value placed on various forms of expression. All of these cultural norms and values in the U.S. have explicitly or implicitly racialized ideals and assumptions (for example, what “nude” means as a color, which facial features and body types are considered beautiful, which child-rearing practices are considered appropriate.)

Source: Racial Equity Tools

Individual Racism

Individual racism refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can be deliberate, or the individual may act to perpetuate or support racism without knowing that is what he or she is doing.
Examples:

• Telling a racist joke, using a racial epithet, or believing in the inherent superiority of whites over other groups.

• Avoiding people of color whom you do not know personally, but not whites whom you do not know personally (e.g., white people crossing the street to avoid a group of Latino/a young people; locking their doors when they see African American families sitting on their doorsteps in a city neighborhood; or not hiring a person of color because “something doesn’t feel right”).

• Accepting things as they are (a form of collusion).

Source: Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens, and Barbara Major (2005).

Institutional Racism

Institutional racism refers specifically to the ways in which institutional policies and practices create different outcomes for different racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group, but their effect is to create advantages for whites and oppression and disadvantage for people from groups classified as people of color.
Examples:

• Government policies that explicitly restricted the ability of people to get loans to buy or improve their homes in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African Americans (also known as “red-lining”).

• City sanitation department policies that concentrate trash transfer stations and other environmental hazards disproportionately in communities of color.

Source: Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens, and Barbara Major (2005).

Internalized Racism

Internalized racism is the situation that occurs in a racist system when a racial group oppressed by racism supports the supremacy and dominance of the dominating group by maintaining or participating in the set of attitudes, behaviors, social structures, and ideologies that undergird the dominating group’s power. It involves four essential and interconnected elements:

1. Decision-making - Due to racism, people of color do not have the ultimate decision-making power over the decisions that control our lives and resources. As a result, on a personal level, we may think white people know more about what needs to be done for us than we do. On an interpersonal level, we may not support each other’s authority and power – especially if it is in opposition to the dominating racial group. Structurally, there is a system in place that rewards people of color who support white supremacy and power and coerces or punishes those who do not.

2. Resources - Resources, broadly defined (e.g. money, time, etc), are unequally in the hands and under the control of white people. Internalized racism is the system in place that makes it difficult for people of color to get access to resources for our own communities and to control the resources of our community. We learn to believe that serving and using resources for ourselves and our particular community is not serving “everybody.”

3. Standards - With internalized racism, the standards for what is appropriate or “normal” that people of color accept are white people’s or Eurocentric standards. We have difficulty naming, communicating and living up to our deepest standards and values, and holding ourselves and each other accountable to them.

4. Naming the problem - There is a system in place that misnames the problem of racism as a problem of or caused by people of color and blames the disease – emotional, economic, political, etc. – on people of color. With internalized racism, people of color might, for example, believe we are more violent than white people and not consider state-sanctioned political violence or the hidden or privatized violence of white people and the systems they put in place and support.

Source: Donna Bivens, Internalized Racism: A Definition (Women’s Theological Center, 1995)

Interpersonal Racism

Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals. Once we bring our private beliefs into our interaction with others, racism is now in the interpersonal realm.
Examples: public expressions of racial prejudice, hate, bias, and bigotry between individuals

Source: Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequities by Keith Lawrence and Terry Keleher (2004).

Liberation

The creation of relationships, societies, communities, organizations, and collective spaces characterized by equity, fairness, and the implementation of systems for the allocation of goods, services, benefits, and rewards that support the full participation of each human and the promotion of their full humanness.

Source: Critical Liberation Theory, Barbara J. Love, Keri DeJong, and Christopher Hughbanks (UMASS, Amherst, 2007).

Marginalization

Marginalization is both a condition and a process that prevents individuals and groups from full participation in social, economic, and political life enjoyed by the wider society.

Source: Defining Marginalization: An Assessment Tool, Niyara Alakhunova Oumar Diallo
Isabel Martin del Campo Whitney Tallarico (2015).

Model Minority

A term created by sociologist William Peterson to describe the Japanese community, who he saw as being able to overcome oppression (read: being interned in camps during WWII) because of their cultural values. This term has come to describe Asian Americans in general, when it really only describes East Asians and certain South Asian groups. The term largely does not apply to Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, or SWANA (South West Asian and North African) populations, who are systematically affected by discrimination and experience poorer standards of living. This phenomenon is related to colorism and its root, anti-Blackness. The model minority myth creates an understanding of Asian Americans as a monolith, or as a mass whose parts cannot be distinguished from each other. The model minority myth can be understood as a tool that white supremacy uses to pit people of color against each other in order to protect its status.

Source: Brown University | Asian American Activism: The Continuing Struggle

Oppression

The systemic nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that saturate most aspects of life in our society.

• Oppression denotes structural and material constraints that significantly shape a person’s life chances and sense of possibility.

• Oppression also signifies a hierarchical relationship in which dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of subordinated or targeted groups.

• Oppression resides not only in external social institutions and norms but also within the human psyche as well.

• Eradicating oppression ultimately requires struggle against all its forms, and that building coalitions among diverse people offers the most promising strategies for challenging oppression systematically.

Source: (Adams, Bell, and Griffin, editors. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge.)

Performative Allyship

Allyship that is carried out to increase one's social capital instead of true devotion to the cause. Though this can take many forms, a common instance of performative allyship is showing public support for the cause on social media, merely to signal one's own virtuous moral compass or otherwise, without taking the effort to enact real action offline or in private. Put simply, it's putting on the guise or display of activism and allyship without doing the actual work — a behavior that can do more harm than good.

Plantation

If one examined the framework of a plantation today, it would be comparable to a labor or concentration camp. The enslaved were expected to perform physically demanding labor from sunrise to sunset, which could be up to fourteen hours a day, for six days a week. They subsisted on meager rations and were tortured regularly. Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project commented, “when you think about the image that the word 'plantation' evokes, it's 'Gone With the Wind,' it's bucolic, it's mint juleps and it's these beautiful dresses, and undergirding all of that is torture, and the threat of torture.”

Prejudice

A pre-judgment or unjustifiable, and usually negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward another group and its members. Such negative attitudes are typically based on unsupported generalizations (or stereotypes) that deny the right of individual members of certain groups to be recognized and treated as individuals with individual characteristics.

Source: Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti-Racism Initiative

Privilege

A group of unearned cultural, legal, social, and institutional rights extended to a group based on their social group membership. Individuals with privilege are considered the normative group, leaving those without access to this privilege invisible, unnatural, deviant, or just plain wrong. Most of the time, these privileges are automatic and most individuals in the privileged group are unaware of them. Some people who can “pass” as members of the privileged group might have access to some levels of privilege.

Source: Brown University | Asian American Activism: The Continuing Struggle (J. Beal 2009)

Racial Equity

Racial equity is a process of eliminating racial disparities and improving outcomes for everyone. It is the intentional and continual practice of changing policies, practices, systems, and structures by prioritizing measurable change in the lives of people of color. Racial equity is the process for moving towards the vision of racial justice. Racial equity seeks measurable milestones and outcomes that can be achieved on the road to racial justice. Racial equity is necessary, but not sufficient, for racial justice.

Source: Race Forward

Racial Inequity

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing, such as the percentages of each ethnic group in terms of dropout rates, single family home ownership, access to healthcare, etc.

Source: Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019

Racial Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the spiritual practice of seeking loving, liberating and life-giving relationship with God and one another, and striving to heal and transform injustice and brokenness in ourselves, our communities, institutions and society.

Source: The Episcopal Church

Racism

Racism = race prejudice + social and institutional power
Racism = a system of advantage based on race
Racism = a system of oppression based on race
Racism = a white supremacy system

Racism is different from racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination. Racism involves one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values that support those racist policies and practices.

Source: “What is Racism?” Dismantling Racism Works

Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism refers to colonization in which colonizing powers create permanent or long-term settlement on land owned and/or occupied by other peoples, often by force. This contrasts with colonialism where colonizer’s focus only on extracting resources back to their countries of origin, for example. Settler Colonialism typically includes oppressive governance, dismantling of indigenous cultural forms, and enforcement of codes of superiority (such as white supremacy). Examples include white European occupations of land in what is now the United States, Spain’s settlements throughout Latin America, and the Apartheid government established by White Europeans in South Africa.

Source: Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege is So Hard to Talk About” 2018

Structural Racism

A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.

Source: The Aspen Institute

Tokenism

The practice of making a symbolic effort of inclusivity in order to give the appearance of compliance with laws, regulations, or public opinion.

White Fragility

A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable [for white people], triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.

Source: Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility” (International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011)

White Supremacy

The idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless (worth less), immoral, bad, and inhuman and “undeserving.” Drawing from critical race theory, the term “white supremacy” also refers to a political or socio-economic system where white people enjoy structural advantage and rights that other racial and ethnic groups do not, both at a collective and an individual level.

Source: “What is Racism?” Dismantling Racism Works

White Supremacy Culture

White Supremacy Culture refers to the dominant, unquestioned standards of behavior and ways of functioning embodied by the vast majority of institutions in the United States. These standards may be seen as mainstream, dominant cultural practices; they have evolved from the United States’ history of white supremacy. Because it is so normalized it can be hard to see, which only adds to its powerful hold. In many ways, it is indistinguishable from what we might call U.S. culture or norms – a focus on individuals over groups, for example, or an emphasis on the written word as a form of professional communication. But it operates in even more subtle ways, by actually defining what “normal” is – and likewise, what “professional,” “effective,” or even “good” is. In turn, white culture also defines what is not good, “at risk,” or “unsustainable.” White culture values some ways of thinking, behaving, deciding, and knowing – ways that are more familiar and come more naturally to those from a white, western tradition – while devaluing or rendering invisible other ways. And it does this without ever having to explicitly say so...

Source: Gita Gulati-Partee, OpenSource Leadership Strategies, & Maggie Potapchuk, “Paying Attention to White Culture and Privilege: A Missing Link to Advancing Racial Equity”