Critical Race Theory: How to Identify CRT by Terminology Used

CRITICAL
RACE
THEORY TERMINOLOGY

Critical Race Theory Terminology

In order to recognize the tenets of critical race theory in your child’s K-12 school (assignments, lessons, curriculum, the way their classroom is decorated, surveys, tests, policies, strategic plans, field trips, activities, books, the list goes on and on), you must become familiar critical race theory terminology. Because the tenets of critical race theory are embedded into culturally responsive teaching and social emotional learning they become camouflaged by their frameworks (system). This was done by accident, this was very much intentional.   Once you become familiar with it, you’ll be able to spot it quickly and easily.  It’s like the old saying about riding a bike- once you’ve finally seen the tenets of critical race theory at work, you will never unsee it. Even though the wording  constantly changes, you’ll still be able to recognize it when you see it. Read

“Familiarize Yourself With Critical Race Theory Terminology” so You Can Fight It” to learn more.

A

Elementary school version: A preference either for or against an individual or group that affects
fair judgment.

Elementary school version: Prejudice and/or discrimination against a person or group based on
stereotypes

A term referring to “Black and/or Indigenous People of Color.” While “POC” or People of Color is often used as well, BIPOC explicitly leads with Black and Indigenous identities, which helps to counter anti-Black racism and invisibilization of Native communities.  SOURCE:  Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox for Advancing Racial Equity for Arts and Cultural Organizations, Nayantara Sen & Terry Keleher, Race Forward (2021).

  • Black

Black is defined as a person who identifies as Black AND has African indigenous ancestry that predates colonization (be located anywhere in the diaspora—excluding generic claims of Dinknesh (or also known as Lucy) descendants)

To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and
together. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on
understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these
concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas,
rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them. For people of color, a caucus is a place
to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism,
and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation. At times, people
of color may also break into more specific race-based caucuses, sometimes based on experiences with
a particular issue, for example police violence, immigration, or land rights. Groups that use caucuses
in their organizational racial equity work, especially in workplaces and coalitions, generally meet
separately and create a process to rejoin and work together collectively. SOURCE:  Black Lives Matter, “Herstory” (accessed 7 October 2019).

  • Black liberation
  • Black vs. White (identity)
  • Black-White binary
  • Black-Binary factor
  • “blend in”
  • Black liberation theology
  • Black nationalism
  • Black separatism
  • Board of Directors Lever
  • brown privilege
  • Butlerian (math)
  • buzzwords (such as theory and practice, changed to new buzzwords  equity and critical
    thinking)

An economic system in which products are produced and distributed for profit using privately owned capital goods and wage labor. Many feminists assert that a critique of capitalism is essential for understanding the full nature of inequality, as global economic restructuring based on capitalism reflects a particular ideology that celebrates individual wealth and accumulation at the lowest cost to the investor, with little regard for the societal costs and exploitation

  • Care Economy

An unpaid economy sometimes called the “domestic” or “reproductive” sector or “social reproduction” in which women do most of the work of maintaining the labor force and keeping the social framework in good order – both vital services for government and the commercial economy. The care economy produces and reproduces family and provides community-oriented goods and services such as healthcare, childcare, education and the like as a part of the process of caring for people and often outside the money economy. The care economy overwhelmingly depends on women’s labor. The value of the care economy is usually excluded from official economic statistics, making it hard to assess the gender impact of budget and policy decisions that touch on this sector. Work in the care economy is often not paid, though it may be supported by payments from the government. Conversely, government cutbacks on social programs or funding inadequacies in the provision of basic social services and essential utilities in infrastructure and other areas of basic needs can add substantially to women’s burden of unpaid work in the care economy. — Feminist Movement Builder’s Dictionary

A caucus is an intentionally created space for those who share an identity to convene for learning, support, and connections. Caucuses based on racial identity are often comprised, respectively, of people of color, white people, people who hold multiracial identities, or people who share specific racial or ethnic identities.

To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. Caucuses provide spaces for people to work within their own racial/ethnic groups. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas, rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation. At times, people of color may also break into more specific race-based caucuses, sometimes based on experiences with a particular issue, for example police violence, immigration, or land rights. Groups that use caucuses in their organizational racial equity work, especially in workplaces and coalitions, generally meet separately and create a process to rejoin and work together collectively. SOURCE:  RacialEquityTools.org (ACT / Strategies / Caucus and Affinity Groups)

  • Cede power to people of color within and across teams,
    organizations, and systems.
  • centering (also see de-centering (can apply to math)
  • 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.

2. White supremacy—which has harmed everyone, including robbing white people of their own humanity—needs anti-blackness to thrive. Centering blackness removes both the fuel and the constraints of white supremacy, allowing everyone to be free of its tyranny. Doing so acknowledges the historical root of this racial hierarchy that has intentionally placed black people at the bottom of society and gives us the opportunity to see the world through the lens of the black experience. It requires us to imagine how our rules and structures would be reorganized and envision a world where we all thrive because the bottom is removed. When we remove blackness from the bottom, everybody gets to be seen. 

SOURCES:

  1. Centering Blackness,”Insight Center.

  2. Alicia Walters, Black Thought Project, interviewed by Siraad Dirshe in “What Does it Mean to ‘Center Black People’?,” The New York Times (2020).

  • centering whiteness
  • Classism

The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are from low-income or working-class
households based on a social hierarchy in which people are ranked according to socioeconomic status.
Elementary school version: Prejudice and/or discrimination against people because of their
socioeconomic status (how much money their families have or do not have).

  • Climate & Culture
  • climate justice
  • “challenge the dominant ideology”
  • co-constructions
  • Collusion

When people act to perpetuate oppression or prevent others from working to eliminate oppression. SOURCE:  Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin (Routledge, 1997). 

  • Colonialism

A power relationship in which an external nation state (colonizer, in this case Europe and the U.S.) directly controls the political and economic system of another nation state and/or people (in our platform we’ll be focused on Black people). It normally involves the presence of a military force to crush dissent and the migration of people from the colony to the nation state of the colonizer (in this case, stopping African migrants from moving to the U.S.). Colonialism can also occur within geographic boundaries of a colonizer nation state. For example, Black people exist as a domestic colony within the U.S.

  • 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:  Emma LaRocque, PhD, “Colonization and Racism,” (Aboriginal Perspectives). Also see Racism and Colonialism, edited by Robert Ross (1982), and Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” (Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, 2012). (See related  Diaspora and Colonization; “Global History of Colonialism” and “Neo-Colonialism and Settler Colonialism)

  • collective action (#metoo movement)
    The term “collective action” refers to the coordinated work of a traditionally
    marginalized or oppressed group banding together to demand justice and equality.
    Teaching Tolerancecollective guilt
  • collective learning
  • collusion
  • color-conscious
  • colorism
  • color blindness
  • colorblind racism

is the belief that—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—race is
not a significant factor is determining how opportunities, benefits, and burdens are distributed
across the county’s population; that all Americans have an equal opportunity to achieve the
“American dream.” This form of racism can weaken support for programs and policies that are
designed to remove racialized barriers to opportunity

  • communism
  • Community Control

Occurs when a community, whether community be defined by geographical boundaries, culturally, or otherwise, directs the institutions and businesses that affect their lives, on how they will meet the community’s needs.

    It is in essence the the local community having control of issues that directly affect their lives, land and security. Implicit in this definition is the clear statement that Black people must determine and control the pace, shape and manner of change and decision-making at local, regional, state and national levels.” – adopted from http://www.bullinahahs.org.au/about-us/aboriginal-community-control/

 

  • Community Lever
  • complicity
  • Conflict theory
  • conscious and unconscious bias
  • conspiracy theory
  • continuous dialogue
  • counterstory/counterstorytelling
  • Cosmetic Bias
  • “creating patterns” (math)
  • critical
  • Critical collaborative inquiry
  • critical consciousness
  • critical ethnic studies
  • critical eye through a racial equity lens
  • critical mass

    In reference to representation of people of color within an organization or at a certain level of leadership. This figure is dependent on, and reflective of, the specific demographics of the communities in which an organization serves or operates.

  • critical pedagogy
  • critical postmodern theory
  • critical race pedagogy
  • Critical Race Theory (CRT)

    A theory that explicitly states and recognizes that racism is ingrained in the fabric and system of American society. Even without overt racists present, institutional racism is pervasive in dominant culture. Critical Race Theory examines existing power structures, and identifies these structures as based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuate the marginalization of people of color. Overall, Critical Race Theory examines what the legal and social landscape would look like today if people of color were the decision-makers.

  • The Critical Race Theory movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step by step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and principles of constitutional law. SOURCE:  Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, NYU Press, 2001 (2nd ed. 2012, 3rd ed. 2017)
  • Critical Race Theory in practice (praxis)
  • critical race theory lens
  • critical reflection
  • critical self-awareness
  • critical self-reflection
  • Critical Social Justice
  • Critical Theory
  • “critiquing the status quo”
  • CRT language
  • 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:  Colours of Resistance Archive, “Cultural Appropriation (accessed 28 June 2013).

Cultural misappropriation distinguishes itself from the neutrality of cultural exchange, appreciation, and appropriation because of the instance of colonialism and capitalism; cultural misappropriation occurs when a cultural fixture of a marginalized culture/community is copied, mimicked, or recreated by the dominant culture against the will of the original community and, above all else, commodified. One can understand the use of “misappropriation” as a distinguishing tool because it assumes that there are 1) instances of neutral appropriation, 2) the specifically referenced instance is non-neutral and problematic, even if benevolent in intention, 3) some act of theft or dishonest attribution has taken place, and 4) moral judgement of the act of appropriation is subjective to the specific culture from which is being engaged. SOURCE:  Devyn Springer, “Resources on What ‘Cultural Appropriation’ Is and Isn’t” (2018, accessed 7 October 2019). 

  • 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:  RacialEquityTools.org

  • cultural relevance
  • Cultural Repertoires
  • cultural self-awareness
  • cultural separatism 
  • culturally distinct  entities
  • Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
  • cultural responsiveness
  • culturally-responsive educator
  • culturally responsive practices
  • Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) or Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning (CRTL)
  • Culturally Sustaining
    Pedagogy (CSP)
  • Culture

A social system of meaning and custom that is developed by a group of people to assure its adaptation and survival. These groups are distinguished by a set of unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors and styles of communication. SOURCE:  Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti-Racism Initiative, A Community Builder’s Tool Kit, Appendix I (2000).

In the context of racial equity work, accountability refers to the ways in which individuals and communities hold themselves to their goals and actions, and acknowledge the values and groups to which they are responsible.

To be accountable, one must be visible, with a transparent agenda and process. Invisibility defies examination; it is, in fact, employed in order to avoid detection and examination. Accountability demands commitment. It might be defined as “what kicks in when convenience runs out.” Accountability requires some sense of urgency and becoming a true stakeholder in the outcome. Accountability can be externally imposed (legal or organizational requirements), or internally applied (moral, relational, faith-based, or recognized as some combination of the two) on a continuum from the institutional and organizational level to the individual level. From a relational point of view, accountability is not always doing it right. Sometimes it’s really about what happens after it’s done wrong. SOURCE:  Accountability and White Anti-Racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work, Bonnie Berman Cushing with Lila Cabbil, Margery Freeman, Jeff Hitchcock, and Kimberly Richards (2010).  

Related Resources:  Accountability

Someone who gets involved in activities that are meant to achieve political or social change;
this also includes being a member of an organization which is working on change.
Elementary school version: A person who uses or supports actions such as protests to help make
changes in politics or society

  • advancing equity
  • affinity group
  • affirmative action

A program designed to redress past discrimination against certain groups (usually racial/
ethnic minorities and women) by increasing the opportunities available to them in areas such
as employment and education. These policies are designed to increase the representation of
members of these groups in institutions historically controlled by white men.

  • agender
  • Aggressor

Someone who says or does something harmful or malicious to another person
intentionally and unprovoked.


Elementary school version: Someone who says or does hurtful things to another person on
purpose and over and over

Someone who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, class, race, sexual identity, etc.) and work in solidarity with oppressed groups in the struggle for justice. Allies understand that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways.

An action, not an identity. Members of the advantaged group recognize their privilege and work in solidarity with oppressed groups to dismantle the systems of oppression(s) from which they derive power, privilege, and acceptance. Requires understanding that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways. It means taking intentional, overt, and consistent responsibility for the changes we know are needed in our society, and often ignore or leave for others to deal with; it does so in a way that facilitates the empowerment of persons targeted by oppression. This framework can be used to imply that one does not feel directly implicated by the oppression.

SOURCE:

  1. OpenSource Leadership Strategies, “The Dynamic System of Power, Privilege, and Oppression” (2008).

  2. Compiled by White Noise Collective, “Shared Understandings.” Citation is unknown (see their list).

Elementary school version: Someone who helps or stands up for someone who is being bullied or
the target of bias.

https://www.opensourceleadership.com/documents/DO%20Definitions.pdf

“Anti-bias education is an approach to teaching and learning designed to
increase understanding of differences and their value to a respectful and
civil society and to actively challenge bias, stereotyping and all forms of
discrimination in schools and communities. It incorporates inclusive
curriculum that reflects diverse experiences and perspectives, instructional
methods that advance all students’ learning, and strategies to create and
sustain safe, inclusive and respectful learning communities.”
Anti-Defamation League

  •  Anti-bias Framework (ABF)
  • Anti-Black

The Council for Democratizing Education defines anti-Blackness as being a two-part formation that both voids Blackness of value, while systematically marginalizing Black people and their issues. The first form of anti-Blackness is overt racism. Society also associates un-politically correct comments with the overt nature of anti-Black racism. Beneath this anti-black racism is the covert structural and systemic racism which categorically predetermines the socioeconomic status of Blacks in this country. The structure is held in place by anti-Black policies, institutions, and ideologies.

The second form of anti-Blackness is the unethical disregard for anti-Black institutions and policies. This disregard is the product of class, race, and/or gender privilege certain individuals experience due to anti-Black institutions and policies. This form of anti-Blackness is protected by the first form of overt racism.  The Movement for Black
Lives (M4BL), “Glossary.”

An organization that actively recognizes and mitigates the oppressive effects of white dominant culture and power dynamics, striving to equalize that power imbalance internally and for the communities with which they work. 

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. Race Forward, “Race Reporting Guide” (2015)

Is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing anti racist ideas. This includes the expression of ideas that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and supporting policies that reduce racial inequity. Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019.

Is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equal in all of their apparent differences and that there is nothing wrong with any racial group. Anti Racists argue that racist policies are the cause of racial injustices. Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019.

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  • The phenomenon that occurs when people belonging to the nondominant group understand dominant culture norms and take on their characteristics either by choice or by force. Many people of color are asked to “check their identities at the door” in professional settings to make their white peers comfortable. By doing so, many people of color find it easier to get promotions and professional opportunities, as well as to gain access to informal networks typically accessible only to whites. 

    (cultural genocide)

One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group. SOURCE:  Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019.

B

  

Elementary school version: A preference either for or against an individual or group that affects
fair judgment.

Elementary school version: Prejudice and/or discrimination against a person or group based on
stereotypes

A term referring to “Black and/or Indigenous People of Color.” While “POC” or People of Color is often used as well, BIPOC explicitly leads with Black and Indigenous identities, which helps to counter anti-Black racism and invisibilization of Native communities.  SOURCE:  Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox for Advancing Racial Equity for Arts and Cultural Organizations, Nayantara Sen & Terry Keleher, Race Forward (2021).

Black is defined as a person who identifies as Black AND has African indigenous ancestry that predates colonization (be located anywhere in the diaspora—excluding generic claims of Dinknesh (or also known as Lucy) descendants).

To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and
together. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on
understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these
concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas,
rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them. For people of color, a caucus is a place
to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism,
and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation. At times, people
of color may also break into more specific race-based caucuses, sometimes based on experiences with
a particular issue, for example police violence, immigration, or land rights. Groups that use caucuses
in their organizational racial equity work, especially in workplaces and coalitions, generally meet
separately and create a process to rejoin and work together collectively. SOURCE:  Black Lives Matter, “Herstory” (accessed 7 October 2019).

Buzzwords (such as theory and practice, changed to new buzzwords  equity and critical
thinking)

C

An economic system in which products are produced and distributed for profit using privately owned capital goods and wage labor. Many feminists assert that a critique of capitalism is essential for understanding the full nature of inequality, as global economic restructuring based on capitalism reflects a particular ideology that celebrates individual wealth and accumulation at the lowest cost to the investor, with little regard for the societal costs and exploitation

An unpaid economy sometimes called the “domestic” or “reproductive” sector or “social reproduction” in which women do most of the work of maintaining the labor force and keeping the social framework in good order – both vital services for government and the commercial economy. The care economy produces and reproduces family and provides community-oriented goods and services such as healthcare, childcare, education and the like as a part of the process of caring for people and often outside the money economy. The care economy overwhelmingly depends on women’s labor. The value of the care economy is usually excluded from official economic statistics, making it hard to assess the gender impact of budget and policy decisions that touch on this sector. Work in the care economy is often not paid, though it may be supported by payments from the government. Conversely, government cutbacks on social programs or funding inadequacies in the provision of basic social services and essential utilities in infrastructure and other areas of basic needs can add substantially to women’s burden of unpaid work in the care economy. — Feminist Movement Builder’s Dictionary

A caucus is an intentionally created space for those who share an identity to convene for learning, support, and connections. Caucuses based on racial identity are often comprised, respectively, of people of color, white people, people who hold multiracial identities, or people who share specific racial or ethnic identities.

To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. Caucuses provide spaces for people to work within their own racial/ethnic groups. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas, rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation. At times, people of color may also break into more specific race-based caucuses, sometimes based on experiences with a particular issue, for example police violence, immigration, or land rights. Groups that use caucuses in their organizational racial equity work, especially in workplaces and coalitions, generally meet separately and create a process to rejoin and work together collectively. SOURCE:  RacialEquityTools.org (ACT / Strategies / Caucus and Affinity Groups)

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.

2. White supremacy—which has harmed everyone, including robbing white people of their own humanity—needs anti-blackness to thrive. Centering blackness removes both the fuel and the constraints of white supremacy, allowing everyone to be free of its tyranny. Doing so acknowledges the historical root of this racial hierarchy that has intentionally placed black people at the bottom of society and gives us the opportunity to see the world through the lens of the black experience. It requires us to imagine how our rules and structures would be reorganized and envision a world where we all thrive because the bottom is removed. When we remove blackness from the bottom, everybody gets to be seen. 

SOURCES:

  1. Centering Blackness,”Insight Center.

  2. Alicia Walters, Black Thought Project, interviewed by Siraad Dirshe in “What Does it Mean to ‘Center Black People’?,” The New York Times (2020).

The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are from low-income or working-class
households based on a social hierarchy in which people are ranked according to socioeconomic status.


Elementary school version: Prejudice and/or discrimination against people because of their
socioeconomic status (how much money their families have or do not have).

When people act to perpetuate oppression or prevent others from working to eliminate oppression. SOURCE:  Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin (Routledge, 1997). 

A power relationship in which an external nation state (colonizer, in this case Europe and the U.S.) directly controls the political and economic system of another nation state and/or people (in our platform we’ll be focused on Black people). It normally involves the presence of a military force to crush dissent and the migration of people from the colony to the nation state of the colonizer (in this case, stopping African migrants from moving to the U.S.). Colonialism can also occur within geographic boundaries of a colonizer nation state. For example, Black people exist as a domestic colony within the U.S.

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:  Emma LaRocque, PhD, “Colonization and Racism,” (Aboriginal Perspectives). Also see Racism and Colonialism, edited by Robert Ross (1982), and Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” (Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, 2012). (See related  Diaspora and Colonization; “Global History of Colonialism” and “Neo-Colonialism and Settler Colonialism)

(#metoo movement)
The term “collective action” refers to the coordinated work of a traditionally
marginalized or oppressed group banding together to demand justice and equality.

Is the belief that—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—race is
not a significant factor is determining how opportunities, benefits, and burdens are distributed
across the county’s population; that all Americans have an equal opportunity to achieve the
“American dream.” This form of racism can weaken support for programs and policies that are
designed to remove racialized barriers to opportunity

Occurs when a community, whether community be defined by geographical boundaries, culturally, or otherwise, directs the institutions and businesses that affect their lives, on how they will meet the community’s needs.

    It is in essence the the local community having control of issues that directly affect their lives, land and security. Implicit in this definition is the clear statement that Black people must determine and control the pace, shape and manner of change and decision-making at local, regional, state and national levels.” – adopted from http://www.bullinahahs.org.au/about-us/aboriginal-community-control/

 

Intentions and methods are specifically geared toward identifying and exposing problems in order to facilitate revolutionary political change.

 

  • CRT language
  • 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:  Colours of Resistance Archive, “Cultural Appropriation (accessed 28 June 2013).

  • Cultural awareness
  • Cultural competence
  • Cultural data
  • Cultural genocide (assimilation)

A social system of meaning and custom that is developed by a group of people to assure its adaptation and survival. These groups are distinguished by a set of unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors and styles of communication. SOURCE:  Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti-Racism Initiative, A Community Builder’s Tool Kit, Appendix I (2000).

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:  Colours of Resistance Archive, “Cultural Appropriation (accessed 28 June 2013).

Cultural misappropriation distinguishes itself from the neutrality of cultural exchange, appreciation, and appropriation because of the instance of colonialism and capitalism; cultural misappropriation occurs when a cultural fixture of a marginalized culture/community is copied, mimicked, or recreated by the dominant culture against the will of the original community and, above all else, commodified. One can understand the use of “misappropriation” as a distinguishing tool because it assumes that there are 1) instances of neutral appropriation, 2) the specifically referenced instance is non-neutral and problematic, even if benevolent in intention, 3) some act of theft or dishonest attribution has taken place, and 4) moral judgement of the act of appropriation is subjective to the specific culture from which is being engaged. SOURCE:  Devyn Springer, “Resources on What ‘Cultural Appropriation’ Is and Isn’t” (2018, accessed 7 October 2019). 

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:  RacialEquityTools.org

D

  1. Decolonization may be defined as the active resistance against colonial powers, and a shifting of power towards political, economic, educational, cultural, psychic independence and power that originate from a colonized nation’s own indigenous culture. This process occurs politically and also applies to personal and societal psychic, cultural, political, agricultural, and educational deconstruction of colonial oppression.

Per Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang: “Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym”; it is not a substitute for ‘human rights’ or ‘social justice’, though undoubtedly, they are connected in various ways. Decolonization demands an Indigenous framework and a centering of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous ways of thinking.
SOURCE:
1. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “Glossary.”
2. Eric Ritskes, “What Is Decolonization and Why Does It Matter?

Related Resources:  Decolonization Theory and Practice

We exist within societal structures rooted in historical facts, one of which is colonialism: the policy and practice of acquiring control of land (frequently occupied by people of color), occupying it, and codifying power structures to elevate one race and culture above all others. The international practice of colonization informs the dominant culture that characterizes American society today, driving ideologies and subconscious biases rooted in centuries of racism, classism, and white privilege. In order to dismantle white supremacy and the white dominant culture norms it influences, one must actively “decolonize” the mind, recognizing and counteracting the thoughts, preferences, practices, and behaviors that are deeply rooted vestiges of colonization. 

Diaspora is “the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions …” There is “a common element in all forms of diaspora; these are people who live outside their natal (or imagined natal) territories and recognize that their traditional homelands are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, religions they adopt, and the cultures they produce.” SOURCE:  Leong Yew, “The Culture of Diasporas in the Postcolonial Web” (quoting Ashcroft et al., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, and Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction).

Related Resources:  Diaspora and Colonization

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

[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, A Community Builder’s Tool Kit, Appendix I (2000).
  2. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Laws Enforced by EEOC (accessed 28 June 2013).

Diversity includes all the ways in which people differ, and it encompasses all the different characteristics that make one individual or group different from another. It is all-inclusive and recognizes everyone and every group as part of the diversity that should be valued. A broad definition includes not only race, ethnicity, and gender—the groups that most often come to mind when the term “diversity” is used—but also age, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, and physical appearance. It also involves different ideas, perspectives, and values.

It is important to note that many activists and thinkers critique diversity alone as a strategy. For instance, Baltimore Racial Justice Action states: “Diversity is silent on the subject of equity. In an anti-oppression context, therefore, the issue is not diversity, but rather equity. Often when people talk about diversity, they are thinking only of the “non-dominant” groups.” SOURCE:  UC Berkeley Center for Equity, Inclusion and Diversity, “Glossary of Terms” (page 34 in 2009 Strategic Plan). Baltimore Racial Justice Action, “Our Definitions” (2018).

Dominant culture in a society refers to the established language, religion, values, rituals, and social customs on which the society was built. It has the most power, is widespread, and influential within a social entity, such as an organization, in which multiple cultures are present. An organization’s dominant culture is heavily influenced by the leadership and management standards and preferences of those at the top of the hierarchy. In this paper, dominant culture refers specifically to the American context in which organizational culture is predominantly defined by white men and white women in positional power. See also “White Dominant Culture.”

E

  • Voluntary, employee-led groups that foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned with organizational mission, values, goals, business practices, and objectives. Often, these groups provide support to staff who formally or informally lead race equity work in some capacity within an organization. 

A social construct that divides people into smaller social groups based on characteristics such as shared sense of group membership, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests, history, and ancestral geographical base.

Examples of different ethnic groups are: Cape Verdean, Haitian, African American (Black); Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese (Asian); Cherokee, Mohawk, Navaho (Native American); Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican (Latino); Polish, Irish, and Swedish (White). SOURCE:  Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, Routledge, 1997.

Related Resources:  Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity

Elementary school version: The quality of being fair or just

  • Ethnicity refers to one’s membership in an identifiable social group that is founded on a
    particular racial, national, or cultural association. Affiliation with this identity may be denoted
    by an individual’s adherence to group-specific customs, beliefs, or linguistic nuances. Unlike
    race, physical appearance is not a significant distinguishing characteristic.

F

The systematic destruction of Black self determination to control our food (including land, resource theft and discrimination), a hyper-saturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing, and a blatantly discriminatory corporate controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes of all times. Many tend to use the term “food desert,” however food apartheid is a much more accurate representation of the structural racialized inequities perpetuated through our current system.

A process whereby communities most impacted and exploited by our current corporate controlled, extractive agricultural system shift power to re-shape, re-define and provide indigenous, community based solutions to accessing and controlling food that are humanizing, fair, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, environmentally sound and just.

A framework going beyond access to ensure that our communities have not only the right, but the ability to have community control of our food including the means of production and distribution. Food sovereignty entails a shift away from corporate agricultural system and towards our own governance of our own food systems. It is about our right to healthy food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, with the right to define and ultimately control our own food and agriculture systems. Shifting from an exclusively rights based framework to one of governance puts the needs of those who work and consume at all points of the food chain at the center rather than the demands of corporations and markets.

Is a verb, framing refers to the way in which an idea is presented and subsequently interpreted.

The supporting details, context, and other cues can change the presentation of an idea and
consequently affect the way in which the audience perceives the idea. Frames can be used to
encourage some interpretations while discouraging others. The concept of a frame is largely
attributed to sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic text, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the
Organization of Experience.

G

H

The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer
and/or asexual, based on the belief that heterosexuality is the norm. (Often called homophobia to describe
a fear of anyone or anything that is perceived to be LGBTQ. Other related terms include anti-LGBTQ bias,
cissexism, biphobia and transphobia.)


Elementary school version: Based on the thinking that homosexuality is wrong and/or that all
people are straight (that all boys date only girls, and girls date only boys).

Refers to any form of bullying related to the characteristics considered
unique to a person’s identity, such as their race, religion, sexual orientation or physical appearance.
Elementary school version: When someone is bullied based on an aspect of who they are or are
perceived to be: their identity.

  • identity deconstruction
  • identity, diversity, justice and action (IDJA)
  • identity politics
  • ideological diversity
  • Imbalance and Selectivity
  • Impact of “Whiteness”
  • implicit bias
  • Implicit curriculum

Also known as unconscious or hidden bias, implicit biases are negative associations that people unknowingly hold. They are expressed automatically, without conscious awareness. Many studies have indicated that implicit biases affect individuals’ attitudes and actions, thus creating real-world implications, even though individuals may not even be aware that those biases exist within themselves. Notably, implicit biases have been shown to trump individuals’ stated commitments to equality and fairness, thereby producing behavior that diverges from the explicit attitudes that many people profess. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is often used to measure implicit biases with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, and other topics. SOURCE:  Cheryl Staats, State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013, Kirwan Institute, The Ohio State University.  Related Resources:  Implicit Bias

  • implicit cultural assumptions
  • implicit racial bias

Is denoted by subtle unconscious negative attitudes toward members

of other-race groups. These attitudes may include fear, animosity, distrust, and superiority.
Typically, implicit bias operates exclusively in our “unconscious mind” and is beyond our dayto-day perception. Implicit bias is fueled by a set of “symbolic attitudes” that develop in our
unconscious mind over many years. These attitudes include positions on issues like race or
liberal/conservative political ideology

  • Imposter syndrome
  • Inclusion

Authentically bringing traditionally excluded individuals and/or groups into processes, activities, and decision/policy making in a way that shares power.

SOURCE:  OpenSource Leadership Strategies

  • inclusivity education
  • Independent post racial neoliberalism
  • indigeneity

Indigenous populations are composed of the existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them and, by conquest, settlement, or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial condition; who today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic, and cultural customs and traditions than with the institutions of the country of which they now form part, under a State structure which incorporates mainly national, social, and cultural characteristics of other segments of the population which are predominant.

(Examples: Maori in territory now defined as New Zealand; Mexicans in territory now defined as Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma; Native American tribes in territory now defined as the United States.) SOURCE:  United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2010, page 9), originally presented in the preliminary report of the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, José Martínez Cobo (1972, page 10).

Related Resources:  Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity

  • 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).

  • inequitable-power
  • ingroup (also see outgroup). 

The “ingroup” is the group that a person psychologically identifies with. In certain
contexts, the ingroup may also be a socially dominant identity group, but in others it
may not.

  • institutional bias
  • Institutional/Extracurricular approaches
  • institutional oppression
  • 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).

Related Resources:  Racism 

Is the process by which history, culture, people, policies, practices, and
systems interact within a specific institutional framework (education, criminal justice, housing,
etc.) to produce and sustain racial inequality

  • Integration

Integration is broadly defined as the process of unifying parts of a whole. It often refers to
uniting people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds so that they may freely associate with
one another, as in a society. Integration differs from assimilation, as one must not forfeit his/her
own ethnic identity in order to integrate.

  • intentional embed
  • intentional racial

 Discrimination is the overt act of treating a member of one racial group
less favorably than a member of a similarly situated racial group and producing a harmful or
negative consequence for the person who is discriminated against. Example: Two male job
applicants—one African America, the other white—have very similar skills and experience, but
the African American applicant is rejected because of his race.

  • Internalized Dominance

Occurs among white people when they believe and/or act on assumptions that white people are superior to, more capable, intelligent, or entitled than people of color. It occurs when members of the dominant white group take their group’s socially advantaged status as normal and deserved, rather than recognizing how it has been conferred through racialized systems of inequality. Internalized dominance may be unconscious or conscious. A white person who insists that anyone who works hard can get ahead, without acknowledging the barriers of racism, is consciously or unconsciously expressing internalized dominance. Whites who assume that European music and art are superior to other forms are enacting internalized dominance.

SOURCE:  Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell, with Diane J. Goodman and Khyati Y. Joshi (Routledge, 2016), page 137.

Related Resources:  Internalized Racism

  • 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).

Related Resources:  Internalized Racism

  • 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 Inequalities by Keith Lawrence and Terry Keleher (2004).

Related Resources:  Racism

  • interrogate

To interrogate the dominant narrative. Understand implicit
bias and your identity and role in enabling and propagating
structural racism.

Exposing [one’s] multiple identities can help clarify the ways in which a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression. For example, a Black woman in America does not experience gender inequalities in exactly the same way as a white woman, nor racial oppression identical to that experienced by a Black man. Each race and gender intersection produces a qualitatively distinct life.

    1. Per Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: Intersectionality is simply a prism to see the interactive effects of various forms of discrimination and disempowerment. It looks at the way that racism, many times, interacts with patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia — seeing that the overlapping vulnerabilities created by these systems actually create specific kinds of challenges. “Intersectionality 102,” then, is to say that these distinct problems create challenges for movements that are only organized around these problems as separate and individual. So when racial justice doesn’t have a critique of patriarchy and homophobia, the particular way that racism is experienced and exacerbated by heterosexism, classism etc., falls outside of our political organizing. It means that significant numbers of people in our communities aren’t being served by social justice frames because they don’t address the particular ways that they’re experiencing discrimination.

  • intersectional lens
  • intersectional studies
  • intersectionality
  • Intersectional theoretical approach
  • land acknowledgment
  • leadership
  • Leadership for Educational Equity
  • Learning Environment Lever
  • “Lens of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome”
  • Liberalism
  • 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).

Related Resources:  Racial Equity

  • Liberatory Consciousness

A liberatory consciousness enables humans to:

  • Live their lives in oppressive systems and institutions with awareness and intentionality, rather than on the basis of the socialization to which they have been subjected.

  • Maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving in to despair and hopelessness about that condition, to maintain an awareness of the role played by each individual in the maintenance of the system without blaming them for the roles they play, and at the same time practice intentionality about changing the systems of oppression.

  • Live “outside” the patterns of thought and behavior learned through the socialization process that helps to perpetuate oppressive systems.

Four elements in developing a liberatory consciousness are awareness, analysis, acting, and accountability/ally-ship.

SOURCE:  Barbara J. Love, “Developing a Liberatory Consciousness,” Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Maurianne Adams et. al., pages 599–600.

Related Resources:  Racial Equity

  • male vs. female (identity)
  • Management Lever
  • manifest into actions (learning standards)
  • Marginalization

A social process by which individuals or groups are (intentionally or unintentionally) distanced from access to power and resources and constructed as insignificant, peripheral, or less valuable/privileged to a community or “mainstream” society. This term describes a social process, so as not to imply a lack of agency. Marginalized groups or people are those excluded from mainstream social, economic, cultural, or political life. Examples of marginalized groups include, but are by no means limited to, groups excluded due to race, religion, political or cultural group, age, gender, or financial status. To what extent such populations are marginalized, however, is context specific and reliant on the cultural organization of the social site in question.

SOURCE:  The University of British Columbia’s Equity & Inclusion Glossary of Terms, citing The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

  • marginalized
  • marginalized groups
  • marginalized identities
  • marginalized/Minoritized/Under-represented communities
  • “Materialist”
  • mathematics identity
  • mathematics learning experience
  • “mathematical product” (e.g., new theorem, new proof) 
  • meaningful participation
  • meritocracy
  • microaggression(s)

The everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.

SOURCE:  Derald Wing Sue, PhD, “Microaggressions: More than Just Race” (Psychology Today, 17 November 2010).

Related Resources:  Racism

  • Model Minority

A term created by sociologist William Peterson to describe the Japanese community, whom he saw as being able to overcome oppression because of their cultural values.

While individuals employing the Model Minority trope may think they are being complimentary, in fact the term is related to colorism and its root, anti-Blackness. The model minority myth creates an understanding of ethnic groups, including 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:  Asian American Activism: The Continuing Struggle, “Glossary” (2016).

  • movement building

Movement building is the effort of social change agents to engage power holders and the broader society in addressing a systemic problem or injustice while promoting an alternative vision or solution. Movement building requires a range of intersecting approaches through a set of distinct stages over a long-term period of time. Through movement building, organizers can:

  • Propose solutions to the root causes of social problems.

  • Enable people to exercise their collective power.

  • Humanize groups that have been denied basic human rights and improve conditions for the groups affected.

  • Create structural change by building something larger than a particular organization or campaign.

  • Promote visions and values for society based on fairness, justice, and democracy.

SOURCE:  Julie Quiroz-Martinez, From the Roots: Building the Power of Communities of Color to Challenge Structural Racism (Akonadi Foundation, 2010), citing the Movement Strategy Center, which offers these further definitions.

Related Resources:  Movement Building

  • Multicultural competency or Multicultural competent (in terms of ACT / Strategies)

A process of learning about and becoming allies with people from other cultures, thereby broadening our own understanding and ability to participate in a multicultural process. The key element to becoming more culturally competent is respect for the ways that others live in and organize the world and an openness to learn from them.

SOURCE:  Paul Kivel, “Multicultural Competence” (2007).

Related Resources:  Multicultural Competency

  • Muli-cultural training
  • multiculturalism
  • multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS)

The systematic subjugation of one social group by a more powerful social group for the social, economic, and political benefit of the more powerful social group. Rita Hardiman and Bailey Jackson state that oppression exists when the following 4 conditions are found:

  • the oppressor group has the power to define reality for themselves and others,

  • the target groups take in and internalize the negative messages about them and end up cooperating with the oppressors (thinking and acting like them),

  • genocide, harassment, and discrimination are systematic and institutionalized, so that individuals are not necessary to keep it going, and

  • members of both the oppressor and target groups are socialized to play their roles as normal and correct.

Oppression = Power + Prejudice

SOURCE:  What Is Racism?” − Dismantling Racism Works (dRworks) web workbook.

  • oppressor vs. oppressed
  • Organizational Culture Lever
  • organizational transformation (equity audit)
  • Other Institutions

When we refer to “other institutions” in the reparations demand we are speaking about the major institutions, like churches, universities and philanthropic institutions, who have also profited off of Black labor and are culpable.

  • out-group relationships

The “outgroup” is the group with which a person does not psychologically identify. In
certain contexts, the outgroup may also be a socially marginalized identity group, but in
others it may not.

A form of social stratification and power-relationships in society that favors men, mainly White men, and grants them more rights and privileges over women and oppresses women’s social, political, financial, sexual and human rights. It has a connection with a social economic system such as capitalism. — Agenda to Build Black Futures

  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed
  • People of Color

Often the preferred collective term for referring to non-White racial groups. Racial justice advocates have been using the term “people of color” (not to be confused with the pejorative “colored people”) since the late 1970s as an inclusive and unifying frame across different racial groups that are not White, to address racial inequities. While “people of color” can be a politically useful term, and describes people with their own attributes (as opposed to what they are not, e.g., “non-White”), it is also important whenever possible to identify people through their own racial/ethnic group, as each has its own distinct experience and meaning and may be more appropriate.

SOURCE:  Race Forward, “Race Reporting Guide” (2015).

  • performativity (math)
  • play (play)
  • “pleasing and rewarding” (math)
  • pluralistic
  • political activism
  • Political Activity

Is defined as activity directed towards the establishment and/or control of local, national or international governance.

  • politics of parody (math)
  • Political Prisoners

A political prisoner is defined as someone imprisoned because they have opposed, criticized or participated in activities that oppose or are in direct contradiction to the established government’s exertion of power and control over a land and people.

  • Positive education disruption
  • Postcolonial Theory (math)
  • positionality
  • positivism 
  • Postmodernism/postmodern (math)
  • poststructural
  • poststructuralism
  • Post-Traumatic Growth
  • Power

    1. Power is unequally distributed globally and in U.S. society; some individuals or groups wield greater power than others, thereby allowing them greater access and control over resources. Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates. Although power is often conceptualized as power over other individuals or groups, other variations are power with (used in the context of building collective strength) and power within (which references an individual’s internal strength). Learning to “see” and understand relations of power is vital to organizing for progressive social change.

    2. Power may also be understood as the ability to influence others and impose one’s beliefs. All power is relational, and the different relationships either reinforce or disrupt one another. The importance of the concept of power to anti-racism is clear: racism cannot be understood without understanding that power is not only an individual relationship but a cultural one, and that power relationships are shifting constantly. Power can be used malignantly and intentionally, but need not be, and individuals within a culture may benefit from power of which they are unaware.

    3. (A) The ability to name or define. (B) The ability to decide. (C) The ability the set the rule, standard, or policy. (D) The ability to change the rule, standard, or policy to serve your needs, wants, or desires. (E) The ability to influence decision makers to make choices in favor of your cause, issue, or concern. Each of these definitions can manifest on personal, social, institutional, or structural levels:  

    • Personal Power – 1. Self-determination. 2. Power that an individual possesses or builds in their personal life and interpersonal relationships.  

    • Social Power – 1. Communal self-determination. 2. A grassroots collective organization of personal power. 3. Power that social groups possess or build among themselves to determine and shape their collective lives.  

    • Institutional Power – 1. Power to create and shape the rules, policies, and actions of an institution. 2. To have institutional power is to be a decision maker or to have great influence upon a decision maker of an institution.  

    • Structural Power – To have structural power is to create and shape the rules, policies, and actions that govern multiple and intersecting institutions or an industry.

    SOURCE: 

    1. Intergroup Resources, “Power” (2012).

    2. Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, “Racism and Power” (2018) / “CARED Glossary” (2020).

    3. Our Shared Language: Social Justice Glossary, YWCA (2016).

  • power-knowledge
  • Practice methodologies
  • praxis
  • Predominantly White institution (PWI)
  • 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, A Community Builder’s Tool Kit, Appendix I (2000).

Elementary school version: Judging or having an idea about someone or a group of people before you actually know them. Prejudice is often directed toward people in a certain identity group
(race, religion, gender, etc.).

  • prejudice reduction

    “The term ‘prejudice’ refers to stereotypes which lead parties to view their opponents as threatening adversaries who are inherently inferior or are actively pursuing immoral objectives. … Prejudice reduction refers to a collection of techniques designed to break down these destructive stereotypes.” Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado

  • Principles of Griot Storytelling
  • privilege

Unearned social power accorded by the formal and informal institutions of society to ALL members of a dominant group (e.g. white privilege, male privilege, etc.). Privilege is usually invisible to those who have it because we’re taught not to see it, but nevertheless it puts them at an advantage over those who do not have it.

SOURCE:  Colours of Resistance Archive, “Privilege” (accessed 28 June 2013).

  • privileging of White
  • problematizes
  • Professional Educational Licensing (PEL)
  • “Professionalism” standards
  • protect vulnerable identities
  • pseudo-reality (paralogy, “lived experiences”)
  • “purexi”
  • “Purposive action to dismantle White supremacy
  • “purpose of solving problems” (e.g., survival)
  • Pyramid of White Supremacy Framework
  • Race

    For many people, it comes as a surprise that racial categorization schemes were invented by scientists to support worldviews that viewed some groups of people as superior and some as inferior. There are three important concepts linked to this fact:

    1. Race is a made-up social construct, and not an actual biological fact.

    2. Race designations have changed over time. Some groups that are considered “white” in the United States today were considered “non-white” in previous eras, in U.S. Census data and in mass media and popular culture (for example, Irish, Italian, and Jewish people).

    3. The way in which racial categorizations are enforced (the shape of racism) has also changed over time. For example, the racial designation of Asian American and Pacific Islander changed four times in the 19th century. That is, they were defined at times as white and at other times as not white. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as designated groups, have been used by whites at different times in history to compete with African American labor.

    SOURCE:

    1–2. PBS, “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (2018–2019 relaunch of 2003 series).

    3. Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2002), page 141.

    Related Resources:  Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity

  • Race-based
  • Race-based caucusing
  • Race-consciousness
  • Race equity champions
  • Race equity culture 

    A culture focused on proactive counteraction of social and race inequities inside and outside of an organization. 

  • Race equity
  • race equity lens
  • Racial equity tools
  • Race equity work
  • Race essentialism
  • Racial and educational equity
  • Racial and Ethnic Identity

An individual’s awareness and experience of being a member of a racial and ethnic group; the racial and ethnic categories that an individual chooses to describe him or herself based on such factors as biological heritage, physical appearance, cultural affiliation, early socialization, and personal experience.

SOURCE:  Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, Routledge, 1997.

Related Resources:  Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity

  • Racial Capitalism

If capitalism is intended to maximize profit, its operation inherently divides workers and extracts labor from communities of color, including enslaved people, Indigenous people, and immigrants. 

If you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden, then what you end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also relies on an ideology or racial regime, and the racial regime convinces a lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through slavery, through Jim Crow, convinces them to support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based in white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty minuscule. So if you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy.

SOURCE:  Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Rebellion Against Racial Capitalism,” interviewed by Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept (2020).

Related Resources:  Theory

  • Racial aggression
  • Racial demographics
  • Racial Equity

    1. Racial equity is the condition that would be achieved if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares. When we use the term, we are thinking about racial equity as one part of racial justice, and thus we also include work to address root causes of inequities, not just their manifestation. This includes elimination of policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race or that fail to eliminate them.

    2. “A mindset and method for solving problems that have endured for generations, seem intractable, harm people and communities of color most acutely, and ultimately affect people of all races. This will require seeing differently, thinking differently, and doing the work differently. Racial equity is about results that make a difference and last.”

    SOURCE:

    1. Center for Assessment and Policy Development.

    2. OpenSource Leadership Strategies.

    Related Resources:  Racial Equity

  • Racial equity balances
  • Race
    equity capacity
    building
  • Racial justice practice
  • Racial Equity Learning (REL)
  • Racial equity lens
  • Racial equity tools
  • Racial Healing

To restore to health or soundness; to repair or set right; to restore to spiritual wholeness.

SOURCE:  Michael R. Wenger, Racial Equity Resource Guide (W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2012).

Related Resources:  Addressing Trauma and Healing and Trauma, Violence, and Healing

  • Racialization

Racialization is the very complex and contradictory process through which groups come to be designated as being of a particular “race” and on that basis subjected to differential and/or unequal treatment. Put simply, “racialization [is] the process of manufacturing and utilizing the notion of race in any capacity” (Dalal, 2002, p. 27). While white people are also racialized, this process is often rendered invisible or normative to those designated as white. As a result, white people may not see themselves as part of a race but still maintain the authority to name and racialize “others.”

SOURCE:  Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, “Racialization” (2018) / Calgary Anti-Racism Education, “CARED Glossary” (2020)

  • racialized identity
  • Racial Reconciliation

Reconciliation involves three ideas. First, it recognizes that racism in America is both systemic and institutionalized, with far–reaching effects on both political engagement and economic opportunities for minorities. Second, reconciliation is engendered by empowering local communities through relationship-building and truth-telling. Lastly, justice is the essential component of the conciliatory process—justice that is best termed as restorative rather than retributive, while still maintaining its vital punitive character.

SOURCE:  The William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, Position Statement on Reconciliation (2014).

Related Resources:  Racial Reconciliation

  • Racial Identity Development Theory

Racial Identity Development Theory discusses how people in various racial groups and with multiracial identities form their particular self-concept. It also describes some typical phases in remaking that identity based on learning and awareness of systems of privilege and structural racism, cultural, and historical meanings attached to racial categories, and factors operating in the larger socio-historical level (e.g. globalization, technology, immigration, and increasing multiracial population).

SOURCE:  New Perspectives on Racial Identity Development: Integrating Emerging Frameworks, edited by Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe and Bailey W. Jackson (NYU Press, 2012).

Related Resources:  Theory

  • Racial Identity Theory
  • 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 Justice

    1. The systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice—or racial equity—goes beyond “anti-racism.” It is not just the absence of discrimination and inequities, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures.

    2. Operationalizing racial justice means reimagining and co-creating a just and liberated world and includes:

    • understanding the history of racism and the system of white supremacy and addressing past harms,

    • working in right relationship and accountability in an ecosystem (an issue, sector, or community ecosystem) for collective change,

    • implementing interventions that use an intersectional analysis and that impact multiple systems,

    • centering Blackness and building community, cultural, economic, and political power of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), and

    • applying the practice of love along with disruption and resistance to the status quo.

    SOURCE:

    1. Race Forward, “Race Reporting Guide” (2015).

    2. Maggie Potapchuk, “Operationalizing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Organizations” (MP Associates, 2020). This definition is based on and expanded from the one described in Rinku Sen and Lori Villarosa, “Grantmaking with a Racial Justice Lens: A Practical Guide” (Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, 2019).

  • Racial prejudice
  • Racial sensitivity
  • Racial sensitivity training
  • Racial supremacy
  • Racial Triangulation Theory
  • Racially biased behavior mindsets
  • 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 (dRworks) web workbook.

Related Resources:  Racism

  • Racist

One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or interaction or expressing a racist idea.

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

  • Racist classroom dynamics
  • Racist Ideas

A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.

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

  • Racist Policies

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between or among racial groups. Policies are written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups. Racist policies are also expressed through other terms such as “structural racism” or “systemic racism”. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.

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

Related Resources:  Laws and Policies

  • Radical
  • Radical authenticity
  • Radicalism
  • Radicalized
  • Raising Consciousness
  • Reality
  • “Reconstruct” America
  • Reflective exercises
  • Reimagining
  • Reparations

States have a legal duty to acknowledge and address widespread or systematic human rights violations, in cases where the state caused the violations or did not seriously try to prevent them. Reparations initiatives seek to address the harms caused by these violations. They can take the form of compensating for the losses suffered, which helps overcome some of the consequences of abuse. They can also be future oriented—providing rehabilitation and a better life to victims—and help to change the underlying causes of abuse. Reparations publicly affirm that victims are rights-holders entitled to redress.

SOURCE:  International Center for Transitional Justice.

Related Resources:  Reparations

  • Representation and inclusion
  • Resistance
  • Responsible Business / Accountable Business

Responsible Business/Accountable Business is a position by which a business will be held in check or account for their decisions and actions. An accountable business requires a commitment to the vision of Black and other oppressed peoples to assume self-determination over those areas deemed by Black and other oppressed people to directly affect their lives. “Responsible” or “Accountable” businesses must meet three basic criteria: provide living wage jobs for community residents; adhere to ethical labor and investment standards; treat workers and consumers/clients with dignity and respect; and make regular charitable contributions that support Black communities.

  • Restorative Justice

Restorative Justice is a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused by crime and conflict. It places decisions in the hands of those who have been most affected by a wrongdoing, and gives equal concern to the victim, the offender, and the surrounding community. Restorative responses are meant to repair harm, heal broken relationships, and address the underlying reasons for the offense. Restorative Justice emphasizes individual and collective accountability. Crime and conflict generate opportunities to build community and increase grassroots power when restorative practices are employed.

SOURCE:  The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “Glossary.”

Related Resources:  Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice

  • Restorative practices
  • Revolution
  • Scapegoating

Blaming an individual or group for something based on that person or group’s identity
when the person or group is not responsible. Bias, prejudicial thinking and discriminatory acts can lead
to scapegoating.
Elementary school version: The action of blaming a person or group for something when, there
may not be a person or group responsible for the problem. Example: “If the girls weren’t talking
so much, we wouldn’t have lost the game.”

  • Science
  • seeking (math)
  • Senior Leadership Lever
  • 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.

Per Dina Gillio-Whitaker, “Settler Colonialism may be said to be a structure, not an historic event, whose endgame is always the elimination of the Natives in order to acquire their land, which it does in countless seen and unseen ways. These techniques are woven throughout the US’s national discourse at all levels of society. Manifest Destiny—that is, the US’s divinely sanctioned inevitability—is like a computer program always operating unnoticeably in the background. In this program, genocide and land dispossession are continually both justified and denied.”

SOURCE:  Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege Is So Hard to Talk About” (2018).

Related Resources:  Diaspora and Colonization 

  • social action

  • Social control
  • social constructivism
  • social critique
  • social identities
  • social justice
  • social justice activism (“doing the work”)
  • Sociocultural Revolution
  • Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
  • Social justice
  • Social justice meta-practice skills
  • social justice training
  • Social Oppression

Refers to oppression that is achieved through social means and that is social in scope—it affects whole categories of people. This kind of oppression includes the systematic mistreatment, exploitation, and abuse of a group (or groups) of people by another group (or groups). It occurs whenever one group holds power over another in society through the control of social institutions, along with society’s laws, customs, and norms. The outcome of social oppression is that groups in society are sorted into different positions within the social hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Those in the controlling, or dominant group, benefit from the oppression of other groups through heightened privileges relative to others, greater access to rights and resources, a better quality of life, and overall greater life chances. Those who experience the brunt of oppression have fewer rights, less access to resources, less political power, lower economic potential, worse health and higher mortality rates, and lower overall life chances.

SOURCE:  Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Glossary of Terms.

  • social-political challenges
  • social-political dimensions of mathematics
  • “socialpolitical turn (math)
  • social sector 

    The group of organizations that consist of both nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. 

  • social turn (math)
  • Social work curriculum
  • Social work
  • Social Work Coalition for Anti-Racist Educators (SWCAREs)
  • Social work education
  • societal status quo
  • spirit murdering
  • strategic colorblindness

is the perception that talking about race acknowledges the reality of
racial differences and is therefore a racist behavior.

  • structural bias
  • structural inequity
  • Structural Racialization

Structural racialization connotes the dynamic process that creates cumulative and durable inequalities based on race. Interactions between individuals are shaped by and reflect underlying and often hidden structures that shape biases and create disparate outcomes even in the absence of racist actors or racist intentions. The presence of structural racialization is evidenced by consistent differences in outcomes in education attainment, family wealth, and even life span.

SOURCE:  Systems Thinking and Race: Workshop Summary by john a. powell, Connie Cagampang Heller, and Fayza Bundalli (The California Endowment, 2011).

Related Resources:  Structural Racism

  • Structural Racism
  1. The normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics – historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal – that routinely advantage Whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. Structural racism encompasses the entire system of White domination, diffused and infused in all aspects of society including its history, culture, politics, economics, and entire social fabric. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution because it involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually reproducing old and producing new forms of racism. Structural racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism – all other forms of racism emerge from structural racism.

  2. For example, we can see structural racism in the many institutional, cultural, and structural factors that contribute to lower life expectancy for African American and Native American men, compared to white men. These include higher exposure to environmental toxins, dangerous jobs and unhealthy housing stock, higher exposure to and more lethal consequences for reacting to violence, stress, and racism, lower rates of health care coverage, access, and quality of care, and systematic refusal by the nation to fix these things.

SOURCE:

  1. Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities by Keith Lawrence, Aspen Institute on Community Change, and Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, for the Race and Public Policy Conference (2004).

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

Related Resources:  Structural Racism

  • student focus
  • student voice
  • subjective truth
  • subjectivity of perspective
  • symbolic racism

Is the belief that members of certain racial and ethnic groups do not live up
to widely held American values such as hard work, honesty, and personal responsibility.

  • systemic bias
  • systemic equity action
  • systemic oppression (historical and present day)
  • Systems
  • systems of oppression
  • Systemic Racism

    1. This is an interlocking and reciprocal relationship between the individual, institutional and structural levels which function as a system of racism. These various levels of racism operate together in a lockstep model and function together as a whole system. These levels are: 

    • Individual (within interactions between people) 

    • Institutional (within institutions and systems of power)

    • Structural or societal (among institutions and across society)

    2. In many ways “systemic racism” and “structural racism” are synonymous. If there is a difference between the terms, it can be said to exist in the fact that a structural racism analysis pays more attention to the historical, cultural, and social psychological aspects of our currently racialized society.

    SOURCE:

    1. Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Glossary of Terms.

    2. Aspen Institute, “11 Terms You Should Know to Better Understand Structural Racism” (2016).

  • Systems of power and oppression
  • Systemic Power
  • Systems theory
  • Targeted Universalism

Targeted universalism means setting universal goals pursued by targeted processes to achieve those goals. Within a targeted universalism framework, universal goals are established for all groups concerned. The strategies developed to achieve those goals are targeted, based upon how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal. Targeted universalism is goal oriented, and the processes are directed in service of the explicit, universal goal.

SOURCE:  Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice – A Primer by john a. powell, Stephen Menendian, and Wendy Ake (Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, 2019).

Related Resources:  Theory

  • Tokenism

Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic, and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because they recruit and use POC as racialized props. Examples include:

  • Recruit POC to formal leadership positions, but keep all the power.

  • Only hire POC for POC “stuff.”

  • Convene Special “Diversity Councils” but don’t build POC leadership on your main Board.

  • Use POC as your mouthpiece and shield against other POC.

SOURCE:  Helen Kim Ho, “8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits,” The Nonprofit Revolution (2017).

  • “too much ‘understanding’” )in regards to teachers)
  • Transdiagnostic perspective
  • “transformational interventions”
  • transformative change

Refers to intentional change that seeks to alter the core of an issue,
perspective, or situation in ways that are both innovative and creative. This type of change
has wide-ranging ramifications, as it promotes deep understanding and may alter underlying
assumptions, processes, and structures.

  • Transformative Justice

“Transformative justice [is] a theory and approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing. Three core beliefs: 1) Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other; 2) The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice. 3) State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.

Transformative Justice seeks to provide people who experience violence with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities. This accountability includes stopping immediate abuse, making a commitment to not engage in future abuse, and offering reparations for past abuse. Such accountability requires on-going support and transformative healing for people who sexually abuse.” — Generation 5

The main goal of transformative justice is to repair the harm done as much as possible. Ideally, transformative justice seeks the transformation of individuals, communities, and society as a whole. Also, transformative justice at its best places the power to respond to harm back into the hands of the people most affected by harm. The institutions of the state and of white supremacy would no longer control and dictate responses to acts of harm. — Critical Resistance

  • Transforming White Privilege (TWP)
  • Transgender

An umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were
assigned at birth.
Elementary school version: A term for people whose gender identity differs from how they were
assigned at birth (e.g., assigned girl or boy).

  • Unconscious bias
  • Underserved
  • “understanding your whiteness”
  • Undoing racism
  • unearned privilege
  • Unintentional racial discrimination

Occurs when situational conditions unknowingly create
a disadvantage for people of a particular racial grouping. Example: A white manager asks her
current employees—who are all white—to recommend people to fill a new position. 

  • Western
  • White
  • White accountability group
  • White acculturalization
  • White ally
  • white, deficit-based lens
  • “White dominance”
  • White dominant culture
  • White educators
  • “White emotionalities”
  • “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).

Related Resources:  System of White Supremacy and White Privilege

  • “White” institutions
  • White mathematics (see ethnomathematics above)
  • White oppressiveness 
  • White Privilege

    1. Refers to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.

    2. Structural White Privilege: A system of white domination that creates and maintains belief systems that make current racial advantages and disadvantages seem normal. The system includes powerful incentives for maintaining white privilege and its consequences, and powerful negative consequences for trying to interrupt white privilege or reduce its consequences in meaningful ways. The system includes internal and external manifestations at the individual, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels. 

    The accumulated and interrelated advantages and disadvantages of white privilege that are reflected in racial/ethnic inequities in life-expectancy and other health outcomes, income and wealth, and other outcomes, in part through different access to opportunities and resources. These differences are maintained in part by denying that these advantages and disadvantages exist at the structural, institutional, cultural, interpersonal, and individual levels and by refusing to redress them or eliminate the systems, policies, practices, cultural norms, and other behaviors and assumptions that maintain them.

    Interpersonal White Privilege: Behavior between people that consciously or unconsciously reflects white superiority or entitlement.

    Cultural White Privilege: A set of dominant cultural assumptions about what is good, normal or appropriate that reflects Western European white world views and dismisses or demonizes other world views.

    Institutional White Privilege: Policies, practices and behaviors of institutions—such as schools, banks, non-profits or the Supreme Court—that have the effect of maintaining or increasing accumulated advantages for those groups currently defined as white, and maintaining or increasing disadvantages for those racial or ethnic groups not defined as white. The ability of institutions to survive and thrive even when their policies, practices and behaviors maintain, expand or fail to redress accumulated disadvantages and/or inequitable outcomes for people of color.

    SOURCES:

    1. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspon­dences Through Work in Women Studies” (1988).

    2. Transforming White Privilege: A 21st Century Leadership Capacity, CAPD, MP Associates, World Trust Educational Services (2012).

  • white racial identity
  • White social capital
  • 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 (dRworks) web workbook.

Related Resources:  System of White Supremacy and White Privilege and Addressing Hate and White Supremacy

  • White supremacy claims
  • White Supremacy Culture

    1. 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…

    2. An artificial, historically constructed culture which expresses, justifies, and binds together the United States white supremacy system. It is the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system.

    SOURCE:

    1. Gita Gulati-Partee and Maggie Potapchuk, “Paying Attention to White Culture and Privilege: A Missing Link to Advancing Racial Equity” (The Foundation Review vol. 6: issue 1, 2014).

    2. Sharon Martinas and the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, 4th revision (1995).

    Related Resources:  Organizational Change Process (see the first section: “Addressing White Dominant Culture”)

  • White values (universal values)
  • White women
  • Whiteness

    1. The term white, referring to people, was created by Virginia slave owners and colonial rules in the 17th century. It replaced terms like Christian and Englishman to distinguish European colonists from Africans and indigenous peoples. European colonial powers established whiteness as a legal concept after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, during which indentured servants of European and African descent had united against the colonial elite. The legal distinction of white separated the servant class on the basis of skin color and continental origin. The creation of ‘whiteness’ meant giving privileges to some, while denying them to others with the justification of biological and social inferiority.

    2. Whiteness itself refers to the specific dimensions of racism that serve to elevate white people over people of color. This definition counters the dominant representation of racism in mainstream education as isolated in discrete behaviors that some individuals may or may not demonstrate, and goes beyond naming specific privileges (McIntosh, 1988). Whites are theorized as actively shaped, affected, defined, and elevated through their racialization and the individual and collective consciousness formed within it … Whiteness is thus conceptualized as a constellation of processes and practices rather than as a discrete entity (i.e. skin color alone). Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives, and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

    SOURCE:

    1. PBS, “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (2018–2019 relaunch of 2003 series).

    2. Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility” (International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011).

    Related Resources:  System of White Supremacy and White Privilege

  • whiteness is integral
  • whiteness studies
  • “whitewashed” curriculum
  • woke
  • Woke Vigilante
  • wokeness
  • Xenophobia

Any attitude, behavior, practice, or policy that explicitly or implicitly reflects the belief that immigrants are inferior to the dominant group of people. Xenophobia is reflected in interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels oppression and is a function of White supremacy.

SOURCE:  Lee Cokorinos, “The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement,” The Black Agenda Report (2007).

1619 Project

7E Model for Cultural Humility

Started 09/6/2021

Revised 11/8/2021

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