BIPOC: The acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Eurocentric beauty standards: Social standards of beauty that privilege European characteristics such as light skin, thin lips and noses, and straight hair.
Cishet: A combination of cisgender and heterosexual. This word refers to people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth and are attracted to people of the opposite gender.
Code-switching: Adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities.
Coming out: The process that people who are LGBTQ go through as they work to accept their sexual orientation or gender identity share that identity openly with other people.
Great Migration: Movement of Black Americans from the South to the North, generally between 1915-1970, in search of jobs, education, and freedom from the racial oppression of the “Jim Crow” South.
Jim Crow: Racial segregation and discrimination enforced by laws, customs, and practices, especially in the southern states of the U.S. from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the mid-20th century.
LGBTQ+: The acronym for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. The plus shows inclusion of other identities.
Passing: the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category different from their own, which may include racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age and/or disability status.
Passive Racism: Unfair treatment of people due to their race.
Queer: An adjective used by some people whose sexual orientation is not exclusively heterosexual. Often, for those who identify as queer, the terms lesbian, gay, and bisexual are perceived to be too limiting and/or fraught with cultural connotations they feel don’t apply to them. Once used as a slur, the term “queer” has recently been reclaimed by the community to be empowering and create a sense of community.
Queerphobia: Fear or hatred of queer people.
Trans: Short for "transgender"; people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.
Violent Racism: Physical harm done to people or their property because of their race.
Vogue: A highly stylized, modern house dance originating in the late 1980s that evolved out of the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s.
White gaze: The assumption in American society that people of color must make themselves fit a standard of “normal” as white people define it.
White supremacy: the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races; also, the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races.