Key Definitions

Biases

Attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in making favorable and unfavorable assessments of others. They are often activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.
SOURCE: Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

Compensatory Resources

Materials, actions, and/or strategies that lead you to mitigate or unlearn (i.e. "compensate for") biases you have about others.

Complicity

The condoning of dominant beliefs and practices (e.g. racism) by passive acceptance and, often, lack of action. Someone complicit in a system for racism, for example, may not explicitly act on beliefs about racial superiority over others, but they might think "it doesn't affect me" and avoid discussions or actions that regard race and racism.

Culture

A social system of meaning and customs 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.

Cultural Humility

The ability to maintain a curious and humble stance in relation to learning about aspects of cultural identity, particularly ones that are not your own. Cultural Humility is a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation, recognizing and fixing power imbalances, and developing partnerships with people and groups who advocate for others.
SOURCE: Reflections on Cultural Humility. Amanda Waters and Lisa Asbill.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

A system of teaching beliefs and practices that empower students, particularly students of color, by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It helps students to recognize and honor their own cultural beliefs and practices while acquiring access to the dominant culture to improve their socioeconomic status and making informed, critical decisions.
SOURCE: The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education. Brittany Aronson, Judson Laughter.

Deficit Perspectives

"Approaching students based upon our perceptions of their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Such a perspective deteriorates expectations for students and weakens educators’ abilities to recognize giftedness in its various forms (Ford & Grantham, 2003). The most devastating brand of this sort of deficit thinking emerges when we mistake difference for deficit." (Gorski, 2010, p. 2)

Dominant Group

A group of people bound by an identity that holds the power and authority in society relative to the subordinates and determines how that power and authority may be acceptably used. By definition, they set the social parameters through which subordinated groups operate.
SOURCE: "Who am I? The Complexity of Identity" by Beverly Tatum

Educational Equity

Educational beliefs, processes, and practices that raise the achievement of all students while (1) narrowing the gaps between the lowest and highest performing students; and (2) eliminating the racial or cultural disproportionality of which student groups occupy the highest and lowest achievement categories, including rates of graduation.
SOURCE: Policy 1304 Equity and Diversity. Minneapolis Public Schools 10/08/2013

Gender

A concept that describes how societies manage sex categories; the cultural meanings attached to men and women’s roles; and how individuals understand their identities including, but not limited to, being a man, woman, transgender, intersex, gender queer and other genders. Gender involves social norms, attitudes and activities that society deems more appropriate for one's sex assigned at birth.
SOURCE: Sociology of Gender. Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos. Routledge, 2017.

Gender Identity

One’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s). Everyone has a gender identity, including you. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same.
SOURCE: Trans Education Resource Center

Institutional Sexism

Gender discrimination reflected in the policies and practices of organizations such as schools that create unequal outcomes for people across gender identities.
SOURCE: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender

Institutional Racism

The ways in which policies and practices (like those in schools) create unequal outcomes for racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group, but they create advantages for whites and disadvantage for people from groups classified as people of color.
SOURCE: Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building. Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens and Barbara Major. 2005.

Intersectionality

An approach largely advanced by women of color, arguing that systems of oppression (e.g. racism and sexism) cannot be analyzed separate from one another; they interact and intersect in individuals’ lives and society. For example, a Black woman in America experiences the intersection of racism and sexism (what Kimberle Crenshaw calls, "oppression squared") simultaneously whereas a white woman experiences sexism but not racism.
SOURCE: WPC Glossary from 14th Annual White Privilege Conference Handbook, White Privilege Conference, 2013.

Oppression

A pervasive social web of institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and prejudice. This entangled web creates an unequal power differential between dominant and subordinated groups. Oppression affords the dominant group (e.g. heterosexual people) with the right to define "normal", "real, and "correct" ways of being, knowing, and acting.
SOURCE: Intergroup Resources, 2012

Power

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, building collective strength, and power within, an individual’s internal strength.
SOURCE: Intergroup Resources, 2012

Privilege

Unearned social power accorded 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 it puts us at an advantage over those who do not have it.
SOURCE: Colors of Resistance Archive Accessed June 28 2013.

Race

A social and political construction created to concentrate power with white people and legitimize dominance over non-white people. As Ta-Nehisi Coates states in Between the World and Me, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.”
SOURCE: OpenSource Leadership Strategies, Some Working Definitions

Racial Identity Development Theory

Racial Identity Development Theory discusses how people in various racial groups form their self-concept about race. It also describes some typical phases in remaking that identity based on learning and awareness of systems of oppression, meanings attached to racial categories, and factors operating in the global level.
SOURCE: New Perspective on Racial Identity Development: Integrating Emerging Frameworks, Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe and Bailey W. Jackson, editors. NYU Press, 2012.

Racial Healing

To restore to health or soundness; to repair or set right; to restore to spiritual Wholeness.
SOURCE: Racial Equity Resource Guide, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Michael R. Wenger, 2012.

Racism

Individual, cultural, institutional and systemic ways by which differential consequences are created for groups historically or currently defined as white being advantaged, and groups historically or currently defined as non-white (African, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, etc.) as disadvantaged. That idea aligns with those who define racism as prejudice plus power, a common phrase in the field.
SOURCE: Racial Equity Tools

Social Location

An expression of your place in relation to others, particularly people in dominant social groups (e.g. white people, cisgender men), that influences your access to power, resources, opportunities, and political influence (Kirk & Okazawa-Rey, 2010). [NEED TO CITE]

Structural Racism

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.
SOURCE: Structural Racism for the Race and Public Policy Conference, Keith Lawrence, Aspen Institute on Community Change and Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center.

Subordinate Group

"Also referred to as "marginalized", "targeted" or "oppressed" groups, they a group, often bound by an identity, that are labeled as defective or substandard in significant ways in comparison to dominant groups. Subordinates are usually said to be innately incapable of performing the preferred roles...To the extent that those in this group internalize the images that the dominant group reflects back to them, they may find it difficult to believe in their own ability."
SOURCE: "Who am I? The Complexity of Identity" by Beverly Tatum

White Fragility

Discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice.White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, 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.
SOURCE: White Fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3. Robin DiAngelo. 2011.

Whiteness

A set of characteristics and experiences that are attached to the white race and white skin. In the U.S. and European contexts, whiteness marks ones as normal, belonging, and native, while people in other racial categories are perceived as and treated as unusual, foreign, and exotic. Sociologists believe that what whiteness is and means is directly connected to the construction of people of color as "other" in society. Because of this, whiteness comes with a wide variety of privileges.
SOURCE: The Definition of Whiteness. Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D. July 23, 2018

White Privilege

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.
SOURCE:White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women Studies. Peggy McIntosh. 1988.Transforming White Privilege: A 21st Century Leadership Capacity, CAPD, MP Associates, World Trust Educational Services, 2012.

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