Competency 1 Key Definitions

Race/Racial

A social and political construction created to concentrate power with white people and legitimize dominance over people of color.

Culture/Cultural

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.

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.

Biases

Attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in making favorable and unfavorable assessments of others. They are often activated without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.

Compensatory Resources

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

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.

Institutional Racism

Institutional racism refers to 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.

Institutional Sexism

Gender discrimination reflected in the policies and practices of organizations such as schools that create unequal outcomes for people across gender identities.