CORE CONCEPTS
To understand how to become an anti-racist organization, it is important to understand the core concepts of race and racism as a system of oppression. Having a deeper understanding of how race manifest supports our efforts in disrupting racism and dismantling the practices and/or polices that perpetuate racism. Below are some key core concepts to help build a foundation of understanding race and racism more. In the "Additional Resource" section tab, you will find links to articles, books, and other materials for further exploration of these core concepts and topics.
All content on this page are from sources listed under each section
History of Race and Racial Identity
I. Race & Ethnicity
Race and Ethnicity can be understood as systems of organizing people into groups based on identified categories that can or may change over time. While both are often used interchangeably, both should be considered as an overlapping of each other, rather than identical categories.
Race - Race is understood as “a social construct that artificially divides people into distinct groups based on certain characteristics such as physical appearance (particularly skin color) ancestral heritage, cultural affiliation, cultural history, ethnic classification...Racial categories subsume ethnic groups.” (p. 88, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice).
Race is also understood as a socio-historical concept. “ Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded. Racial meanings have varied tremendously over time and between different societies.” These categories change over time and reflect social, rather than physical, basis that come from the societies assigned meaning and how race is structured. This structuring of race is the foundation of the concept of institutional racism.
The consequences of racial categorization are real. The ideology of race has become embedded in our identities, institutions, and culture, and is used as a basis for discrimination and racial profiling.
Ethnicity - Ethnicity is defined as groups of people that share a common identity-based culture, language, or ancestry, often based on customs, beliefs, and migration or colonization.
“A social construct that artificially 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.” (p. 88, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice)
Resources for Further Exploration:
Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World by Stephen E. Cornell & Douglas Hartmann
"Historical Formations of Race" by David R. Roediger at National Museum of African American History and Culture
Race: The Power of an Illusion, PBS Doc Special
Racial Formations, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, eds., Racial Formation in the United States, Second Edition, pp. 3-13
Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin eds., pp. 82-109
Race & Ethnicity in the Context of Colonization and Diaspora
A large part of the history of racial formation in the US is rooted in the context of slavery. As discussed in the 1619 project, with the arrival of chattel slavery that lasted over 250 years, the core foundations of US institutions and structures began out of the early concepts of power and superiority through justifying slavery and anti-black racism. The justification of slavery institutionalized the concept of race and anti-black racism in the US. Slavery in the US began with the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade established by Western European white culture during colonization between the 16th - 19th century. To understand social constructions of race in a US context, it is important to acknowledge its roots in colonization and diaspora.
“Diaspora is the voluntary or forcible movement of typically indigenous or marginalized peoples from their homelands into new regions...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.” Colonization is a system where more powerful and industrialized nations, namely Western European white cultures, by force of other means, weaken regions for the benefit of the dominant power. Both the concept of diaspora and colonization are deeply rooted in the justification of a system of categorization of dominance and marginality based on race.
Resources for Further Exploration:
"Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy" by Andrea Smith
Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies by Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.
The Atlantic Slave Trade by Editorial Staff at Black History Month
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes by Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, from Slate
The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism That Never Happened by Andrea Smith
"The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism" by Paul Kivel
The New York Times Magazine 1619 Project
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story? By Suzanne Model
What Do We Mean When We Say Colonized? by Janani Balasubramanian
II. Power, Privilege, & Oppression
To understand how race functions as a system of oppression, it’s important to understand Power, Privilege, and Oppression.
Power is understood as having access to resources and having the ability to name, define, change, influence, and/or decide rules, standards, and policies to serve your needs, wants, and best interests. Power can be visible, hidden, or invisible, and power can show up as power-over (use of authority or domination), power with others (communal and collective strength), or power-within (personal ability). Power is also relational and can manifest on personal, social, institutional and structural levels.
Personal Power is power that an individual possesses or builds in their personal life and interpersonal relationships. Social Power is the collective of a social group’s power used to determine and shape their collective interests and needs. Institutional Power is power that decision makers possess to create, greatly influence, and shape the rules, policies and actions of an institution. It is also the capacity to exercise control over and decide what is best for others and who has access to resources. Structural Power is the power to create, greatly influence, and shape the rules, policies, and actions that govern multiple institutions and industries.
Privilege is unearned social power and access accorded by the formal and informal institutions of society to all members of a dominant group. It’s access to resources only readily available to some people as a result of their advantaged social group membership. Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because the group they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels, and grants advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant social identities, such as white, wealthy, male, Christians in a US context.
Privilege can manifest through visible advantages, such as access to wealth, professional opportunities, and social status, as well as more subtly (invisible) such as freedom of behavior, and setting the standard of normative culture against which others are judged. Dominant group members may be aware or unaware of their privilege or take it for granted.
White Privilege is the unearned social power, advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. It also operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, structural, and institutional levels. The system of Structural White Privilege is one in which creates and maintains the belief that current racial advantages and disadvantages are normal. It’s the use of powerful incentives for maintaining white privilege and its consequences, and use of powerful negative consequences for attempts at disrupting white privilege. Part of how structural white privilege is maintained is through denying that existence of advantages and disadvantages along the lines of race, at the structural, personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional level. Institutional White Privilege is understood as policies, practices, and behaviors or institutions that have the effect of maintaining or increasing accumulated advantages for white appearing and white identified people, while also maintaining or increasing disadvantages for people of color.
Resources for Further Exploration
Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin eds
"Sometimes You’re a Caterpillar" a video on privilege by Franchesca Ramsey
Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin eds
What is White Privilege: Recognizing White Privilege Begins with Truly Understanding the Term itself by Cory Collins, Teaching Tolerance
What Does Power and Privilege have to do with Racism?
Racism is a system of Oppression that involves a privileged group's power to carry out systemic discrimination based on race through institutional policies and practices in a society, and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values maintained to justify those policies and practices.
Oppression is Power + Privilege (and Prejudice). Oppression is the systemic targeting or marginalization of one social group by a more powerful social group for social, economic, and political benefit of the more powerful social group. Oppression can operate on a personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional level and manifest through systems of classism, sexism, racism, and other forms of "isms." Oppression exist when:
"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."
Resources for Further Exploration:
III. The System of Racism
Racism is a system of oppression in which one race (White in a US context) maintains superiority or supremacy over another race through a set of attitudes, behaviors, social structures, and institutional power. Racism is a “system of structured [inequality] where the goods, services, rewards, privileges, and benefits of the society are available to individuals according to their presumed membership in” particular racial groups (Barbara Love, 1994. Understanding Internalized Oppression). Power, Privilege, and Prejudice are all drivers of racism and racial oppression. Racism can manifest on an individual, structural, cultural, and institutional level. Structural and Institutional power create, maintain, and reinforce practices, policies, and normative culture that further racial inequality.
"Racism is the need to ascribe bone-deep features to
people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them."
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Individual Racism is beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism, usually driven by explicit and implicit bias. Cultural Racism is representation, messages, and stories about normalizing whiteness, white behavior and values as better then other racially defined groups. Cultural racism plays a role in maintaining systems of internalized supremacy and internalized racism by means of influencing what is deemed of value, appropriate and acceptable against whiteness. Institutional Racism is when policies and practices of organizations or systems create different outcomes for different racial groups. Structural Racism is "a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representation, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial inequality...(Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change)." In this structured system, racism is developed, maintained, and protected.
White Supremacy Is the idea that white people, their values, beliefs, and actions are superior to people of color and non-white people. White supremacy supports and maintains institutional and structural racism by reinforcing a system of inequality by means of deeming people of color less than or worthless compared to whiteness.
Prejudice are stereotypes, negative thoughts, and beliefs about an individual or group based on their social identity such as race. Racial prejudice is a symptom of racism but not racism itself. A person of any race can have prejudices about people of other races, but only members of the dominant social group can exhibit racism because racism is prejudice plus the institutional power to enforce it.
" [Prejudice is] an attitude based on limited information, often on stereotypes. Prejudice is usually, but not always, negative. Positive and negative prejudices alike, especially when directed toward oppressed people, are damaging because they deny the individuality of the person. In some cases, the prejudices of oppressed people (“you can’t trust the police”) are necessary for survival. No one is free of prejudice."
Anti-Black Racism
"The Council for Democratizing Education defines Anti-Blackness as being a two-part formation that both strips Blackness of value (dehumanizes), and systematically marginalizes Black people. This form of anti-Blackness is overt racism. Society also associates politically incorrect comments with the overt nature of anti-Black racism. Beneath this anti-Black racism is the covert structural and systemic racism which predetermines the socioeconomic status of Blacks in this country and is held in place by anti-Black policies, institutions, and ideologies."
The other form of Anti-Blackness defined by the Movement for Black Lives is "unethical disregard for anti-Black institutions and policies—a 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"
Ana Cecilia Perez describes Anti-Black prejudice "as an unconscious response to internalized oppression—survival behavior under white supremacy. These behaviors are rooted in competition for limited resources and are structural setups intended to perpetuate the power of White people."
“If there’s one thing missing in our country, it’s an acknowledgment of the broad humanity of black folks.
Racism—and anti-black racism in particular—is the belief that there’s something wrong with black people.“
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Resources for Further Exploration:
Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin eds.
7 Ways Non-Black People of Color Perpetuate Anti-Blackness by Palmira Muniz
"As Non-Black POC, We Need to Address Anti-Blackness" by Ana Cecilia Perez, Latinx Equity Racial Project
Racial Equity and Anti-Black Racism, UC San Francisco Multicultural Resource Center
IV. What is Anti-Racism?
Anti-Racism is "the active process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes, so that power is redistributed and shared equitably (NAC International Perspective: Women and Global Solidarity)."
Anti-Racism Action - Six Actions from Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
Understand the definition of Racism - Dr. Kendi shares that "one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inactions, or expressing a racist idea" is racist. To be antiracist, where one is supporting and advocating for antiracist policy or ideals, means you have to first be able to recognize and understand how racism operates in all forms (understand how it manifest through ideology and policy) to be able to advocate for change that is antiracist.
Stop saying, "I'm not racist" - By defining yourself as not racist, or beyond racism's system of power, it makes it challenging to see how your thoughts, and actions could be racist. Being antiracist means embracing antiracist views and beliefs.
Identify racial disparities - Identify and understand the inequities and disparities that give certain racial groups, such as white people, material advantages over people of color.
Confront the racist ideas you may hold - Do the work to assess and identify potential internal and implicit biases that have perpetuated racism or racial inequality. Try an Implicit Bias assessment to understand how you think about Race and Ethnicity.
Understand the importance of intersectional Antiracism action - It is important to use an intersectional approach in becoming anti-racist because race intersects with multiple aspects of identity and all systems of oppression (sexism, classism, agism) are linked by their nature of being systems of oppression. To become antiracist is to be aware and understand how all systems of oppression operate across identities.
Advocate and champion on antiracist ideas, policies and practices - Support local organizations in the community that are striving or racial equity policies and practices, and fighting against policies and practices that reinforce racial disparities. Identity and use your power in spaces that you are able to influence and change racist policies and practices.
Resources for Further Exploration
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race" a video by Jay Smooth at TedX Event
How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
"White anti-racism: living the legacy" From Teaching Tolerance