Race, Social Justice, and Civil Rights

Hegemony: In common use, hegemony means domination or authority over others. As the term was conceived by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony implies domination by consent, particularly the domination of subordinate classes by the ruling class. Hegemony stands in contrast to direct forms of domination such as force, persuasion, coercion, and intimidation. Instead, hegemony is achieved through cultural institutions whereby the interests of the dominant class are expressed as the interests of all classes. (Kathleen O'Reilly. "Hegemony." In Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Barney Warf, 206-208. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2006. Gale Virtual Reference Library)

Implicit Bias: 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. (Racial Equity Tools; Cheryl Staats, State of the Science Implicit Bias Review 2017, Kirwan Institute, The Ohio State University)

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. (Racial Equity Tools; Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens and Barbara Major, Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, 2005)

Inequality: The fundamental story of inequality is more good to some, less to others. These unequally distributed “goods” can be material, as necessities for survival (such as water, calories, and land), or abstract, as economic inputs or derivatives (such as labor, income, and wealth)… Ultimately, inequality in goods and resources may be the critical predictor of stubbornly durable differences both within and across various ways of grouping people in human suffering: differences in the incidence of malady, morbidity, and mortality. Racial and ethnic inequalities—the segregated assignment of resources across groups defined by notional genealogical differences—are perhaps the most pervasive, frequently rationalized, and hermetic versions of the construct. (Kobi Abayomi. "Inequality: Overview." In Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2nd ed., edited by Patrick L. Mason, 413-431. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2013. Gale Virtual Reference Library.)

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. (Racial Equity Tools; Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens and Barbara Major, Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, 2005)

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. [Visit source cited for a more comprehensive definition.] (Racial Equity Tools; Donna Bivens, Internalized Racism: A Definition, Women’s Theological Center, 1995)

Intersectionality: Intersectionality refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power. (Colin Clark, “Intersectionality,” Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2013, Gale Virtual Reference Library).

Marginalization: The process in which groups of people are excluded by the wider society. Marginalization is often used in an economic or political sense to refer to the rendering of an individual, an ethnic or national group, or a nation-state powerless by a more powerful individual. (Center for the Study of Social Policy; National Conference for Community and Justice—St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program)

Microaggression: Brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial, gender, sexual orientation and religious slights and insults to the target person or group (D. W. Sue, Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010; in Virginia Commonwealth University, Diversity and Inclusion Dictionary, 2016.)

Oppression: The systemic and pervasive nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry and social prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that saturate most aspects of life in our society. Oppression denotes structural and material constraints that significantly shape a person's life chances and sense of possibility. Oppression also signifies a hierarchical relationship in which dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of subordinated or targeted groups. Oppression resides not only in external social institutions and norms but also within the human psyche as well. Eradicating oppression ultimately requires struggle against all its forms, and that building coalitions among diverse people offers the most promising strategies for challenging oppression systematically. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; Maurianne Adams, Lee Ann Bell, Pat Griffin, editors, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, New York, Routledge).

Prejudice: A prejudgment or unjustifiable, and usually negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward another group and its members. (Racial Equity Resource Guide, American Healing, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2012)

Privilege: A right that only some people have access or availability to because of their social group memberships (dominants). Because hierarchies of privilege exist, even within the same group, people who are part of the group in power (white/Caucasian people with respect to people of color, men with respect to women, heterosexuals with respect to homosexuals, adults with respect to children, and rich people with respect to poor people) often deny they have privilege even when evidence of differential benefit is obvious. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; National Conference for Community and Justice — St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program); Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti Racism Initiative. A Community Builder's Tool Kit. Claremont, Calif.: Claremont Graduate University).

Race: A social construct that artificially divides people into distinct groups based on characteristics such as physical appearance (particularly color), ancestral heritage, cultural affiliation, cultural history, ethnic classification, and the social, economic and political needs of a society at a given period of time. Racial categories subsume ethnic groups. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; Maurianne Adams, Lee Ann Bell, Pat Griffin, editors, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, New York, Routledge).

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. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; Maurianne Adams, Lee Ann Bell, Pat Griffin, editors, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, New York, Routledge).

Racial equality: Access or provision of equal opportunities for people from all racial or ethnic backgrounds. Racial equality refers to social equality for people of different races. (Center for the Study of Social Policy; J. Manza and M. & Sauder, M., Inequality and society: social science perspectives on social stratification, 2009)

Racial equity: 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 fail to eliminate them. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; Center for Assessment and Policy Development).

Racial justice: A proactive reinforcement of policies, practices, attitudes, and actions that produce equitable power, access, opportunities, treatment, impacts, and outcomes for all. (Center for the Study of Social Policy; Robert S. Chang, "Reverse Racism!: Affirmative Action, the Family, and the Dream That Is America," 23 Hastings Const. L.Q. 1115, 1996.)

Racial profiling: Racial profiling is a form of differential treatment based on an individual's racial or ethnic social identity. Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution's core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. (Brian Williams, "Racial Profiling and Biased Policing," Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013, Gale Virtual Reference Library; American Civil Liberties Union, "Racial Profiling," Racial Justice.)

Racism: Racism is a complex system of beliefs and behaviors, grounded in a presumed superiority of the white race. These beliefs and behaviors are conscious and unconscious; personal and institutional; and result in the oppression of people of color and benefit the dominant group, whites. A simpler definition is racial prejudice + power = racism. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; National Conference for Community and Justice — St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program.)

Right: A resource or position that everyone has equal access or availability to regardless of their social group memberships. (Racial Equity Resource Guide; National Conference for Community and Justice — St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program.)

Segregation: A system that keeps different groups separate from each other through physical dividers, social pressures, or laws. (Center for the Study of Social Policy; National Conference for Community and Justice — St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program.)

Social justice: Social justice includes a vision of society in which the distribution of resources is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure. Social justice involves social actors who have a sense of their own agency as well as a sense of social responsibility toward and with others and the society as a whole. (Racial Equity Tools; Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, editors, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook)

Social power: Access to resources that enhance one's chances of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life. (Racial Equity Tools; Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, editors, Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook)

Stereotype: Stereotypes are associations and beliefs about the distinguishing characteristics and attributes of a group and its members that shape how people think about and respond to the group. (John F. Dovidio and Melissa-Sue John, "Stereotype," Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013, Gale Virtual Reference Library)

Structural racism: The structural racism lens allows us to see that, as a society, we more or less take for granted a context of white leadership, dominance and privilege. This dominant consensus on race is the frame that shapes our attitudes and judgments about social issues. It has come about as a result of the way that historically accumulated white privilege, national values and contemporary culture have interacted so as to preserve the gaps between white Americans and Americans of color.

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 healthcare coverage, access and quality of care and systematic refusal by the nation to fix these things (Racial Equity Tools;  Karen Fulbright-Anderson, Keith Lawrence, Stacey Sutton, Gretchen Susi and Anne Kubisch, Structural Racism and Community Building, New York: The Aspen Institute, 2004; Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens and Barbara Major, Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, MP Associates, Inc. and the Center for Assessment and Policy Development, 2005.)

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. (Racial Equity Tools; Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women Studies, Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988)