Compiled by White Noise Collective
ALLY
An action, not an identity. Members of the advantaged group who recognize their privilege and work in solidarity with oppressed groups to dismantle the systems of oppression(s) from which they derive power, privilege and acceptance. It means taking intentional, overt and consistent responsibility for the changes we know are needed in our society, and often ignore or leave for others to deal with, and does so in a way that facilitates the empowerment of persons targeted by oppression. Requires understanding that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways. This framework can be used to imply that one does not feel directly implicated by the oppression.
ANTI-BLACK RACISM
Describes how white supremacy creates a racialized hierarchy that requires blackness (and people of African descent) to occupy the most marginalized position in the hierarchy. Anti-black racism often appears as prejudice and racial animosity toward black people by both white and non-black ethnic minorities in the United States. Anti-black racism is buoyed by the Model Minority Myth and racial resentment.
(THE) BUFFER ZONE
A range of jobs and occupations that structurally serve to maintain the wealth and power of the ruling class by acting as a buffer between those at the top of the pyramid and those at the bottom. The buffer zone serves a threefold function: taking care of people, keeping hope alive, and controlling people. Credit to Paul Kivel.
CALLING IN
Based in the belief that mistakes happen and that harm is an opportunity for transformation, especially when mistakes/harm occurs in a relationship with shared values and within communities seeking justice and freedom. Involves addressing someone’s behavior more privately and personally, identifying the hurtful behavior, and making space to talk about it with compassion and patience.
“I picture “calling in” as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us… as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. (Ngọc Loan Trần)
CALLING OUT
Calling out is bringing public attention to an individual’s oppressive behavior. Calling someone out serves two primary purposes: It lets that person know they’re being oppressive, and it lets others know that the person was being oppressive. By letting others know about this person’s oppressive behavior, more people can hold them accountable for their actions. Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others.
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE
These are stories of people captured by enemies whom they generally consider “uncivilized.” Stories of women and men of European descent who were captured by Native Americans, were immensely popular in from the 17th century until the close of the US frontier in the late 19th century. It featured tales of Indian savagery, the bravery of white male settlers, and the vulnerability of white women in need of protection and rescue. These stories were used to justify, ignore and erase the genocide of the Native people by people of European descent, and the effects of this continue today.
CLASSISM
Differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class. Systematic oppression of subordinated class groups to advantage and strengthen the dominant class groups. It’s the systematic assignment of characteristics of worth and ability based on social class.
When an organization has a policy banning working from home when appropriate (checking and sending emails, for example), without acknowledging that employees have differential access to private transportation, and due to costs of housing in a community some employees live substantially farther from a workplace than others.
COLONIALISM
The policy and/or practice of a power to create borders, then extend control past those borders over other land/people. It usually includes:
- acquisition and expansion of property and creation of settler colonies
- invasion, subjugation/enslavement, displacement, and/or genocide of indigenous populations
- dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants
- absorption and assimilation of the colonized into the culture of the colonial power in order to destroy any remnant of the foreign cultures that might threaten the colonial power by inspiring rebellion
- creation of a colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized
It is often based on the ethnocentric belief that the morals and values of the colonizer are superior to those of the colonized. The invasion need not be military; it can begin—or continue—as geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban or industrial encroachments.
“Colonizer habits include ignoring the history, acting like it never happened, not holding myself and my People accountable for immense harms done, and escaping to a comfortable, consensual, racial amnesia. These habits reinforce the biggest colonizer habit, which is to regard the land I live on as legitimately mine.” (Denise C. Breton)
DECOLONIZATION
The undoing of colonialism, including dismantlement of outside rule, reclamation of indigenous practices and reconnection to self, family and community.
GENDER
HETEROSEXISM
Structural, interpersonal, or other forms of discrimination or prejudice against anyone who does not conform to binary gender norms based on the assumption that heterosexuality is the normal/correct sexual orientation.
Assuming someone has an opposite-gendered partner, or using opposite-gender pronouns to describe someone’s partner.
IMPLICIT/UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
Refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Encompasses both favorable and unfavorable assessments, activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, they are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.
When walking down the street at night, a white woman tenses up when she sees a Black man standing on the street corner, even though she would otherwise deny having any prejudice towards Black men.
A 2012 study used identical case vignettes to examine how pediatricians’ implicit racial attitudes affect treatment recommendations for four common pediatric conditions. Results indicated that as pediatricians’ pro-white implicit biases increased, they were more likely to prescribe painkillers for patients who were white as opposed to Black.
INTERSECTIONALITY
The concept and reality that it is not enough to take on one kind of oppression without acknowledging other kinds of oppression that interlock and fuel one another. Intersectionality was always about exposing the ways Black women are caught up in multiple systems of oppression, namely race, gender and class, but often many more. It was meant to help Black women understand their experiences in a white supremacist patriarchal culture. From Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (who coined the term in 1989).
LIBERATORY CONSCIOUSNESS
A mindfulness of systems of oppressions and how individuals have been and are continually socialized to play roles in maintaining these systems. It empowers individuals to take actions to interrupt oppressive acts and institutions with the ultimate goal of deconstructing these systems (Barbara Love). It includes:
Awareness: to take notice of one’s behavior and attitudes as well as an attention to events and actions of others in person’s surroundings
Analysis: applying critical thinking to what is now noticed as well as making decisions on how to interpret and respond to a situation
Action: the decision and follow-through of steps that need to be taken to address a given situation on an
individual or collective level
Accountability/allyship: establishing a support network of individuals that will encourage and sustain one’s commitment to recognition, analysis, and action
MARGINALIZATION
To place in a position of marginal importance, influence, or power. It is the process in which individuals or entire communities of people are systematically blocked from (or denied full access to) various rights, opportunities and resources that are normally available to members of a different group, and which are fundamental to social integration within that particular group (e.g., housing, employment, healthcare, civic engagement, democratic participation, and due process).
As a result of colonialism, Aboriginal communities in Australia lost their land, were forced into destitute areas, lost their sources of livelihood, and were excluded from the labor market. Additionally, Aboriginal communities lost their culture and values through forced assimilation and lost their rights in society. (Wikipedia)
MODEL MINORITY MYTH
A stereotype that generalizes Asian Americans by depicting them as the perfect example of an “if they can do it so can you” success story by highlighting the success of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants with a specific professional and educational background. The model minority myth is successful because it constructs Black people as the “problem” minority. It uses comparisons between social status and the accomplishments of Asian Americans and Black Americans to maintain the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth. It is a historical and presently used tool designed to protect institutionalized white supremacy and validate anti-black racism.
OPPRESSION
Systematic, institutional, individual (and often unconscious and/or internalized) devaluing, marginalizing, targeting, disadvantaging and domination of certain social identities in contrast to a more privileged or powerful social identity for the social, economic and political benefit of the more powerful group. It can be systemic, institutional, individual, and often unconscious and/or internalized. It occurs when some people are denied something of value, while others have ready access. In the U.S., there are many forms of it: racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, anti-semitism, ableism, ageism, etc. Prejudice plus power.
National Institute on Drug Abuse: White students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, heroin at seven times the rate of black students; and have nearly identical rates of marijuana use among high school seniors as black students. Nevertheless black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than white men. (The New Jim Crow)
PATRIARCHY (INSTITUTIONAL/STRUCTURAL/SYSTEMIC SEXISM)
An historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression in which those assigned male, or those exhibiting characteristics that have been assigned male, hold ultimate authority and privilege central to social organization, occupying roles of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property. It implies and entails female subordination. Can result in gendered outcomes even without specific gendered animus articulated between individuals.
Almost half of all contemporary films fail the Bechdel test, which asks if a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
In a patriarchal system, “men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.” (Andrea Dworkin)
POWER
A relational term. It can only be understood as a relationship between human beings in a specific historical, economic and social setting. It must be exercised to be visible, but can also exist in hidden and invisible forms.
- Involves access to, or influence/control over, resources, decision-makers, and state-sanctioned institutions, coupled with the capacity to make and enforce decisions based on this control.
- It is the ability to define reality, for yourself and potentially for others, and to convince, persuade or force others to consent to this reality and enact policies that reinforce it.
- It is also the capacity of an individual or group of people to decide what they want and to act in an organized way to get it.
When all (or most) managers that have decision-making authority at a multi-racial, multi-gender organization are white, straight, male, and cis-gendered.
But that’s not a grassroots way of viewing power. The grassroots way views power as flowing upwards.
PRIVILEGE
Systematic and unearned (or earned through histories of violence and exploitation) favoring, valuing, validating and advantaging of certain social identities at the expense of others. This can range from visible (professional opportunities) to subtle (setting the “norm” against which others are judged). It is not something that is taken by the individual, but something that is given by the formal and informal institutions of society to ALL members of a certain identity. It is usually invisible to those who have it because we’re taught not to see it, but nevertheless it puts us at an advantage over those who do not have it. In the US, these identities include US citizen, male, white (i.e. European ancestry), settler, able-bodied, financially secure, heterosexual, cis-gendered, thin and Christian.
A white person entering a store to shop is allowed to browse freely without interruption or surveillance by security or store owners.
RACIAL RESENTMENT
Defined as the convergence of anti-black sentiments with traditional American views on effort, hard work and individualism. People who express affirmative beliefs like this: “Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors,” and or disagree with beliefs like this: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class,” express high racial resentment.
RACISM
Race prejudice + power. Often manifests as actions, practices, or beliefs that consider individuals to be divided into races, based on color of skin, that can be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to others, or that members of different races should be treated differently.
Supported by the Supreme Court case United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, it is legal for police to take a person’s Mexican appearance into account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain undocumented immigrants. (The New Jim Crow)
INDIVIDUAL RACISM
Prejudiced beliefs expressed or acted upon in the context of social interactions against a person of color. Includes conscious or unconscious actions, cultural norms, values, assumptions, and “personal opinions” that normalize white behavior and create disadvantages for those identified as people of color. It is connected to and learned from broader socio-economic histories and processes and is supported and reinforced by systemic racism.
When someone believes that black men demonstrate low rates of employment in the United States because they are lazy or do not prioritize formal education.
INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
Discriminatory treatment, unfair policies and inequitable opportunities and impacts, based on race, produced and perpetuated by institutions (schools, media, police, courts, etc.). Can result in racialized outcomes even without specific racial animus articulated between individuals.
“We can look to the history of the women’s movement in Britain. The third demand passed in 1971 at the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) national conference focused on reproductive rights, demanding that women have access to abortion and contraception on demand. This demand benefited all women – black or white. In particular it benefited working class women who did not have the resources to be able to afford anything but backstreet abortions. But…the WLM failed to see how sexist restrictions on reproductive rights were also racialised and affected by sexuality. Had they noticed this they would have also demanded adoption rights for lesbian women and made anti-sterilisation demands in solidarity with women of colour in the US. The WLM had blind spots regarding how women’s oppression affected certain women, which then reflected what they fought for, who they related to and who they recruited into the movement. ” (Shanice McBean)
**STRUCTURAL/SYSTEMIC RACISM (SEE WHITE SUPREMACY)
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
An approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims, the offenders, and the involved community, rather than the state and instead of satisfying abstract legal principles. The goal is to repair the harm that has been done, rather than add more layers of harm, by such means as apologizing, returning stolen money, or community service. It also provides help for the offender in order to avoid future offences.
SEXISM
Gender or sex prejudice + power. Often involves imposing a limited or false notion of masculinity and femininity on people with a belief that a person of one sex is intrinsically superior to a person of the other.
When someone assumes tools belong to a male in a mix-gendered household, or that a woman will be responsible for cooking and cleaning the meals for a mix-gendered household.
**INSTITUTIONAL/STRUCTURAL/SYSTEMIC SEXISM (SEE PATRIARCHY)
SOCIALIZATION
The process of consciously and unconsciously learning norms, beliefs, and practices from individuals, media and institutions about who does/does not have power and privilege as it relates to social identities and how the self is positioned in relationship to these identities. “How we are supposed to act.”
Through exposure to popular movies, television shows, plays, books, and contemporary news, a child grows up with an unconscious belief that business executives are straight white men. When this person walks into an office building of mixed race and mixed gender business people to meet with the executive, they look immediately to the white man and ask to speak to him.
STATE VIOLENCE
Acts of violence or terrorism committed by an official state, military or sponsored by a sovereign government outside of the context of a declared war, which targets civilians or shows a disregard for civilian life in attacking targets – either people or facilities – for the purpose of attaining a political or religious goal. There is the symbolic kind of violence, including thought control (ie propaganda, giant parades and nationalist music). There is also the development of penal and legal institutions which often divides up the population into the free and the imprisoned.
VIRTUOUS VICTIM NARRATIVE
A stereotyped role that casts certain individuals (usually feminized, often white women in mainstream culture) as virtuous victims who need protection from “bad guys.” This pattern shows up in a lot of ways. We see the white woman on a pedestal and objectified. She is an image or a caricature, not a person who can inhibit authentic relationships and relationships. She is saintly, sexually pure, and obedient. The white woman is seen as needing protection, and her image, or the defense of her image, has repeatedly been used, usually by white men, to justify violence against communities of color.
“DESERVING” VICTIM
In contrast, the deserving victim is cast as having certain characteristics (gendered, sexualized, & raced) that are coded as inherently worthless and therefore they are inviting themselves to be violated. This can be seen in contexts such as “slut-shaming.”
“The project of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable – and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable.” (Andrea Smith)
WHITE FRAGILITY
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. It 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. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. (Robin DiAngelo)
WHITE SUPREMACY (STRUCTURAL/SYSTEMIC RACISM)
An historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by White peoples and nations of the European continent for the purpose of establishing, maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege. It 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, producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color.
Communities of color in the United States are more likely to be exposed to higher levels of environmental toxins, be employed in more dangerous jobs, live in poorer housing conditions, be exposed to higher rates of violence, face more lethal consequences for reacting to violence, stress and racism, and have lower rates of health care coverage and less access to high quality health care.
WHITENESS
A social construct that has changed over time, and has been used to explain problems with people who have refused to assimilate to the dominant colonizing culture in Europe and the US even after centuries of exposure. As a racial term, it now refers to people of primarily European background. British colonists referred to themselves as “people,” “citizens,” or “Christians,” and others were referred to by their racial categories. In the US, the term did not always include Jews, the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Italians. These groups were included within concept of whiteness as a response to chattel slavery in order to prevent interracial uprisings. The social status of “whiteness” and its benefits are also conferred upon non-white skinned people who obey the systems of power and adhere to certain values.
WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX
An idea held by individuals who grew up with the relative privileges of the United States or Western Europe and expect that their work will be solving the problems of any number of marginalized communities. Based in the notion that white people/Westerners are the solution to others’ problems and can control who gets to be the savior and who has to be saved. This requires portraying the latter as helpless and centers the narrative of the white person while overshadowing or undermining the work others are doing in their own communities.
WHITE FEMALE SAVIOR COMPLEX
It’s the idea that what a white woman has to offer is better than what others have and she should share it. Leads to over-representation of white women in helping professions, international aid projects, restorative justice movements, etc. Inadvertently enforcing colonial norms (“harming by helping”)
WHITE WOMAN
A dominant or mainstream gendered, raced, and classed identity with certain images, messages and narratives that have been used to uphold systems of oppression. It is an identity that those socialized as white and female (even if the person does not use these terms) often have to negotiate with, whether by resisting, conforming, imitating, subverting or distancing.
“We grow up little girls- absorbing a hundred stereotypes about ourselves and our role in life, our secondary position, our destiny to be a helpmate to a man or men. But we also grow up white- absorbing the stereotypes of race, the picture of ourselves as somehow privileged because of the color of our skin. The two mythologies become intertwined, and there is no way to free ourselves from one without dealing with the other. “ (Anne Braden)
Definitions, quotes and examples compiled from many sources, including Andrea Ayvazian, Andrea Smith, Black Girl Dangerous, Class Action, Kathryn Mathers, Dr. Wade Nobles, Peggy McIntosh, Love, Race and Liberation, Barbara Love, OpenSource Leadership, Racial Equity Tools, Robin DiAngelo, Colors of Resistance, Challenging White Supremacy, Isaac Giron, Anne Braden, Wikipedia, and Barbara Major, & People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Please do not directly credit WNC with these definitions.