Terms to Know
Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 9 of this newsletter! This week’s topic is Language & Terminology and it looks a little different than past editions. Think of it as an ever-evolving resource. Next week, in Part II of this newsletter, I’m going to dive deeper on language as it pertains to the Black community.
One of the most important aspects to me when discussing race is being able to say what I mean and to fully comprehend what those around me are saying. Language and the vocabulary we use in our anti-racism work becomes powerful when it is specific. Let’s get into it!
*NOTE: Since writing this newsletter, I actually wrote an entire book on this topic called ACTIV-ATING: Your Vocabulary, through my company, ACTIV-ISM
Race: A social construct developed in the late 19th and early 20th century in Western Europe, and claimed that humans could be divided into racial groups based on physical and behavioural traits linked to ethnicity, nationality, and related concepts like shared language. These theories were influenced by colonialism and imperialism, and the desire to show that non-white groups were inferior in order to justify the actions of Western nations. These false notions of racial difference have become embedded in the beliefs and behaviours of society, especially in Western nations. ‘Race’ is strongly linked to skin colour.
Race Classifications According to the US Census :
American Indian or Alaska Native: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.
Asian: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Black or African American: A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.
White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
Ethnicity: A social construct that 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. It is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art or physical appearance. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, it is sometimes possible for individuals or groups to leave one ethnic group and become part of another. The social construct that ethnic groups share a similar gene pool has been contradicted within the scientific community as evidenced by data finding more genetic variation within ethnic groups compared to between ethnic groups.
Ethnic Classifications According to the US Census:
Hispanic or Latino: A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. The term, "Spanish origin", can be used in addition to "Hispanic or Latino".
Not Hispanic or Latino
Read more about why this is the only ethnic classification here.
Nationality: A legal identification of a person in international law, establishing the person as a subject, a national, of a sovereign state. It affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state against other states.
Racism: Racial prejudice + power. Power here is defined as the authority granted through social structures and conventions—possibly supported by force or the threat of force—and access to means of communications and resources, to reinforce racial prejudice, regardless of the falsity of the underlying prejudiced assumption. Racism cannot be understood without understanding that power is not only an individual relationship but a cultural one, and that power relationships are shifting constantly.
Discrimination: Unfair or unequal treatment of an individual (or group) based on certain characteristics, including age, disability, ethnicity, gender, marital status, national origin, race, religition, sexual orientation, etc.
Prejudice: Prejudice is a baseless and often negative preconception or attitude toward members of a group. Negative feelings, stereotyped beliefs and a tendency to discriminate. Although prejudice is a noun and not a verb, the behavior is often influenced by bias. Once the switch is made from "thought/feeling" to "action," discrimination has occurred.
Xenophobia: The fear or hatred of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between an ingroup and an outgroup and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, a desire to eliminate their presence, and fear of losing national, ethnic or racial identity.
Systemic Racism: "Individual" racism is not created in a vacuum but instead emerges from a society's foundational beliefs and "ways" of seeing/doing things, and is manifested in organizations, institutions, and systems (including education).
Colorism: Prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color
White Privilege: White privilege is the unearned, mostly unacknowledged social advantage white people have over other racial groups simply because they are white. The two-word term packs a double whammy that inspires pushback. 1) The word white creates discomfort among those who are not used to being defined or described by their race. And 2) the word privilege (especially for poor and rural white people) sounds like a word that doesn’t belong to them—like a word that suggests they have never struggled. This defensiveness derails the conversation, which means, unfortunately, that defining white privilege must often begin with defining what it’s not.
White Fragility: discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice.
Microaggressions: Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups. Often, they are never meant to hurt - acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed regularly.
Implicit Bias: The attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. They are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control and reside deep in the subconscious. The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages, early life experiences, the media and news programming.
Allyship: an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group. Read my blog post on allyship here.
Cultural Appropriation: The adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from marginalized cultures. Cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a marginalized culture by members of a dominant culture, these elements are used outside of their original cultural context. Often, members of the originating culture expressly state they do not condone being used in this way because the original meaning of these cultural elements are lost or distorted when they are removed from their originating cultural contexts, and such displays are disrespectful and can even be a form of desecration.
Toxic Positivity: Positivity becomes toxic when it is implied that we should always look on the bright side at all times and not allow ourselves to feel difficult emotions. The downside of positivity culture is that it can vilify the normal range of human emotional experience. Toxic positivity undermines the pain of others. Example: We are all one human race, I don’t see color. Let’s focus on the positives instead of always talking about oppression.
Emotional Labor: When a person must constantly manage their emotions—either by suppressing them, showing them, or redefining them— in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.
Tone Policing: Tone policing describes a diversionary tactic used when a person purposely turns away from the message behind another’s argument in order to focus solely on the delivery of it.
Historical Terms
The Black Codes: Restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.
War on Drugs: The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Richard Nixon started the “War on Drugs” and his domestic policy chief was quotes saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
The 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Scholars, activists and prisoners have linked that exception clause to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor.
The Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This gave citizenship to Black people born in America.
The Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”— The 15th Amendment granting African-American men the right to vote was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory practices were used to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. State legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of Black voters in the decades following Reconstruction. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied African-Americans their right to vote.
Having Conversations About Race
Intersectionality: Intersectionality is a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem as affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexity of prejudices they face.
Environmental Racism: The disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It refers to the institutional rules, regulations, policies or government and/or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based upon race.Communities consisting primarily of people of color continue to bear a disproportionate burden of this nation’s air, water and waste problems. Read my blog post on environmental racism here.
Prison Industrial Complex: The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. This term is derived from the "military–industrial complex" of the 1950s and describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit. Read my blog post on the prison industrial complex here.
Ebonics: A portmanteau, a blend of the words ebony or black and phonics or sounds. The term was created in 1973 by a group of Black scholars who disliked the negative connotations of terms like 'Nonstandard Negro English' that had been coined in the 1960s when the first modern large-scale linguistic studies of African American speech-communities began. Scholars who prefer the term Ebonics wish to highlight the African roots of African American speech and its connections with languages spoken elsewhere in the Black Diaspora, e.g. Jamaica or Nigeria.
Redlining: The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Black inner-city neighborhoods were most likely to be redlined. Investigations found that lenders would make loans to lower-income Whites but not to middle- or upper-income African Americans. The result of this redlining in real estate could still be felt decades later. Examples of redlining can be found in a variety of financial services, including not only mortgages but also student loans, credit cards, and insurance.
Tokenism: The practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a marginalized group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.
