Antiracism Resources

Race – a social construct, not a biological fact. Historically, race and racial categorizations were created to support the view that some groups of people are superior and some are inferior. Race designations and the way racial categorizations are enforced have changed over time. Source: adapted from Racial Equity Tools Glossary

Racism – This definition has changed over time from referring to individual prejudice to now refer to the systemic and structural ways that our society is white-centered, white-dominant, and white-identified. It is an ongoing structure of society that gives advantage to whites at the expense of people of other racial groups. Racism is ingrained in almost every aspect of our culture and society. It affects us all – positively or negatively, directly or indirectly – on a daily basis. This definition of racism is structural and systemic. It does not apply to individuals and it is not concerned with personal feelings or attitudes. Source: PC(USA) Facing Racism Guide

Diversity – The Bible insistently reveals that God loves diversity and justice. This is seen in the wide variety of creation in which God delights. It is heard in the words of the prophets, who reject oppression and commend justice as true worship. It is embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, who resists the power of empire and values all persons, regardless of status, as children of God.
Source: PC (USA) Facing Racism – Churchwide Antiracism Policy – Vision Statement.

Diversity includes all the ways in which people differ, and it encompasses all the different characteristics that make one individual or group different from another. It is all-inclusive and recognizes everyone and every group as part of the diversity that should be valued. A broad definition includes not only race, ethnicity, and gender—the groups that most often come to mind when the term “diversity” is used—but also age, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, and physical appearance. It also involves different ideas, perspectives, and values.
Source: Racial Equity Tools Glossary.

Equality – ensuring that every individual has an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives and talents, and believing that no one should have poorer life chances because of where, what or whom they were born, what they believe, or whether they have a disability. Equality recognizes that historically, certain groups of people with particular characteristics (race, disability, sex and sexuality) have experienced discrimination.
Source: Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Inclusion – the act of creating environments in which any individual or group can be and feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued to fully participate. An inclusive and welcoming climate embraces differences and offers respect in words and actions for all people. Source: Building Bridges; UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been in the news lately and may be hard to understand just what it is. Developed by scholars in the 1970’s and 80’s in response to their concern about a lack of racial progress following the civil rights movements of the 60’s. CRT is a way of thinking about American history through the lens of racism. Central tenets of CRT are that race is a socially constructed concept and that racism is systemic in this nation’s institutions and they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society. Click here for more on understanding CRT.

White Privilege – The unearned, mostly unacknowledged social advantage white people have over other racial groups simply because they are white. Source: adapted from Racial Equity Tools Glossary.

Individual Racism includes the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. This can be deliberately done, or a person may act to perpetuate or support racism without knowing that they are doing so. For example, telling a racist joke, avoiding persons of color whom you do not know personally (like crossing the street to avoid such an encounter), believing in the inherent superiority of whites over other groups, or simply accepting things as they are and that they cannot be changed.
SOURCE: Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens, and Barbara Major (2005).

Interpersonal Racism – Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals as the name implies. It is when we bring our private beliefs into our interactions with others as in public expressions of racial prejudice, hate, bias, and bigotry between individuals. SOURCE: Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities by Keith Lawrence and Terry Keleher (2004).

Internalized Racism – 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.

SOURCE and for more information: Donna Bivens, Internalized Racism: A Definition (Women’s Theological Center, 1995).

Institutional Racism – 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.

Examples:
• Government policies that explicitly restricted the ability of people to get loans to buy or improve their homes in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African Americans (also known as “red-lining”).
• City sanitation department policies that concentrate trash transfer stations and other environmental hazards disproportionately in communities of color.

SOURCE and for more information: Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens, and Barbara Major (2005).

Cultural racism refers to representations, messages and stories conveying the idea that behaviors and values associated with white people or “whiteness” are automatically “better” or more “normal” than those associated with other racially defined groups. Cultural racism shows up in advertising, movies, history books, definitions of patriotism, and in policies and laws. Cultural racism is also a powerful force in maintaining systems of internalized supremacy and internalized racism. It does that by influencing collective beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior, what is seen as beautiful, and the value placed on various forms of expression. All of these cultural norms and values in the U.S. have explicitly or implicitly racialized ideals and assumptions (for example, what “nude” means as a color, which facial features and body types are considered beautiful, which child-rearing practices are considered appropriate.)

SOURCE: RacialEquityTools.org

Racist Policies – any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between or among racial groups. Policies are written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups. Racist policies are also expressed through other terms such as “structural racism” or “systemic racism”. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.

SOURCE: Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019.

Related Resources: Laws and Policies

Structural Racism – The normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics – historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal – that routinely advantage Whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. Structural racism 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. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution because it involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually reproducing old and producing new forms of racism. Structural racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism – all other forms of racism emerge from structural racism.

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 health care coverage, access, and quality of care, and systematic refusal by the nation to fix these things.

SOURCE:
1. Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities by Keith Lawrence, Aspen Institute on Community Change, and Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, for the Race and Public Policy Conference (2004).
2. Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens, and Barbara Major (2005).

Whiteness –

1. The term white, referring to people, was created by Virginia slave owners and colonial rules in the 17th century. It replaced terms like Christian and Englishman to distinguish European colonists from Africans and indigenous peoples. European colonial powers established whiteness as a legal concept after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, during which indentured servants of European and African descent had united against the colonial elite. The legal distinction of white separated the servant class on the basis of skin color and continental origin. The creation of ‘whiteness’ meant giving privileges to some, while denying them to others with the justification of biological and social inferiority.
2. Whiteness itself refers to the specific dimensions of racism that serve to elevate white people over people of color. This definition counters the dominant representation of racism in mainstream education as isolated in discrete behaviors that some individuals may or may not demonstrate, and goes beyond naming specific privileges (McIntosh, 1988). Whites are theorized as actively shaped, affected, defined, and elevated through their racialization and the individual and collective consciousness formed within it … Whiteness is thus conceptualized as a constellation of processes and practices rather than as a discrete entity (i.e. skin color alone). Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives, and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

SOURCE:
1. www.racialequitytools.org/glossary
2. PBS, “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (2018–2019 relaunch of 2003 series).
3. Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility” (International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011).

Colonization can be defined as some form of invasion, dispossession and subjugation of a people. The invasion need not be military; it can begin—or continue—as geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban or industrial encroachments. The result of such incursion is the dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants. This is often legalized after the fact. The long-term result of such massive dispossession is institutionalized inequality. The colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized.

Ongoing and legacy colonialism impact power relations in most of the world today. For example, white supremacy as a philosophy was developed largely to justify European colonial exploitation of the Global South (including enslaving African peoples, extracting resources from much of Asia and Latin America, and enshrining cultural norms of whiteness as desirable both in colonizing and colonizer nations).

SOURCE: Emma LaRocque, PhD, “Colonization and Racism,” (Aboriginal Perspectives). Also see Racism and Colonialism, edited by Robert Ross (1982), and Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” (Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, 2012).

Bigotry – Intolerant prejudice that glorifies one’s own group and denigrates members of other groups.

SOURCE: National Conference for Community and Justice, St. Louis Region. Unpublished handout used in the Dismantling Racism Institute program.

Implicit biases, also known as unconscious or hidden bias, 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.

SOURCE: Cheryl Staats, State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013, Kirwan Institute, The Ohio State University.

Accountability – the ways in which individuals and communities hold themselves to their goals and actions, and acknowledge the values and groups to which they are responsible.

To be accountable, one must be visible, with a transparent agenda and process.. Accountability demands commitment. Accountability also requires some sense of urgency and becoming a true stakeholder in the outcome. Accountability can be externally imposed (legal or organizational requirements), or internally applied (moral, relational, faith-based, or recognized as some combination of the two) on a continuum from the institutional and organizational level to the individual level. From a relational point of view, accountability is not always doing it right. Sometimes it’s really about what happens after it’s done wrong.

SOURCE: Accountability and White Anti-Racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work, Bonnie Berman Cushing with Lila Cabbil, Margery Freeman, Jeff Hitchcock, and Kimberly Richards (2010).

Racial Justice – The systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice—or racial equity—goes beyond “anti-racism.” It is not just the absence of discrimination and inequities, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures. Source: Race Forward, “Race Reporting Guide” (2015).

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.

Examples of different ethnic groups are: Cape Verdean, Haitian, African American (Black); Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese (Asian); Cherokee, Mohawk, Navaho (Native American); Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican (Latino); Polish, Irish, and Swedish (White).

SOURCE: Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, Routledge, 1997.

Microagression – a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority) also : behavior or speech that is characterized by such comments or actions.

Source: Microaggression.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/microaggression.

Cultural Misappropriation – is not the neutrality of cultural exchange, appreciation, and appropriation because of the instance of colonialism and capitalism; Rather, Cultural Misappropriation occurs when a cultural fixture of a marginalized culture/community is copied, mimicked, or recreated by the dominant culture against the will of the original community and, above all else, commodified. One can understand the use of “misappropriation” as a distinguishing tool because it assumes that there are 1) instances of neutral appropriation, 2) the specifically referenced instance is non-neutral and problematic, even if benevolent in intention, 3) some act of theft or dishonest attribution has taken place, and 4) moral judgement of the act of appropriation is subjective to the specific culture from which is being engaged.

SOURCE: Devyn Springer, “Resources on What ‘Cultural Appropriation’ Is and Isn’t”.

Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic, and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves this while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because they recruit and use POC as racialized props.

Examples include:
• Recruiting POC to formal leadership positions while keeping all the power.
• Only hiring POC for POC “stuff.”
• Convening Special “Diversity Councils” without building POC leadership in positions of power.
• Using POC as a mouthpiece and shield against other POC.

SOURCE: Helen Kim Ho, “8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits,” The Nonprofit Revolution (2017).

BIPOC – refers to “Black and/or Indigenous People of Color.” While “POC” or People of Color is often used as well, BIPOC explicitly leads with Black and Indigenous identities, which helps to counter anti-Black racism and invisibilization of Native communities.

SOURCE: Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox for Advancing Racial Equity for Arts and Cultural Organizations, Nayantara Sen & Terry Keleher, Race Forward (2021).

Intersectionality means exposing [one’s] multiple identities to help clarify the ways in which a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression. For example, a Black woman in America does not experience gender inequalities in exactly the same way as a white woman, nor racial oppression identical to that experienced by a Black man. Each race and gender intersection produces a qualitatively distinct life.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw says that intersectionality is simply a prism to see the interactive effects of various forms of discrimination and disempowerment. It looks at the way that racism, many times, interacts with patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia and sees that the overlapping vulnerabilities created by these systems actually create specific kinds of challenges.

SOURCE:
1. Intergroup Resources, “Intersectionality” (2012).
2. Otamere Guobadia, “Kimberlé Crenshaw and Lady Phyll Talk Intersectionality, Solidarity, and Self-Care” (2018).

Prejudice is a pre-judgment or unjustifiable, and usually negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward another group and its members. Such negative attitudes are typically based on unsupported generalizations (or stereotypes) that deny the right of individual members of certain groups to be recognized and treated as individuals with individual characteristics.

SOURCE: Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change Anti-Racism Initiative, A Community Builder’s Tool Kit, Appendix I (2000).

Racial Equity – 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 that fail to eliminate them.

SOURCE:
1. Center for Assessment and Policy Development.
2. OpenSource Leadership Strategies.

Racialization – the very complex and contradictory process through which groups come to be designated as being of a particular “race” and on that basis subjected to differential and/or unequal treatment. Put simply, “racialization [is] the process of manufacturing and utilizing the notion of race in any capacity.” While white people are also racialized, this process is often rendered invisible or normative to those designated as white. As a result, white people may not see themselves as part of a race but still maintain the authority to name and racialize “others.”

SOURCE: Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, “Racialization” (2018) / Calgary Anti-Racism Education, “CARED Glossary” (2020).

A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.

And, a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between or among racial groups. Policies are written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups. Racist policies are also expressed through other terms such as “structural racism” or “systemic racism”. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.

SOURCE: Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Random House, 2019.

Racial Wealth Gap: There is significant wealth inequality in the United States, and it is particularly unequal when we disaggregate measures of wealth by race. White households in the U.S. on average have 10 times more wealth than Black households and 8 times more wealth than Latinx households.
This difference in wealth between White households and Black and Latinx households is known as the racial wealth gap.

SOURCE: The Chicago Community Trust: https://www.cct.org/about/about-the-racial-wealth-gap/

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed into law and signed by President Obama on October 28, 2009. This Act expanded the federal hate crime law, intended to protect against hate crimes committed on the basis of a person’s characteristics of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality, to also include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Emmett Till Antilynching Act – The Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed into law, and signed by President Biden on March 29, 2022. This Act amends the “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” and defines lynching as any conspired bias-motivated offense that results in death or serious bodily injury.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till_Antilynching_Act and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard_and_James_Byrd_Jr._Hate_Crimes_Prevention_Act

Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday. [history.com]

Pride Month is a month-long observance in celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people—and the history, culture, and contributions of these people and their communities. Pride Month (and earlier events like Gay Pride Day) traces back to a parade held in New York City in 1970 to mark the one-year anniversary of what became known as the Stonewall Uprising. This event, sometimes referred to simply as Stonewall, started on June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, a New York City bar frequented by gay and gender non-conforming people (at a time when terms like LGBTQ didn’t yet exist). Source: dictionary.com

The official Presbyterian position on LGTBQ+ people has evolved since 1970. In 1987, the General Assembly (PCUSA) eliminated church laws governing the private sexual behavior of consenting adults. Gay clergy became allowed in 2011 and gay marriage in 2015.
Source: PCUSA

The Great Migration was the movement of some six million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between 1916 and 1970. It occurred in two waves, before and after the Great Depression. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South. By 1970, nearly half of all African Americans lived in Northern cities. Many moved because of poor economic conditions in the South and ongoing racial oppression from Jim Crow laws. Reports from the North of good wages and better living conditions also motivated many to move there.

The greater economic and educational opportunities in the North led to an explosion of artistic expression in music and literature, seen in the Harlem Renaissance and the sound of blues music. The Great Migration was a factor in desegregating sports, and in leading to the Civil Rights movement.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration

An excellent resource on this time in our history is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson.

Cultural representations refer to popular stereotypes, images, frames and narratives that are socialized and reinforced by media, language and other forms of mass communication and “common sense.” Cultural representations can be positive or negative, but from the perspective of the dismantling structural racism analysis, too often cultural representations depict people of color in ways that are dehumanizing, perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes, and have the overall effect of allowing unfair treatment within the society as a whole to seem fair, or ‘natural.’
Source: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/structural-racism-definition/

Reparation – States have a legal duty to acknowledge and address widespread or systematic human rights violations, in cases where the state caused the violations or did not seriously try to prevent them. Reparations initiatives seek to address the harms caused by these violations. They can take the form of compensating for the losses suffered, which helps overcome some of the consequences of abuse. They can also be future oriented—providing rehabilitation and a better life to victims—and help to change the underlying causes of abuse. Reparations publicly affirm that victims are rights-holders entitled to redress.

SOURCE: International Center for Transitional Justice.

Xenophobia is any attitude, behavior, practice, or policy that explicitly or implicitly reflects the belief that immigrants are inferior to the dominant group of people. Xenophobia is reflected in interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels oppression and is a function of White supremacy.

SOURCE: Lee Cokorinos, “The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement,” The Black Agenda Report (2007).
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The Combahee River Collective was an organization formed in 1974 by some of the strongest leaders of the Black feminist movement. Dismayed by the feminist movement, which they believed was dominated by middle-class white women, and the black-nationalist organizations which were overwhelmingly dominated by the male viewpoint, they strove to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their experiences as Black women. The Collective is best known for its “Combahee River Collective Statement” notable for its introduction of the term “identity politics.”

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

SOURCE: newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/until-black-women-are-free-none-of-us-will-be-free; teachingamericanhistory.org/document/combahee-river-collective-statement. For more informative essays on the history of African America, read “Four Hundred Souls” edited byX. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain.
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Black Liberation Theology was founded by the Rev. James Cone. It began on July 31, 1966, when 51 black pastors bought a full page ad in the New York Times and demanded a more aggressive approach to eradicating racism. The movement has its roots in 1960s civil-rights activism and draws much of its inspiration from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm A. It is characterized “mainly a theology that sees God as concerned with the poor and the weak.”

According to Cone, at the core of black liberation theology is an effort — in a white-dominated society, in which black has been defined as evil — to make the gospel relevant to the life and struggles of American blacks, and to help black people learn to love themselves. It’s an attempt, he says “to teach people how to be both unapologetically black and Christian at the same time.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89236116

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. This is the beginning of an article found at https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws
Click on the link to learn more about this topic.

Christian nationalism is an academic term that encompasses different degrees of intensity. It includes less harmful, white evangelicals who believe politicians and courts should eliminate barriers separating church and state—perhaps by allowing for prayer in schools or other public spaces—as well as those with a “dominionist” perspective, who feel  compelled to bring the nation’s institutions under control of people who will enforce “God’s law.”  The term also includes violent extremists willing to tear down democratic processes to bring about their vision of a white Christian nation. 

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/christian-nationalist-identity-marjorie-taylor-greene.html