Baltimore Racial Justice Action

BRJA

our definitions

Shared definitions are crucial to productive conversations. Most of us have been taught ambiguous or even incorrect meanings of the terms we use to talk about inequity. Drawing from racial equity experts across the country, BRJA uses the following terms & definitions to address racial justice:

PREJUDICE:

A positive or negative attitude toward a person or group, formed without just grounds or sufficient knowledge, and not likely to be changed in spite of new evidence or contrary argument. Prejudice is an attitude. All social groups can possess them. They are often expressed through code words and symbolic issues rather than overtly offensive language.

DISCRIMINATION:

Unequal treatment of people based on their membership in a group. In contrast to prejudice, discrimination is a behavior. To discriminate is to treat a person, not on the basis of their intrinsic individual qualities, but on the basis of a prejudgment about a group. Discrimination can manifest in the law or in practice without legal sanction.

OPPRESSION:

The systematic exploitation of one social group by another for its own benefit; it involves institutional control, ideological domination and the imposition of the dominant group’s culture on the marginalized group. It is pervasive – woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individual consciousness. It is restricting – structural limits significantly shape a person’s life chances and sense of possibility in ways beyond the individual’s control. It is hierarchical – the dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of subordinated or targeted groups.

PRIVILEGE:

The benefits automatically received from being a member of the dominant group. Privilege includes not having to think about the implications of one’s identity because of automatically fitting in the category that is the “norm” or the “standard” for the society. The advantages created for members of the dominant group are often invisible to them, or are considered “rights” available to everyone as opposed to “privileges” awarded to only some individuals and groups.

DIVERSITY:

Speaks only to the statistical presence of individuals of varying physical characteristics, cultures, or identities in a group. Diversity is silent on the subject of equity. In an anti-oppression context, therefore, the issue is not diversity, but rather equity. Often when people talk about diversity, they are thinking only of the “non-dominant” groups. Diversity requires a mix of people of different races, genders, sexual orientations, etc.

RACISM:

In the United States of America, racism refers to individual, cultural, institutional, and systemic ways by which differential consequences are created for groups historically or currently defined as white being advantaged, and groups historically or currently defined as non-white/people of color (African, Asian, Latinx, Native American, etc.) as disadvantaged. Simply put, racism can be defined as prejudice plus power; the power of some—white people—to normalize and perpetuate at every level of society and throughout time the oppression of another—people of color/non-whites.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION:

Use of cultural symbols, such as dress, hair style, religious artifacts, ceremonies, etc., by someone who is not part of the culture from which the symbols come. Cultural appropriation is usually considered to be a majority group (usually white people) mining a minority culture for the jewels of its heritage for their own pleasure or benefit while the voices of that culture remain silent or silenced.

WHITE SUPREMACY:

This is a “hot button” term because it is often associated only with extreme groups of white people who openly express hatred of people of color. However, it is a normalized belief that “white culture” – attitudes, behavior, beliefs, standards, history, values, etc. – is superior to all others. We may not say that we believe this, but we often act on the belief when we expect all other groups to meet that standard. It is the term for the idea of white superiority and is the foundation of all U.S. racism.

EQUITY:

The condition and the process together that would be achieved if the identities assigned to historically oppressed groups no longer acted as the most powerful predictor of how one fares. The root causes of inequities, not just their manifestations, would be eliminated. This includes elimination of policies, practices, attitudes and cultural messages that reinforce or fail to eliminate disproportional outcomes (economic, educational, health, criminal justice, etc.) by group identity.

Baltimore Racial Justice Action (BRJA) (2016)