This Glossary Of Anti-Racism Terms Will Help You Speak Out

While some activists advocate to defund, but keep, police forces, some activists advocate following that with abolition, which seeks to dismantle the prison-industrial complex (PIC) entirely.

According to activist group Critical Resistance, PIC abolition aims to eliminate imprisonment, policing, and surveillance as responses to harm. Instead of investing in more police and prisons, abolitionists want to get rid of these things entirely, in favor of restorative and transformative justice.

Anti-Blackness refers to systemic racism and oppression specifically against Black people, which includes the devaluation of Black lives, casual violence against Black people, and the unwillingness to acknowledge their humanity.

Anti-Blackness is in part overt racism against Black people; this is the type of racism that is blatantly visible, whether through slurs, hate crimes, police brutality, or other targeted attacks. The second part is covert or unspoken systemic racism, which plays a major role in Black people’s socioeconomic status in the United States. (See “institutional racism” above.) Unlike overt racism, covert racism typically hides behind existing laws and institutions, and often takes on a guise of “political correctness” to seem palatable. Covert anti-Blackness manifests in everything from racist housing laws and Black maternal mortality rates to the disproportionate damage imposed by climate change on predominantly Black neighborhoods. In both its overt and covert forms, white and non-Black people of color may perpetuate anti-Blackness in their communities and institutions.

The commitment to identifying and fighting racism in any form, including in yourself and your own life. It is an active stance, as opposed to simply “not being racist.” According to Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How To Be Antiracist, being non-racist implies neutrality, and neutrality in the face of racism simply upholds existing racist systems.

An acronym for Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Activists have started using the term BIPOC more frequently than “people of color” to highlight the disproportionate forms of oppression faced by Black and Indigenous people, while still building solidarity among all people of color.

However, this term should not be used when speaking to or about a specific group of people — if the issues you're discussing specifically affect, say, Black people, make sure you say that, rather than use an umbrella term like "BIPOC" or "people of color."

The #BlackLivesMatter movement and network was launched in 2013 by three Black organizers: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Seven years later, Black Lives Matter is both a rallying cry and an activist network demanding justice and humanity for Black people — not only in light of police killings, but also in fields ranging from education and housing to electoral politics and health care. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” refers to the fact that Black lives should matter, but that existing systems and institutions do not currently treat them as though they do.

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which private, for-profit companies have control over a country’s trade and industry, rather than workers or the government. For decades, anti-racist activists and scholars have argued that capitalism and racism are closely intertwined, while some activists have denounced capitalist structures’ tendency to value economic resources or productivity over people. In 1983, a university professor named Cedric J. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” primarily to describe the process by which white people and institutions derive social and economic value from people of color. As critical race theorist Cheryl Harris wrote, the fact that the United States was built on the “hyper-exploitation of Black labor” and the “conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture” was a key example of how capitalism was weaponized against Black and Indigenous people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking fashion, music, style, or other trends from another culture. More specifically, cultural appropriation refers to when someone from a dominant culture takes elements from the culture of a group that has historically been oppressed or marginalized and uses them for the dominant group’s benefit. (This is what distinguishes cultural appropriation from acts of cultural exchange.) Examples of cultural appropriation including donning a Halloween costume depicting Indigenous people, or sporting looks that “borrow” Black hairstyles.

Activists who advocate to defund the police demand that instead of putting more money into policing in order to reform it, governments should direct that money away from the police and into other resources, like education, health care, and housing in marginalized communities.

This concept does not call for immediately eliminating police, and it does not mean that there will be no one responding to calls for help. Instead, activists want resources that currently go toward policing to instead be used to address specific community needs and prevent the root causes of crime, thereby eliminating the need for police.

Environmental racism refers to the disproportionate impact of climate change — along with pollution and other environmental risks — on communities of color. The term “environmental racism” was initially coined in the 1980s by the Rev. Ben Chavis, in part to describe the phenomenon of pollution-producing facilities like factories or landfills predominantly being built in or near poor communities of color, frequently without their knowledge or input. Even President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed the impact of environmental racism in a 2018 report, which found that people of color have a greater likelihood of living near polluters — and therefore of breathing polluted air.

Eurocentrism refers to a worldview that centers Europe and European perspectives and positions European narratives and history over that of other cultures and regions. In the United States, many textbooks, classroom activities, and essays treat European versions of history and culture as the standard. As the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Germany’s Bielefeld University pointed out, a Eurocentric approach to history and geopolitics often disregards the colonial violence inflicted by Europe on much of the world and implies European perspectives are dominant or reliable narrators.

Institutional racism looks at the big picture of how racism is enshrined in systems at every level of society, and affects people of color in all aspects of their lives. You may also hear the related terms “structural racism” and “systemic racism” to describe how the social structures and systems in place today were designed to benefit people in positions of power — namely, straight cisgender white men. Institutional racism has manifested in things like voter suppression, the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latinx people, and the War on Drugs.

Internalized racism describes what happens when people of color accept or normalize the racism in the society around them, often due to the racism and stigma they have experienced. People who internalize racism may not know they are doing it, but doing so may cause them to hold negative beliefs about their own identity, race, and community. While the experience of internalized racism will differ depending on a person's individual community, on a systemic level, internalized racism is often the product of systems that reward people of color for upholding or colluding with systems of whiteness, power, and privilege. People of color can’t force white people to confront their own racism and privilege, but they can work on their own internalized racism.

Intersectionality refers to the overlap of systems of oppression — including sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. — and the way they disproportionately affect people with intersecting identities. (For example, the unique ways in which Black women are subjected to both racism and sexism.)

The theory of intersectionality was developed by lawyer and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. In 2020, Crenshaw defined intersectionality in an interview with TIME as “a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.” Today, activists commonly use the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression interact with and exacerbate one another.

Microaggressions are subtly discriminatory incidents, statements, or other experiences. Examples of racist microaggressions can include being asked to explain your origins, being compared to other people of your race, or assumptions about your intentions based on your race and appearance. Unlike explicit racial slurs or racist attacks, microaggressions manifest in more insidious ways, and can have a lifelong negative impact on physical and mental health, particularly when they happen frequently and the effects are compounded. The term “microaggression” was originally coined by Dr. Chester Pierce in 1970 and subsequently used by Columbia professor Derald Sue.

Prejudice is a preconceived idea about a particular group of people, often without justification and/or without a basis in personal experience. Prejudice is a sociological term used to describe personal beliefs and biases about others, (often negative, but sometimes positive) and is frequently associated with racial bias.

But while prejudice and racism are connected, they are not the same in cause or impact. Someone in a position of privilege may encounter prejudice — for example, a blond person who finds blond jokes offensive — but racism is a form of structural oppression against BIPOC in which prejudices have resulted in systemic discrimination, such as inequitable access to housing, employment, health care, and many other essential resources. Put more simply, racism is often made up of prejudices that have systemic consequences due to a majority group’s power and privilege. In June 2020, at the urging of Drake University graduate Kennedy Mitchum, Merriam-Webster revised its definition of the term “racism” for the first time in decades to explicitly highlight the systemic nature of racism.

Race and ethnicity overlap, but they are not the same thing. Ethnicity is an anthropological term used to refer to people in a certain geographic region or the descendants of those people who share cultural markers like nationality, language, and culture. Race, on the other hand, refers to physical, social, and biological attributes, like skin color. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stanford University's director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, told Oprah Mag in 2019 that “race is something we believe to be heritable, and ethnicity is something learned; however, this masks the history of how race has been used to create these concepts for political power.”

Unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, refers to the social stereotypes, prejudices, or beliefs that people may unknowingly develop about people of a different race, gender, or other social group. It is the opposite of conscious — or explicit — bias, which can manifest through intentional acts of discrimination via policies or individual actions. According to The Guardian, the concept of unconscious bias may help explain why we still see so much inequality, even when various rights and protections have been written into law.

Examples of unconscious bias include employers hiring or interviewing employees with whiter-sounding names, or doctors not taking Black patients — especially Black women — as seriously when they report pain or other difficulties. Unconscious bias can manifest in different ways depending on the people involved and where they are, but even people who consider themselves “progressive” or “not racist” are not immune to it.

White fragility describes the feelings of discomfort and defensiveness a white person may feel when confronted with the realities of racism and inequality. Robin DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” in 2011 to describe the disbelief that many white people feel when asked to challenge their own ideas about race and racism. According to DiAngelo, white people often live their lives in segregation without having meaningful relationships with BIPOC — and without realizing they are inherently complicit in systems of racism and white supremacy. DiAngelo further elaborates on this concept in her 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, though some have critiqued the book for failing to center contemporary Black scholars in its exploration of whiteness.

This term refers to the way in which institutions and systems give white people an advantage due to the color of their skin. The term “white privilege” does not signify that white people do not experience poverty or other hardships. Instead, it indicates that any systemic difficulties a white person encounters will not be the result of their skin color.

White supremacy refers to the concept and social practice of treating whiteness as preferential or superior. However, the term goes beyond individual beliefs that white people are superior, and includes systems of oppression and exploitation based in this assumption.

White supremacy includes the historical enslavement and genocide of BIPOC, as well as more modern manifestations like redlining, voter suppression, and patterns of thinking that devalue non-white people. In a 2017 document for the Catalyst Project — an anti-racist center for political education in the San Francisco Bay Area — Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, an American Chicana feminist organizer and educator, wrote that it is important to talk about white supremacy in the context of a system, rather than simply of “personal prejudices and individual acts of discrimination.”