Glossary
Accountability Refers to how people hold themselves to a set of community standards and responsibility. Accountability requires any violator of those standards or responsibilities to be present and confronted with a complete examination of the impact of their action. Accountability can be imposed by an external institution, such as a court or organization, but it can also be applied internally through a process of reflection, whether spiritual, faith-based, or otherwise.
Ally An ally works externally to support and amplify the struggles of oppressed groups. Internally, they commit to recognizing and examining their own privilege—be it racially based or stemming from a gender or class difference—while committing to reducing their own footprint in the system of oppression that targets these groups. Allies operate with the understanding that oppression impacts every community, even if it’s only directed at one group in particular.
Antisemitism A hatred or fear of Jews, Judaism, Jewish culture, and related symbols, either by disparagement or generic bias.
Assimilation In anthropological and sociological settings, assimilation is the absorption of individuals of colonized cultures and heritages into the mainstream. Colloquially, it is embodied in the “love it or leave it” rebuke to critics of the status quo. After then-President Donald Trump resurfaced this rhetoric in 2018, Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, told Mother Jones, “My initial thought is that it sort of conveys—particularly to people of color—that this is not our home.”1
Ban the Box Ban the Box refers to state and national campaigns for fair chance employment, specifically by removing questions from initial job application forms that reference criminal history. In some states, checks for crimes relating to the employer’s specific industry may be conducted after a full assessment of the applicant’s qualifications. Nearly 77 million Americans are impacted by the stigma of incarceration when it comes to finding employment after serving their sentence.2 Ban the Box advocates point to research-based evidence that employment reduces recidivism rates among people coming out of incarceration. Furthermore, their participation in business and gainful employment betters the economy.
Black feminism Black feminism grew out of the intersection of anti-racism and anti-sexism. The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists formed in the 1970s, defined their politic as such: “Black women are inherently valuable, that [Black women’s] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.”3
Black Lives Matter (concept) The ideology that unequivocally condemns police violence against and homicides of Black people by police. This is not to the exclusion of violence against people of other races. Rather, it is deployed as a method of highlighting the systematic inequalities Black people face in various institutions and law enforcement policies.
Black Panther Party A revolutionary organization formed in 1966, it served as a safety and social program, autonomous of the federal and state governments. In addition to embracing philosophies regarding arming oneself as a means of protection—as well as reparations and the release of Black prisoners—the Black Panther Party provided social programs such as free breakfasts for children and medical clinics.
Civil disobedience A method of political protest embraced and deployed by civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It espouses the use of nonviolent means to disobey laws that promote inequality.
COINTELPRO Shorthand for Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO was a covert operation used by the FBI to discredit and neutralize groups the agency deemed to be “subversive” to US political stability. The program used infiltration and leverage to pressure, criminalize, and undermine movement leaders and foster infighting, often in violation of constitutional rights. These campaigns against leaders of the 1960s Black liberation movements led to the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton. The program was officially active between 1956 and 1971, but reports of similar infiltration methods have been discovered as recently as 2020.
Colorblind racism Explored in depth by Michelle Alexander in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, colorblind racism is a complex, almost inadvertent form of racism. It is espoused by people who presume to “not see” skin color or race in their daily interactions. Although the idea may generate from an authentic belief that all people should be treated equally regardless of their race or ethnicity, in practice it invalidates the value of peoples’ culture and ignores centuries of racist policies that have created systematic discrepancies that put Black people at a disadvantage.
Criminalization A legislature-initiated act that deems certain behaviors illegal and punishable under law.
Cultural racism The establishment of white people’s behaviors and values as “the norm” or superior to the culture of other races. In a gross oversimplification, it is the indoctrination of a media-heavy society to believe in the validity of white supremacy through representations of white superheroes and Black villains. It can also manifest in magazines, television, and advertisements that define what is “beautiful,” and news outlets that widely publish the plight of a white child while omitting coverage of similar or worse atrocities committed against children of color.
Defund the police A way of addressing police violence that stops short of total abolition. It is based on a reallocation of funds to government agencies that are designed to bolster underserved communities, particularly in education, housing, and youth services. The funds proposed for reallocation range from decarceration-centered reforms to demilitarizing police agencies.
Directly impacted A term used by anti-carceral advocacy groups to refer to people with criminal histories—those directly impacted by the criminal justice system.
Equity Equity requires both equal opportunity for advancement and the removal of barriers set in front of certain groups pursuing advancement. This desire for advancement is not solely financial. It is a desire to reach one’s full potential and attain a quality of life for themselves and their family.
Free Speech Movement A series of demonstrations conducted by students at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1964–65 school year. The movement was triggered by the suspension of students from two on-campus groups—the Congress for Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—for allegedly recruiting students for off-campus political actions. As many as 7,000 students demonstrated in solidarity with the organizers who were suspended and arrested for conducting political activity that included the proliferation of information regarding racial inequities and injustices throughout the country. The Free Speech Movement marked a new generation of student activists who would go on to participate in the civil rights movement and protest the war in Vietnam.
GPS monitoring GPS monitors were first used in the 1960s after brothers at Harvard retrofitted old military equipment to create an anklet meant to monitor the movements of young defendants to ensure they showed up to court cases.4 Over time the technology evolved from using radio signals to GPS locating and cell tower signals. Today the global industry for GPS tracking devices is estimated at $3.1 billion.5
Grassroots movements Movements designed around mobilizing community members. They engage communities impacted by a particular oppressive system to deploy strategies designed by movement leaders to dismantle that system. At the heart of grassroots movement is self-liberation.
HBCUs Historically Black colleges and universities were developed in the 1960s to offer higher education to Black youth still being excluded from many educational institutions. There are 99 HBCUs between the US, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands. Non-Black students make up 25 percent of enrollment.6
Historical trauma The multigenerational emotional and psychological repercussions of profound atrocities—such as slavery or forced relocation—on communities.
Horizontal prejudice A term that acknowledges how individuals from a targeted racial group actually reinforce discriminatory and oppressive systems.
Hot-spot policing A method of identifying areas of high crime concentration through algorithms and flooding those areas with police officers. The most notorious use of hot-spot policing was the “stop-and-frisk” policy instituted by then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Institutional racism The result of policies and practices with a single agency that have produced racially divided results at a chronic level. Variations in outcomes for people of different races may be intentional or accidental, but they are consistent and deeply embedded in the institution’s foundational elements. The government’s segregation laws and denial of home loans to people living in areas with a Black resident majority (redlining) are both forms of institutional racism.
Jim Crow Jim Crow refers to an era when laws criminalized Black life and enforced racial segregation. These laws, such as racially segregated public facilities and public vagrancy, were instituted primarily at the state level after the American Civil War, when Southern states sought a way to preserve free labor after a costly conflict. While many Jim Crow laws originated in the late nineteenth century, many remained in place until the 1960s.
LGBTQ An acronym used to define one’s sexual orientation. Its initials stand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning. A recent evolution of the acronym includes the letters I and A as well as a plus sign (LGBTQIA+). I stands for intersex (a term for bodies that fall outside the male/female binary) and A for asexual or aromantic. The plus sign is an acknowledgment that the sexual orientation spectrum is still being explored and other expressions of sexuality may still be unknown.
Marginalized A term based on a visual representation of society as having a flush and concentrated center, with diminishing substance and resources farther from the middle. Being marginalized is being pushed to the outer edge of this design through exclusive policies and barriers to advancement.
Mass incarceration The term highlights the United States utilizing criminalization as a method of large-scale racial and social control. It was first used as a way of differentiating the US from the rest of the world—both developed and underdeveloped countries—and how the US imprisons its population. It is also an acknowledgment of the 600 percent increase in prison population between the 1970s and 2000s due to America’s War on Drugs.
Movement building Campaigns around social and racial justice are powered by movement building. Rather than doing demonstrative actions, movement builders focus on strengthening the foundation of groups vying for social change; they create connections between like-minded individuals and organizations and empower movements, either by providing resources or proliferating messaging and humanizing narratives. Ultimately, the goal is to build up a movement so it can effectively engage with power holders and garner public support for the visions of equity and justice.
People of color A collective term for non-white racial groups. Not to be confused with the racist inference of “colored people,” people of color is a way of unifying racial groups against white supremacy culture. A more modern version is BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), calling attention to the more severe consequences of systemic racism on Black and Indigenous communities.
Power A relational way of describing one’s influence over another. Power is particularly significant when it influences access and control over societal elements governing politics, education, and health care. That is not to say those without access are powerless. Rather, every group has power in its ability to either reinforce or disrupt relationships with institutions, systems, or assemblies it interacts with.
Race A social construct developed as a way to ensure people of different skin color in the same economic class did not unify against the ruling class. While we identify race primarily by variations in skin color, this idea of race as a social construction has allowed it to be applied to people of similar ancestral lineages, cultural histories, and ethnic backgrounds.
Racial justice A movement rooted in racial equity and systemic shifts in power that rectify long-term discriminatory practices across an array of institutions and policies. Racial justice requires both eliminating outdated policies that deliberately or inadvertently produce unequal treatment of non-white communities, as well as introduce policies that proactively serve to support and sustain racial equity. The ideal of racial justice is a society that functions with systemic fairness and a level playing field from which individuals, regardless of race, can thrive.
Racial wealth gap A term to describe the lasting effects of discriminatory practices among a confluence of systems. Disparities in how non-white employees are treated by corporations, banks, educational institutions, and other key players on the road to financial gain have denied upward mobility. Although some individuals have successes, there is an absence of generational wealth—the ability of one generation to leave assets to the next—among marginalized communities. Black and Latino families are twice as likely as white families to have “zero wealth,” meaning their debts are of matching value to their assets.
Reconstruction era Referring to the years immediately following the Civil War, between 1865 and 1877. During this time the former Confederacy was folded back into the United States, which resulted in a number of compromises and carve-outs that Southern politicians insisted they needed for the South’s ability to survive without slavery.
Restorative justice Refers to an alternative method of accountability and reconciliation that is focused on healing. Restorative justice shifts power from the court to the people most directly harmed by the alleged actions. Methods often feature meetings between the perpetrator of a crime and their victim; through these meetings, instances of crime create opportunities for community building and victim satisfaction.
School-to-prison pipeline A grim trend identified in the 1980s of minority students entering the juvenile justice system. The implementation—and present-day preservation—of “zero tolerance” introduced law enforcement to school premises and created criminal consequences for non-criminal offenses (things that may be reprehensible to a school administrator, but not seen as criminal in the eyes of the law). According to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans accounted for 31 percent of school-related arrests.7
Social justice A process by which commonly oppressed groups seek equal access to resources, opportunities, and seats of power. As a group forms, they challenge oppressive systems and empower its members by reinforcing autonomy, which reinforces solidarity.
Structural/systemic racism The validation and legitimization of systems that have historically advantaged white citizens over their non-white counterparts. Systemic racism is manifested in America’s policies, social fabric, and governing institutions as a method of reinforcing white supremacy over infinite generations. To that end, it is in a constant state of evolution, resurfacing old, pejorative practices in new, seemingly colorblind forms. It is a way of preserving institutional racism in ways that are perceived to be justified, thereby normalizing its existence and effect.
