Glossary of Terms
Language can be used to engage or divide. The language we use relating to challenging intersectional issues of systemic racism, environmental inequities, and economic exploitation allows us to honor, celebrate, and amplify voices of BIPOC, women, GNC, and LGBTQIA movement leaders, activists, and communities working toward a world of interdependence, liberation, and resilience.
This glossary is not intended to be comprehensive but reflects the language MSC uses in conversations regarding social justice, diversity, and allyship. In every context, the meaning of these words may change and evolve. This glossary and its definitions provide a starting point for our community and our new website visitors to engage in open and honest conversation throughout our ecosystem. We hope it will be used as a tool to build a shared language of understanding.
Abolition
A political vision and broad strategy eliminates imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creates lasting alternatives to punishment and incarceration. Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
Accountability
How individuals and communities hold themselves to their goals and actions and acknowledge the values and the groups for which they are responsible. To be accountable, one must be visible, with a transparent agenda and process.
Afrofuturism
The philosophical intersection of imagination, history, the future, and liberation melds African Diaspora culture with technology.
Ally
A person who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, class, race, sexual identity, etc.). A person who works in solidarity with oppressed groups in the struggle for justice. Allies understand that it is in their interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways.
Anti-black
A two-part formation that both voids the values of Blackness while systematically marginalizing Black people and their issues. The first form of anti-Blackness is overt racism and the covert structural and systemic racism that categorically predetermines the socioeconomic status of Black people in this country. The second form of anti-Blackness is the unethical disregard for anti-Black institutions and policies as a product of class, race, and/or gender privilege that certain individuals experience due to anti-Black institutions and policies. The first form of overt racism protects the second form of anti-Blackness.
Beloved Community
Coined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the concept describes a society built on economic and social inclusivity, a community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, exploitation, and hate.
Bigotry
Intolerant prejudice that glorifies one group and denigrates members of other groups.
BIPOC
Referring to those who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color.
Black Lives Matter
An ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black humanity, Black contributions to society, and Black resilience in the face of deadly oppression.
A political movement started in 2013 by three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi; it addresses systemic and state violence against African Americans.
Colonization
Invasion, dispossession, and subjugation need not be military; it can begin — or continue — as a geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban, or industrial encroachments. Such incursion is the dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants, 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.
Climate Resilience
A future in which ecosystems, human labor, and cultures are integrated into a thriving regenerative web of life.
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory considers many of the same issues conventional civil rights and ethnic studies take. Still, it places them in a broader perspective, including economics, history, and even emotions and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and principles of constitutional law.
Cultural Appropiation
Theft of cultural elements — including symbols, art, language, customs, etc. — for one’s use, commodification, or profit, often without understanding, acknowledgment, or respect for its value in its original culture. It results from a dominant (i.e., White) culture’s right to appropriate other cultural elements.
Decolonization
The active resistance against colonial powers and a shifting of power towards political, economic, educational, cultural, and psychic independence originates from a colonized nation’s own indigenous culture.
Diaspora
The voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions. The common element in all forms of the diaspora are people who live outside their natal (or imagined natal) territories and recognize that their traditional homelands are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, the religions they adopt, and the culture they produce.
Discrimination
The unequal treatment of various groups based on race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, and other categories.
Diversity
How people differ, including 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 can also involve different ideas, perspectives, and values.
Ecosystem
In the pursuit of equity, liberation, inclusion, and justice, the MSC beloved community ecosystem comprises Movement Strategy Center’s board, staff, network partners, sponsored projects, program participants, and supporters.
Embodied Practice
An embodiment practice is a method of using the unique sensations of our body as a tool to develop awareness, stay present, self-regulate, feel whole, find balance, feel connected, know ourselves, love ourselves, and be empowered.
Ethnicity
Refers to identifying a group based on a perceived cultural distinctiveness that makes the group into a “people.” A social construct, Ethnicity divides people into smaller social groups based on ancestral geographical base, history, the shared sense of group membership, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests.
Equity
Recognizing each person has different circumstances and allocating the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equally positive outcome.
GNC
Gender Non-Conforming, referring to those who do not identify with binary gender identity.
Implicit Bias
Negative associations that people unknowingly hold and express automatically, without conscious awareness. Implicit biases affect an individual’s attitudes and actions, thus creating real-world implications, even though they may not even be aware that those biases exist within themselves. This produces behavior that diverges from the explicit attitudes that many people profess. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is often used to measure implicit biases concerning race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, and other topics.
Inclusion
The act of including traditionally excluded individuals and/or groups into processes, activities, and decision-making in a way that shares power with authenticity.
Incubation
Physical spaces for social interaction and development in which socially vulnerable individuals, through the use of cross-sectoral partnerships and community-adapted development services, are empowered to become agents of their social transformation.
Indigeneity
Indigenous peoples can be identified in particular geographical areas by the presence in varying degrees of the following characteristics: close attachment to ancestral territories and the natural resources in these areas; self-identification and identification by others as members of a distinct cultural group; an indigenous language, often different from the national language; the presence of customary social and political institutions, and primarily subsistence-oriented production.
Individual Racism
Individual racism refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can be deliberate, or the individual may act to perpetuate or support racism without knowing what they are doing.
Institutional Racism
Institutional racism refers specifically to how institutional policies and practices create different outcomes for different racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group. Still, their effect is to create advantages for Whites and oppression and disadvantage for other groups.
Internalized Racism
Internalized racism is 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.
Intersectionality
Coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, intersectionality can help clarify how a person can simultaneously experience privilege and oppression. For example, a Black woman in America does not experience gender inequalities in the same way as a White woman, nor does she experience racial oppression identical to that experienced by a Black man. Each race and gender intersection produces a qualitatively distinct experience.
Just Transition
A set of unifying principles and practices supporting a just society has shifted from an extractive economy to a waste-free, regenerative economy. It must be equitable and must redress past harms. Its process must be just, or the outcome will not be.
LGBTQIA
Referring to those who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer and Questioning, Intersex, Asexual.
Movement Building
The process of organizing and activating the will and capacity of people and organizations to work individually or collectively toward a shared vision.
Power
The ability to influence others and impose one’s beliefs. All power is relational, and different relationships either reinforce or disrupt one another. The importance of the concept of power to anti-racism is evident: racism cannot be understood without understanding that power is an individual relationship and a cultural one. Those power relationships are constantly shifting. Power can be used malignantly and intentionally but need not be, and individuals within a culture may benefit from the power they are unaware of. Cultural power is all-encompassing, economic power is foundational, and political power reflects economics and culture.
Privilege
Society’s formal and informal institutions accord the unearned social power to all members of a dominant group (i.e., white privilege, male privilege, etc.). Privilege is usually invisible to those who have it because we are taught not to see it, but it puts them at an advantage over those who do not.
Prison Industrial Complex
A term used to describe the overlapping interest of governments and industries who use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems.
Racial Equity
The condition that would be achieved if racial identity was no longer a statistical predictor of outcomes, including eliminating policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race or that fail to eliminate them.
Racial Healing
To restore to health or soundness; to repair or set right; to restore to spiritual wholeness.
Rematriation
Returning to the ways of life that hold reverence for Nature and are inclusive of many types of knowledge.
Repatriation
Commonly used to describe the rightful return of land, remains, and cultural items to Native communities. Tied to Euro-centric, male-dominant ideas of ownership.
Restorative Justice
A theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused by crime and conflict. It places decisions in the hands of those most affected by wrongdoing and gives equal concern to the victim, the offender, and the surrounding community.
Social Justice
The idea that all people should have equal rights, opportunities, and access to resources.
Systemic Racism
The structure through which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various and often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial inequities among groups.
Transformative Justice
Transformative Justice (TJ) is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm, and abuse. It seeks to respond to violence at its most basic without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. TJ can be thought of as a way of “making things right” or creating justice together. TJ is an abolitionist framework that understands that prisons, police, and I.C.E. are sources of enormous amounts of violence and are systems designed to maintain social control through inherent violence.
Transformative Movements
Movements that recognize that we are whole people and whole communities and our issues and problems are interconnected; thus, our systemic solutions and movements must be interconnected.
Transformative Practice
An intentional activity, or set of activities, done regularly over an extended period to ground oneself in purpose and facilitate profound growth, embodiment, and transformation.
White Fragility
A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable for White people, triggering a range of defensive moves. These can include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and/or guilt, and behaviors including argumentation, silence, and/or leaving a stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate White racial equilibrium.
White Privilege
Refers to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits, and choices bestowed on people solely because they are White. Generally, White people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.
White Supremacy
An ideology that White people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of White people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. White supremacy is ever-present in our institutional and cultural assumptions. It assigns value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the White group while casting others as immoral, evil, inhuman, and undeserving.
White Supremacy Culture
Artificial and historically constructed, White Supremacy Culture is the dominant culture (that of the White middle class) that shapes our institutions, our media, the way we see ourselves, and each other. White Supremacy Culture is unconsciously used as the norms and standards that promote white supremacy thinking, training, internalized attitudes, and behaviors that can show up in any group or organization, and are harmful to people of color and White people. Those characteristics are perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, objectivity, right to comfort, and progress.
A friendly reminder: we’ve done our research, but you should, too! Check our sources against your own, and always exercise sound judgment.
Sources
ABC’s of Social Justice A Glossary of Working Language for Socially Conscious Conversation
Colors of Resistance Archive: Cultural Appropriation
“Glossary.” Racial Equity Tools
Them “Kimberlé Crenshaw and Lady Phyll Talk Intersectionality, Solidarity, and Self-Care.”
Iyer, Deepa “My Role in a Social Change Ecosystem: A Mid-Year Check-In.”
Lundgren, Kristina Lundgren, and Fares Youcefi. “Social Incubators or Social Work?
National Conference for Community and Justice, St. Louis Region Dismantling Racism Institute
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “Glossary.”
“What Is the PIC? What Is Abolition?” Critical Resistance