What is Racial Equity?

• The difference between racial equity and equality:  equity is about fairness, while equality is about sameness.
• "When race can no longer be used as to predict life outcomes and outcomes for all groups are improved"

Why Race?

• Normalizing conversations about race and operationalizing strategies for advancing racial equity allows us to build systems that address income and wealth inequity and recognize bias based on gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, and other protected categories.
• Allows us to develop a framework, tools and resources that apply to other areas of marginalization, recognizing that different strategies will be necessary to achieve equity in other areas.

Who benefits directly and indirectly from diversity, equity, and inclusion?

• BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)
• All Community Members
• Juvenile Justice - Youth
• Homelessness - people on the verge of currently experiencing homelessness
• Substance Abuse - people at risk of abusing substances, people currently abusing substances and people in recovery
• Mental Health - people experiencing mental health challenges (past, present, and future)

Working Social Justice Definitions
(Courtesy of National Conference for Community & Justice of Metropolitan St. Louis (NCCJ St. Louis) 

*Please note, language is frequently changing and these definitions are currently what is known to be accurate and preferred.  It is important to rely on and empower individuals and groups to self-identify and to use their preferred language.

Ability: A social identity category referencing an individual’s orientation to the world in relation to physical and mental functioning; including motor, speech, hearing, vision, cognitive, psychological, environmental, and medical; and the degree to which it conforms to societal norms and expectations.

Ableism: The system of oppression that enforces beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with disabilities and often rests on the assumption that people with disabilities need to be “fixed” in one form or the other.

Adultism: The system of oppression that enforces subordination and mistreatment of young people based on their age, through restrictions and denial of opportunities to exercise social, economic, and political power.

Age: A social identity category referencing the number of years that an individual has lived, the resulting relative stage of development, and the perception of this through interactions with society.

Ageism: The system of oppression that enforces subordination and mistreatment of elders based on their age, through restrictions and denial of opportunities to exercise social, economic, and political power.

Agent: Individuals who belong to social identity groups that have ready access to resources which enhance one’s chances of getting what one wants and influencing others. Those with social power and privilege.

Androgynous: A term used to describe an individual whose gender expression is fixed between or fluctuates between masculine and feminine or resists the categories of masculine and feminine.

Appearance: The observable physical characteristics of a person and how they fit with what is considered beautiful. This includes size, eye/skin/hair color and texture, facial features, and dress.

Asexual: A sexual orientation describing people who experience little or no sexual attraction and/or sexual desire for sexual contact with others. Asexual people, while typically lacking in sexual desire, may engage in emotional, intimate, and/or romantic relationships.  Each asexual person may experience things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.

Bias: The human tendency to make systematic errors in judgment; also, the making of decisions based upon certain thinking, thoughts, or preconceived notions.

Bisexual: A sexual orientation describing one whose primary romantic, emotional, physical and sexual attractions and connections can be with people from different sexes assigned at birth and genders. 

Border: Individuals or groups that may or may not have been privileged in the past, or who have privilege in some contexts and are targeted in other contexts. Members of this group may be able to “pass” as members of the agent group. Border identities illustrate the fluidity of these categories over time, by choice, by accident, or by other circumstances. 

Cisgender: A gender identity wherein one’s gender aligns with one’s sex assigned at birth. From the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning “on the same side.”

Cis-sexism: The system of oppression that holds people to traditional expectations based on gender; punishing or excluding those who don't conform to traditional gender expectations.

Class: A social identity category referencing social rank in terms of income, wealth, status, education, and power.

Classism: The system of oppression that assigns and enforces differential value to people according to their class in a social system characterized by economic inequality.

Cultural Imperialism: One of the Five Faces of Oppression, cultural imperialism standardizes the agent group’s experience and culture as normal and universal, while the targeted group is rendered both invisible and stereotyped as “other”. Agent groups define the norm, and targeted groups are considered special, deviant, or different.

Discrimination: When prejudiced thoughts/feelings/beliefs about a specific person or group are put into action and they are denied equal treatment. Discrimination can be conscious and deliberate, or it can be unconscious and unintentional. 

Diversity: Having a variety of social identities represented in shared spaces, communities, institutions or society.

Equity: Equity is often conflated with the term “Equality” which means sameness and assumes, incorrectly, that everyone has had equal access, treatment, and outcomes. In fact, the need to work towards equity implies that an individual or group may need to experience or receive something different (not equal) in order to attain outcomes similar to privileged groups.

Ethnicity: A social identity category reflecting the sharing of characteristics such as culture, values, language, political/economic interests, history, nationality, and geographic ancestry.  

Eurocentrism/Western-Centrism: A system of oppression that reinforces European and Anglo-American history, values, and experiences as normal and superior to others.

Exploitation: One of the Five Faces of Oppression, exploitation is the transfer of labor, energy, and power from targeted groups to agent groups who benefit from this oppression. Exploitation includes social rules about what work is, who does what for whom, and how work is compensated, to enact inequality.

Five Faces of Oppression: Iris Marian Young developed this framework to describe the five distinct ways that oppression utilizes to target a social identity group.  These five “faces” include violence, powerlessness, marginalization, exploitation, and cultural imperialism.

Gay: A sexual orientation for a person identifying as male, describing their primary romantic, emotional, physical and sexual attractions and connections with other people that identify as male.

Gender: A social identity category usually conflated with sex assigned at birth in a socially constructed binary system that presumes one to be either male/man/masculine or female/woman/feminine. Gender is the complex interrelationship between sex assigned at birth, gender identity and gender expression.

Gender Expression: People’s physicality, appearance and behaviors that convey something about one’s gender identity, or that others interpret as meaning something about their gender identity. This can be the ways in which someone demonstrates their gender identity, such as dress, hair, how people sit or walk, etc. Often referred to with the terms masculine, feminine and androgynous.

Gender Identity: An individual’s internal, personal sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary or another designation.

Genderqueer: A gender identity commonly used by people who do not identify or express their gender within the gender binary. Those who identify as genderqueer may identify as both men and women or neither men nor women, may see themselves as outside of or in between the binary gender boxes, or may simply feel restricted by gender labels. Not everyone who identifies as genderqueer identifies as transgender or nonbinary.  Genderqueer can be a politicized label, demonstrating an intentional resistance to gender as a system.

Heterosexism: The system of oppression that reinforces heterosexuality as natural and normal and the only acceptable sexual orientation; the assumption that everyone does or should identify as heterosexual.

Horizontal Oppression: When people take on the socialization messages that enforce oppression and enact them towards members of their same social identity group. Because of their different relationship to power, people in the border group can experience or enact horizontal oppression in relation to members of either the target or the agent group.

Inclusion: The action or state of including, or of being included, in a group or structure.  More than simply diversity and numerical representation, inclusion involves authentic and empowered participation and a true sense of belonging.

Individual-Level Oppression: Attitudes and actions that enforce a prejudice against a social group (can be either intentional or unintentional).

Institutional- Level Oppression: Policies, laws, rules, norms, and customs enacted by organizations and social institutions that privilege some social groups and target other social groups. These institutions include religion, government, education, law, the media, and the health care system (can be either intentional or unintentional).

Internalized Oppression (IO): A socialization process where people in the target group take on, then enact: 1) a sense of inferiority (whether conscious or subconscious) about their target group and 2) the societal rules that enforce inequality. When these messages are not addressed, this “scripting” can guide thoughts and behavior. IO can show up as self-hatred, self-blaming, or horizontal oppression towards others that are in the target group or border group. Internalized oppression involves self-destructive coping mechanisms that are a result of systemic mistreatment rather than the inevitable or chosen pattern of any group of people.

Internalized Superiority (IS): A socialization process where people in the agent group take on, and then enact: 1) a sense of superiority (whether conscious or subconscious) about their agent group and 2) the societal rules that enforce inequality. When these messages are not addressed, this “scripting” can guide thoughts and behavior. IS can show up as: 1) an implicit belief that the agent group's socially superior status is normal and deserved, and 2) horizontal oppression towards others in the agent group or border group.

Intersectionality:  Coined by critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is a framework that recognizes that multiple aspects of how our border and target identities 1) can either advantage us or disadvantage us, 2) do not exist independently of each other, and 3) inform and influence each other. We cannot always separate singular oppressions, for they are experienced and enacted intersectionality.

Intersex: A general term used for the sex assigned at or after birth for individuals whose anatomy, physiology, and/or chromosome variation differs from the western societally constructed binary of male and female. Intersex is a category that reflects real biological variation and its existence challenges the socially constructed binary way society thinks about sex assigned at birth. Intersex people are typically assigned “male” or “female” at birth and undergo surgery in infancy to forcibly fit into the culturally acceptable binary of sex assigned at birth. Some states now assign intersex people “x” gender markers as opposed to an “m” or “f”.

Lesbian: A sexual orientation for a person identifying as female, describing their primary romantic, emotional, physical and sexual attractions and connections with other people that identify as females.

Lookism: The system of oppression in which people whose faces and/or bodies that fit social ideals have more social power than people whose faces and/or bodies do not. Standards of beauty vary from culture to culture, but just about every human society has them.

Marginalization: One of the Five Faces of Oppression, marginalization defines what groups of people are useful to the system and which are considered marginal, dependent, and inferior. In marginalization, targeted groups are often subject to patronizing and punitive treatment, excluded from equal citizenship rights, and denied the right to privacy, respect, and individual choice.

Nonbinary: An umbrella term for a gender identity other than, or in addition to, woman/man. Not all nonbinary people identify as transgender and not all transgender people identify as nonbinary.

Oppression: The one-way systemic mistreatment of a social identity group that is enforced by society and maintained by a network of institutional structures, policies and practices that create unearned benefits for the agent group, and discrimination and disadvantage for people in border and target groups. While all people have bias and prejudice, oppression creates systemic and institutional power that goes beyond individual behaviors and beliefs.  Oppression has five distinct manifestations, coined by Iris Marian Young as the Five Faces of Oppression, including violence, powerlessness, marginalization, exploitation, and cultural imperialism.

Owning Class: A social identity group whose members have enough assets and investment income that paid work is not essential.

Omni/Pan-sexual: A sexual orientation describing one whose primary romantic, emotional, physical and sexual attractions and connections are not limited to specific genders or sexes assigned at birth.

Questioning:  A term used to describe those who are in a process of discovery and exploration about their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or a combination thereof.

Powerlessness:  One of the Five Faces of Oppression, powerlessness involves how targeted groups are viewed, and the cultural assumptions made about them. While agent groups have intrinsic access to respectability, status, and autonomy, targeted group members have to prove themselves for the same access.

Privilege: The unearned, often unquestioned and unconscious advantages, entitlements, benefits, choices, assumptions and expectations bestowed upon people based solely on their membership in the social group called the agent group.

Prejudice: Adverse beliefs or opinions without just ground, before acquiring specific knowledge, about certain groups or people; “pre-judgements.”

Race: A social identity category based on the recent notion that groups people together according to common origin and perceived commonalities in physical characteristics (particularly skin color), often presumed incorrectly to be biologically meaningful.

Racism: The system of oppression that assigns and enforces differential value to people according to their race. A common definition: Racism = race prejudice + social and institutional power. Racism involves one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination at the individual, institutional, and cultural/societal level.

Religion: A social identity category referencing a set of beliefs shared, and sometimes held sacred, by a group of people that have been organized into formal structures created and maintained because of their shared beliefs.

Religious Oppression: The system of oppression that creates individual, institutional, and societal subordination of minority religious groups.

Settler Colonialism:  the ongoing system that targets Native Americans, involving land theft, genocide and cultural narratives that support these acts.  The system organizes different groups according to race and plays out in the erasure of current Indigenous presence. While anyone not Indigenous and living in the U.S. is a settler, all settlers do not all benefit equally, as many people were brought as slaves, indentured servants, refugees, etc.

Sex Assigned at Birth: A social identity category referencing the physiological and anatomical characteristics of maleness, femaleness or intersexness with which a person is born. These markers include internal and external reproductive organs, chromosomes, and hormones. Infants are usually assigned a sex category at birth on the basis of such characteristics (primarily the appearance of external genitals). This assignation then appears on birth certificates and other legal documents and can be changed later through legal actions.

Sexism: The system of oppression which functions to maintain status and power dynamic of males/men over females/women and masculinity over femininity. 

Sexual Orientation: A social identity category reflecting an individual’s romantic, emotional, sexual and/or other forms of attraction and connection to others as they relate to sex assigned at birth and gender. 

Sizeism: The system of oppression in which people whose body shapes and sizes that fit social ideals have more social power than people whose body shapes and sizes do not. In contemporary Western society, people with slender build are considered more attractive than people who are heavy.

Social Identity: A socially constructed characteristic, such as age, race, gender, class, etc., shared by a group of people which sets them apart from other groups. 

Social Power: Access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one wants and influencing others.

Socialization:  The process of being exposed to, and taught (whether overtly or covertly) societal norms, i.e. rules about appropriate or acceptable social identities, beliefs and behaviors. We are born into society with norms already in place and enculturated to them from an early age. These messages are offered by a widening social network as we age (interpersonal, institutional, structural). Through socialization, we learn about social identity categories, as well as the boundaries of human worth and value. We then (consciously or unconsciously) use this framework to guide our behaviors, beliefs, and professional practices.

Societal/Cultural - Level Oppression: Social norms, roles, rituals, language, music, and art that reflect and reinforce the belief that one social group is superior to another (can be either intentional or unintentional).

Stereotype: A popular belief, assumption and/or perception about specific individuals or social identity groups, often negative and untrue; standardized and simplified conceptions.

Target: A group consisting of individuals that are denied access to resources which enhance one’s chances of getting what one wants and influencing others because of their social identity. Those with less or without social power. 

Transgender: An umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. 

Vertical Oppression: When people in the agent group appropriate the socialization messages that enforce oppression and enact them towards members of the border and target groups.

Violence: One of the Five Faces of Oppression, violence is not only the physical or state act of violence towards a targeted group member, it is also the idea the targeted group should expect and fear unprovoked attacks solely based on their social identity. The violence is a type of violence is often regarded as unsurprising, and often goes unpunished.