GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The following definitions of key terms are offered for clarity and shared understanding.

BIPOC

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. A term used to describe communities of color, while centering Black and Indigenous issues and experiences. While by no means perfect, it reminds us to center Black and Indigenous issues and experiences across all communities, including non-Black and non-Indigenous communities. It reminds us that even in communities of color, Black and Indigenous peoples are marginalized and invisibilized.

Collective Action

Action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their condition and achieve a common objective. It is grounded in people understanding they have individual power, and that they have even greater power when joining with others for a common purpose.

Community Organizing

Community Organizing is the process by which people impacted by injustice take collective action, guided by an intersectional racial justice analysis, to build power to win meaningful change in their lives and communities, challenge the power structure, and achieve systemic change. Organizing often involves winning changes in practice, policy, and resource distribution of public or private institutions. It is fundamentally about justice, grassroots democracy, and self-determination. 

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. However, their effect is to create advantages for whites and oppression and disadvantage for people from groups classified as people of color.

Examples:

  • Government policies that explicitly restricted the ability of people to get loans to buy or improve their homes in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African Americans (also known as “red-lining”).

  • City sanitation department policies that concentrate trash transfer stations and other environmental hazards disproportionately in communities of color.

Internalized Racism

Internalized racism is what 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.

Interpersonal Racism

Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals. Once we bring our private beliefs into our interaction with others, racism is now in the interpersonal realm.

Examples: public expressions of racial prejudice, hate, bias, and bigotry between individuals, etc.

Intersectional Racial Justice

As Kimberlé Crenshaw states, “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” It is also the very tool by which those power imbalances could be eliminated altogether. Race Forward states that “Racial Justice is a vision and transformation of society to eliminate racial hierarchies and advance collective liberation, where Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, in particular, have the dignity, resources, power, and self-determination to fully thrive.”

Having an assessment of how white supremacy connects with sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, anti-black racism and every other oppression not only leads to a deeper understanding how a decision, policy or change impacts people based on the various ways that people experience our systems, but it also enables us to win fully equitable solutions.

Justice

Equitable access to resources, equality in relations, and the protection of human rights are some of the indicators of justice.

Woods Fund Chicago's definition of justice is intertwined with grassroots democracy and self-determination, whereby justice is achievable when people directly impacted have the democratic power to make the decisions that impact their lives - whether it is through voting for people and policies, how budgets get spent, or deciding what campaigns are untaken. The fundamental concept of individual power means that people themselves have the right and the responsibility to determine the direction of the lives of themselves, their families, and communities. 

Movement Building

Movement building is the effort of social change agents to engage power holders and the broader society in addressing a systemic problem or injustice while promoting an alternative vision or solution. Movement building requires a range of intersecting approaches through distinct stages over a long-term period of time.

Through movement building, organizers can:

  • Propose solutions to the root causes of social problems.

  • Enable people to exercise their collective power.

  • Humanize groups that have been denied basic human rights and improve conditions for the groups affected.

  • Create structural change by building something larger than a particular organization or campaign.

  • Promote visions and values for society based on fairness, justice, and democracy. 

Power

Although power is often conceptualized as power over other individuals or groups, other variations are power with (in the context of building collective strength) and power within (which references an individual’s internal strength). Learning to “see” and understand power relations is vital to organizing for progressive social change. Power is unequally distributed globally and in U.S. society; some individuals or groups wield greater power than others, thereby allowing them greater access and control over resources. Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates. Woods Fund Chicago invests in collective power.

Power Structure

Power is capacity and influence. Organizations build capacity through leadership development (skills, knowledge, and analysis), base building, and strategic collaboration with others. Organizations grow and exert influence when they hold decision-makers accountable, by people continually coming together to assess, act, and reassess to get what they want. Power is built with and by communities, not for communities.

“Base building, in general, is a diverse set of strategies and methods to support community members to be in relationship with one another; invest in each other’s leadership; share a common identity shaped by similar experiences and an understanding of the root causes of their conditions; and use their collective analysis to create solutions and strategize to achieve them.” — USC Equity Research

Organizations must grow the capacity to win campaigns, as well as the ability to analyze structural power. The power structure in a stratified society is a system of domination made up of a network of organizations (such as government, business sector and the military) and roles that is responsible for maintaining the social structure and shaping policies. Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates.

For further reading:

Privilege

A “system of advantage” that gives people from more powerful social groups access to resources and opportunities that are denied to others (and usually gained at their expense) simply because of the groups to which they belong.

Racial Justice

  1. The systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice — or racial equity — goes beyond “anti-racism.” It is not just the absence of discrimination and inequities but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures.

  2. Operationalizing racial justice means reimagining and co-creating a just and liberated world. 

This includes:

  • Understanding the history of racism and the system of white supremacy and addressing past harms.

  • Working in the right relationship and accountability in an ecosystem (an issue, sector, or community ecosystem) for collective change.

  • Implementing interventions that use an intersectional analysis and that impact multiple systems.

  • Centering Blackness and building community, cultural, economic, and political power of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC).

  • Applying the practice of love along with disruption and resistance to the status quo.

Racism

We are using the term “racism” specifically to refer to individual, cultural, institutional, and systemic ways by which differential consequences are created: Groups historically or currently defined as white are advantaged, and groups historically or currently defined as non-white (African, Asian, Latinx, Native American, etc.) are disadvantaged. That idea aligns with those who define racism as prejudice plus power, a common phrase in the field. Combining the concepts of prejudice and power points out the mechanisms by which racism leads to different consequences for different groups. The relationship and behavior of these interdependent elements have allowed racism to recreate itself generation after generation. Systems that perpetuate racial inequity no longer need racist actors or to explicitly promote racial differences in opportunities, outcomes, and consequences to maintain those differences.

Social Impact Investing

Impact investments are investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Woods Fund Chicago intends to put its endowment to work, ensuring it invests in opportunities to increase wealth for communities in Chicago that have long been denied the means of wealth-building.

Social Justice Community 

Individuals, organizations, and institutions that align with the idea that all people should have equal access to wealth, health, well-being, justice, privileges, and opportunity regardless of their legal, political, economic, or other circumstances.

Structural Racism

The normalization and legitimization of an array of historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal dynamics routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. Structural racism encompasses the entire system of white domination, diffused, and infused in all aspects of society, including its history, culture, politics, economics, and entire social fabric. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution. It involves reinforcing reproduced and newly produced forms of racism from multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present. Structural racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism — all other forms of racism emerge from structural racism.

Systemic Change

A complete transformation of the values and structures in society. Organizers look beneath the surface beyond the symptoms of social problems to reveal and tackle the systemic root causes that fuel injustice in order to create a more just and equitable society. It requires thinking beyond the present moment to the impact of the long arc of generations to come.

Winning Change

Organizing isn’t just about protesting what is wrong and unjust, organizing also requires demanding solutions and holding decision makers accountable for the changes the community seeks. To successfully win, organizers build a base, prioritize issues, conduct power analysis, take action, negotiate, ensure implementation, and evaluate during and at the end of a campaign.

Photo by Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago