Glossary
Language is powerful. WEVA provides this glossary to help define the specific terms and phrases included in our member policies.
Anti-racism: the practice of identifying, challenging, and changing the values, structures and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism.
Brave Spaces: a non-physical space within a school or organization designed to help create an environment that allows individuals to engage with one another over controversial issues like race, diversity, and social justice with honesty, sensitivity, and respect. The intention is to help reassure those who feel anxious about sharing their thoughts and feelings regarding these sensitive and controversial issues.
Ethnicity: the social characteristics that people may have in common, such as language, religion, regional background, culture, foods, etc. Ethnicity is revealed by the traditions one follows, a person’s native language, and so on.
Explicit Bias: is characterized by overt negative behavior that can be expressed through physical and verbal harassment or through more subtle means such as exclusion.
Implicit Bias: a mental process that stimulates negative attitudes about people who are not members of one’s own “in group” often developed in response to direct and indirect negative information an individual receives throughout their lives related to race. While these biases are often relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness and/or control, they may dictate one’s feelings and actions towards groups of people if unchecked.
Individual Racism: pre-judgment, bias, or discrimination by an individual based on race. Individual racism includes both privately held beliefs, conscious and unconscious, and external behaviors and actions towards others.
Institutional Racism: occurs within institutions and organizations, such as schools, that adopt and maintain policies, practices, and procedures that often unintentionally produce inequitable outcomes for people of color and advantages for white people
Microaggression: the everyday, subtle, intentional — and oftentimes unintentional — interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups.
Nationality: the status of belonging to a particular nation.
Racism: A social construct that artificially divides people into distinct groups based on certain characteristics such as physical appearance (particularly skin color) ancestral heritage, cultural affiliation, cultural history, ethnic classification.
Stereotypes: the belief that most members of a particular group have some specific characteristic or set of characteristics.
Tokenism: the practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a minority group, or planning a styled shoot with models from an underrepresented group without a commitment to inclusivity) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly.
White Privilege: a web of institutional and cultural treatment and exemption from racial and national oppression that results in preferential treatment for white people.
White Supremacy: the political, economic, and cultural systems in which white individuals overwhelmingly control power over material resources—a form of dominance and control, and not just the overt hate of one group towards another.
Systemic or Structural Racism: The way in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various ways to reinforce and perpetuate racial group inequity. It is not something we as individual members of society actively choose to practice, instead it is a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist. It refers to the history, culture, ideology, and interactions of institutions and policies that perpetuate a system of inequity that is detrimental to communities of color.