WCA Staff put together this glossary of Racial and Social Justice terms that we use in our day-to-day work. This glossary accompanies our Racial Equity Action Plan to provide clarity to similar and commonly used terms. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but a grounding place to start.
Ally
Someone who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, class, race, sexual identity, etc.) and work in solidarity with oppressed groups to elevate their voices above their own in the struggle for justice.
Anti-Racist
To actively identify and oppose systemic racism while working towards racial equity. An anti-racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. To be anti-racist, we must understand how racist behaviors and beliefs have been normalized in society, and we must combat this through self-examination and self-awareness.
Source: Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist.
Coalition
Formal or informal group of organizations and/or communities working together to meet community needs and a common vision, purpose, or goal in the pursuit of social and environmental justice.
Cultural Burning
Cultural burning refers to the Indigenous practices of using controlled fires to modify and maintain landscapes such as forests and grasslands for a variety of ecological and social purposes, including but not limited to the creation of wildlife corridors; promoting fire-adapted plant species for medicinal, culinary, and material applications; and improving soil. Cultural burning can also result in decreased risk of wildfire severity, and many of the forests of what is now the western US are adapted to frequent, intentional burning. However, the federal and many state governments have prohibited cultural burning as part of their wildfire suppression policies. Recent and ongoing efforts are making progress in removing barriers to the inherent rights of Tribal nations to practice cultural burning.
Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is the fair and equitable involvement of – and outcomes for – all people in environmental policies, practices, attitudes, and actions. Due in large part to the environmental movement being historically white-led, there have been unequal benefits of environmental protection with most benefits felt by white communities. This has led to a present-day landscape of environmental injustice where communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities bear the most burden of pollution and environmental degradation. Communities of color and tribal nations often lead environmental justice work, while historically white-led organizations have an important role to play.
Environmental Racism
Refers to any environmental policy, practice, or directive that differently affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Environmental racism is one form of environmental injustice and is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions. For example, government funding for cleanup of toxic waste sites is frequently directed toward wealthier, white communities while these sites are disproportionately located in communities of color and low-income communities.
Equity vs. Equality
Equity: Working to understand and give people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives.
Equality: Ensuring that everyone gets the same things in order to enjoy full, healthy lives. Like equity, equality aims to promote fairness and justice, but it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and needs the same things. Once everyone enjoys a similar level of health and well-being, we can focus on preserving fairness by giving everyone the same things: this is equality. As the Pan-American Health Organization puts it, “equity is the means, equality is the outcome.”
Free, Prior, and Informed Consent
Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires “States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.”
References: United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Frontline Communities
Frontline communities experience the most severe impacts of climate change and other environmental harms caused by extraction and pollution. In Washington, race is the primary factor which determines how a person’s health is impacted by climate change and pollution.
Frontline communities include those who experience the impacts of climate change first, such as wildfires, sea-level rise, floods, and heat waves. This also applies to communities on the frontlines of the extractive polluting economy and the workers on the frontlines of those industries.
Source: Front & Centered. 2021 Community Conversations Report.
Government-to-Government Consultation
As part of its treaty and trust responsibilities, the US government must consult with sovereign Tribal governments regarding any policy or action that may affect Native nations. Consultation must be a dialogue and provide an opportunity for joint decision-making on a nation-to-nation level.
Sources: https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/framing-paper-consultation-with-tribes.pdf and https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/11/09/00-29003/consultation-and-coordination-with-indian-tribal-governments
Intersectionality
Aspects of identity, including race, class, gender, and others intersect and shape the oppression and privilege that individuals experience in their daily lives. The concept of intersectionality was developed by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s. Intersectionality provides a basis for understanding and examining how various aspects of one’s identity work with one another in interpersonal and structural contexts Intersectionality brings to light dynamics of discrimination that can be obscured if discrimination is only considered in siloes and can provide a richer understanding of one’s positionality within structures of power.
Source: Center for the Study of Social Policy. Key Equity Terms and Concepts.
Income Inequality
The inequitable distribution of social, political, and economic power and the subsequent creation of inequitable systems and living conditions.
Microaggression
Verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights or actions that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages toward people based on their membership in a marginalized group. While “micro” implies these instances are insignificant, they can and do cause real harm. A person engaging in microaggressions may not intend to cause harm, but should still take responsibility for their actions and the impact they have. ‘Unintentional’ microaggressions result from unchecked biases that are normalized and perpetuated by oppressive systems. Certain compliments can also be microaggressions. Microaggressive ‘compliments’ are rooted in asserting power or highlighting exceptionalism to contrast harmful generalizations about marginalized communities.
Native Nation
Native nations are independent nations within a nation. The term “nation” shows respect for sovereignty. There are currently 574 federally-recognized Native nations that share geography with the United States. Each has unique systems of government, histories, cultures, languages, and ways of life.
Reference: www.nativegov.org
Overburdened Community
A community that experiences the disproportionate burdens of environmental hazards. Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities disproportionately are located in areas with environmental hazards due to racism embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, or practices such as redlining.
Sources: National Caucus of Environmental Legislators and Overburdened Communities as defined by WA Statute RCW 70A.02.010
Poverty
A level at which someone lacks income, resilience, and access to resources and services.
Racial Justice
The work to uproot historically racist systems and replace them with fair, just, and equitable policies and practices.
Racial Equity
Providing everyone what they need to be successful by taking race and the impacts of racism into account. This is distinct from racial equality, which is treating everyone the same.
Racism
Discrimination or prejudice pointed at an individual or group of individuals from a position of systemic power, based on the assumption that their race is inferior, or the belief that all individuals of a race maintain a specific characteristic or carry out specific actions.
Solidarity
The union arising from common responsibilities and interests. Standing in solidarity means embracing the common responsibility and leveraging our privilege to reform the inherent racism worldwide.
Systemic Injustice / Structural Racism
Systemic and structural racism are forms of racism that are pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, and entrenched practices and beliefs that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment and oppression of people of color, with adverse economic, social, and physical/mental health consequences. Examples include residential segregation, unfair lending practices and other barriers to home ownership and accumulating wealth, schools’ dependence on local property taxes, environmental injustice, biased policing and sentencing of men and boys of color, and voter suppression policies.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35130057/
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
“The concept of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), along with synonymous or closely related terms like indigenous knowledge and native science, has some of its origins in literatures on international development and adaptive management. There is a tendency to want to determine one definition for TEK that can satisfy every stakeholder in every situation. Yet a scan of environmental science and policy literatures reveals there to be differences in definitions that make it difficult to form a consensus. What should be explored instead is the role that the concept of TEK plays in facilitating or discouraging cross-cultural and cross-situational collaboration among actors working for indigenous and non-indigenous institutions of environmental governance, such as tribal natural resources departments, federal agencies working with tribes, and co-management boards. [T]he concept of TEK should be understood as a collaborative concept. It serves to invite diverse populations to continually learn from one another about how each approaches the very question of “knowledge” in the first place, and how these different approaches can be blended to better steward natural resources and adapt to climate change. The implication is that environmental scientists and policy professionals, indigenous and non-indigenous, should not be in the business of creating definitions of TEK. Instead, [the focus should be] on creating long term processes that allow the different implications of approaches to knowledge in relation to stewardship goals to be responsibly thought through.”
Source: Whyte, Kyle. (2012). On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A Philosophical Study.
Treaty Tribes of Washington State
Refers to the Tribes who signed treaties with the US Government with Usual and Accustomed Areas within Washington State. The federal government has neglected to recognize all Tribes who signed treaties.
Sources: https://nwtreatytribes.org/about-us/ and https://www.critfc.org/ and http://nwifc.org/w/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/10/understanding-treaty-rights-final.pdf
Tribal Sovereignty
Tribal Sovereignty refers to the inherent right and authority to self-govern. It is important to understand that tribal sovereignty is not delegated from the US government. Treaties, executive orders, and laws have confirmed fundamental contracts between tribes and the United States despite repeated and ongoing attempts to undermine that sovereignty. Not all tribes’ sovereignty has yet been recognized by the US government.
Source: https://www.ncai.org/policy-issues/tribal-governance
Tribal Treaty Rights
Refer to sovereign rights reserved under treaties signed by Tribes with the US Government. Tribal Treaty Rights existed prior to the treaties and pre-date state law. In Washington, these rights include but are not limited to the right to fish, hunt, and gather at all usual and accustomed places.
Sources: Understanding Tribal Treaty Rights in W. WA and NCAI
White Privilege
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
White Supremacy shapes everything about life in the United States of America and is the system within which we operate as an organization. It structurally, culturally, and morally positions white people (Europeans and European descendants) as the epitome of human achievement, centering them as normal, worthy, safe, intelligent, and good, and all others as deviant. The system determines who has access to resources, power, and safety. White supremacy successfully endures through ongoing investment in racist and colonialist systems, institutions, and laws, and through the ignorance, inaction, silence, and complicity of white people and their reluctance to break with white solidarity.
Whiteness
The culture upholding white supremacy, characterized by white comfort, white superiority, and the invisibility of white privilege to white people.
