racism & xenophobia: key terms
• antisemitism: fear, hatred, or prejudice against Jewish people.
• bigotry: intolerance or hatred of certain groups of people; prejudice against those that are
viewed as different or “other.”
• discrimination: the treatment of a person or group of people based on a group or category
that they belong to (e.g. race, class, gender, etc.).
• diversity: the inclusion of different types of people and cultures.
• equity: the practice of giving people what they need to succeed (as opposed to equality, which
means treating everybody the same, regardless of whether or not they have the same needs).
• ethnicity: a category of people who identify with each other, usually based on a shared
language, culture, society, ancestry, or nation.
• implicit bias: negative attitudes or stereotypes that a person may have without being
consciously aware of them.
• intersectionality: the way that different forms of oppression or discrimination, such as
racism, sexism, classism, overlap in individuals.
• Islamophobia: fear, hatred, or prejudice against Muslim people.
• oppression: systematic subjugation of one social group by a more powerful group.
• prejudice: a negative attitude towards a person or group of people.
• race: a concept that categorizes individuals based on the color of their skin. Race and racial
differences are often presented as biologically-based but these “scientific” theories have been
widely debunked.
• racial prejudice: discriminatory attitude against a group of people because of their race.
Racial prejudice can be expressed by a person from any racial group against people of a different
race.
• racism: a system of racial prejudice plus power. Racism as a system refers to the ways in which
a society’s laws and institutions privilege one racial group over another. For this reason, racism
occurs when a group with more privilege or power in society discriminates against a group with
less privilege or power.
• white privilege: advantages that white people have (regardless of their social, political,
or economic circumstances) that people of color do not. White privilege does not mean that
white people do not experience hardships; it means that they do not experience systemic
discrimination based on the color of their skin.
• white supremacy: a political or socio-economic system that privileges white people over
people of color. White supremacy is also a belief that white people are inherently superior to all
other groups.
• xenophobia: prejudice against people from different countries, cultures, or religions.
WovenTeaching.org Racism and Xenophobia
