“Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals.”¹

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

The following is an initial list of concepts and terms that reflect the racial justice principles and apply to policy, system change, and resource allocation efforts. Rather than approaching these as “fixed” definitions, we recommend that readers view them as “parameters for defining terms” which allows for our understanding of these core concepts to grow and evolve over time as community-determined racial justice language and strategies evolve. We also urge readers to examine how these operational definitions and concepts align with your own work and to consider the consistency and intentionality with which you are communicating your own priorities and actions.

For additional resources, we recommend:

• The Alliance for Justice, Bolder Advocacy overview of advocacy related terminology. 
• Race Forward: What is Racial Equity?
• Racial Equity Tools Glossary
• Podcast: Developing a shared vocabulary- Introduction to Othering, Bridging & Belonging

Anti-Black Racism: “a term used to specifically describe the unique discrimination, violence and harms imposed on and impacting Black people specifically.”2

Antiracism: “a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas;” and antiracist policy is “any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.”³

Contextual Evidence:⁴ A collection of measurable factors in the community that may impact the success of a prevention strategy (e.g., community history, organizational capacity, social norms, etc.). The role that contextual evidence plays in the evidence-based decision-making process is to provide information to help determine whether a prevention strategy is likely to be acceptable, feasible, and useful in a local setting. Contextual evidence can be gathered from a variety of local data sources and offers a ‘snapshot’ of measurable community characteristics that may impact a particular decision. Some examples of data sources and methods for collecting contextual evidence include census data, local administrative data (hospital, school, and law enforcement), community needs/assets assessments, surveys, and focus groups/interviews.

Criminal legal system: Laws that define what actions are considered a crime, what actions are not, and the systems for policing, prosecuting, adjudicating, and punishing people to enforce these laws. Structural racism is embedded within the criminal legal system in the U.S.^5,6,7,8 The term criminal legal system is used in these modules, rather than criminal justice system. This is to clarify that the criminal legal system is focused on enforcement of laws, rather than on ensuring justice and fairness from the perspective of equity or morality.

Distributional Equity/Justice: Distributional equity/justice means fair distribution of resources, benefits, and burdens, and prioritizes resources for communities experiencing the greatest inequities.⁹ Distributional equity/justice is often the first thing people think about when they think about equity because it is the most quantifiable or tangible.¹⁰ Distributional equity/justice is guided by quantitative and qualitative data and allocates goods, services, and other resources in a manner that creates fair opportunities for health and well-being for all.¹¹

Experiential Evidence:¹² The collective experience and expertise of those who have practiced or lived in a particular setting. It also includes the knowledge of subject matter experts. These insights, understandings, skills, and expertise are accumulated over time and are often referred to as intuitive or tacit knowledge. Experiential evidence is systematically gathered from multiple stakeholders who are familiar with a variety of key aspects about populations in specific settings who have knowledge about the community in which a prevention strategy is to be implemented (i.e., knowledge about what has/has not worked previously in a specific setting with particular populations; insight on potential implementation challenges; insight regarding the needs and challenges of the community and those who live in it). Experiential evidence provides distinctive guidance in the form of real-world experience. Some examples of data sources and methods for eliciting experiential evidence include reflective questions, communities of practice, expert panels, team decision making, and other consensus processes.

Intersectionality: Coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Intersectionality is simply a prism to see the interactive effects of various forms of discrimination and disempowerment. It looks at the way that racism, many times, interacts with patriarchy, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia — seeing that the overlapping vulnerabilities created by these systems actually create specific kinds of challenges.”¹³

Liberation: “the creation of relationships, societies, communities, organizations, and collective spaces characterized by equity, fairness, and the implementation of systems for the allocation of goods, services, benefits, and rewards that support the full participation of each human and the promotion of their full humanness.”¹⁴

Narratives: “the themes and ideas that permeate collections of stories” and deep narratives are “the stickiest themes and ideas that have permeated stories for more than 50 years.”¹⁵

Narrative strategy is “a long-term effort to raise certain values and diminish others in ways that engage multiple kinds of narrators and audiences, and that are not bound by short term communications needs,” and community narrative power building is “growing narrative power in the hands of local communities that experience the outcomes of harmful and helpful narratives.”¹⁶

Power Building: Power-building includes civic engagement, and education and capacity building on topics such as policy and budget advocacy. Community organizing and power-building build the capacity of oppressed communities to stand up to structural racism and apply pressure for change.

Power: Power is the capacity to achieve a purpose. Because communities of color have faced intentional, structural, and sustained discrimination, violence, exploitation, and denial of opportunities, power-building is explicitly included within community violence prevention strategies. These approaches will look different in each community, but many of the most successful approaches draw on culturally based knowledge and practices, values, and traditions. By engaging community members across generations, these practices help communities reconnect to, reaffirm, and celebrate cultural identity and build community cohesion.

Procedural Equity/Justice: Procedural equity/justice refers to transparent, fair, and inclusive processes that provide additional opportunities for those who are disproportionately impacted.¹⁷ These values of transparency, fairness, and inclusion apply to who participates, how participants are engaged, and how input is valued.¹⁸ Procedural equity/justice involves acknowledging imbalances in power and technical expertise that often exist when historically marginalized communities engage with public agencies in decision-making.¹⁹

Race-Conscious Policies: “Race-conscious policies are policies also aimed at remedying structural racism (hence, they are race ‘conscious’ and have a racial purpose), but they are designed or implemented within a nonracial frame.”²⁰

Race-Specific or Race-Targeted: Race-specific or race-targeted strategies “are those that address structural racism by targeting people on the basis of their race and providing benefits or extending protections on the basis of their racial identity.”²¹

Racial Equity: Racial equity is “a process of eliminating racial disparities and improving outcomes for everyone. It is the intentional and continual practice of changing policies, practices, systems, and structures by prioritizing measurable change in the lives of people of color.”²²

Racial Justice: Racial justice is the systematic fair treatment of people of all races that results in equitable opportunities and outcomes for everyone. All people are able to achieve their full potential in life, regardless of race, ethnicity, or the community in which they live.²³ Achieving racial justice involves processes that lead toward truth and reconciliation, justice, and fairness, including the redistribution and sharing of power and resources to rectify the compounding effects of historic and present day policies and practices rooted in discrimination and exclusion.²⁴ Racial justice has structural, procedural, distributional dimensions. Racial justice can be said to have been achieved when structural inequities between racial groups have been eliminated and whereby phenotype no longer serves as a predictor of health, safety, and other outcomes.²⁵ Racial justice processes entail the elimination and reversal of policies, practices, norms, and messages that create differential outcomes based on phenotype, and transformation of the systems and structures that uphold inequities health and safety outcomes between whites and non-whites.²⁶ Racial inequities in community violence are rooted in structural racism, and therefore, community safety needs to be rooted in racial justice. In other words, racial justice can be understood as a social determinant of community safety. In communities and societies characterized by racial justice, the protective conditions that promote safety in the places where people of color live, learn, work, are distributed equitably. In such communities and societies, racial inequities in community violence affecting adolescents and young adults are eliminated, thereby substantially reducing the burden of community violence.

Racism: Racism is “a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on phenotype that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.” Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones²⁷ has developed a framework for understanding racism at three levels: institutionalized racism, personally mediated racism, and internalized racism. Institutional racism is defined as “differential access to goods, services, and opportunities of society by race.” There is no identifiable perpetrator because it is structured into our institutions. Personally mediated racism is “prejudice and discrimination, where prejudice means differential assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intentions of others according to their race, and discrimination means differential actions toward others according to their race.” This is generally what people think of when they are asked to define racism. And then there’s internalized racism, which is defined as “acceptance by members of the stigmatized races of negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth. It is characterized by their not believing in others who look like them, and not believing in themselves.”

Social Determinant of Health (SDOH): Conditions in the places where people live, learn, work and play that affect a wide range of health and quality-of-life risks and outcomes."²⁸ The SDOH framework makes the invisible visible by elucidating the relationship between structural and intermediate determinants of health, inequity, and health outcomes".²⁹ The WHO cautions that addressing social determinants of health alone may reinforce disparities if we do not also address the structural forces that create more or less advantaged population groups due to inequitable distributions of social determinants.”³⁰

Social Determinant of Violence: A social determinant of violence can be thought of as the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of violence and safety outcomes; in other words, structural or social determinants that positions communities for differential risk of experiencing violence.

Structural Equity/Justice: Structural equity/justice addresses underlying structural factors and policies that gave rise to inequities and commits to correcting past harms and preventing future unintended consequences.³¹ While more difficult to measure than the other types of equity, structural equity/justice is no less important.³² Structural equity/justice exposes deep factors related to power that perpetuate disadvantage within systems and then reverses these inequities through some combination of new norms, policies and/or representation.³³

Structural Racism: Structural racism is "the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination, through mutually reinforcing inequitable systems (in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, criminal justice, and so on) that in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources, which together affect the risk of adverse health outcomes."³⁴ Structural racism involves interconnected institutions, whose linkages are historically rooted and culturally reinforced.³⁵

Targeted universalism: Targeted universalism  “means setting universal goals pursued by targeted processes to achieve those goals. Within a targeted universalism framework, universal goals are established for all groups concerned. The strategies developed to achieve those goals are targeted, based upon how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal.”³⁶

¹ Kendi IX. Extracts: Ibram X. Kendi defines what it means to be an antiracist. Penguin.co.uk. Published June 9, 2020. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/06/ ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist. 

²  The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). Glossary. N.d. Accessed 7/10/23.

³  Kendi IX. How to Be an Antiracist. One World; 2019

⁴ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Evidence Project Overview. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. N.d. Accessed 8/19/2021.

⁵ Hinton E, Cook D. The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview. Annu Rev Criminol. 2021;4(1):261-286. doi:10.1146/annurev-criminol-060520-033306

⁶ Demby G, Escobar N. From Negro Militias to Black Armament. National Public Radio Code Switch. Published 12/22/2020. Accessed 8/16/2021.

⁷Scommegna, P. U.S. Has World’s Highest Incarceration Rate. Population Reference Bureau website. Published 8/10/2012. Accessed 8/16/2021.

⁸ Alexander M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press; 2016.

⁹Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

¹⁰Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

¹¹Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

¹²Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Evidence Project Overview. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. N.d. Accessed 8/19/2021.

¹³ Racial Equity Tools Glossary: https://www.racialequitytools.org/glossary

¹⁴Racial Equity Tools Glossary: https://www.racialequitytools.org/glossary

¹⁵Sen R, Moore M. Funding Narrative Change: An Assessment and Framework by the Convergence Partnership. Convergence Partnership. https://mailchi.mp/2f63721b8ef1/funding-narrative-change-an-assessment-…. Accessed September 26, 2022.

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁷Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

¹⁸Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

¹⁹Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network.

²⁰powell ja, Menendian S, Ake W. Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice. Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Published May 2019. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeted-universalism.

²¹Menendian S. The Structural Racism Remedies Project. Othering & Belonging Institute. Published February 16, 2022.  https://belonging.berkeley.edu/structural-racism-remedies-project#recommendations.

²²Race Forward. What is Racial Equity? Understanding Key Concepts Related to Race. https://www.raceforward.org/about/what-is-racial-equity-key-concepts#equity-justice. Accessed 5/15/23.

²³The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Equity vs. Equality and Other Racial Justice Definitions. The Annie E. Casey Foundation Website. https://www.aecf.org/blog/racial-justice-definitions. Published 2020, Updated 2021. Accessed 7/20/21.

²⁴Aboelata M, Rivas R, Williams L, Yañez E. Building Bridges: The Strategic Imperative for Advancing Health Equity and Racial Justice. Prevention Institute. 2020.

²⁵Aboelata M, Rivas R, Williams L, Yañez E. Building Bridges: The Strategic Imperative for Advancing Health Equity and Racial Justice. Prevention Institute. 2020.

²⁶Aboelata M, Rivas R, Williams L, Yañez E. Building Bridges: The Strategic Imperative for Advancing Health Equity and Racial Justice. Prevention Institute. 2020.

²⁷Jones CP. Levels of racism: a theoretic framework and a gardener's tale. Am J Public Health. 2000 Aug;90(8):1212-5. doi: 10.2105/ajph.90.8.1212. PMID: 10936998.

²⁸U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Social Determinants of Health. Healthy People 2030 website. N.d. Accessed 8/16/2021.

²⁹Armstead TL, Wilkins N, Nation M. Structural and social determinants of inequities in violence risk: A review of indicators. J Community Psychol. 2019;49(4):878-906. doi:10.1002/jcop.22232

³⁰Armstead TL, Wilkins N, Nation M. Structural and social determinants of inequities in violence risk: A review of indicators. J Community Psychol. 2019;49(4):878-906. doi:10.1002/jcop.22232

³¹Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

³²Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

³³Yuen T, Yurkovich E, Grabowski L, Altshuler B. Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. https://www.usdn.org/uploads/cms/documents/usdn_guide_to_equitable_comm…. Accessed 7/20/2021.

³⁴Bailey ZD, Krieger N, Agénor M, Graves J, Linos N, Bassett MT. Structural racism and health inequities in the USA: evidence and interventions. The Lancet. 2017;389(10077):1453-1463. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30569-X

³⁵Bailey ZD, Krieger N, Agénor M, Graves J, Linos N, Bassett MT. Structural racism and health inequities in the USA: evidence and interventions. The Lancet. 2017;389(10077):1453-1463. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30569-X

³⁶powell ja, Menendian S, Ake W. Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice. Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Published May 2019. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeted-universalism.