Anti-Racism Terms and Resources

Four levels of Oppression/”isms” and Change:

●      Personal: Values, Beliefs, Feelings

●      Interpersonal: Actions, Behaviours, Language

●      Institutional: Rules, Policies, Procedures

●      Cultural: Beauty, Truth, Right

●      White people;

●      Able-bodied people;

●      Heterosexuals;

●      Males;

●      Christians;

●      Middle or owning class people;

●      Middle-aged people;

●      English-speaking people

Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe that they have earned the privileges that they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and they are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent. Unlike targets of oppression, people in dominant groups are frequently unaware that they are members of the dominant group due to the privilege of being able to see themselves as persons rather than stereotypes.

●      Shifts away from diversity to notions of difference and power,

●      Recognizes intersecting forms of inequality,

●      Assumes the role of power in the perpetuation of racism,

●      Criticizes racialized inequalities,

●      Addresses white supremacy,

●      Works throughout and across the curriculum,

●      Urges parents, caregivers and teachers to reflect on their own racialized locations,

●      Examines the role of the school in the perpetuation of inequality,

●      Involves others: a community effort between the classroom and the home,

●      Requires us to destabilize the idea of race itself, “unpacking racial identifications, including whiteness, to recognize how they are created and fluid” (Raby, p. 380)

In recent years, the term “inclusive” has proven problematic, insofar as its practitioners and proponents have falsely assumed that an increase in representations of diversity (a wider range of students seeing their communities reflected in the curriculum) somehow automatically equals anti-racism education. This is because the diversity of representations (and even increases in the hiring of teachers of colour and indigenous teachers) does not automatically change how the system functions, nor does it in itself change the power dynamics that continue to grant power and authority to whiteness/white people and dominant methods. Instead, an “add-on” approach to education has been adopted, in which the system remains fundamentally unchanged in its practice and assumptions, with representations of people of colour and indigenous people of colour in a difficult position: the increase in diverse representation is pointed to by white people as evidence that inclusiveness has already been achieved, while they are left in the periphery of the decision-making process.