Race and Racism

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Race and its impact on society, including how it is constructed, perpetuated and justified.

Historical context: This includes the history of colonialism, slavery, immigration policies, and the creation of racial categories that shape modern-day prejudice and discrimination.
Intersectionality: This focuses on the multiple identities and social categories that influence a person's experiences with racism, including gender, sexuality, class, and nationality.
White supremacy: This explores the ways that white people maintain and benefit from systems that prioritize whiteness over other racial identities, often through structural and institutional means.
Microaggressions: These are small everyday acts of racism that can accumulate over time and lead to marginalization and discrimination for people of color.
Systemic racism: This encompasses institutional practices and policies that perpetuate unequal access to opportunities and resources for people of color, such as redlining, mass incarceration, and discriminatory hiring practices.
Colorism: This refers to the preferential treatment given to lighter-skinned individuals over darker-skinned individuals, often based on racist stereotypes.
Cultural appropriation: This describes the appropriation of cultural elements from a marginalized group by dominant culture without proper understanding or acknowledgement of its historical context and significance.
Whiteness studies: This involves examining the social construction of race and analyzing how whiteness has been normalized and privileged in society.
Anti-racism: This involves actively working to dismantle racist systems, practices, and beliefs, both individually and collectively.
Intersectional activism: This involves recognizing the intersectionality of oppressions and working towards social justice for all marginalized communities.
Indigenous studies: This focuses on the experiences, histories, and cultures of indigenous peoples and examines how colonization and racism have impacted their lives.
Decolonization: This involves the undoing of colonial structures, systems, and ideologies and the restoration of autonomy to colonized communities.
Implicit bias: This refers to unconscious biases that can influence our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors towards different racial groups.
Allyship: This involves working in solidarity with marginalized communities and actively using privilege and power to challenge and dismantle systems of oppression.
Environmental racism: This examines how racism intersects with environmental issues, including access to clean water, land use, and pollution.
Critical race theory: This is a legal and social theory that examines how law and power intersect with race and racism, and how racism is embedded in social institutions.
Liberation theology: This is a movement that combines theology and social justice activism, focusing on the liberation of oppressed groups and challenging dominant power structures.
Postcolonial studies: This examines the ongoing effects of colonialism in the present day, including the persistence of racialized power dynamics and the impacts of globalization.
Intersectional feminism: This is a feminist framework that recognizes the interconnectedness of oppressions and focuses on the experiences of marginalized women, including women of color, queer women, and women with disabilities.
Disability studies: This focuses on the experiences and rights of people with disabilities and examines how ableism intersects with other forms of oppression, including racism.
Quote: "Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society."
Quote: "The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations."
Quote: "By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits, and then later to national affiliations."
Quote: "Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."
Quote: "While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning."
Quote: "The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another."
Quote: "Social conceptions and groupings of races have varied over time, often involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits."
Quote: "Modern scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits."
Quote: "Scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways."
Quote: "Others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic."
Quote: "All living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens."
Quote: "Since the second half of the 20th century, race has been associated with discredited theories of scientific racism."
Quote: "Race has become increasingly seen as a largely pseudoscientific system of classification."
Quote: "Race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and/or loaded terms: populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context."
Quote: "Its use in genetics was formally renounced by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2023."
Quote: "Folk taxonomies define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits."
Quote: "While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior..."
Quote: "Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens."
Quote: "Race has become increasingly seen as a largely pseudoscientific system of classification."
Quote: "The use in genetics was formally renounced by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2023."