AIS 119 VOCAB
1. Affirmative Action: An active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women. Affirmative action began as a government remedy to the effects of long-standing discrimination against such groups and has consisted of policies, programs, and procedures that give preferences to minorities and women in job hiring, admission to institutions of higher education, the awarding of government contracts, and other social benefits. The typical criteria for affirmative action are race, disability, gender, ethnic origin, and age.
2. Agency: The capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
3. Counter Hegemony: Attempts to critique or dismantle hegemonic power. In other words, it is a confrontation and/or opposition to existing status quo and its legitimacy in politics, but can also be observed in various other spheres of life, such as history, media, music, etc.
4. Cultural Appropriation: Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture. Often, the original meaning of these cultural elements is lost or distorted, and such displays are often viewed as disrespectful by members of the originating culture, or even as a form of desecration.
5. Discrimination: Action or behavior that denies equal access, opportunities, and rights to persons because of prejudice or other arbitrary reasons.
6. Economic Development: Efforts that seek to improve the economic well-being and quality of life for a community by creating and/or retaining jobs, and supporting or growing incomes and the tax base.
7. Emigration: Leaving a country.
8. Empowerment: The process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.
9. Environmental Justice: The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.
10. Ethnic group is defined by three basic factors:
A. historical or national origin
B. distinctive cultural traits and practices
C. a sense of community
11. Ethnocentrism: At its basic level is an intense feeling of commitment to and preference for one’s own ethnic group, seeing it as the major or exclusive center of one’s concerns and activities.
A. A negative form of ethnocentrism can be defined as a preference for one’s own group, but also a tendency (ex. Eurocentrism/Eurocentric):
a. to view one’s own group as superior to others;
b. to judge others by the standards and values of one’s own group; and
c. to deny others the rights and equal access to wealth, power and status one claims for one’s own self and group
B. A positive form of ethnocentrism can be defined as (ex. Afrocentrism):
A. centering or grounding oneself in one’s own community and culture;
B. assuming a position that one’s culture is not better than all others, but rather preferred by one for non-prejudicial reasons; and
C. being open to mutually beneficial relations and exchanges with others.
12. Genocide: The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (article 2) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … ”, including:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
13. Hegemony: Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.
14. Immigration: Coming to a different country.
15. Language Policy: What a government does either officially through legislation, court decisions, or policy to determine how languages are used, cultivate language skills needed to meet national priorities or to establish the rights of individuals or groups to use and maintain languages.
16. Meritocracy: The system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievements, such as in the United States of America. However, with the existence of structural and institutional modes of domination, no matter how hard people work, they may never advance in society. Consider the phrase, “Pick yourself up from the bootstraps.”
17. Migration: Transfer of populations within a country.
18. Modes of Domination: Race, class, and gender are modes of domination. In other words, these are ways people are oppressed and controlled.
A. Race - A socio-biological concept constructed to assign human worth and social status using Europeans as the paradigm (especially the male).
B. Class - A socio-economic grouping, which reflects unequal possession of and access to wealth, power and status.
C. Gender - A socio-biological category used to impose, explain and justify unequal, exploitative and oppressive relations between males and females.
D. Racism - A system of denial, deformation and destruction of a people's history, humanity and human rights based exclusively or primarily on the specious concept of race.
E. Classism - Thought and practice reflective of concern for and imposition and maintenance of socio-economic hierarchy, i.e., wealth, power and status.
F. Sexism - Social thought and practice which uses gender to establish, justify and maintain unequal, exploitative and oppressive relations between men and women.
19. Modes of Response: Race, class, and gender offer a context in which modes of response can also be compared. There are several ways the subordinated or dominated groups can respond:
A. Submission - They can essentially accept the domination, its imposition, ideology and institutions; in a word, they can collaborate in their own oppression.
B. Accommodation - They can internally reject the inequities and oppression of the system, but externally work within its framework, seeking gradual change.
C. Resistance - They can reject the system and confront it on every level possible. Some of the varied and constant forms of resistance are: cultural struggle; armed struggle; economic struggle (strikes, boycotts, selective buying); political struggles (organization, demonstrations, education, mobilization, institutional penetration, and institutional disruption).
20. Multiculturalism: The presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society.
21. Oppression: Prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control.
22. Political Power: The ability to influence or outright control the behavior of people. The term "authority" is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to humans as social beings.
23. Prejudice: A negative attitude towards others based on faulty assumptions about them or their culture.
24. Race: A concept which has both a biological and social dimension:
A. Race is a biological category for distinguishing different kinds of human beings. What is important in the definition of race is the social meaning attributed to one’s physical appearance.
B. Race can be defined as a socio-biological concept constructed to assign human worth and social status, using Europeans as the paradigm. In other words, the farther one is from the paradigm, the lower one’s human worth and the lower one’s social status. Likewise, the closer one is to the paradigm, the higher one’s human worth and the higher one’s social status.
C. Race is a social construction. In other words, differences in physical appearance are given social meaning with white features and white people being privileged
25. Racial Prejudice: A hostile attitude directed toward others because of negative assumptions about their group and culture.
26. Racism: Evolves out of the concept of race and can be defined as a system of denial, deformation and destruction of a people’s history, humanity and human rights based exclusively or primarily on the specious concept of race.
A. Impositional Racism - An act of dominance, which is always at first an act of violence and appropriation, i.e., conquest, annexation, enslavement, colonialism, occupation, segregation, subjugation, decimation, deculturalization, etc.
B. Ideological Racism - A system of popular, pseudo-scientific or pseudo-intellectual assumptions negative about the oppressed and racialized group to justify oppression and unequal treatment.
C. Institutional Arrangement - Racism is structures and practices to perpetuate and promote dominance (Imposition). It involves educational systems, the legal system, the media, the cultural apparatus, the political system, and the economic system, i.e. the entire social system.
27. Reparations: The making of amends for a wrong one has done. The struggle for justice for a people, accountability for the oppressors, and an ethical model for the world of how to treat grievously injured people.
28. Sovereignty: The authority of a state to govern itself.
29. Stereotype: A preconceived notion and an overgeneralization about a group of people.
30. Treaty Rights: Certain rights that were reserved by indigenous peoples when they signed treaties with settler societies in the wake of European colonization.
31. White Privilege: An institutional (rather than personal) set of benefits granted to white Europeans, like those who resemble the people who dominate the powerful positions in our institutions. One of the primary privileges is that of having greater access to power and resources than people of color do.