Civil Rights The term “civil rights” immediately brings to mind the Civil Rights Movement, with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and the March on Washington. However, what does civil rights actually include? It is technically defined as “the protected rights and privileges of citizens,” but does that mean non-citizens do not have any rights? “Civil rights” is a limited term that refers to how the legal system is used to give rights and possibly protect these rights for Black people and other people of color, especially in the United States. To move beyond the term civil rights, you must consider the meaning of human rights.

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Class The word class refers to one’s social and/or economic status. Class divisions in the United States is a major determinant of opportunities.

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Colorism There are many forms of prejudice based on perceived racial difference. Colorism is prejudice or discrimination that favors lighter skin tones over darker skin tones. Discrimination against Afro- hair types sometimes fall within this category as many people with darker skin also have textured hair.

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Diaspora The literal definition of this word means a group of people who have settled away from their “ancestral” lands. The African diaspora refers to the unprecedented movement of Black people from the continent into the Americas due to the Atlantic Slave Trade.

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Disenfranchisement This word means to deprive someone of a privilege or right. It is used often to describe the deprivation of the right to vote. Disenfranchisement of Black Americans has been an ongoing issue since the right to vote was granted to all men with the Fifteenth Amendment.

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Double Consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois popularized the concept of double consciousness in his work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. It is used to describe the dissonance or disconnect Black Americans felt between their African heritage and their experiences in the Americas.

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Harlem Renaissance (aka New Negro Era) It is hard to pin down an exact date for an ideology, but a general consensus amongst historical texts say that the height of the movement occurred from the early 1920s to about 1935. Of course, artistic and cultural productions happened before and after these dates, but this fifteen year saw a concerted effort to create and share Black American artwork. The Harlem Renaissance is known as the New Negro era as well. This term comes from the works of Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois, who advocated for racial uplift that would, in their hopes, lead to racial equality. Another name for this time period is the New Negro Renaissance, a combination of Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Era, which refers to an increase in cultural production amongst international Black communities.

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Intersectionality This term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” in 1989. Intersectionality originality referred to the specific experiences of Black women under racist, classist, and sexist conditions. Over time it became a word to signify diversity, and used to push back against racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

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Lynching This term refers to the extrajudicial murder of Black Americans as a means of reinforcing racial and economic segregation. There are many documented cases, and possibly many more unknown cases, of lynching from 1865 to the present day. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has been working to document and memorialize the victims of lynching across the United States. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by EJI, is known in layman’s terms as the National Lynching Memorial. For more information visit https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial.

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Miscegenation The word miscegenation means the mixture of races. It is used often to discuss the marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between people of differing races. Miscegenation was coined in 1864 through an anonymous pamphlet.

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Race The racialization of humanity is a social construct; there is no biological aspect to race. To put it simply, race is not real. Black and white are, if anything, cultural identifiers. It is an idea that was created at the beginning of modernity, around the 1500s, and it was initially used to justify slavery. Part of the creation of race involved the erasure of Africa. Europe and Africa knew of each other before the Atlantic Slave Trade, but the history of this relationship was hidden to justify the enslavement of African captives. The concept of race was imposed to justify the inhumanity of slavery.

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Racial Passing The issue of racism causes much unrest and destruction. To avoid these issues, some people have chosen to use their physical appearance to their advantage. Historically, some Black Americans with lighter skin tones have chosen to identify as white to avoid racial stigmas. Since race is a social construct, it was not technically difficult to adopt a different racial identity. However, the social and emotional consequences of racial passing could be devastating because it required the denial of one’s Black heritage and possibly estrangement from family. Racial passing was also illegal under various state laws, so there was the added threat of judicial punishment if caught. There is a long history of trials in the United States which were held to determine a person’s racial identity.

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Racial Uplift The ideology of racial uplift argues that “respectable” Black Americans could become fully accepted citizens of the United States by changing the perception of white Americans. The scholar Kevin Gaines literally defined it as the belief that “the improvement of African Americans’ material and moral condition through self-help would diminish white racism.” Racial uplift works under the idea that Black Americans would be accepted if they adopted white American culture and behaviors.

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Respectability The concept of respectability is a part of racial uplift ideology. It argues that a person’s individual behavior has a direct impact on their experience with racism. Respectability is a flawed logic that places the blame of racism on the backs of the oppressed people who suffered racism, and partly absolves the racists of responsibility. Black Americans’ individual behavior, whether good or bad, have no direct impact on racial prejudices because racism is a systemic problem. Individual people can be racist, but the very basis of the United States is embedded in racist ideology because of its history of enslavement. Therefore, the experiences of racism in the United States cannot be resolved through individual behaviors alone.

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Segregation The United States was legally segregated through the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which created the idea of “separate but equal.” Segregation in the United States is also known as Jim Crow segregation. It is important to understand that segregation was not a passive, legal act, but a violent system of oppression. Although the Supreme Court required “separate but equal” opportunities and access, there was never any equality.

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Slavery The literal definition of slavery is “the condition of a person or people in permanent servitude.” This definition does not begin to truly describe the horrors and violence of slavery in the Americas. Although slavery is an ancient practice, slavery in the Americas was markedly different from previous practices. Slavery in the Americas was chattel slavery, which meant that the enslaved person and their descendants were enslaved for life. Chattel slavery made enslavement an inherited state. Black Americans to the present day struggle with the generational effects of enslavement, even though it was legally abolished in 1865.

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The Talented Tenth This term was coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 essay of the same name. It refers to the upper class of Black Americans who were economically well off and typically well-educated. Du Bois argued that these “exceptional” people would be the saviors of the Black race and that the culture of Black elites would positively influence the entire Black community. He believed that being well-educated and culturally influential would force White Americans to begin to accept racial equality. It was an incredibly optimistic, but misguided view that proposed that racial injustice could be solved if Black Americans proved that they could be “civilized” and assimilated into U.S. culture.