Definitions

Shared language

To ensure that there is a shared understanding of language when approaching anti-racism work in STEMM, provided below is a glossary of critical terms. While we have shared some definitions to create a shared understanding, this work requires individual, personal learning dedicated to understanding and dismantling structural inequities that exist in STEMM and in our society.

Term	Definition
Anti-Blackness
Anti-racism
Diversity	A variety of racial identities or characteristics (e.g. African Americans, Native Americans, Latinx). Diversity is a quantitative measure of representation.
Equity	Ensures that outcomes in the conditions of well-being are improved for marginalized groups, lifting outcomes for all. Equity is a measure of justice.
Inequity
Imperialism	Imperialism and its legacies speak to the entanglements of empire building and the practices of racialized economic dispossession, exclusion, and destruction of indigenous peoples and colonial subjects. The projects of imperialism and colonialism require research, which for many signifies violence and destruction. Research and its legitimized forms of violence are entangled in knowledge production and contribute to the reproduction of racialized exclusions.
Intersectionality	A critique of the single-axis analysis that further marginalizes multidimensional experiences of minoritized groups. Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities inform different forms of oppression and privilege. (Crenshaw, 1989)
Race	The idea that people can be grouped based on inherited physical characteristics. However, race is a social construct, not a biological reality.
Racism	Uneven and unfair distribution of power, privilege, land and material goods favoring white people- a system in which people of color as a group are exploited and oppressed by white people as a group. Racism operates at multiple levels: interpersonal, institutional, structural and cultural (Kivel, 2017). Racism is based on the concept of whiteness – a power fiction enforced by power and violence. Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white. (Kivel, 2017)
Racial Equity	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.
Racial Injustice
Social Justice
Settler Colonialism	Settler-colonialism and its legacies speak to the practice of destroying and disappearing Indigenous peoples and their lives. Settler colonialism also involves the subjugation and forced labor of slaves. As part of the settler colonial project are the invisibilized dynamics of organization, governance, curricula, and assessment. These dynamics inform the settler perspectives and worldviews that inform particular knowledge and research. These projects ultimately maintain and rationalize unfair and inequitable social structures. (Tuck & yang, 2012)
Systemic Racism	Recognizing the historical and present manifestations of racism expose the ways that racial exclusions and barriers are sustained for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color as a continuum of historic racist policies and pseudoscientific theories. This requires the implementation of anti-racist practices and the promotion of actionable practices and policies to transform and change values, structures, and behaviors.
Scientific Racism	Scientific racism is rooted in the concept of biological differences among peoples. The material realities of this erroneous understanding are historically and presently embedded within the sciences and continue to reproduce through systemic and social structures.
White supremacy	The previous definition got erased!!! White supremacy can be seen as pervasive, deep-rooted, and long-standing exploitation, control, and violence directed at people of color, Native Americans, and immigrants of color. (Kivel, 2017)