POWER & PRIVILEGE DEFINITIONS

We operate from a common language, understanding that identities, especially in our trans, gender expansive, and queer communities, evolve quickly and are individually unique. This is only a suggested guide; each person’s identity can be complex and vary in definition and experience.

INSTITUTIONAL POWER - The ability or official authority to decide what is best for others. The ability to determine who will have access to resources. The capacity to exercise control over others.

PREJUDICE - A judgment or opinion formed on insufficient grounds before facts are known or disregards facts that contradict it. Prejudices are learned and can be unlearned.

HOMOPHOBIA - Negative attitudes, hostility, fear, and/or hatred of people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay, or bisexual; Homophobia transphobia is manifested in several ways, including bullying, harassment, discrimination, or violence.

TRANSPHOBIA - Negative attitudes, hostility, fear, and/or hatred of people who identify or are perceived as transgender or who otherwise go beyond the bounds of traditional gender norms; transphobia is manifested in several ways, including bullying, harassment, discrimination, or violence.

HETEROSEXISM – a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality, relationships, and gender binary behaviors.  It can include the presumption that other people are heterosexual (otherwise known as straight) or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only acceptable behavior and, therefore, superior.

STEREOTYPE - An exaggerated or distorted belief that attributes characteristics to members of a particular group, simplistically lumping them together and refusing to acknowledge differences among group members.

OPPRESSION - The combination of prejudice and institutional power, which creates a system that discriminates against some groups (often called “target groups”) and benefits other groups (often called “dominant groups”). These systems include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, ageism, and anti-Semitism. These systems enable dominant groups to control target groups by limiting their rights, freedom, and access to essential resources such as health care, education, employment, and housing.

FOUR LEVELS OF OPPRESSION/”ISMS” & CHANGE

  • Personal: Values, Beliefs, Feelings

  • Interpersonal: Actions, Behaviors, Language

  • Institutional: Rules, Policies, Procedures

  • Cultural: Beauty, Truth, Right

PRIVILEGE - Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups. In the United States, privilege is granted to people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups:

  • 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 they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to achieve them. Privileges are unearned and granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, regardless of their stated intent.

RACE - Someone has said that “race is a figment of our imagination.” That is a clever way of saying that race is an invention. It is a way of arbitrarily dividing humankind into different groups to keep some on top and others at the bottom, some in and some out.  And its invention has evident historical roots, namely, colonialism. “Race is an arbitrary socio-biological classification created by Europeans during the time of worldwide colonial expansion, to assign human worth and social status, using themselves as the model of humanity, to legitimize white power and white skin privilege” (Crossroads-Interfaith Ministry for Social Justice).

Acknowledging that race is a historically arbitrary invention does not mean that it can be easily dispensed with as a reality in people’s lives. To recognize race as an invention of colonialism is not the same as pretending to be color-blind or declaring, “I don’t notice people’s race!” Instead, our world has been ordered and structured based on skin color, and that oppressive ordering and structuring is RACISM.

RACISM - Racism is a system in which one race maintains supremacy over another through attitudes, behaviors, social structures, and institutional power. Racism is a “system of structured dis-equality where the goods, services, rewards, privileges, and benefits of the society are available to individuals according to their presumed membership” in a particular racial group (Barbara Love, 1994. Understanding Internalized Oppression). 

A person of any race can have prejudices about people of other races. Still, only members of the dominant social group can exhibit racism because racism is prejudice, plus the institutional power to enforce it.

Definitions abridged from:
© Leaven 2003 Doing Our Own Work: A Seminar for Anti-Racist White Women
© Visions, Inc. and the MSU Extension Multicultural Awareness Workshop