Today is the U.N.'s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Take Part!

On March 21, 1960, Afrikaner police in Sharpeville, South Africa opened fire on a crowd that was peacefully demonstrating against apartheid “pass laws”, killing 69 people. Six years later, the General Assembly of the United Nations established the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, thereby calling on the world to “redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.” Another 13 years later and the day-long call to action was expanded into a week of solidarity with people struggling against racism and racial discrimination.

Progress has been made since then, yet the story is far from finished. Look at U.S. History, for example.  In the 1960s, landmark pieces of legislation were passed, meant to eliminate discrimination “in all places of public accommodation”. But you don’t have to look hard to find examples of racism existing in this country today. It’s clear that the problem is deep and pervasive, and that so much is left to do.

On this day which commemorates and reminds us of the goal to end racial discrimination, we wanted to take a moment not just to recognize that we all need to play a bigger role in this effort but also to ask you: do you know the issues being discussed? Below is a glossary of the words and phrases you should know in order to talk about racial discrimination. It is in no way an exhaustive resource but it’s a start to getting everyone on the same page:

• Racial equity: This term looks forward to a reality in which a person is no more or less likely to experience society’s benefits or burdens just because of the color of their skin. In other words, achieving racial equity means a person of color would no longer be statistically more likely to be incarcerated, unemployed, in a state of poverty, and so on.

• White privilege: You can’t really talk about the disadvantages that people of color face without also talking about the advantages that come from being white. Net Impact CEO Liz Maw reflected upon this privilege in a post last year using this analogy gleaned from a Racial Equity Institute workshop she’d just attended: imagine you’re joining a game of Monopoly two hours after everyone else began playing. “The icons would be gone; the properties and hotels purchased. It is almost impossible to win.” Now carry that metaphor to real life; add in things like affordable mortgage rates, union support, access to elite universities, and full-time salaried jobs, and you’ve begun to understand white privilege. If you’re white and reading this, however, don’t just crumple and fall to the floor in helpless agony; that doesn’t really help anyone. As Net Impact’s Dwight Smith blogged here last year: “Privilege should not be a constant source of guilt. Rather, it should fuel action against the inequality that it breeds and sustains.”

• Structural racism: The Aspen Institute defines structural racism as a series of public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations and other societal norms that basically perpetuate racial inequity. “It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time,” says the institute’s website. Structural racism is a natural segue from discussing white privilege, because while you yourself might be an open-minded individual who would never, ever intentionally discriminate against someone because of their racial background (that is, you’re not explicitly a racist), it doesn’t mean that such a thing isn’t built into all of society. Within structural racism is the category of institutional racism: the ways in which people of color are unfairly treated, from school policies to practices in policing. Studies have been proving this for years, coming up with pages and pages of numbers, such as: black students make up nearly 40 percent of all school expulsions; a black man at a traffic stop is three times more likely to be searched and six times more likely to be sent to jail than a white person; a black person serving time will stay behind bars about 20 percent longer than a white person who committed a similar crime. On and on the statistics go, and so the question is not whether or not structural racism exists; it’s how we’re going to eradicate it.

• Implicit bias: Also called unconscious bias, the Kirwan Institute defines it as “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.” Beyond the issue of race, humans show bias towards one another in the context of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and we do so by drawing on our early life experiences, coupled with our exposure to various forms of media, including news coverage. It’s not really a question of who does this, because we all do; it’s a question of where in your life you’ve made some sort of assumption about someone, for better or for worse, based on nothing but the ideas in your head. Don’t believe it? Then take this test.