Core Concepts
One way to jumpstart racial equity work is by reviewing its core concepts. These include: race, ethnicity, racism, white privilege and internalized racism. To create effective strategies that contribute to progress on addressing racial inequities or improving race relations, it helps to know how race is constructed, and to understand how racism works, how privilege is embedded in our systems, and how internalized racism and superiority are created and maintained. In group work, it is especially helpful to spend time developing some common understandings and vocabulary for discussing these core concepts together. Groups that move forward without investing in that work often find themselves stuck later on, when they realize people have been working from very different assumptions about what these words mean, and their underlying relationships and components.
