ACCENT DISCRIMINATION: Discrimination, for example, by an employer against a worker, on the basis of a foreign-sounding accent; or the assumption that native English speakers should not have to make an effort to understand accented English.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Policy that strives for increased minority enrollment, activity, or membership, often with the intention of diversifying a certain environment such as a school or workplace.
AFROCENTRISM: Intellectual position grounded in African values and ethos.
AMERICANIZATION: Effort by social workers to teach immigrants American customs, diets, and hygiene.
AMICUS BRIEF: Friend-of-the-court document usually filed by an organization with an interest in a case.
ANTI-SEMITISM: Attitude or behavior that is discriminatory toward Jewish people.
ANTISNITCHING CAMPAIGNS: Informal pressures not to cooperate with the police in investigating crimes.
APARTHEID: Official separation of the races, as formerly in South Africa.
ARYAN RACE: Term applied to white people of northern European descent; often used to imply white supremacy.
ASSIMILATION: Process of taking on social and cultural traits of the majority race in the nation in which one resides.
AVERSIVE RACISM: Attempts to avoid people of color or to be formal, correct, and cold in dealings with them.
BARRIO: Latino neighborhood.
BICULTURAL EDUCATION: Pedagogical approach that encourages retention of a child’s original or family culture.
BILINGUALISM: Policy that emphasizes preservation of native languages.
BINARY PARADIGM OF RACE: Pattern of framing race issues in terms of two categories, such as black and white.
BIOLOGICAL VIEW OF RACE: Once popular view that humanity is divided into four or five major groups, corresponding to objective and real physical differences.
BIRACIAL IDENTITY: Identity of a person whose heritage or culture encompasses more than one category.
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP: Status of persons born in the United States who automatically become citizens irrespective of their parents’ legal status.
BLACK PANTHERS: Radical Black Power organization that sprang up in the 1960s and rejected integration and nonviolent change.
BLACK RAGE: Legal defense notion, as yet unrecognized, holding that a criminal action that results from understandable racial anger or indignation should qualify for a partial excuse.
BLACK-WHITE BINARY: Binary paradigm that considers the black-white relationship central to racial analysis.
BORDERLANDS: Southwestern lands that lie close to the United States’ border with Mexico and still retain much Mexican culture and influence.
BORDER PATROL: Federal agency charged with policing the border between the United States and Mexico, as well as between the United States and Canada.
BRACERO PROGRAMS: Official programs that permit entry of temporary Mexican workers, especially for agriculture.
BROKER CLASS: Minorities, often well assimilated, educated, and light skinned, who perform tasks on behalf of dominantly white corporations, managing other minorities or helping the corporations sell products to the minority community.
CAMPUS SPEECH CODES: University and college regulations that provide for discipline of speakers who insult or demean members of the campus community.
CAPITALISM: System in which market forces dictate economic decisions and most property is privately owned.
CHICANOS/CHICANAS: Self-designation adopted by many Mexican Americans living in the United States; often a term of pride.
CHINESE EXCLUSION ACTS: Federal laws that prevented Chinese laborers from entering or reentering the United States.
CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS: Federal statutes guaranteeing nondiscrimination in employment, housing, voting, education, and similar areas.
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: Effort to advance the interests of minority communities in achieving equal citizenship.
CLASS: Group of individuals who share a similar socioeconomic status.
COALITION POLITICS: Joint approach by minority groups in pursuit of common ends.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Puzzlement at perceiving something that deviates from the expected, such as a black astrophysicist who wins the Nobel Prize, or over an inconsistency between what one knows and how one has been acting.
COLD WAR: Battle of position between the United States and the former Soviet Union that began shortly after the conclusion of World War II.
COLONIALISM: European effort to maintain control of weaker nations; the United States followed similar policy in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
COLOR BLINDNESS: Belief that one should treat all persons equally, without regard to their race.
COLOR IMAGERY: Words, texts, and television images that associate skin color with traits such as innocence, criminality, or physical beauty.
CONSERVATIVE BACKLASH: Reaction of some persons and corporations to civil rights gains, often including campaigns against welfare, affirmative action, and immigration.
CONTRADICTION-CLOSING CASE: Judicial decision handed down to conceal a widening gap between our ideals and the actual situation in the world, often the product of injustice.
CORRIDO: Latino folk song or lament, recounting a tale of heroic resistance or bravery in the face of danger.
COUNTERMAJORITARIANISM: View that the court system is free to strike down laws enacted by the majority that are unfair to minority groups.
COUNTERSTORYTELLING: Writing that aims to cast doubt on the validity of accepted premises or myths, especially ones held by the majority.
CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES: Legal movement that challenged liberalism from the Left, denying that law is neutral, that every case has a single correct answer, and that rights are of vital importance.
CRITICAL RACE FEMINISM: Application of critical race theory to issues of concern to women of color.
CRITICAL RACE MASCULINISM: Application of critical race theory to the construction of male norms in society.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY: Progressive legal movement that seeks to transform the relationship among race, racism, and power.
CRITIQUE OF RIGHTS: Critical legal studies position that rights are alienating, ephemeral, and much less useful than most people think.
CULTURAL DEFENSE: Criminal law strategy that shows that the accused’s crime was acceptable in his or her culture.
CUMULATIVE VOTING: Reform in which voters may cast as many votes as positions up for election and may concentrate them on one individual if they choose.
DECONSTRUCTION: Intellectual approach that targets traditional interpretations of terms, concepts, and practices, showing that they contain unsuspected meanings or internal contradictions.
DEPORTATION: Process by which undocumented persons are expelled to their nation of origin.
DESEGREGATION: Policy to integrate the races in schools or housing.
DETERMINISM: View that individuals and culture are products of particular forces, such as economics, biology, or the search for high status.
DIFFERENTIAL RACIALIZATION: Process by which each racial and ethnic group comes to be viewed and treated differently by mainstream society.
DISCOURSE: Formal, extensive, oral or written treatment of a subject; the way we speak about something.
DISCRIMINATION: Practice of treating similarly situated individuals differently because of race, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, or national origin.
DISENFRANCHISEMENT: Process by which citizens are deprived of voting or other rights of citizenship, for example, as a result of a felony conviction (“felon disenfranchisement”).
DIVERSITY: Policy founded on the belief that individuals of different races and ethnicities can contribute to workplaces, schools, and other settings.
DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS: Notion attributed to W. E. B. Du Bois that black folks are able to see racial events from two perspectives—that of the majority group and their own—at the same time.
DREAMERS: Children of undocumented parents who have spent most of their lives in the United States but are not U.S. citizens and seek to remain here legally, for example, to enroll in college.
DRIVING WHILE BLACK: Term for police practice of singling out minority drivers for special attention, such as by pulling them over and searching for drugs or contraband. See also Profiling.
EDUCATION, CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN: Scholarly movement that applies critical race theory to issues in the field of education, including high-stakes testing, affirmative action, hierarchy in schools, tracking and school discipline, bilingual and multicultural education, and the debate over ethnic studies and the Western canon.
EMPATHIC FALLACY: Mistaken belief that sweeping social reform can be accomplished through speech and incremental victories within the system.
ENGLISH-ONLY MOVEMENT: Movement that seeks to require the use of English solely in government services, voting, schools, and other settings.
EPITHETS: Pejoratives or slurs used to demean another person or group.
EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC): Federal agency charged with investigating employment discrimination.
EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE: Part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that requires that states treat citizens equally.
ERASURE: Practice of collective indifference to the identity, history, stories, and culture of a group, rendering them invisible.
ESSENTIALISM: Search for the unique essence of a group.
ETHNICITY: Group characteristic often based on national origin, ancestry, language, or other cultural characteristic or pattern.
EUGENICS: Attempt to better the quality of the human race through means such as sterilization, selective breeding, or mass extermination.
EUROCENTRISM: Tendency to interpret the world in terms of European values and perspectives and the belief that they are superior.
EXCEPTIONALISM: Belief that a particular group’s history justifies treating it as unique and special.
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: Phenomenon in which oppressed people internalize and identify with attitudes and ideology of the controlling class.
FARMWORKERS’ MOVEMENT: Organization spearheaded by César Chávez in the 1960s to improve health and safety standards and employment opportunities for farmworkers, including migrants.
FIRST AMENDMENT: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides for freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.
FORMAL EQUALITY: Belief that the law should only provide treatment and opportunity that are the same for all.
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides for equal protection and due process.
GAY BASHING: Violence or harsh words aimed at gays and lesbians.
GAY/LESBIAN (LGBT) OR QUEER LEGAL THEORY: Theory that places sexual orientation and liberation at the center of analysis.
GREASER: Derogatory term for Mexicans or Chicanos.
GREEN CARD: Identification card proving that a noncitizen is a permanent legal resident within the United States.
HATE CRIME: A crime motivated by bias based on race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, or other category designated by law.
HATE SPEECH: Racial slurs and epithets or other harsh language that has no purpose other than to demean and marginalize other people or groups.
HEGEMONY: Domination by the ruling class and unconscious acceptance of that state of affairs by the subordinate group.
HETEROSEXISM: Preference for straight relationships and view that same-sex ones are unnatural.
HIP-HOP THEORY: Approach to racial justice that borrows ideas and attitudes from popular culture, especially rap music.
HIRING QUOTAS: Policy of setting aside a specific number of slots or jobs for certain groups or people.
HISPANIC: Term for persons of Iberian or Spanish ancestry; now less commonly used than the terms “Latino” or “Chicano.”
HOMOPHOBIA: Prejudice against lesbians and gays.
HYPODESCENT: “One-drop rule” that holds that anyone with any degree of discernible African ancestry is black.
IDENTITY: That by which one defines oneself, such as straight, college educated, Filipina.
IDEOLOGY: Set of strongly held beliefs or values, especially dealing with governance of society.
ILLEGAL ALIEN: Pejorative term for undocumented worker, that is, one who works in the United States without holding official papers.
IMMIGRANT ANALOGY: Belief that racialized minority groups, especially Latinos and Asians, will follow the same path of assimilation as white European ethnics.
IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE (INS): Federal agency formerly charged with enforcing immigration laws; its functions have now been taken up by the Department of Homeland Security.
IMMIGRATION REFORM: Collection of proposals to lessen undocumented entry, provide a path to citizenship, and “gain control over our borders.”
IMPERIALISM: Political and economic domination of one nation or group over another.
IMPLICIT BIAS: Unconscious association of one idea with another, such as race and personal qualities, frequently evincing a negative attitude.
INDETERMINACY: Idea that legal reasoning rarely, if ever, has exactly one right answer and that politics and social pressures on judges influence outcomes.
INDIAN REMOVAL: Policy of relocating eastern Native American tribes to lands west of the Mississippi so that white settlers could take over their homelands.
INITIATIVE PROCESS: Direct democracy by which citizens vote for laws without the intervention of their elected representatives.
INTEGRATION: Process of desegregating environments such as public schools or neighborhoods.
INTEREST CONVERGENCE: Thesis pioneered by Derrick Bell that the majority group tolerates advances for racial justice only when it suits its interest to do so.
INTERNAL COLONIALISM: View that some domestic minority groups, particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, are for all intents and purposes internal colonies of the United States.
INTERNMENT: Forced confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation camps during World War II.
INTERSECTIONALITY: Belief that individuals and classes often have shared or overlapping interests or traits.
JIM CROW LAWS: Antiloitering laws, poll taxes, sundown provisions, and other measures enacted, usually in the South, in order to maintain white superiority even after slavery came to an end.
JUDICIAL REVIEW: Policy under which courts determine whether laws are constitutional.
JURY NULLIFICATION: Process by which a jury acquits a defendant even though the law would technically require conviction.
KU KLUX KLAN: White-supremacist organization originating in the nineteenth-century South that has employed lynching, cross burnings, parades, and terrorism to intimidate African Americans, Mexicans, Catholics, and Jews.
LATCRIT (LATINO-CRITICAL) THEORY: Branch of critical race theory that considers issues of concern to Latinos, such as immigration, language rights, and multi-identity.
LATINOS/LATINAS: Persons of Latin American ancestry residing in the United States; sometimes called “Hispanic.”
LEGAL DOCTRINE: Rule of law derived from a legislative enactment or judicial opinion.
LEGAL REALISM: Early-twentieth-century forerunner of critical legal studies that disavowed mechanical jurisprudence in favor of social science, politics, and policy judgment.
LEGAL STORYTELLING AND NARRATIVE: Using stories, parables, and first-person accounts to understand and analyze racial issues.
LEGITIMACY: Quality of an institution, such as the law, that is viewed as justified and worthy of respect.
LIBERALISM: Political philosophy that holds that the purpose of government is to maximize liberty; in civil rights, the view that law should enforce formal equality in treatment of all citizens.
MAJORITARIANISM: View that majority culture and attitudes should hold sway.
MANIFEST DESTINY: Mid-nineteenth-century ideology holding that U.S. territorial expansion was inevitable and just.
MAQUILADORAS: Assembly plants set up by U.S. corporations just inside the Mexican border to take advantage of cheap labor and lax workplace and environmental regulations.
MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS: Notion that free exchange of ideas best promotes truth and good government.
MARXISM: Political, social, and economic doctrine of Karl Marx, in particular the view that capitalism exploits workers and promotes inequality.
MELTING POT: Assimilation metaphor holding that individuals and groups blend together to create a new society.
MERIT: Conventional worthiness—concept that critical race scholars call into question because they hold that it is unfair to rank people according to mechanical scales and distribute valuable social benefits on that basis.
MESTIZOS/MESTIZAS: Person of mixed European and Indian ancestry, especially in countries that were once colonized by Spain.
MICROAGGRESSION: Stunning small encounter with racism, usually unnoticed by members of the majority race.
MIGRANT WORKER: Individual who moves from region to region to find work, especially in harvesting crops.
MINDSET: State of mind or attitude, often unconscious.
MISCEGENATION: Marriage or cohabitation between individuals of different races; formerly prohibited by law when one of the parties was white.
MODEL MINORITY MYTH: Idea that Asian Americans are hardworking, intelligent, and successful and that other groups should emulate them.
MULTICULTURALISM: View that social institutions should reflect many cultures.
MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS: Ability of people of color to perceive something in two or more ways, for example, as a member of his or her group would see it and as a white would. See also Double consciousness.
MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY: A category for people with mixed racial background that many people think the U.S. Census should provide.
MULTIRACIAL PERSON: Individual whose ancestry includes persons of different races.
NAFTA: North American Free Trade Agreement that allows American corporations access to Mexican and Canadian markets.
NATIONALISM: View that a minority group should focus on its own affairs and interests first.
NATIVISM: View that the United States should give priority to its current citizenry and limit immigration.
NATURALIZATION: Process of becoming a U.S. citizen.
NEGROPHOBE: One who irrationally fears or dislikes African Americans.
NEOCOLONIALISM: View that society is taking on the structure of a colonial society, with an occupying group maintaining control over a large but diffuse group, usually of color.
NORMATIVE: Of, pertaining to, or based on a norm, especially one regarded as broad or universal.
ONE-DROP RULE: Rule of hypodescent, that any person with discernible black ancestry is black and can never be white.
OPERATION WETBACK: Government policy instituted in 1954–1959 under which as many as 3.7 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported, in violation of their civil liberties.
PARADIGM: Reigning system of belief that controls what is seen as possible, relevant, and valid.
PASSING: Crossing the color line and gaining acceptance into a race other than one’s original one.
PATRIARCHY: System of beliefs and practices in which men dominate and control women.
PERSPECTIVALISM: Belief that a person’s or group’s position or standpoint greatly influences how they see truth and reality.
PLENARY POWER DOCTRINE: Judicial view that congressional enactments concerning immigration are unreviewable by courts because Congress’s power in this area is unlimited.
POPULIST MOVEMENT: Movement that focuses on the common people or workers.
POSTMODERNISM: Critique of modernism, a previous system founded on Enlightenment thinking and philosophy, and capitalism.
POSTRACIAL: The condition of being beyond race; an era when race no longer matters.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM: Critique of structuralism, an earlier movement that aimed to determine basic structural elements of social systems, especially in the social and behavioral sciences.
PREJUDICE: Belief or attitude, usually unfavorable, about a person or group before the facts are known; a prejudgment.
PRINCIPLE OF INVOLUNTARY SACRIFICE: Notion, attributed to Derrick Bell, that the costs of civil rights advances are always placed on blacks or low-income whites.
PRIVILEGE: Right or advantage, often unwritten, conferred on some people but not others, usually without examination or good reason.
PROFILING: Practice in which the authorities single out ethnic or racial minority persons for heightened suspicion or detention. See also Driving while black.
PROPERTY INTEREST IN WHITENESS: Idea that white skin and identity are economically valuable. See also Whiteness as property.
PUBLIC-PRIVATE DISTINCTION: Notion that many types of law operate only in the public sector, for example, that one is free to rent a room in one’s personal home to anyone one wants.
PUSH-PULL THEORY OF MIGRATION: Idea that Mexicans come to the United States in accordance with the demand of the U.S. labor market or in response to adverse conditions in Mexico.
RACE: Notion of a distinct biological type of human being, usually based on skin color or other physical characteristics.
RACE TRAITOR: A white person who identifies as black in an effort to subvert white privilege and tacit assumptions that underlie racism.
RACIAL FRAUD AND BOX CHECKING: Action on the part of a nonminority person, or one with a very slight connection with a minority group, to gain the benefit of minority status, as with affirmative action.
RACIALIZATION: Process of creating a race, such as Latinos; also injecting a racial element into a situation. See also Differential racialization.
RACIAL REALISM: View that racial progress is sporadic and that people of color are doomed to experience only infrequent peaks followed by regressions.
RACISM: Any program or practice of discrimination, segregation, persecution, or mistreatment based on membership in a race or ethnic group.
REASONABLE RACIST: One who treats members of another group in racist fashion because he or she believes that, statistically, the other group is prone to crime or similar behavior.
RECONSTRUCTION: Period when society is attempting to redress racial wrongs consistently and in thoroughgoing fashion.
REDISTRICTING: Process of redrawing geographical lines of political districts to achieve fairness in voting.
REDLINING: Policy by insurance companies, banks, and mortgage lenders not to do business with home buyers or owners in certain areas with heavy minority population.
REPARATIONS: Forms of compensation, such as money, given to a group or class of individuals who have been wronged.
RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS: Legally enforceable limitation on land use or occupancy, often created by the original home owner or developer of neighborhoods.
REVERSE DISCRIMINATION: Discrimination aimed at the majority group.
REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION: View of history or an event that challenges the accepted one.
RULE OF LAW: Legal formalism, which some theorists believe is necessary for order, stability, and cohesiveness in a society.
SEGREGATION: Separation of individuals or groups by race.
SEPARATE-BUT-EQUAL DOCTRINE: Rule of law holding that separate but equal facilities for different races are constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
SEPARATISM: View that a racial minority group should separate itself from mainstream society and pursue its own interests primarily. See also Nationalism.
SILENCING: Practice or speech that interferes with the ability of others to communicate.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION: Process of endowing a group or concept with a delineation, name, or reality.
STANDING: Rule that limits the person who may bring a lawsuit to the one who suffered the “injury in fact.”
STATUS QUO: Current state, the way things are—usually said to require a good reason before it is changed.
STEREOTYPE: Fixed, usually negative, image of members of a group.
STEREOTYPE THREAT: Tendency of test-takers to perform poorly if they are conscious that an examination may confirm a widespread social image of them as intellectually inferior.
STIGMATIZATION: Process of marking a person, thing, or group as an object of shame or disgrace.
STOCK STORIES: Tales that a people commonly subscribe to and use to explain their social reality, for example, that African Americans who try hard will be accepted and succeed, or that Mexican immigrants will take black jobs.
STRUCTURAL DETERMINISM: Concept that a mode of thought or a widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually without our conscious knowledge.
SUBORDINATION: Process of rendering a particular group of lesser importance, as through racial discrimination, patriarchy, or classism.
SWEATSHOP: Factory where workers, such as recent immigrants or Third World women, work under unsafe conditions, often for low pay.
TERRA NULLIUS: British doctrine according to which colonial land belonged to the settling nation. See also Manifest Destiny.
TITLE VII: Federal law that governs employment discrimination.
TRAIL OF TEARS: Route used for forced removal of certain Native American nations from the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. See also Indian removal.
TRANSPARENCY: Tendency of whiteness to disguise itself and become invisible.
TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY: View that American Indian nations and tribes are separate political entities (nations) and entitled to treatment as such.
UNCONSCIOUS RACISM: Racism that operates at an unconscious or subtle level.
UNDOCUMENTED WORKER: U.S. immigrant who has not obtained legal status.
VIGILANTE: An individual who sets out to enforce the law on his or her own and without official authorization, for example, a border vigilante.
VOICE: Ability of a group, such as African Americans or women, to articulate experience in ways unique to it.
WASP: Term for persons of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent.
WHITENESS: Quality pertaining to Euro-American or Caucasian people or traditions.
WHITENESS AS PROPERTY: Notion that whiteness itself has value for its possessor and conveys a host of privileges and benefits. See also Property interest in whiteness.