Key Terms.
The first agreement from Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements is to be impeccable with your words. RJ Squared stands by this and asserts that words have impactful meaning, but sometimes their meaning can be varied. Common language lays the foundation for productive conversations and can help prevent assumptions or misaligned understandings.Here you can find a growing list of key terms and their definition, which align with RJ Squared’s values,so that we can be impeccable with our words:
Birth Equity
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The assurance of the conditions of optimal births for all people with a willingness to address racial and social inequities in a sustained effort.
Birth Justice
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Is a framework that recognizes that all peoples can birth and be parents; People of color, immigrant peoples, and LGBTQ+ communities in particular have survived a history of trauma and oppression around their decisions to have and not have babies. Birth Justice as a framework defines rights for mother and parents across the pregnancy spectrum including: abortion, miscarriage, prenatal, birth, and postpartum care.
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Source: Southern Birth Justice Network
Disparity
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A difference in level or treatment, especially one that is seen as unfair.
Source: Oxford Languages
Equity
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Ensures that outcomes in the conditions of well-being are improved for marginalized groups, lifting outcomes for all. Equity is a measure of justice.
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Source: Race Forward
Institutional Racism
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Occurs within institutions. It involves unjust policies, practices, procedures, and outcomes that work better for White people than people of color, whether intentionally or not.
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Source: Race Forward
Intersectionality
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The overlapping of systems of oppression creates distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories.
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Source: Kimberlee Crenshaw
Marginalization
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A spatial metaphor for a process of social exclusion in which individuals or groups are relegated to the fringes of a society, being denied economic, political, and/or symbolic power and pushed towards being ‘outsiders’
Source: Oxford Reference
Race
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Race is a socially constructed system of categorizing humans largely based on observable physical features (phenotypes), such as skin color, and on ancestry. There is no scientific basis for or discernible distinction between racial categories. The ideology of race has become embedded in our identities, institutions and culture and is used as a basis for discrimination and domination.
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Source: Annie E Casey foundation
Reproductive Justice
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The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
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Source: Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collaborative
Structural Racism
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Is racial bias and inequities across institutions, policies, social structures, history, and culture. Structural racism highlights how racism operates as a system of power with multiple interconnected, reinforcing, and self-perpetuating components which result in racial inequities across all indicators for success.
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Source: Race Forward
Systemic Racism
Systemic racism is racism that is pervasively and deeply embedded in systems and structures such as laws, written or unwritten policies, and widespread, deeply rooted, established practices, beliefs, and attitudes that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment of people of color.
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Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Systemic Racial Conditioning©
The process of indoctrinating a society to adopt beliefs and attitudes about racialized groups of people. This indoctrination fosters hegemonic belief systems that reinforce these biases as natural, tried truths with no critical analysis.
Source: RJ Squared original
Human Rights
Human Rights Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.
Source: United Nations
International Human Rights Law
International human rights law lays down the obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups.
Source: United Nations