Page 14 - Professional Advisory on Anti-Black Racism

Definitions
The following websites were consulted in providing definitions for this advisory:
Ontario Human Rights Commission Calgary Anti-Racism Education
Canadian Race Relations Foundation National Council of Teachers of English
Ontario's Equity and Inclusion Education Strategy
The definitions included here are not limited to the ones used in this advisory and includes terms you may come across in your own research and additional learning.
Anti-racism/anti-oppression: an active and consistent process of change to eliminate individual, institutional and systemic racism as well as the oppression and injustice racism causes.
Adverse impact: having a harmful result. Sometimes treating everyone the same will have a negative effect on some people.
African Canadian: a Canadian of African origin or descent.
Barrier: anything that prevents a person from fully taking part in all aspects of society, including physical, architectural, information or communications, attitudinal, economic and technological barriers, as well as policies or practices.
Bias: a predisposition, prejudice or generalization about a group of persons based on personal characteristics or stereotypes.
Bigotry: intolerance, negative attitudes or stereotypes related to another person’s creed, race, sexual orientation, etc.
Black: a social construct referring to people who have dark skin colour and/or other related racialized characteristics. The term has become less of an indicator of skin colour and more of racialized charac- teristics. Diverse societies apply different criteria to determine who is Black.
The Canadian Press style guides are the authoritative and accepted standard for Canadian writing. The latest guide specifies capitalizing the term Black. In addition,
the capitalization of this term is done to empower the Black culture, while high- lighting the fact that this term was used by the larger white society to remove indi- vidual Black identity.
12 PROFESSIONAL ADVISORY ON ANTI-BLACK RACISM