Alberta Ballet is committed to anti-racist work and ongoing training. Understanding the foundations of systemic racism and discrimination helps us as individuals and as an organization to unlearn, acknowledge and stop racism and discrimination within the work we do.

Privilege often operates in an unconscious, invisible manner. We believe that part of the process of becoming anti-racist allies involves exploring and understanding how privilege has operated in our own lives.

PREJUDICE

A judgment or opinion that is formed on insufficient grounds before facts are known or in disregard of facts that contradict it. Prejudices are learned and can be unlearned.

STEREOTYPE

An exaggerated or distorted belief that attributes characteristics to members of a particular group, simplistically lumping them together and refusing to acknowledge differences among members of the group.

RACISM

Racism is a system in which one race maintains supremacy over another race through a set of attitudes, behaviors, social structures, and institutional power. Racism is a “system of structured dis-equality where the goods, services, rewards, privileges, and benefits of the society are available to individuals according to their presumed membership in” particular racial groups (Barbara Love, 1994. Understanding Internalized Oppression). A person of any race can have prejudices about people of other races, but only members of the dominant social group can exhibit racism as they typically have the institutional power to enforce it.

RACE

Race is an artificial way of arbitrarily dividing humankind into different groups for the purpose of keeping some on top and some at the bottom; some in and some out. Its invention has very clear historical roots in colonialism.

Racism’s artificial roots do not diminish the impact it can have on many people’s lives. To acknowledge race as an invention of colonialism is not the same as pretending to be colour blind. Our world has been ordered and structured on the basis of skin colour and that oppressive ordering and structuring is racism.

OPPRESSION

The combination of prejudice and institutional power which creates a system that discriminates against some groups (often called “target groups”) and benefits other groups (often called “dominant groups”).

Examples of these systems are racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, ageism, and anti-Semitism. These systems enable dominant groups to exert control over target groups by limiting their rights, freedom, and access to basic resources such as health care, education, employment, and housing.

TARGETS OF OPPRESSION

Targets of oppression are members of social identity groups that are disenfranchised, exploited, and victimized in a variety of ways by agents of oppression and the agent’s systems or institutions.

Targets of oppression are people subjected to exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.

Targets of oppression have fewer life chances or benefits as a result of their membership in a particular social group. As examples, there is a higher likelihood that Indigenous males will be arrested than White males; there is a greater chance that males will have a higher salary than females; and there is a higher probability that persons using a wheelchair for mobility will have fewer job opportunities than non-disabled people.