1. A system of advantage based on race.¹

2. Racism is different from racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination. Racism involves one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values that support those racist policies and practices.²
   

The 4 levels of racism³ include:

1. Internalized racism lies within individuals. These are private beliefs and biases about race that reside inside our own minds and bodies. For White people, this can be internalized privilege, entitlement, and superiority; for people of color, this can be internalized oppression. Examples: prejudice, xenophobia, conscious and unconscious bias about race, influenced by the white supremacy.

2. Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals. Bias, bigotry, and discrimination based on race. Once we bring our private beliefs about race into our interactions with others, we are now in the interpersonal realm. Examples: public expressions of prejudice and hate, microaggressions, bias and bigotry between individuals.

3. Institutional racism occurs within institutions. It involves unjust policies, practices, procedures, and outcomes that work better for White people than people of color, whether intentional or not. Example: A school district that concentrates students of color in the most overcrowded, under-funded schools with the least experienced teachers.

4. Structural racism is racial 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. Structural racism is the racial inequity that is deeply rooted and embedded in our history and culture and our economic, political, and legal systems. Examples: The “racial wealth gap,” where Whites have many times the wealth of people of color, resulting from the history and current reality of institutional racism in multiple systems.

Internalized racial oppression⁴ is defined as a complex societal, multi-generational process that teaches Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) to believe, accept, live, or act out negative societal definitions of self. This can show up as a rejection of other BIPOC, rejection of self, assimilation, covering, anti-Blackness, worshipping whiteness, and in other ways.

Internalized racial superiority⁴ is defined as a complex societal, multi-generational process that teaches white people to believe, accept, and live out superior definitions of self. This can show up as entitlement, unwillingness to acknowledge or inability to see privilege, saviorism, anti-Blackness and conscious racism, unhealthy white racial identity, denial of racism and in other ways.

Masking, in this context, refers to the metaphorical masks that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) — particularly African Americans — wear to survive and thrive in America. Some wear a mask in the workplace, in court rooms, during encounters with the police, at the hospital, and at various times in their daily lives.

The mask is worn for a myriad of reasons, including: physical and psychological protection, to “fit in” with white culture, or as a refuge or hiding place from “white gaze.”

Some have likened it to “code-switching,” the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation to appeal to the dominant culture.

Masking is not about being phony. Rather, it is highly associated with internalized racism and the behaviors it elicits. It can be thought about as having “double consciousness,” a concept coined by WEB DuBois. In his renowned book, The Souls of Black Folk, he describes it as, “always looking at one's self through the eyes" of whiteness and "measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt."