Glossary of terms - Djembe: Inspiring Inclusive Connections

Djembe: Inspiring Inclusive Connections

The glossary of terms provides descriptions for words and phrases included in the Djembe: Inspiring Inclusive Connections relating to common topics within diversity, equity, inclusion. Our goal is to avoid misunderstandings, invite clarity, and provide a shared language and meaning behind the words and phrases used.

Our intention is to avoid unnecessary debates about terminology as a distraction from the human connections, knowledge, and skills encouraged through Djembe. The glossary sheds light on ideas we find to be critical to the discussions Djembefolas (a djembe player) will be experiencing. Our intent is for all the djembefolas to share a common understanding intended to deepen their knowledge and encourage further brave conversations.

Please use the glossary as often as needed. Thank you for joining the Djembe experience!

Djembe Team

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

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Abundance & Unity

Homelessness

Homelessness is a situation where an individual, family, or community is without stable, safe, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means and ability to acquire it. However, homelessness is not a choice and there are many reasons why people experience homelessness, including the lack of structural support for those experiencing poverty, job loss, and inadequate discharge planning for those leaving hospitals, correctional facilities, and mental health facilities.

Quality Food and Hunger

The biggest food challenge today is not hunger, but nutritional deficiency. This hidden hunger is the dominant form of food insecurity. More food is available but much of it is lacking the minerals and vitamins essential for optimal physical and mental growth. Now we must shift the paradigm from food quantity to diet quality.

Mental and Emotional Health

Mental health influences your thoughts and actions, and it covers your psychological, social, and emotional well-being. Emotional health is having both an awareness of your emotions and the ability to manage and express those feelings in an age-appropriate manner. An important distinction between mental and emotional health is that you can experience mental health issues while maintaining good emotional health, and vice versa.

Privilege and Over-Privilege

Having privilege does not mean that an individual is immune to life’s hardships, but it does mean having an unearned benefit or advantage one receives in society by nature of their identity. It refers to any advantage that is unearned, exclusive, and socially conferred. It’s about the circumstances of your life that provide you benefits you never asked for. Privilege is not about individuals being bad people, but it is about entire systems that favor some groups and put down others.

Physical Health

Access to Nature

Natural spaces are valued for their contribution to a sense of well-being, identity, and shared heritage. A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that exposure to urban green spaces has positive impacts on both our physical and mental health. Spending more time in nature helps people cope with adversity and improves their health; these aspects should be considered alongside material and economic benefits. The impact of green spaces on mental health includes reduced stress levels, improved general mood, reduced depressive symptoms, better cognitive functioning, improved mindfulness and creativity.

Play and Pleasure

Pleasure is the sensation of being fully alive, with our senses alert and eager. It is our natural state; it happens when we allow ourselves to feel and function with a spontaneous, unaffected indulgence. We don’t create it; we get out of its way and give it permission to radiate from inside of us. We get more physical and psychological benefits from play if we take it on its own terms, and we relinquish control to the inner child who knows that play is not meant to be productive.

Human Relations

LGBTQ

LGBTQ is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning. These terms are used to describe a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. You may also hear the terms “Queer Community” or “Rainbow Community” used to describe LGBTQ+ people. This acronym and the various terms are always evolving so don’t try to memorize the list. The most important thing is to be respectful and use the terms that people prefer.

Gender Fluid

Gender fluidity is a gender identity that may change over time. or according to relational or psychological states. It also incorporates the feeling of not having a gender. It is when gender expression shifts between masculine and feminine. It can be displayed in how we dress, express, and describe ourselves. A person’s gender identity can be something other than the conventional gender archetypes of male and female.

Transgender

Transgender is a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. They are diverse in their gender identities (the way you feel on the inside), gender expressions (the way you dress and act), and sexual orientations (the people you’re attracted to). Transgender people express their gender identities in many different ways. Some people use their dress, behavior, and mannerisms to live as the gender that feels right for them. Some transgender people reject the traditional understanding of gender as divided between just “male” and “female,” so they identify just as transgender, or genderqueer, genderfluid, or something else.

Cisgender

Cisgender refers to people whose gender identity and expression matches the biological sex they were assigned when they were born. It relates specifically to gender rather than sexuality. A person can be cisgender and have any sort of sexuality. For example, two men may both be cisgender but one straight and one gay.

Allies

Allies are people of the dominant or majority group who work to end oppression in their private and professional lives through support of, and as an advocate for, the oppressed population. Allies are supportive advocates for LGBTQ+ communities through their activism against oppression and inequality.

Platonic Connection

A platonic connection is a special emotional and spiritual relationship between two people who love and admire one another because of common interests, a spiritual connection, and similar worldviews. It does not involve any type of sexual involvement. Typically, in a platonic relationship, caring, concern, and love are displayed through words and body language.

Sexuality

Sexuality is about your sexual feelings, thoughts, attractions, and behaviors towards other people. You can find other people physically, sexually, or emotionally attractive, and all those things are a part of your sexuality. Sexuality is diverse and personal, and it is an important part of who you are. Discovering your sexuality can be a very liberating, exciting, and positive experience.

Humanity & Strength

Human Empowerment

Human empowerment is ultimately an individual condition of gaining the power to control and modulate changes in one’s own life. If not in a complete sense, it is at least in a significant and focal manner in areas that are considered important to one’s identity and adjustment in life. Human empowerment comes through providing the opportunity for people to achieve through education and employment, and to gain access to greater social control over resources, along with increased responsibility in the utilization of those resources.

Body Sovereignty

Body Sovereignty is the concept that each person has the right to full control of their body. Body sovereignty is the permission to choose, to err, to protect, to feel, to experience, to play, to refuse, to take up space, to be different, to be the same, to make noise, and to perform for no one. This works on many levels: food, clothing, sexual activity, tattoos, piercing, etc. It is to be beholden to no one but yourself.

Women’s Empowerment

Women’s empowerment ensures that women and girls have control over their lives and are able to participate actively in social, political, and economic domains. It is about realizing true equality for men and women. Women’s empowerment has five components: their sense of self-worth, their right to have access to opportunities and resources, their right to have the power to control their own lives, and their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally.

Parental/Custodial Rights

Campaigning for men’s rights is not about denying the importance of women’s rights – it’s not a zero-sum game. Campaigning for any kind of group-based rights should be about ensuring that everyone can enjoy their human rights, and acknowledging that some groups, including men, face unique challenges. Men are more likely to become homeless than women. On average, men die younger than women. This is partly due to biological or evolutionary reasons, but other factors such as higher suicide rates and more dangerous working conditions, are rooted in society.

Career

The career is an individual’s metaphorical journey through learning, work, and other aspects of life. It concerns an individual’s progression through a series of jobs over his or her lifetime and includes that person’s education and unpaid work experiences, such as internships and volunteer opportunities.

Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is the state of equilibrium where a person creates a balance with the demands of one’s career and the demands of one’s personal life. A good work-life balance has numerous positive effects, including less stress, a lower risk of burnout, and a greater sense of well-being. This not only benefits employees but employers, too.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

The Equal Pay Act of 1963, amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, protects against wage discrimination based on sex. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) protects both men and women. All forms of compensation are covered, including salary, overtime pay, bonuses, life insurance, vacation and holiday pay, cleaning or gasoline allowances, hotel accommodations, reimbursement for travel expenses, and benefits. If there is an inequality in wages between men and women who perform substantially equal jobs, employers must raise wages to equalize pay, but may not reduce the wages of other individuals.

Understanding

Married vs. Single

In American society, marriage bestows couples with a whole array of unearned social, psychological, emotional, political, and cultural privileges. Married people’s lives are valued and celebrated, while single people’s lives are oftentimes marginalized or even mocked.

Lifelong single people do better than married people in a variety of ways that don’t get all that much attention. Singles do more to maintain their ties to friends, siblings, parents, neighbors, and coworkers. They do more than their share of volunteering and helping people, such as aging parents, who need a lot of help. They experience more autonomy and self-determination, and more personal growth and development.

Polyamory & Monogamy

Polyamory is the practice of having multiple intimate relationships, whether sexual or just romantic, with the full knowledge and consent of all parties involved. Polyamory is not gender-specific and rejects the idea of exclusivity; anyone can have multiple partners of any gender. Monogamy is when you are married to, or in a sexual relationship with, one person at a time.

Kids & No Kids

Today, more and more women are choosing not to have children. It might be for personal or biological reasons. The issue is even more fraught for women of childbearing age who are having trouble conceiving and are asking themselves how far they should take fertility efforts, how much they want it, and if their partner wants it more than they do. If you value social norms, you’ll probably have kids. Because even as childlessness becomes more common, it still isn’t socially accepted.

Lineage & Bloodline

Someone’s lineage is the series of families from which they are directly descended.

Bloodline is all the members of a family group of people or animals over a period of time, especially when considering their shared family characteristics.

Divorced & Widowed

Divorce is complicated, and there are many factors that lead to the end of a marriage. It’s extremely rare that one person is the absolute victim, and the other the absolute villain. Divorce represents a major change. Getting divorced feels like your world is falling apart, but there are also feelings of relief, joy, and excitement. After the pain of heartbreak, there’s the joy of starting over. After learning so many hard lessons, there is the knowledge that everything you’ve been through has made you stronger than you’ve ever been before.

A widowed is someone whose spouse has died and who has not remarried.

Common-Law and Legal Rights

Common law is a body of unwritten laws based on legal precedents established by the courts. It influences the decision-making process in unusual cases where the outcome cannot be determined based on existing statutes or written rules of law.

Legal rights are rights that exist under the rules of legal systems or by virtue of decisions of suitably authoritative bodies within them. They raise a number of different philosophical issues.

Extended Family and Pets

Extended families consist of several generations of people and can include biological parents and their children, as well as in-laws, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Extended families are typical of collective cultures where all family members are interdependent and share family responsibilities including child-rearing roles. There is a growing global trend to consider pets as part of the family. And there is evidence suggesting that attachment to pets is good for human health and even helps build community.

Endurance & Resourcefulness

Physical Disability

A physical disability is a physical condition that affects a person’s mobility, physical capacity, stamina, or dexterity. This can include brain or spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, respiratory disorders, epilepsy, hearing and visual impairments, and more. A person with a physical disability is constrained by their physical ability to perform an activity independently such as walking, bathing, dressing etc.

Mental (Emotional Health) Disability

Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking, or behavior. These conditions deeply impact day-to-day living and may also affect the ability to relate to others. Mental illness can make you miserable and can cause problems in your daily life, e.g. at school or work or in relationships. In most cases, symptoms can be managed with a combination of medications and talk therapy (psychotherapy).

Learning and Language

Learning is a complex process of discovery, collaboration, and inquiry facilitated by language. Composed of interrelated, rule-governed symbol systems, language is a social and uniquely human means of representing, exploring, and communicating meaning. As well as being a defining feature of culture, language is an unmistakable mark of personal identity and is essential for forming interpersonal relationships, understanding social situations, extending experience, reflecting on thought and action, and contributing to a democratic society. Language is the primary basis of all communication and the primary instrument of thought.

Visual Impairment

Visual impairment is any visual condition that impacts an individual’s ability to successfully complete the activities of everyday life. Essentially, it is an umbrella term used to describe the loss of sight that can be a consequence of a number of different medical conditions. The impact of the visual impairment on individual learning is also tied to the onset, severity, and type of vision loss, as well as to any coexisting disabilities that may be present.

Invisible Disabilities

Invisible disability is a physical, mental, or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside, yet can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses, or activities. It refers to symptoms such as debilitating pain, fatigue, dizziness, cognitive dysfunctions, brain injuries, learning differences, and mental health disorders, as well as hearing and vision impairments. These are not always obvious to the onlooker, but vary from person to person and can limit daily activities, ranging from mild challenges to severe limitations.

Chronic Illness

Chronic diseases are defined broadly as conditions that last one year or more, and require ongoing medical attention and/or limit daily living activities of daily living. Most chronic illnesses do not fix themselves and are generally not completely curable. Some can be immediately life-threatening, e.g. heart disease and stroke. Others, like diabetes, linger over time, and need intensive management. Most chronic illnesses persist throughout a person’s life but are not always the cause of death, e.g. arthritis.

Travel Ability

There are many valuable things that travel can teach you that will only enhance your career. Travel presents one opportunity after another for you to strengthen your adaptability skills because things rarely ever go completely according to plan. You learn very quickly on the road that if you hope to have any fun at all, you are better off learning how to roll with the punches rather than letting small disappointments ruin your entire day or trip. Being adaptable and flexible can also help you with your stress management skills.

Reconciliation & Peacemaking

Race Affirmative

“Do something” is one of the meanings of “affirmative action” today. Many firms and educational institutions have affirmative action or diversity officers. Their job is to ensure not only that hiring and promotion are handled in a color-blind manner, but that good-faith efforts are made to include racial minorities (and sometimes individuals in other categories, e.g. women, veterans and disabled persons) in the hiring pool, and, if they are qualified, to attempt to recruit them. In this context, “affirmative” means: demonstrate that you did your best to find and promote members of underrepresented groups.

Culture

Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the system of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. Culture, in its broadest sense, is cultivated behavior that is the totality of a person’s accumulated, learned, socially-transmitted experience, i.e. behavior through social learning.

Racism

Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. It is the belief that another person is less than human because of skin color, language, customs, place of birth, or any factor that supposedly reveals the basic nature of that person. It has influenced wars, slavery, the formation of nations, and legal codes.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity denotes groups that share a common, identity-based ancestry, language, or culture. It is often based on religion, beliefs, and customs as well as memories of migration or colonization. It first consists of a reference to a collective identity, involving fundamental dilemmas. Ethnicity is a notion that refers to social entities sharing real or putative ascriptive features, like a common origin or cultural-linguistic legacy which assumedly commands special collective commitment, as well as their retention and transmission.

Cultural Adaptivity

Cultural Adaptability is an individual’s willingness and ability to adapt their manner of communicating, motivating, and managing across countries and cultures. In an increasingly interconnected world, cultural adaptability is both a key skill and a necessary personal commitment for any leader.

Race Salience

Race salience is characterized by seeing and organizing by race. It may be a natural developmental acquisition in an environment where race is functionally important. Race salience is gauged by two measures: sorting by race and by racial justification. Sorting by race represents the functional use of race, whereas racial justification represents noticing and describing a perceptual difference.

Race Invisibility

Invisibility is considered a psychological experience wherein the person feels that his or her personal identity and ability are undermined by racism in a myriad of interpersonal circumstances. Our society is racially characterized by subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice. At the present time, people have adopted an attitude of racial denial, reinforcing an attitude of racial invisibility.

Nationality

Nationality is the status of belonging to a particular nation. The right to a nationality is of paramount importance to the realization of other fundamental human rights. Possession of a nationality carries with it the diplomatic protection of the country of nationality and is also often a legal or practical requirement for the exercise of fundamental rights. Consequently, the right to a nationality has been described as the “right to have rights.” Individuals who lack a nationality or effective citizenship are therefore among the world’s most vulnerable to human rights violations.

Wisdom

Worldview

A worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of reality that ground and influence an individual’s perception, thoughts, knowledge, and action. One’s worldview is also referred to as one’s philosophy, mindset, outlook on life, ideology, faith, or even religion. Worldview influences your action based on the assumption that thought is the basis for action, and knowledge is the basis for thought.

Ritual Practices

Ritual practices are habitual activities that structure the lives of communities shared by and relevant to many of their members. They are significant because they reaffirm the identity of those who practice them as a group or a society and, whether performed in public or private, are closely linked to important events. Ritual practices may help to mark the passing of the seasons, events in the agricultural calendar, or the stages of a person’s life. They are closely linked to a community’s worldview and perception of its own history and memory.

Intention and Meaning

Intention is a mental state that represents a commitment to carrying out an action or actions in the future. Intention involves mental activities such as planning and forethought.

Meaning is what an individual intends to convey, especially by language. It is something meant or intended.

Tradition and Values

Tradition is the part of a culture that is passed from person to person or generation to generation, possibly differing in detail from family to family, such as the way to celebrate holidays.

Values are a collection of guiding principles; what one deems to be correct and desirable in life, especially regarding personal conduct.

Fixed vs Fluid

A fixed belief is whatever you consider to be absolute truth. This does not need to be an objective truth, because many of us believe things that can’t be quantified or verified. It’s whatever you believe to be true.

A fluid belief is something you regard as being true, but not an absolute truth. You’re open to new stimuli and feedback that could add a new layer to the belief.

Fairness

Fairness is treating people justly, not letting your personal feelings bias your decisions about others. You want to give everyone a fair chance and believe there should be equal opportunity for all, though you also realize that what is fair for one person might not be fair for another. Fairness is a cognitive judgment capacity that involves reasoning and making judgments.

Race Invisibility

Religion and Spirituality

Religion commonly refers to an institution that has a set of organized practices, and a structured belief system shared by and among members. Their beliefs, which are often transcendental, are passed on from members to converts, and are based on either a formally documented creed or established cultural practices. Spirituality is about one’s soul and inner self. Being spiritual involves holding personal beliefs and practices, and searching for the purpose of life. An individual’s definition of spirituality can vary throughout their lifetime, adapting through experiences, personal study, and self-reflection.