Glossary of Terms

This glossary of terms offers definitions of specific terms, concepts, and principles intended to help guide and define equity and environmental justice work at airports. The glossary and deliverables produced through this ACRP project intend to improve collective knowledge and consistency of terminology related to equity and environmental justice in the context of the aviation industry. This glossary is tailored to support the content provided in the Toolkit and is not intended as an exhaustive list of all equity-related terms, concepts, and principles that exist. Many equity-related terms, concepts, and principles may have differing definitions based on the entity that offers the definition. For example, regulatory definitions may differ from those presented by equity-focused planning experts or communities.

Block Group: A “block group” is the smallest geographic unit of census data, containing between 600 and 3,000 people, and the polygons are often around the size of a neighborhood.

Chattel Slavery: Distinct from the general term “slavery,” chattel slavery refers to a “race-based institution” in which one is granted legal ownership of another, typically Black, human being (Zimmerman 2011).

Cumulative Impacts: NEPA requires analysis of cumulative environmental exposure, including those resulting from the proposed action in addition to past, present, and reasonably foreseeable actions. Minority and low-income populations may experience cumulative impacts differently from the general population, and this consideration would be a component of environmental justice analysis (Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice and NEPA Committee 2016).

Data: In a spatial data analysis context, data, datasets, or dataframes refer to the digital files that store structured sets of information.

Data Dashboard Visualization: Visualization tools used to present many variables simultaneously to describe a geography of interest. Dashboards are often automated, interactive, and browser-based visualization tools that provide digestible summary statistics and simple charts.

Deliberative Justice: Relating to the democratic approach to how deliberations are hosted, conducted, managed, or guided alongside impacted communities. This requires an understanding of power inequities that are pre-existing or manifest during deliberation.

Disadvantaged Communities: Communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by governance decisions that have led to pollution and underinvestment in housing, transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and health care (National Environmental Policy Act 1970).

Distributive Justice: Relating to the trauma-informed approach to the equitable distribution of resources, harm, or benefits. Outcomes are typically compared across different social groups and geographic areas.

Doctrine of Discovery: The Doctrine of Discovery is an international legal principle used by colonial powers to legitimize the seizure of Indigenous land in the name of the Church and strengthen European control across the globe (McNeil 2015).

Environmental Burdens: Environmental hazards that disproportionately affect the health of low-wealth and racialized communities, such as air pollution, hazardous waste sites, and lead exposure.

Environmental Justice: Relating to the trauma-informed approach to equitable distribution of environmental resources, hazards, exposure, or harm. Outcomes are typically compared across different social groups and geographic areas.

Epistemic Justice: Relating to equity in approaches to assigning credibility to different knowledge holders. Knowledge is produced and contained within individuals with “othered” identity markers who have been undermined and unrepresented in the dominant language, social lexicon, and other means of information exchange.

Equity: “The consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” [United States and Biden 2021, Sec. 2(a)]

Equity Lens: Equitable processes that identify and provide the tangible and intangible rights, tools, and resources that individuals, households, or social groups need to experience equal access to opportunity. Equitable outcomes result when individuals, households, and social groups can obtain what is valuable to them to thrive in society and is without disparities that disadvantage othered groups. This involves adjusting decision-making processes to consider the impacts that decisions will have on outcomes for stakeholders who have historically been oppressed through racialization and othering, such as considering who will benefit from the decision, who will be harmed from the decision, who is making the decision, who is funding the outcomes of the decision, and who is involved in the governing.

Group-Based Othering: The process of othering happens as identities become socially constructed such that people are marked, sorted, and grouped based on apparent differences in order to maintain oppressive systems and power structures.

Hidden Disability: A hidden or invisible disability refers to neurological, sensory, and cognitive disabilities as well as chronic illnesses that are less visible than widely recognized physical disabilities.

Hot Spot and Heat Map Visualizations: Visualization tools that can aid in identifying spatial patterns of harm by drawing attention to geographies with more extreme characteristics.

Indexing: An analysis strategy that combines multiple variables into a singular measure of risk, harm, or exposure.

Intersectionality: The legal theory of intersectionality describes how individuals experience society and how society treats individuals based on overlapping, socially assigned combinations of socially constructed identities and social markers (Crenshaw 2017).

Meaningful Engagement: Engagement processes and structures that involve actively collaborating with the communities impacted by an airport’s operations, plans, and decisions in a transparent, equitable, and dignifying manner.

Mobility Justice: Relating to the values associated with civil rights and social justice within the context of equitable access to transportation. This includes the opportunities and experiences of geographic equity and equity when it comes to the circulation of people, goods, services, and information.

Oppression: The imposition of power by one group onto another without consent, without compassion, and without morality; usually through means of political alienation, violence, cultural erasure, exploitation, procedural disparities, and disinvestment.

Othering: A social phenomenon, derived from systems of influence and power, whereby individuals or groups are marked, sorted, and grouped based on physical and cultural differences that do not fit into widely accepted social norms (normal is usually defined as being heterosexual, White, male, Christian).

Procedural Justice: Relating to equitable access to the processes of deliberation and decision-making. This includes access to information and meaningful participation that shapes deliberation outcomes.

Project Labor Agreement: A pre-hire collective bargaining agreement between a project’s owner and a labor union that sets the terms and conditions of employment for all workers on the project (Lund and Oswald 2001).

Racial Capitalism: The linked relationship between racialization and capitalism whereby there is commodification of racialized bodies in a “modern world system . . . dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide” (Kelley 2017). It is also understood as “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person” primarily through the commodification of racialized bodies (Leong 2013).

Racial Zoning: Land use practices motivated by racist beliefs that racial integration within neighborhoods was a threat to public health, safety, and welfare. For example, racist and pro-segregation officials promoted the practice as a means of preventing the spread of disease, interracial marriage, and miscegenation (Nightingale 2006).

Racialization: A concept that describes how people experience the racial identities that were assigned to them at birth, with the acknowledgment that different social contexts produce different racialization processes and outcomes.

Racialized Geographies: Geographies whereby boundaries, policies, zoning practices, and governance structures either create, reinforce, or resource processes of racialization, directly resulting from public and private sector policies and practices that rigidly introduced and reinforced racial residential segregation.

Redlining: The practice of strategic disinvestment targeted to racially segregated neighborhoods, particularly neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by Black people.

Reparative Planning: Planning processes and interventions that center atonement, repair, healing, and acknowledgment of past harms committed against impacted communities, such as racist real estate practices like redlining or land development programs like urban renewal.

Restrictive Covenants: A historic form of deed restriction in the United States that prohibited the sale of property to, or occupancy of property by, several racial and ethnic groups. Restrictive covenants either required occupancy by, or sale to, the “Caucasian” or “White race” or specifically prohibited sales to or occupancy by Black people, Asian people, Latinx people, Jewish people, and racialized immigrants.

Settler Colonialism: Refers to the violent occupation of the land of another, often under the guise of the Doctrine of Discovery, whereby colonizers take actions to remove the original inhabitants

from the land while establishing systems of governance that alienate and dehumanize precolonial inhabitants (Veracini 2019).

Small-Area Analysis: A spatial analysis technique in which the investigator’s geography of interest may be a small area delineated by proximity to the airport facility, noise contours, or other pollutants such as contaminated groundwater plumes.

Social Construction: Humans structure what they see and experience into categories to make sense of the physical and social world they interact with. When there is collective agreement about a category across a society, it becomes a social construction. Values, beliefs, and culture shape the meaning and connotations of social constructs. As culture changes over time or geography, the social construct’s meaning may also change. Money, nations, social hierarchies, beauty standards, gender, and race are all examples of social constructs.

Social Justice: Relating to the equitable advancement of civil rights and access to social, economic, and political opportunity. Most definitions relate to protecting rights and resources needed for self-determination, self-development, or capacity to contribute to the common good and to redress the harms visited upon specific racialized and othered groups.

Spatial Data: Data that describes the spatial distribution of resources, pollutants, and community outcomes across various population groups as a way to represent the harm and lived experiences of populations made vulnerable.

Spatial EJ Screening: The data analysis and visualization methods that support exploratory spatial analysis tasks.

Structural Racism: Describes the culturally engrained values of society that perpetually reconstruct race and race-based interactions. The social values are so widely imposed that many believe race is a fixed reality reflecting “the way things are.” Structural racism is distinct from systemic racism, as systemic racism addresses the institutions and processes that rely on racism.

Systemic Oppression: Refers to “the permanent subordination, humiliation, and domination of certain social groups due to their socially constructed lower position in society on account of the socially constructed higher position of the oppressing groups” (Liedauer 2021).

Transatlantic Slave Trade: The involuntary, forcible, and essentially permanent transport of approximately 12 million Africans to Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States to be held in captivity and forced into slavery (Ngwe 2012; Magee 2009).

Transformative Justice: A political framework for responding to violence, harm, and abuse without perpetuating harmful and violent patterns. Transformation requires the responsible entity to acknowledge past and current harms, redress harm, support healing for victims of harm, and end systems that perpetuate harm. Transformative justice recognizes that institutional oppression is the root of the harm and abuse.

Underserved Communities: “Populations sharing a particular characteristic, as well as geographic communities, that have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life.” [United States and Biden 2021, Sec. 2(b)]

Glossary References

Crenshaw, K. (2017). On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New Press. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/255/.

Federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice and NEPA Committee. (2016). Promising Practices for EJ Methodologies in NEPA Reviews. (EPA 300B16001). https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-08/documents/nepa_promising_practices_document_2016.pdf.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2017). What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? Boston Review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/.

Leong, N. (2013). Reflections on Racial Capitalism. Harvard Law Review Forum, 127, 32.

Liedauer, S. (2021). Dimensions and Causes of Systemic Oppression. In W. Leal Filho, A. M. Azul, L. Brandli, A. Lange Salvia, P. G. Özuyar, and T. Wall (eds.), Reduced Inequalities (1–11). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71060-0_91-1.

Lund, J., and Oswald, J. (2001). Public Project Labor Agreements: Lessons Learned, New Directions. Labor Studies Journal, 26(3), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X0102600301.

Magee, R. V. (2009). Slavery as Immigration? USFL Rev., 44, 273.

McNeil, K. (2015). The Doctrine of Discovery Reconsidered: Reflecting on “Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies,” by Robert J Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, and “Reconciling Sovereignties: Aboriginal Nations and Canada,” by Felix Hoehn. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 53(2), 699–728.

National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C § 4321-4370h. (1970). https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter55&edition=prelim.

Ngwe, J. E. (2012). Human Trafficking: The Modern Day Slavery of the 21st Century. Human Trafficking, 17.

Nightingale, C. H. (2006). The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation. Journal of Social History, 667–702.

United States and Biden. (2021). Executive Order 13985 of January 20, 2021, On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, 86 FR 7009 Federal Register 7009 (2021). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/25/2021-01753/advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government.

Veracini, L. (2019). Settler Colonialism. In I. Ness and Z. Cope (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (1–6). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_26-1.

Zimmerman, Y. C. (2011). Christianity and Human Trafficking. Religion Compass, 5(10), 567–578.