A moral case for nuance
A risk-benefit analysis of using equity language in our storytelling
Back in March, the writer George Packer published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Moral Case Against Equity Language,” condemning the equity language guides that recently have proliferated in the social sector, and nonprofits in particular. You’ve probably seen one of these guides, at your own organization or another. Packer mocks the Sierra Club’s guide:
In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.
Packer objects that such language strictures “belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.” He also argues that equity language is only inoffensive because it is vague, whereas “good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.”
These objections to equity language are neither original to Packer nor new. Some points are compelling, but others demonstrate a lack of nuanced understanding of the context surrounding equity language. And nuance is the critical piece missing from how the American social sector thinks about complex issues, storytelling about those issues, and the language they use to storytell.
So, given the increasingly divisive and explosive implications of what we say… I thought I’d close out 2023 with a nuanced exploration of the case for and against equity language. What are the risks and benefits of using equity language in our storytelling, and how does that tie into our motivations for using equity language and the audiences for whom we tell stories?
Risk #1: equity language stands in as a proxy for action
Several years ago, I was asked to put together an equity task force for a large public school district. One of the first things I found out after getting started was that it was the second equity task force that the same superintendent had commissioned in three years. I thought: “He must really be into equity task forces!” Since then, I’ve realized that equity task forces, diversity councils, and the like, are often set up as a proxy for action. Equity language is another low-effort checklist item that an organization can trot out to its board or on its social media to prove, “We’re doing something!” when it literally embodies lip service. The risk of any checklist item is that we feel like we’ve done enough for now, and so will table any meaningful action until later… or never… This risk becomes most likely when our primary motivation for using equity language is to follow the trend of all the other organizations using equity language and/or to cover our asses. In this case, the audiences we’re probably thinking most about are the kind with the power to call us out, e.g. a critical public, critical peers, or the people we used to call our stakeholders. On the flipside, sometimes we choose our words poorly, because we’re human and not always articulate. Those poorly chosen words we might say in a given moment shouldn’t overshadow our track records of meaningful action.
Risk #2: equity language deters reflection and introspection
In middle school, I learned the acrostic Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally to remember the order of operations. One day, my dad asked: “But why do you do those things in that order?” I had no idea—had never even wondered, much less cared to find out. It was enough to know that this trick would get me to the right answer. Equity language guides are supposed to help people avoid using language that’s harmful to other people. But while these kinds of guides can help us efficiently eradicate certain harmful words from our vocabulary, they also train us to be lazy and unreflective. For example, many social sector professionals have learned that it’s taboo to refer to communities as poor—but how many can articulate the biases implicit in that characterization, and then connect those biases to other harmful behaviors?
Risk #3: equity language excludes, confuses, and alienates people
What an oxymoron! How can equity language be elitist insider code? But it sure reads that way, sometimes. Take these baffling lines from an issue of Nonprofit Quarterly:
It explores what it looks like—and takes—to thrive, from a multilevel, systemic perspective. It takes as its premise that health equity is simply not enough; we need healing justice, which proposes that an absolutely essential component of healthcare is understanding and taking into account the historical and ongoing violence and harm done by systems of oppression outside of “healthcare,” so as to get to a deeper-level recognition of the connection between surface-level symptoms and generational, historical traumas.
There are two reasons why we use so much equity language that wise sentiments become rendered into gobbledygook. The generous reason is that we get stuck in our own heads and get carried away. The other reason is that we want to set up our moral and intellectual superiority—to show off. Probably, we’re thinking about audiences we want to impress—e.g. bigwig foundations—or audiences we want to feel inferior, e.g. people we can call out for not using up-to-date equity language… Gotcha! Neither impressing some people nor calling out others is worth the risk of being incomprehensible to the people who we actually need to reach. And honestly, neither motivation belongs in social sector decision-making.
Benefit: equity language drives equitable decision-making
I speak to my toddler in Mandarin, my husband Mark speaks to him in English, and Mark and I speak English to each other. At his daycare in Chinatown, his teachers speak Mandarin to him and Cantonese or Shanghainese to each other. When he was seventeen months old, his pediatrician suggested that I get him tested for early intervention. His teachers have raised the issue of his “delayed speech” to me a few times. I can’t help noticing that my toddler is still learning to articulate sounds and syllables that my friends’ children, of a similar age, easily navigate. I spent a decade working in education. I know the research shows that bilingualism doesn’t delay language acquisition. Yet, I’ve still panicked several times since my toddler began to venture out of babbling: Should I pull him out of daycare, since it exposes him to four languages rather than just two? Should I stop speaking Mandarin to him at home, since my own pronunciation is flawed?
Emergent multilingual is one of those equity terms that have replaced words like English Learner. In some cases, it’s a term that risks excluding, confusing, and alienating a lot of people because it’s so unfamiliar and a mouthful. I’ll admit that when I transitioned to using this term in my professional life, it was more because it was accepted as the “right” terminology than because I believed in its merits (call back to risk #2). But as a parent raising a child in two languages, I’ve become a huge believer in its significance. Mark and I agree not to refer to our toddler’s delayed speech, but to his emerging multilingualism. Over time, using this language has helped me shift my reactions. Rather than comparing my son’s fuzzy articulation of l and y to other toddlers’ articulations, I remember that he is learning various sounds and syllables in multiple languages—like ts and zh—and marvel that he can already say ma using three of four Mandarin intonations. Rather than counting his deficit of English words, I count his cumulative English and Mandarin words. I love that, unbeknownst to me, he probably knows some words in Cantonese and Shanghainese as well! I’ve kept him enrolled in his awesome daycare, where he learns about other aspects of his Chinese heritage. I continue to speak to him in Mandarin at home. Most importantly, I haven’t made my happy, confident toddler feel shy or anxious about his speech development.
So, what’s the tally?
I’ve identified three risks and one benefit, but the case for or against equity language really comes down to the nuances of motivations and audiences. The bottom line is using equity language is only worth it if our goal is to shift people’s decisions and behaviors for the better, including our own, and we’re willing to put the time and effort into understanding (and helping others to understand) the context behind the shift. Otherwise, don’t bother.
