I’ve been traveling across multiple cities this last month, facilitating racial equity trainings and sessions. What’s most alarming in my conversations with organizations and leaders is the fact that many of them are scrubbing racial equity language from their websites and their public facing platforms. Folks have shared that the concept of racial equity and similar or related words have become partisan. And this is true, but it shouldn’t be. Equity isfor everyone, regardless of party or politics. This administration recently released a long list of banned words that include equity related terms (which somehow includes the word “woman.)
Leaders and decision makers are operating from a place of fear, and the immediate instinct is to remove equity language from their platforms. What are folks afraid of? They are afraid of losing funding, of losing their 501c3 status and thus being unable to operate, and of being targeted by online trolls and conservative media. In scrubbing equity language, many organizations believe that they are defending themselves, their mission, and their staff from harm. All good intentions, of course.
Some Organizations are proceeding as if they can continue to do equity work while being race silent and using proxy language. This may be true to a certain extent, but I worry that we are not considering long term harm to our organizations and mission resulting from eliminating race equity related words. The fear in our hearts is valid because the potential for harm is real, as evidenced by the heartbreaking shenanigans of the first two months of this administration. And yet, it is exactly because of these harms that we need to be more strategic in our thinking and planning, and ensure we’re weighing the array of decisions and outcomes in front of us.
Words are not just words. Words create our reality. Words draw our attention to problems and therefore to solutions. There’s a reason why racial justice leaders have strongly advocated for organizations to be race-explicit as a concrete strategy to advance racial justice. Structural racism has shaped our institutions and organizations to be racially silent by default and by design. If we’re not talking about race, then we can’t even begin to talk about structural racism. This also means we won’t be paying attention to the roots and causes of structural racism, its impact on communities of color, and the systemic solutions needed to address it.
We are on a narrative change battlefield, whether we realize it or not. Words are vehicles for our stories and messages that carry our deep narratives - our societal values and belief system that shape our experiences in the world. The call to erase words from nonprofit websites is a narrative strategy designed to further move our values away from racial equity. It is all by intention and part of a long term strategy.
Often, being explicit in using race-explicit equity terms IS the work and the goal.
That organizations are in a state of panic and fear today is the effect intended by this administration. It doesn’t matter that many of the Executive Orders have no legal bite. The goal is to make leaders and organizations afraid enough that they will make rash and unstrategic decisions. And so as we think about the survival and safety of our organizations, I would like to invite us to pause and reflect on questions that will ground us in vision and strategy, instead of fear. It seems counterintuitive to pause and reflect at this moment when the attacks are coming at us swiftly but I truly believe that it is necessary in this political climate of noise and chaos in order for us to be more precise with our tactics and next steps. Below are some questions to guide our reflections:
How does this decision advance or align with our vision? What are we trying to solve? What are we driving towards? The key word here is vision. As we think about the safety of our organizations in the short term, we should also consider the long term vision we set for our organizations and the movement we are a part of. The danger is that by focusing on short term survival we end up on pathways that move us away from our vision of justice and equity. If the goal is racial justice, how will race silence affect our long term goals?
Who is our audience? Who are we trying to bring along? Who are we accidentally leaving behind? What are we protecting? Many organizations have bipartisan audiences. In trying to appeal to more conservative communities or funders, organizations try to use words they feel are “safer” or more “accessible.” In these moments of attacks on racial equity, the push to use proxy or more accessible words than race explicit language is even more heightened. As we decide on a language strategy, we must also think about communities who we may be accidentally leaving behind. There are many stories from 2016 of communities of color feeling left behind by racial justice organizations who stepped away from using race explicit language. In doing so, trust between organizations and communities of color was eroded and needed to be repaired for years. We must be strategic.
Why are racial equity words being banned? How do we make sure we’re not doing the opposition’s work for them? As someone who is in the leadership of a nonprofit, it is understandable for decision-makers to jump into using race-silent organizations to protect their staff and the organization. However, it will benefit us to actually pause and think about why this administration is banning race explicit language to begin with. The answer is that they realize that silencing organizations from using race and equity words is part of the work of upholding systemic racism. Race silence breeds race-silent strategies that do not address the historical and institutional roots of disparities in this country. We must be careful not to do the opposition’s job for them.
Above all, what are the racial equity impacts of this decision point? This has been the most helpful priming question for me as I look at the array of decision points in front of my organization on a day to day, month to month, and year to year basis. I encourage organizations to ground their decision-making on the racial impacts of decision points, not just on the organization and its mission but on communities represented by both.
There is no easy, perfect, black and white answer at this moment. We must pause and weigh the implications of every decision we make from here on out. But it’s important that we ground our reflection on our long-term vision and our impact on the movement and its people.
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