The Inclusive Language Field Guide: 6 Simple Principles for Avoiding Painful Mistakes and Communicating Respectfully 152300424X, 9781523004249

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THE INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE FIELD GUIDE 6 Simple Principles for Avoiding Painful Mistakes and Communicating Respectfully

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The Inclusive Language Field Guide Copyright © 2023 by Suzanne Wertheim All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 1333 Broadway, Suite 1000 Oakland, CA 94612-1921 Tel: (510) 817-2277, Fax: (510) 817-2278 bkconnection.com Ordering information for print editions Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the “Special Sales Department” at the Berrett-Koehler address above. Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626; bkconnection.com Orders for college textbook/course adoption use. Please contact Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626. Distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services. Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. First Edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wertheim, Suzanne, author. Title: The inclusive language field guide : 6 simple principles for avoiding painful mistakes and communicating respectfully / Suzanne Wertheim, PhD. Description: First Edition. | Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007913 (print) | LCCN 2023007914 (ebook) | ISBN 9781523004249 (paperback) | ISBN 9781523004256 (pdf) | ISBN 9781523004263 (epub) | ISBN 9781523004270 (audio) Subjects: LCSH: Communication and culture. | Business communication. | Discourse analysis. Classification: LCC HM1206 .W47 2023 (print) | LCC HM1206 (ebook) | DDC 302.2—dc23/eng/20230417 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007913 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007914 2023-1 Book production: Happenstance Type-O-Rama Cover design: Ashley Ingram

CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Introduction: Harness the Power of Language . . . . . . 1

1 Move Beyond the Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2 Reflect Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 3 Show Respect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 4 Draw People In . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 5 Incorporate Other Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . 127 6 Prevent Erasure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 7 Recognize Pain Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 8 Look to the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

Discussion Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

234

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

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PREFACE

Back when I was a university professor, I taught students from all kinds of backgrounds. They were curious, intelligent, and hardworking. But after my students graduated, some of them would come back to me with disturbing stories about their experiences in the working world. These stories would often involve hurtful things said to them—things that made them feel disrespected, or excluded, or overlooked. It hurt my heart to hear those stories. It made me want to rush over to those offices and organizations and explain to people how their language was causing harm and how they could do better. For years, I’d been educating people about the power and nuances of language as part of my linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics classes. But why was this incredibly useful and practical information basically locked behind academic doors? It seemed unfair to me that to learn concepts that could really help you with your everyday communication, you had to attend an elite institution and also know to take classes like mine— classes that many people thought were only relevant if they were going to major in either linguistics or anthropology. I knew how useful what I taught was to people in a wide range of professions because former students would email me years after taking even just a single intro course to tell me about a concept that they still found helpful. They’d write things like “Professor Wertheim, hierarchy marking helped me figure out why this guy on my team is so annoying—he’s acting like he’s above me when he’s not!” Or “I

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work in marketing now, and I used Bakhtinian ‘flavor’ to talk my boss out of an ad campaign that would have been seriously problematic. Thank you!” They even wrote to tell me that concepts I had taught had helped them with problems with their romantic partners, their families, and their friends. And while these emails made me genuinely happy, they also reinforced just how unfair it was that more people didn’t have access to this useful information. I left the university system determined to address these two problems: 1. People saying unpleasant and harmful things because they

don’t realize what is problematic about their language 2. People not having access to the information that can help

them be as respectful and as welcoming in their communication as they want to be And that is why I have written this book, which boils down twenty-five years of research and instruction into six simple principles—common-sense principles that anyone can use to improve their communication, both at work and in their personal lives. They are: 1. Reflect reality. 2. Show respect. 3. Draw people in. 4. Incorporate other perspectives. 5. Prevent erasure. 6. Recognize pain points.

I know from my former students how important it is to make everyone feel included—but I also know how challenging - vi -

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inclusive language can feel for people who have internalized older, and now outdated, norms. This book is designed to make it easy for you to communicate in a way that’s inclusive. To sidestep problematic language, avoid painful mistakes, and treat people with the respect and consideration that builds and strengthens relationships.

A NOTE TO THE READER This book isn’t organized by identity category, but instead by principles of human behavior. Many people come to guides on inclusive language looking for information on how to talk or write about a specific group of people. But this book is different; it starts with Principles of Inclusive Language and then uses examples involving different kinds of people to illustrate those principles. If you’re looking for information all in one place for one specific group, that’s not what you’re going to find. Instead, this book goes deeper. I’m going beyond the how to use inclusive language and grounding everything in the why. By the end of the book, you’ll have all the information you need to move from problematic language to inclusive language for any group of people that you’re interested in. The journey just may look a little different than what you expected.

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Introduction

Harness the Power of Language

MY FRIEND OSCAR was in the middle of an interview for a job as a professor when a comment from a potential colleague stopped him in his tracks. (His name, like all the names in this book that don’t come from the public domain, has been changed.) This was on Day 2 of his “campus visit,” which might sound casual, but is actually pretty intense. When you’re a finalist for a professor position, you go and visit the college for a few days. You give a talk, you have hours and hours of meetings, and you eat every meal with people who are evaluating you. You’re on your best behavior from morning until night. It’s exhausting. So, Oscar is having lunch with a professor I’m going to call John, who might end up being one of his colleagues for the rest of his working life. (Seriously, these are high-stakes interviews. Many of the people evaluating you are trying to decide if they would like to work with you for the next twenty or thirty years.) And then John looks at Oscar’s wedding ring and says a thing that Oscar has been dreading. “I bet your wife would love those bungalows on the south side of town.” Wife. Problem is, Oscar is gay. And he’s married to a man. So, there’s his husband, Fred. But no wife.

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Imagine what it’s like to be in Oscar’s position. Maybe you don’t have to imagine, because something similar has already happened to you. Now that John, his interviewer, has assumed he’s talking to a person who has a wife, Oscar has two basic choices for his next conversational turn. And neither of them are good ones. Option 1: He can pause and correct John and explain that his spouse is, in fact, male. But that might be dangerous. What if John is biased against people who aren’t straight? He’s already shown through his language that he isn’t considering options beyond heterosexuality. As one of the interviewers, John is in the power position here, and he can shut down Oscar’s job prospects. And in the state where the college is located, it’s perfectly legal for him to refuse to hire Oscar because he’s gay. Usually, an interviewer will say something more coded like, “I think he’s not really a culture fit,” rather than, “I don’t want to hire him because he’s gay.” But the bias is the same. And so is the outcome. Option 2. Since outing himself may be dangerous and cost him this job, Oscar might decide to say nothing. To not correct John and let him keep on assuming that Oscar has a female spouse. This is less dangerous in terms of job prospects, but now Oscar is erasing an important part of his life. And he may be wondering: Is this department a good fit? Can I show up as who I am and be welcomed? Or is this a place that isn’t thinking about people like me? Am I going to have to hide the most important person in my life while my straight colleagues get to talk about their partners? - 2 -

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This is some serious stuff to consider, especially in the middle of a job interview where you’re trying to make a good impression and also trying to figure out if you actually want the job. And Oscar’s dilemma is all because of one word. One noninclusive word. Wife. If John had simply said “spouse” instead of “wife,” there would have been no dilemma for Oscar. In fact, he would probably have noticed the inclusive word choice and thought something like “Oh, John didn’t assume I’m straight! That’s cool. Looks like this is a department that keeps in mind that some of us are LGBTQ+.” Just one word can be the difference between Oscar feeling welcomed and seen or feeling erased and possibly unsafe. A single word can change the course of an interview, a job, a relationship. When you know the Principles of Inclusive Language, you can choose words that are actually as polite, respectful, and welcoming as you want them to be.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ETIQUETTE There is a new twenty-first-century etiquette. We are seeing new words, new norms, and new expectations. And being polite means using inclusive language, now more than ever. In many ways, the new etiquette is like older versions, but with one major update: it is now expected that we will take into consideration people whose perspectives have historically been ignored, erased, or dismissed as less important. I hear from a lot of people that they feel a bit at sea when it comes to this new etiquette. They tell me that it suddenly feels as if what used to be just fine is now enough to get them strongly criticized. That language, especially language that they’re using publicly, now feels like a minefield—and they’re caught in the middle without a map. - 3 -

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Executives tell me that they’re anxious about saying the wrong thing when they address the whole company in all-hands meetings or do interviews with journalists. They’re surprised and unhappy about the negative comments they get on Slack from their younger employees or at getting called out on Twitter. One CEO confessed, “I just don’t want to ‘get cancelled’ for saying the wrong thing. So now I’m afraid to say anything involving ‘difficult’ topics.” But his employees noticed that he was avoiding these topics, and it lowered their trust in him and in the company. PR people and marketers tell me they’re concerned that their press releases and ad campaigns will be accidentally offensive and bring the wrath of the internet down on their heads. One digital marker worried, “What if our campaigns are unintentionally racist or sexist in ways we’re just not seeing? Because, frankly, our team just isn’t that diverse. I’m afraid we’re going to turn off potential customers.” Heads of HR tell me they’re concerned that they’re losing potentially great hires because recruiters are offending them or signaling that the company culture won’t welcome them. A VP of Talent Acquisition told me they were frustrated. “So, a recruiter misgendered a top candidate in an interview the other day, saying things like ‘a woman like you’ and ‘she.’ That candidate just withdrew from consideration, saying they don’t want to work for a company that’s so insensitive. They said they only want to work somewhere they’ll feel comfortable so they can actually focus on their job.” Grandparents tell me they’re nervous talking to their grandkids, especially when it comes to gender and sexual orientation. They see that the landscape has shifted, but they don’t quite know how. “My granddaughter announced that she’s something called nonbinary? And she changed her name from Sophie, which is a perfectly lovely name, to some kind of ridiculous name she says is gender neutral. And they tell me I’m wrong for calling her ‘she’? - 4 -

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But she’s my baby girl!” With this attitude and these language choices, their relationship with their grandchild is likely to be awkward and low on trust, and it may become increasingly distant. Some people in their forties and older tell me that they sometimes just don’t understand their younger colleagues and the rules they’re playing by. (Others have been engaging in these kinds of inclusive practices for a while, so they are already comfortable.) And some autistic people tell me that it can be frustrating to have communication rules that already feel unnatural to them shift without explicit notification or explanation as to why. An engineer in his fifties objected: “Why should I include my pronouns in my Slack profile and in my Zoom window? I’m not also announcing to everyone that I’m gay.” His refusal to adopt the new etiquette, combined with his lack of awareness of the reasons for normalizing pronoun presentation, is negatively impacting his work relationships. It’s no fun to feel the way Oscar did in that interview, but it’s also no fun to feel like you have to constantly second-guess everything you say—or to feel so worried that you avoid saying anything at all. Luckily, all of this complicated business around modern etiquette isn’t actually all that complicated once you understand the Principles of Inclusive Language. And that’s exactly what I’m going to share in the pages to come: the tools that will allow you to communicate with confidence.

•••

When you were a kid, adults probably gave you some basic dos and don’ts. For example, many English-speaking American parents say things like: Do say “please” and “thank you.” Don’t eat with your elbows on the table. - 5 -

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Do say “sir” or “ma’am” to be polite. Don’t interrupt people. But even these rules, which might seem obvious if they were handed down to you as a child, aren’t foolproof. Because what’s appropriate depends on context. For example, among friends, it can be a sign of closeness to just ask for or take something without a more formal sounding “please” or “thank you” attached to it. And some people may think elbows on the table are just fine. What’s more, addressing someone as “sir” when they aren’t male or “ma’am” when they aren’t female won’t express respectful politeness but instead is likely to cause irritation, anger, or pain. Finally, a person may come from a culture in which jumping in while someone is still speaking is a sign of engagement and shows that the conversation is going well. You’ve spent your lifetime developing a sense of what’s appropriate. You might not realize it, but you are incredibly sensitive to context. When you’re assessing a situation and adjusting your behavior, you’re taking into account all kinds of factors. Things like

• • • • •

how many people are involved and how close you are to them; where you are and if you’re communicating in person or via technology; the power dynamics; the type of interaction (like a meeting, a face-to-face conversation, a series of text messages, a social media post); or the identity characteristics of the people involved.

Note that some autistic people may be assessing different contextual factors than allistic people (allistic is a useful term that describes people who specifically are not autistic; neurodivergent - 6 -

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is too broad to use in this way). For example, allistic people are likely to interpret the concept of social in terms of negotiating social status and identifying power gradients. But autistic people are likely to interpret social as working collaboratively in an interaction where the primary goal is to learn from one another.1 Related to this is a communication feature commonly called monologuing. This is where an autistic speaker shares a large amount of highly detailed and often specialized information on a particular topic—a topic that might be considered a special interest. For the autistic person, this way of speaking is an informational way of socializing. It signals interest and engagement in the conversation and is understood as social due to the sharing and learning of information. But for an allistic listener, the monologuing may not seem like social interest and instead can be seen as rude, self-centered, and hogging of the conversational floor. What’s considered appropriate or acceptable changes based the contextual factors I just listed and a whole bunch more. The calculus to figure out what is appropriate is subtle, complicated, and frequently shifting. In fact, I used to teach entire graduate courses on how to analyze the many ways that context affects what people say and how they say it. So when people come to me looking for a straightforward list of inclusive language dos and don’ts, I tell them: I wish it was that simple. Sometimes they ask, “Can’t you just tell me the words I shouldn’t use and the words I should use in their place?” The answer is: sure, for some things. But often, what’s appropriate changes so much based on context that it’s just too complicated to make straightforward lists. What’s more, language evolves and changes over time. Some words that were considered acceptable just a few years ago are seen as less desirable or even unacceptable today. And this is a cycle that keeps on going. - 7 -

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Fortunately, you don’t need to keep up on every trend or change to become proficient in twenty-first-century etiquette. And there is a better way to manage this information than only using long lists of words and phrases (though I have included a helpful list of suggested substitutions in the Resources section at the end of this book). After reading this book, you will be able to use my Six Principles of Inclusive Language, which are based on the scientific concepts at the heart of linguistic anthropology, to confidently navigate whatever communication context you may find yourself in—now or in the future.

EVERYTHING YOU SAY AFFECTS YOUR RELATIONSHIPS People cause pain every day by using problematic language. Most of the time, when people are causing pain it’s because they don’t realize how their words are landing. Why is it so common for well-intentioned people to say hurtful things? It’s because most people haven’t been taught how language actually works. I used to be one of those people. Even though I had been an English major in college and worked as a technical writer afterward, I didn’t understand the real inner workings of language, and I still believed all kinds of myths that scientists of language know are actually false. For example, I thought that the meaning of language was found only in semantics. So you could learn everything you needed to make good word choices by looking in a dictionary. I also thought that words were pretty much the same for everybody—so if a word wasn’t problematic for me, it was hard for me to understand why it might be a problem for someone else. “I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me,” I would think. “Aren’t they just being humorless? Or oversensitive?” - 8 -

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And I thought that some dialects were just better than others, and that your pronunciation and grammar made you sound either smarter or dumber. I grew up in New York and went to college in North Carolina, a state where many people have what might be called a “strong Southern accent.” And because of my misconceptions about dialects, my first few weeks of college were absolutely mind-blowing. In my seminars, I heard people speaking with accents that I had been raised to think of as sounding “unintelligent.” And speaking with these accents, they made comments that were unbelievably insightful and far more sophisticated than anything I had been thinking. It took me many months to bring my mental models into better alignment with the reality around me. I had to learn to stop using dialect stereotypes to judge people’s intelligence or contributions. What’s more, I thought that writing “he or she” instead of just “he” was enough to accurately represent gender. “There, I fixed it,” I would think. “It’s no longer a masculine word masquerading as representing everybody. Now everyone is actually represented.” I had no idea that nonbinary people even existed, even though there are 4,000 years of texts and descriptions of cultural practices, dating back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, that record genders well beyond the binary.2 All of this changed after I became a linguistic anthropologist and started studying language and bias.3 Now I understand a lot more about how language works, and it has changed my life for the better. I have way more insight. And way more control. Don’t get me wrong, I still make mistakes when it comes to inclusive language. I’m only human. And I still struggle with the legacy of the culture I was raised in, where it was generally acceptable to marginalize or dismiss all kinds of people, to not care about their perspectives or their feelings. But I’ve learned how to identify bias “hot spots” and avoid them. How to create checklists for my writing and talks. And how - 9 -

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to create new habits so when I go on autopilot (which happens a lot when we speak), my default language is (usually) the more inclusive option. I’ve written this book so I can share some of the most important things I’ve learned about language with you so you also can gain new insights and gain more control over your language. Then it’s actually doing what you want it to do. Here is one of the most important things I’ve learned: Language is social action. You might have been raised to think that words can’t do much harm, or that words and actions are completely different things. (This shows up in sayings like “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”) But every time you use language to interact with someone, you are affecting your relationship with that person. Every single thing you say or write can cause a relationship to improve or deteriorate. (In this book, I am focusing on examples in spoken and written English. But like now, when I’m talking more generally about language and use words such as say, I am also including sign languages.) A single word, or even an ill-timed pause, can cause real and lasting harm. And this goes for all kinds of relationships; for example, relationships between

• • • • • •

a job candidate and an interviewer, a company and their client, a parent and their child, a manager and their report, two coworkers, a teacher and their student,

- 10 -

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• • •

a content creator and an audience member, two friends, and many, many more.

Language is the glue that holds our relationships together. Except that language is a lot more complicated than glue. And it has a lot more moving parts. One complication that doesn’t get talked about enough is the communication clashes and misunderstandings that arise between autistic people and allistic people. I think that we expect to find culture clashes between people who were raised in different countries, or even different regions of the same country. For example, the “New York normal” I grew up with for conversations is pretty different from what is considered normal in California, where I’ve lived for decades. I’ve seen how when I’m encoding “regular, nothing special” in New York style, Californians may think that I’m so loud that I’m expressing anger, or that my jumping in while someone is still speaking isn’t a sign of engagement but of self-centered rudeness. Or that my touching someone’s arm or shoulder is a sign of sexual interest rather than just something you do when talking with people. These are all misunderstandings that arise from decoding a different social action than the one that was intended. But many allistic people don’t expect to find similar communication clashes when they interact with autistic people. (Meanwhile, many autistic people spend their lives trying to interpret and adjust to the allistic norms around them.) How much and what type of information to give, how long to talk for, when it is your turn to talk (and what you should talk about), how to express empathy, if you should interpret a comment literally or not— these are all common locations of communication clashes based on neurotype.

- 11 -

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For example, the “appropriate length” for a conversational turn is a common clash point. As I noted earlier, the common autistic trait of monologuing means that an autistic person’s “normal” conversational turn may be much, much longer than a “normal” turn for someone who isn’t autistic. And how literally to interpret a comment or question can cause real challenges for many autistic people; their neurotype means that literal interpretation is the default, while allistic speakers will frequently use hints, implications, and subtext to add meaning that they assume will be easily interpreted by the listener.

•••

The world is complicated and dynamic and filled with variety. I’m a birder and a hiker, and I love field guides because they help me make sense of the complex world around me. They give me the skills to identify plants and animals out in the wild. They help me understand what’s safe and what’s dangerous. (Although I don’t think I’ll ever feel confident enough to forage for and eat wild mushrooms.) And they show me what various things have in common and how they are related to one another. That’s why I’ve written this field guide for you. Because language is also complicated and dynamic and filled with variety. Some words are “safe,” and others can be “dangerous.” If you can identify different kinds of language and use simple principles to explain how that language is behaving out in the world, then you are on the path to really understanding human communication— and you’re learning how to avoid accidentally poisoning someone with the verbal equivalent of a toxic mushroom.

EVENT PLANNING Have you ever gone to an event, like a wedding or cookout or birthday party, and felt really welcomed and comfortable? An - 12 -

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event that gave you the feeling, “Wow, they really thought of everything!” Or, on the flip side, have you ever gone to a wedding or cookout or birthday party and felt uncomfortable and unwelcome? Maybe even forgotten about? Where you thought, “Hmm, they weren’t thinking about me at all when they planned this.” A good event requires event planning. And a major part of event planning is thinking through the different kinds of people who are going to come to the event and taking their needs and preferences into account. Let’s say you’re going to host an afternoon cookout and you want to make sure everyone feels comfortable and included. Once you know who’s coming, you might make a list of their various needs and how you will meet those needs.

• • • • • •

“Okay, Michelle is celiac, so I’ll need some gluten-free options. And I’ll have to separate them out so there’s no cross-contamination.” “Srini is hard-core vegetarian, so I’ll need vegetarian food like skewers—and we’ll want to cook them on a separate part of the grill from the meat.” “Allen will need a chair that will be comfortable for him and support his weight. I’d better make sure I’ve got a few good options.” “Khalil doesn’t drink alcohol, so let’s come up with a fun mocktail so he can drink things that aren’t boring.” “Rachel goes really easily into sensory overload, so I’ll make sure there’s a quiet room they can retreat to.” “Julie always runs cold, so I’ll wash that blanket so it’s ready for her if she needs it.” - 13 -

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You then make sure to communicate the care you’ve taken, especially when it comes to comfort and safety. You let Michelle know she doesn’t have to worry about cross-contamination, you let Srini know that the veggies were cooked separately from the meat, and you let Rachel know they’ve got a safe retreat in case things get to be too much. The people who attend this cookout are set up to feel good. They can sit comfortably, they can eat safely, they can drink fun drinks, and they can warm up if it’s too chilly for them. They will probably leave feeling warmly about you, their host. (Note that an event host might be an organization and not an individual.) Your care, your consideration, your respect for their various situations and needs—it has come through in your actions. And the outcome is not just a good cookout. It is a closer and warmer relationship with each of those people who felt taken into consideration, respected, and cared about. I’ve been to incredibly well-planned and inclusive events and really enjoyed them. But I’ve also encountered people who don’t take this approach to event planning. They say things like, “It’s my barbecue and I’m not interested in vegetarian options. If you’re vegetarian, maybe my barbecue isn’t the place for you.” Or they might say, “Gluten-free is just a trend. It’s not real. Nobody’s actually allergic to pasta or pizza. So yeah, I’m having my birthday dinner at the pizzeria.” Or they might say, “Happy hours are what bring our team together! They’re just how we let off steam. Okay, maybe you’re pregnant or Muslim or think you’re a recovering alcoholic. You can have a ginger ale. Hanging out in cool bars is how our team bonds.” If you’re vegetarian and invited to a barbecue where there’s pretty much nothing for you to eat? You’re probably not going to leave feeling closer to or respected by your host. - 14 -

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If you’re celiac and invited to a pizzeria birthday dinner where there’s nothing on the menu that’s safe? You’re likely to just not go. And you’ll probably feel like your host doesn’t care about you— not only about your feelings, but also about your health and safety. If you’re pregnant or an observant Muslim or a recovering alcoholic and your team insists on a weekly alcohol-centered happy hour as bonding time? You’re probably not going to feel bonded with that team. Or maybe even welcome at all. Careful and thoughtful event planning can lead to warmer and improved relationships. And careless and self-centered event planning often leads to weaker and colder relationships.

•••

I’d like you to apply this idea of event planning to what I call communication events. I’ve spent decades analyzing language in context. The handy umbrella term I learned in grad school to describe language in context is speech event. But because this term was coined before we started texting and IMing and emailing and posting on Slack, speech is too narrow. Plus, for many people, the word speech doesn’t invoke sign languages, which makes it feel less inclusive. So, I’ve shifted to communication event. A communication event is any social activity where language is playing an important role. There are real-time events where people are speaking (and, again, speaking includes sign languages); for example:

• • • • •

An in-person conversation A lecture A meeting A sermon A panel discussion

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And there are other forms of communication that involve technology. People may hear, see, read, or feel them after they were produced; for example:

• • • • • •

A text message A post on social media An email A press release A video on social media A commercial

Those inclusive practices for event planning can get transferred right over to communication event planning. At the heart of both kinds of planning is thinking through two core things: 1. Who do I need to think about? 2. What needs do they have that I should take into account?

Twenty-first-century etiquette simply asks us to take into account people whose needs have often been ignored in the past. It suggests that we should treat those people with as much respect, care, and consideration as the people who have been traditionally centered and catered to. For some communication events, like press releases and videos and social media posts, you can plan in advance. For example, you might make an inclusion checklist and before you post or send something out, you run through the list and make sure you h ­ aven’t forgotten about some type of person. (In the Resources section at the end of the book, you’ll find a template for inclusion checklists that you can use as a starting point.) This process is the most like regular event planning, where you set up the food and the space for all kinds of guests. - 16 -

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But for other communication events, such as work conversations and meetings and interviews, you’ll need to have practiced enough so you can be inclusive on the fly. If you’ve developed new habits, then when you go on autopilot, or are so focused on what you’re trying to say that you lose track of how you are saying it, you’ll choose the inclusive option by default. This is more like always having a thoughtfully stocked fridge and pantry so if people with different kinds of needs show up, you’re ready at a moment’s notice to offer them something appropriate.

A NEW FRAMEWORK I’ve developed a simple new framework for people who want to harness the power of inclusive language. People who want to make sure that they’re paying attention. People who want to use language to build and improve their relationships and to create and maintain connection. After I left academia, I started consulting for organizations that want to use more inclusive and appropriate language. For years, my clients have come to me because they feel overwhelmed by all the information out there on inclusive language. It’s often in bits and pieces, it’s sometimes contradictory, it feels scattered, and they can’t figure out how to apply knowledge from one short list of “bad” and “good” words to other areas. The fact that interpretations are so context-dependent can make things feel even more complicated. So I’ve created an organizing system for you. It’s my Six Principles of Inclusive Language. Each principle has been reverse-engineered to address problems I’ve seen in my years of consulting and research—research that is based on multiple languages in multiple countries. So even though the examples in this book will be focused on English as spoken and written in the United States, the principles can be - 17 -

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applied to any language in any location. If you are Deaf and in the US, you can straightforwardly use my examples for written English but will need to translate into equivalents for sign language. And if you speak English in another country, you might have to do some translation work when it comes to the specific examples I use. But the principles I’m illustrating with those examples will hold true. In addition, each principle is based on a foundational truth about what creates feelings of connection, safety, and trust in all kinds of relationships, including the relationships between companies and clients. Finally, each principle is designed to hold steady even as language changes and evolves. Words that are considered acceptable today may become unacceptable in just a few years, but the principles you can use to evaluate these words will stay the same. Together, these six principles can be used as a powerful checklist to evaluate language: 1. Reflect reality. 2. Show respect. 3. Draw people in. 4. Incorporate other perspectives. 5. Prevent erasure. 6. Recognize pain points.

If you follow these principles, you’ll be speaking and writing inclusive language. And you’ll be able to explain to people in a clear and scientific way what’s wrong with problematic language. In the next chapter, I’ll lay the groundwork for these principles, including why it’s important to move beyond the dictionary. I’ll also share some key concepts from linguistic anthropology - 18 -

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that are central to inclusive language: namely, the “flavor” of words, their semantic framing, and their indexicality. Then we’ll go through each of the six principles, which I will illustrate using a few specific examples. In order to reflect reality, it’s important to use appropriate pronouns and accurately refer to gender, which is more than just a binary. I’ll also show you three problematic ways that language is commonly used to distort reality. To show respect, you’ll learn how to avoid giving unconscious demotions—those snap judgments where you assume someone has a lower-prestige job than they actually do. (Or when someone who is just going about their day is assumed to be dangerous or a criminal.) And you’ll see how important it is to say and spell names correctly, avoid using unwanted nicknames, and address people respectfully without misgendering them. To draw people in, you’ll learn about pejoration and how negative cultural attitudes can turn neutral words into insults. We’ll go over the best ways to talk about disability, and how to be both inclusive and respectful when interacting with disabled people. I’ll also explain the concept of markedness and show how it underpins the subtle ways that language can suggest that race only involves people who aren’t white. To incorporate other perspectives, we’ll dig into the importance of thinking through the ways other people’s lived experiences might be different from your own. I’ll lay out some subtle ways that pronouns such as you, we, and everybody can exclude people who haven’t been taken into account. And we’ll take a closer look at softening language and how it can inappropriately shift the focus away from a person who has been harmed by bad behavior. To prevent erasure, we’ll look at the negative effects of phrases like “you guys” and contrast it with the ways that gender-neutral language includes people instead of erasing them. You’ll also see the importance of avoiding misnaming, using language that - 19 -

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reflects that there are multiple skin tones, remembering and including indigenous history, and remembering and including sexual orientations beyond heterosexual. Finally, in order to recognize pain points, you’ll read about how to give compliments that land well and how to avoid compliments that show inappropriately low expectations. And you’ll see how important it is to learn about and avoid lightly referencing painful experiences that have been glossed over in white or Western history, such as dictatorships, genocide, and chattel slavery. As I noted in the preface, these principles are the framework of this book, rather than identity groups of different kinds. When I talk about a specific identity in this book, it is as an illustration of a principle in action: here’s an example of problematic language that people in this group deal with, and here’s a more inclusive alternative you can use in its place. This means that I may not spend a lot of time or detail on an identity you’re particularly interested in. However, the principles are designed to apply to every kind of group of people out there.

WHO SHOULD WE PAY ATTENTION TO? Let’s go back to the ways inclusive language is like event planning. If you’re used to thinking through who is coming to an event and what you need to do to make them comfortable, you can transfer that same process to your communications. I hear from many people that they feel overwhelmed because they don’t know who they should pay attention to, what kinds of categories are important, or what groups of people they could learn more about so they can make more informed decisions when it comes to language. Human beings are complicated! We have lots of different ways we think about ourselves and define ourselves. And we are all of those things at once. For example, I’m female (and was assigned - 20 -

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female at birth), heterosexual, American, originally a New Yorker and now a Californian, short, the oldest child, a sister, a person who grew up speaking English at home, middle-class, “white” on the US Census, but with hair and skin that are dark enough that many people ask “what are you?” or talk to me in other languages, a grandchild of immigrants, neurotypical(ish), and a whole lot more. Some of these aspects of my identity come into play way more than others when it comes to inclusive language. For example, being female is a big one. But being an older sister is not. Being heterosexual is a big one. Being short is not. So I’m going to give you a list of “the big ones.” The dimensions of human identity that most frequently play a role in inclusive language and that you can learn to pay attention to (if you’re not already). For each of these categories, there is a dominant group. (I’m not going to call them the majority, because it often isn’t about numbers. It’s about who has the power or the prestige. I’m also not going to use the word minority for the same reason.) Language is generally oriented toward the dominant group and presents the world from that group’s perspective. When it comes to inclusive language, the people we want to pay particular attention to are the ones who aren’t members of the dominant group. You might call them underrepresented or marginalized. These are the people who historically haven’t been taken into account by language—who haven’t been appropriately represented, and who haven’t been focused on and centered. That’s why we have to put in some extra effort to take them into consideration and make sure that they are given their fair share of attention and care. For inclusion, the most important dimensions of human identity on an individual level are:

• •

Race and ethnicity Gender

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• • • • • •

Sexual orientation Physical ability/disability Neurotypicality/neurodiversity Age Weight Height

In a social context, the most important dimensions of human identity are:

• • • • • • • • • •

Geographic location Language and dialect Country of origin, indigenous status, and immigrant status Socioeconomic class and income Educational background Religion Marital status Parental status Political affiliation Military experience

And for those of you thinking about communications in a work context, you will want to take into account:

• •

Work content and field Division/department/etc.

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• • •

Management status Seniority Work location

This may look like a long list of ways to slice and dice different aspects of a person’s identity. But the more you get into inclusive language, the more you’ll get a feel for which dimensions matter for a given context. For example, religion may play a role when talking about holidays or planning social events for work, but it will probably be less important when it comes to planning out how to hold more inclusive meetings.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK If you don’t speak French, you wouldn’t read a book about French grammar for a few hours, close it, and think, “Well, I read that book, so I speak French now!” That’s because we all know that it takes time and practice to learn new language skills. It’s true for foreign languages. And it’s true for inclusive language as well. So, I have designed this book to bring you to a new level of inclusive language skills. To help you move from passive understanding to active fluency, I’ve given you a short set of exercises at the end of each chapter that explains a principle (Chapters 2 through 7). Here’s how you can use this book for maximum impact. First, you can read it through so you get the big picture and see how it all fits together. Then you can spend a month doing the activities associated with each principle. A month should be long enough to learn new ways of paying attention and develop new habits. If you focus on the activities for one principle each month, by the end of six months, you’ll have a whole new toolkit for

- 23 -

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inclusive language. You’ll be able to speak fluently in ways you couldn’t without practice. When you encounter questions about whether or not language is inclusive, you’ll be able to evaluate that language using the six principles as a checklist. And you’ll be able to make well-informed choices that let you harness the power of inclusive language. By consistently using inclusive language, you can make sure that the people you have relationships with—such as clients, colleagues, students, friends, family members, and romantic partners—feel taken into consideration and valued.

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1 Move Beyond the Dictionary

AFTER THE CLIENTS had waved their final goodbyes and walked out the door, Monica’s boss Rebecca pulled her aside. She said in a concerned tone, “Monica, could you please straighten your hair the next time you’re presenting to clients? Right now, it looks really unprofessional. To be honest, it felt like you were being disrespectful coming in with that frizzy mess.” Monica took a deep breath. She had carefully timed her wash day and spent hours getting her curls defined and in good order for the big presentation. She was wearing her best suit, an expensive silk blouse, and new shoes. Monica felt like she looked polished and professional, just like the slide deck she had worked so hard to craft for her presentation. “Thanks for letting me know,” she responded. But her shoulders slumped as she walked back to her desk, dejected, after what had felt like a real triumph just a few minutes earlier. Monica had been hearing workplace comments about her hair since her first job at fifteen, working the registers at the fast-food place a few blocks from home. She had been told that the only “good hair” was straight hair; that only European-looking hair was “professional hair.” That her natural hair was “unkempt” and “messy” and “a bird’s nest.” So she, and most of her other

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Black female friends, spent a ton of money on relaxers and silk presses and wigs. They damaged their scalps, they avoided swimming and rainstorms, they pressed themselves into the mold in which there’s only one way for women to look professional. But this company had said a lot of appealing things about diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Bring your authentic self to work!” they had announced on the website and during onboarding. What’s more, in her last two quarterly reviews, Rebecca had told Monica that she was performing at the highest levels, well above expectations, and that she was clearly headed for higher-profile projects and other great things. So Monica had thought that this was finally a workplace where, as part of her authentic self, she could bring her authentic hair. As she sat at her desk, she let out a sigh heavy with disappointment. It looked like that talk about authenticity was just that—only talk. About an hour later, Monica overheard another manager, Juana, who was standing at Rebecca’s desk. (In our “employee experience” interview a few months later, Monica told me that in their open office, you could hear basically everything from anywhere.) Juana said, “You were kind of harsh with Monica before, don’t you think? She was so well prepared, and her presentation was great.” Rebecca replied quietly, “But it’s for her own good. We need her to look professional. She needs to look professional for the sake of her own career. Or she’ll never get ahead. Maybe it was uncomfortable for her to hear, but I’m doing her a favor.” Juana paused and said, “But, my friend, this is a really narrow view of what it means to be professional. Professional is a loaded word that can carry some serious bias. You’ve got to be careful how you use it.”

••• - 26 -

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In my experience, people like Rebecca are surprised when they are told that professional is a word that is often used in problematic ways. I frequently hear them defend their word choice, and the most common way is by turning to what they see as the ultimate authority on words and their meanings—the dictionary. Let’s say Rebecca hopped online to open a few dictionary websites and see how professional is defined. She’d find relevant definitions that tell her that professional people:

• • • • • •

act in line with the ethics and standards of their profession; are appropriate for their profession; are businesslike; are conscientious and courteous; are effective, skilled, organized, and serious in their manner; and work to a high standard.1

So Rebecca could bring these entries to Juana and say, “See! The definitions of professional are all positive. There’s nothing wrong with the way I used that word.” But here’s the thing—the dictionary doesn’t tell Rebecca about the hidden meanings associated with the word professional. And it doesn’t tell her that judging someone professional or unprofessional is often associated with racial bias and gatekeeping. Dictionaries are great! But they don’t reveal everything you need to know about how a word is working out there in the world. And they often don’t give you the information you need to distinguish between problematic language and inclusive language. In order to be inclusive in your language choices, there are times you’re going to have to move beyond the dictionary.

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LANGUAGE IS LIKE A FUNGUS I like to compare language to a fungus. When you see a mushroom, it may feel like you’re seeing an entire fungus. But, in fact, you’re just seeing the above-ground fruit. Underground is the mycelium—the part of the fungus that has elaborate and sometimes enormous structures, structures that may have interconnected networks. I’m a big fan of the work of Suzanne Simard, whose pioneering research taught the world how fungal networks allow trees to talk to one another and to share resources.2 She was trying to solve a mystery: after old-growth forests had been cut down and new single-species trees had been planted in their place, the new trees were much frailer and more likely to die. And the reason why turned out to be mostly underground. The new trees were missing both their old neighbors from other species and the complicated fungal networks that connected them all, that helped them access the water, phosphorus, and nitrogen they needed to thrive. Simard had discovered a previously unknown type of interspecies communication between fungal networks and individual trees. When other scientists studied fungi, it was usually in the lab, taken out of context. They could only learn so much about a fungus when it was isolated; they might think they had the whole picture, but they were actually seeing only a tiny piece of it. In isolation, there was no way for them to understand the subtle and dynamic communication that goes on when a fungus is out in the wild, living its best life. Language is like a fungus. When you pull it out of context and study it in isolation, you’re only seeing some of the picture. In this analogy, a single word is like a mushroom. It may look like a complete entity, something that can be studied on its own. - 28 -

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But it’s actually just the visible part of a complex underground system, a system that’s invisible if you’re only looking at the surface. When you take a word out of context in order to examine it, you’re only going to find some information about it. You’ll be able to learn more about a single word’s meaning, what we call its semantics. But you’re going to miss those hidden, subtle, complicated networks that connect words—and connect people. These are the complicated structures and networks that people like me spend time digging up and analyzing. And just like the fungi that scientists couldn’t fully analyze when they were isolated in a lab, there is a lot of complicated stuff going on with words that can only be figured out by examining them in context. Dynamically, in interaction. Context is everything. And it is the key to understanding why a word like professional, which you’ll find defined really positively in any dictionary, can be deeply problematic. In the rest of this chapter, I’m going to share with you three different ways linguists and linguistic anthropologists dig in and find the meaning hidden in complex communication structures: 1) semantic frames, 2) indexicality, and 3) “flavor.” These three concepts can help you move past the dictionary and understand why words with positive or neutral dictionary definitions may not actually be inclusive when used in a conversation or email or video or text message. If you’ve taken linguistics or linguistic anthropology classes, you might already be familiar with these concepts; if not, chances are good they’ll be new to you. But they’re easy to remember, and they’ll give you the power to figure out what’s going on with all kinds of problematic language. I’ll be using these concepts throughout the rest of the book, when I go through my Six Principles of Inclusive Language. The more you understand how language really works when it’s out in the world, the better you’ll be able to apply the principles of inclusive language. - 29 -

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SEMANTIC FRAMES EXPRESS MEANING A single word, most clearly when it’s a noun or a verb, has a hidden structure called a semantic frame. The semantic frame is one of the ways you relate words to the world around you. A word can generate an entire scenario in your head, with a setting, players, and action. For example, think about the verb purchase. It’s just one word. What can you tell about the scenario for the verb purchase?

• • • •

There are at least two people involved. A buyer and a seller. There is the thing being purchased—the goods. This isn’t a gift or a barter scenario, so we know money is playing a role. And there is a location—which these days is as likely to be online as in a brick-and-mortar store.

So, the scenario invoked by the verb purchase can be summed up like this: in a given location, a buyer gives money to a seller in exchange for goods. If you think about it, that’s really a lot of information about the world packed into just one word. Sometimes we need to look at a word’s framing to uncover bias or other distortions, such as double standards. This is where the same behavior is presented as either acceptable or unacceptable, good or bad; the only difference is who is doing it. For example, two news photos were widely circulated in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, which severely damaged several states in the American South. These photos showed people doing exactly the same thing—wading through chest-high water carrying groceries in a bag. In one photo, the caption describes the two people pictured as “finding bread and soda from a local

- 30 -

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grocery store.” In the other, the man pictured is described as “looting a grocery store.”3 Here we have two different words to describe exactly the same action. And the frame generated by the verb loot is very different than the one generated by the verb find. In the scenario of looting, a person is engaged in criminal activity that’s usually presented as not based on real needs. In the scenario of finding, a person is doing something neutral or even positive. They are seen as human beings, doing what you or I might do in the same circumstance—in this case, going into a store and finding food. You may have already guessed that in these photo captions, the person framed as looting was Black, and the people framed as finding were white. Semantic frames also let us see double standards in topics like discussions of children’s behavior and parenting. And just as with looting vs. finding, race and ethnicity can play a major role.4 A white child may be described as enthusiastic and a bit impulsive for the same behavior that gets a Native American child labeled disruptive and undisciplined. Black students in the US are suspended at three times the rate of their white peers, often for exactly the same behavior—it has just been framed differently.5 Researchers who study the school-to-prison pipeline find that students of color are often suspended for behavior that is difficult to define, including insubordination and willful defiance.6 The framing of insubordination and defiance presents a student who is deliberately resistant, rebellious, disobedient. Someone who will not listen to authority. Compare that scenario to the framing that comes with other ways to describe the same behavior, such as high-spirited, smart alecky, and bold. Who is dressed like a hooligan and who is dressed casually? Whose hair is tousled and whose hair is unkempt? Who is giving

- 31 -

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their child autonomy and helping them become self-sufficient and who is neglectful and inattentive? Race and ethnicity are often the key to digging up the double standards found in semantic frames. When I look for bias in semantic framing in the workplace, I usually discover that it’s more subtle than finding vs. looting. Here, I frequently find that gender is the main factor in the double standard. For example, two people engaged in the same behavior may be described differently in performance reviews. I’ve seen men who speak with force and enthusiasm at work described as passionate. And I’ve also seen women who speak with force and enthusiasm described as abrasive. It’s the same behavior but framed with bias. In fact, a 2014 study of performance reviews showed that in a set of hundreds of written reviews, only women were described as abrasive.7 (To be more specific, this study was of people who were perceived as women and people who were perceived as men. In my research, I’ve found that the perception of gender seems to play a much bigger role in how behavior is judged than how people actually identify. So in this example, and in other examples in this book, unless I say otherwise, I am using “women” as a shorthand for “people perceived as women” and “men” as a shorthand for “people perceived as men.”) In my work, I’ve also found that only women are called bossy—meanwhile, men who engage in the same behavior are called leaders. It is usually only women who are called aggressive, while their male counterparts are called assertive. And when men might be called conscientious or straightforward for pointing out problems, women who do the same are often called difficult or problematic. With those kinds of framings and their hidden bias, who do you think is more likely to get promoted based on their performance? - 32 -

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Semantic frames even affect how we view people who are pointing out problems—including behavior that meets the legal definition of discrimination or harassment. In 2020, lawyer Leslie F. Levy invited me to be part of a presentation she was giving at an employment law conference. She was advising plaintiffs’ lawyers to stop using the word complaint and start using the word report instead. For example, instead of saying that a client “complained about the sexual harassment to her manager,” Levy was recommending that lawyers say their client “reported the sexual harassment.” And she asked me to use linguistics to explain why changing out this single word could make a difference. FrameNet, a fantastic resource on semantic frames, tells us that complaining is framed as “communicating a negative emotional reaction to some state of affairs.”8 By contrast, the frame for reporting is when someone “informs the authorities of illegal or improper behavior by a wrongdoer.” See how different the scenarios are? The complainer is seen as emotional and having a negative reaction to something that may or may not be a real problem. By contrast, the reporter is objectively passing along important information about illegal or unacceptable behavior. If you’re an employment lawyer—or someone dealing with discrimination or harassment—the choice is clear. You’ll want to report the problem, since describing your actions as complaining makes it easier to dismiss them as just an emotional overreaction. (Note that many people who are perceived as female face the challenge of being labeled “emotional” as a way of minimizing or dismissing the problems they are talking about.) Dictionary definitions usually aren’t enough to point out a double standard that is being applied based on gender, race, or some other group membership. If you remember that semantic frames can encode bias, then you’ll be able to check the frame and the scenario it invokes to see if a word is inclusive or problematic. - 33 -

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HOW WE “POINT” TO SOCIAL MEANING Have you ever wondered why the second finger of your hand, the one next to the thumb, is usually called the index finger? That’s because when you index something, you point to it, and this second finger is the one most commonly used for pointing among English speakers. In many places, it’s considered rude to point with any of your fingers. For example, when I lived in Russia, I learned to point with my lips, which was pretty fun. Pointing with the index finger isn’t universal. But words that point to things in the world are. This is also why the list of words and page numbers at the end of a book is called the index—because it points to the places in the book where you can find each concept. Words point to things in the world. For example, the word tree can point to the general concept of a tree (“A mature tree can increase your property value”), or it might point to a specific tree (“Hey, look at that beautiful tree over there!”). Some words are completely dependent on their context. This means they have no fixed meaning that you can find outside of that context. For example, if I say “yesterday,” the actual date being pointed to will change based on the day that I say it. When I said “yesterday” the day that I was typing these words, it pointed to the date August 16, 2022. But if you, reader, set aside this book and write or say (or sign the equivalent of) “yesterday,” it will point to an entirely different date. And if I’m having a conversation with someone in English, the meaning of the words I and you will change depending on who is talking. If I’m the one talking, then I points to me. And if the other person is talking, then I points to them.

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Figuring out what the words tree and I are pointing to is pretty straightforward. But it gets a lot more complicated when you try to figure out the intricate and dynamic ways that words point to social and cultural meaning. In my field of linguistic anthropology, we call this indexicality. When words are on decorative objects, it can be a little easier to understand the social meaning they’re indexing. For example, if I see someone wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Matt Berry and the words, “Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Bartender,” I can be pretty sure they’re a fan of the TV show What We Do in the Shadows. I once stayed at an Airbnb where the hosts had put the word Blessed carved out of wood on a shelf near the entrance. This suggested to me that they were religious, and probably Christian. And if I see someone wearing a baseball cap that says, “The Town,” I know that they feel a sense of pride in being a resident of our city of Oakland, California, which has long had the affectionate nickname “Oaktown.” The shirt, the carving, the hat—each of them signals a group that someone belongs to. But when words are spoken or signed or written as part of face-to-face conversations or emails or text messages, the social meaning they index can be a lot more subtle. Some words and ways of speaking seem to point to gender. For example, cursing is often seen as more masculine, while saying “sorry” or using very precise color terms like magenta is often perceived as more feminine. Other ways of speaking may index a regional or racial identity. For example, saying “fixin’ to” can mark the speaker as from the American South. And leaving out the verb is or are in phrases like “she ready” can point to ways of speaking associated with some Black Americans—often in less-formal, in-group settings. (It can also point to Caribbean English spoken by people of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds.)

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In ways that have become especially clear in recent years, there are words that point to political stances and membership. In the US, calling someone a “snowflake” suggests that you are a member of the American right wing and probable supporter of the 45th president. And talking about how it’s important to “acknowledge white privilege” marks you as someone on the left who is interested in the pursuit of social justice. Indexicality may work differently for autistic people and allistic people. For example, for sighted people, the amount of eye contact in a conversation can point to different kinds of social meaning. In Western cultures, allistic speakers may interpret a lack of eye contact as a sign of disrespect or disengagement. But autistic speakers may find eye contact too distracting or overwhelming, so their lack of eye contact may signal that they are listening more intently, and so demonstrating more respect and attention. Here we have a communication clash that has its roots in different origins. Allistic speakers have indexicality for eye contact that is rooted in culture—they have been socialized since infancy to attribute different kinds of social meaning to different kinds of eye contact (for example, honesty, respect, or sexual interest). But autistic people’s eye contact patterns come from biology, from their neurotype. For these speakers, the amount of eye contact affects how they process language, along with their neurological reactions to the interaction. Similarly, knitting during interactions like meetings is an activity that allows many autistic people or people with ADHD to concentrate better and participate more fully. However, neurotypical people may interpret the knitting as rude or a distraction and a sign of disrespect or lack of focus. In addition, the autistic tendency to interpret comments and speak more literally is often understood as deliberately rude by allistic people. For example,

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an autistic employee leaving a company was asked by his boss on his last day, “Are you going to miss working here?” “No,” he answered straightforwardly. His allistic colleagues laughed as if it was a joke, and his boss looked taken aback, but the employee had simply interpreted the question literally and answered it directly and honestly. So how do indexicality and social meaning relate to inclusive language? It’s because often when people are critiquing someone’s words—or the way these words are delivered when spoken, such as the accent or intonational pattern—they are giving a negative evaluation of the identity that is being indexed. When someone says that it’s not okay for women to curse, the deeper issue that they’re pointing to is that, for them, women who curse are presenting themselves in ways that are “unfeminine” and therefore inappropriate. And when someone says that a phrase like “she ready” is “broken English” and “ungrammatical,” they are actually saying that certain ways of speaking that are associated with Black Americans are inappropriate and unacceptable. There is a very wide variety of people out there in the world. And, in general, in more official contexts, the ways of speaking that index the dominant groups—the people with power—are the ones considered “neutral” and “appropriate.” In the US, this means that places like corporate offices, television news, and newspapers are often understood as locations where everyone should pattern their speech and writing on white, heterosexual, middle-class (or higher), neurotypical, and abled men who grew up speaking American English. This is the identity pointed to when people in the US use the term professional. Indexicality lets us find hidden meanings that don’t show up in most dictionary definitions.

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THE “FLAVOR” OF WORDS Language isn’t neutral. And words acquire a “taste” based on the ways we encounter them. A Russian scholar named Mikhail Bakhtin had some incredibly useful insights into language. He pointed out that “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms . . . that can belong to ‘no one.’” That is, there are no words that are just out there—objective, detached, universal. Even words in the dictionary are defined according to the ways they are used by particular people in a particular time and place. Instead, Bakhtin proposed that “All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre . . . a particular person . . . an age group.” He noted, “Each word tastes of the context . . . in which it has lived its socially charged life.”9 Thanks to Bakhtin, we now understand that words acquire a flavor every single time you encounter them. From infancy up to today. Who said it, how they said it, if they were angry or cold or loving or scientific or condescending or respectful. Like a snowball, throughout your life, each word acquires its own social flavor that’s way more than just a dictionary meaning. It’s why linguists know there are no true synonyms. Even if two words mean basically the same thing, they won’t have shown up in the same contexts or in the same ways. So they won’t have the same flavor. This is why you might find yourself searching through the thesaurus for words that mean pretty much the same thing. Each word has a slightly different flavor, and you want to find the one that matches the effect you’re going for. Some words, like the or table, have a neutral flavor for pretty much everybody. But other words can be more charged. For example, the flavor of the word exotic depends a lot on how you encounter it. For many people, it’s got a pretty minimal flavor that’s a little bit positive. For them, it’s just a word used to describe - 38 -

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people or things from distant and foreign places. It hasn’t been used to describe them. But for many other people, myself included, exotic has a stronger and definitely unpleasant flavor. These people are usually not white, and most of the time are perceived as female. Being told you’re exotic can be really othering. It suggests that people see you as different, as not really belonging. It can come as an unpleasant shock that someone is so focused on you seeming different and foreign. Especially when you felt like you belonged. And it can also be inappropriately sexualizing. I’ve collected lots of stories where being called exotic was tied in with other inappropriate comments on appearance or being hit on. (Just typing these words made me realize I’m still irritated about a professional lunch that took place almost twenty years ago where a guy who grew up maybe fifteen miles away from me kept on telling me how “exotic” I was. He was Irish American, blond and blue-eyed. And I . . . was not.) What this means is that just because the flavor of a word is neutral or positive for you, you can’t assume that it is also neutral or positive for everybody else. If somebody tells you, “Hey, I don’t like that word,” now you know that it has an unpleasant flavor for them. Here’s a story involving exotic that was told to me a few years ago as part of a “company culture” interview. Shirin, who shared her experience with me, was born and raised in Iran until she was fourteen and then moved to California with her parents. She worked at a tech company and was reasonably friendly with a teammate named Rob, a white man who had been born and raised in the US. They didn’t hang out outside of work, but they ate lunch together a lot and joked around a bunch.

•••

Shirin followed Rob as he headed into the kitchen with his empty plate. “Hey, Rob,” she said, “can I ask you a favor?” - 39 -

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“Sure, what’s up?” “Well, you called me ‘exotic’ again just now. I know you think it’s a compliment, but I really don’t like that word. So, I’m asking you again, can you please stop describing me as ‘exotic’?” “I mean, I guess,” Rob replied. “But this seems kind of oversensitive on your part, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me.” Shirin’s eyes narrowed, and she bit back the angry words in her head. “Well, Rob, no one here is ever going to call you exotic, are they?” she thought. “But I have to hear all the time about how different I am. I have to deal all the time with people asking about and trying to guess my accent. And with endless people looking at my skin and trying to figure out ‘what kind of brown’ I am, and creepy guys telling me how sexy I am because I’m so . . . exotic. I’m over it.”

••• Rob had fallen into two traps that hold people back from being inclusive with their language: 1. Thinking that someone is being oversensitive rather than

looking for the ways the word he had used might have meanings that weren’t obvious to him 2. Assuming that because a word is okay for him, it’s accept-

able for everyone else as well Rob doesn’t understand that exotic is a word that Shirin has encountered again and again in ways that make it deeply distasteful to her. That the taste it has acquired over time is one she associates with people pointing out how different she is from them, how she doesn’t belong. Or how sexy she is, including times when sexualizing her is especially inappropriate. - 40 -

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Because Rob’s experience with the word exotic has been so different, he doesn’t recognize that the word tastes genuinely bad to Shirin. So, his judgment is impaired. And he leaves thinking she’s too thin-skinned, and that he’ll keep on saying exotic if he wants to, because it’s a perfectly fine word that shouldn’t bother anybody. The next time he calls Shirin exotic it may do real damage to their relationship. She may decide that he’s not someone who can be trusted. Who she can enjoy lunches with or joke around with. That he doesn’t care about her feelings and doesn’t mind if he says things that hurt her. But now you know more than Rob does. So instead of trying to convince someone they’re being overly sensitive when they tell you they have a problem with a word or phrase, you can work with them to find an alternative word that has a good flavor for you both.

•••

The flavor of words—and how they relate to context—is another place where autistic and allistic speakers may differ. For example, some autistic speakers may repeat words or phrases out of context because “it feels good.” This is called echolalia, and while it may have a pleasant or calming flavor for the autistic speaker, it may have an unsettling or disconcerting flavor for allistic listeners who don’t understand why these words and phrases are being repeated in a way that seems random or unrelated to what is going on in the moment. In addition, autistic people may find a certain word funny for “no particular reason,” which may trigger laughter. This laughter may seem disrespectful to listeners or seem like the autistic person is disparaging the concept or identity that the word points to. However, the laughter might be focused on the word itself rather than what it is pointing to. For example, some autistic - 41 -

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people report that they are triggered into laughter when they encounter unfamiliar or uncommon words.10 The interpretation of statements and questions in context can also have a different flavor for autistic speakers and allistic speakers. For example, Darryl was shocked to learn that her boyfriend’s friends thought she was “manipulative” and “a gold digger.” When she asked for specific examples of why, she learned that there was an interpretation issue when she said things like “Oh, I really like that handbag. Too bad I don’t have the money for it.” For Darryl, who is autistic, this was a simple statement of fact with no additional flavor. She was just sharing information in a direct and straightforward way. But for Darryl’s boyfriend and his friends, her statement sounded like a hint, an indirect suggestion that he buy her the expensive bag. This is because the flavor of statements like these is generally different for allistic people, who usually communicate more indirectly, using more subtext. This kind of interpretive difference in flavor, simple statement vs. loaded hint, can cause real relationship issues.

WHO IS “PROFESSIONAL”? Let’s return to the story from the beginning of this chapter, the one where Rebecca told her report Monica that her hair was “unprofessional.” How does this play out in terms of the three kinds of hidden meaning I’ve unpacked for you?

Semantic Frames We can deduce that in Rebecca’s mental model for professional, people who are office workers have straight hair. In this scenario, straight hair is professional. But curly hair, no matter how much effort and grooming have gone into it, is not. - 42 -

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(On a curly hair subreddit that I read for hair tips, people complain all the time about coworkers and bosses pulling them aside and telling them that their hair is “unprofessional.” One white woman was also told, “and it makes you look . . . ‘ethnic,’” in a way that was clearly not a compliment. Comments like these make the link between whiteness and professionalism more explicit.)

Indexicality For Rebecca, the word professional indexes, or points to, behavior associated with white people who are middle-class or higher. She might believe that professional is a neutral concept, one that is objective and universal and just out there in the world. She doesn’t recognize that it is excluding specific dimensions of human ­identity—that it is setting up a model in which some people’s natural hair is professional and other people’s natural hair is not.

Flavor No words are neutral and objective and universal. And for Rebecca, the Bakhtinian “flavor” of professional tastes almost completely like white people, or like people who have assimilated to white cultural norms. The vast majority of the time she has encountered people described as professional has been in contexts that are associated with whiteness, and often maleness. So Rebecca is passing along a very unpleasant hidden meaning to her report: To show up to work in ways that don’t have the flavor of ­middle-class whiteness is unprofessional and inappropriate. And Monica, who had hoped for better from this company and from this boss, is hearing this message. For Monica, this hidden meaning also sounds like: No matter how hard you work and how good your work is, showing up as your authentic self will only harm your career. - 43 -

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There are acceptable and unacceptable ways of being Black, and the acceptable ways look a lot like assimilating to white norms. You can put in extra hours, dress carefully, and perform at the highest levels, but because you aren’t conforming to white cultural expectations, you can still be labeled inadequate and problematic. This hidden meaning can automatically disqualify people from being seen as professional when they have browner skin, or curlier hair, or speak a nonstandard dialect, or speak with an accent that comes when English isn’t your first language. This is the very opposite of inclusive. And it is so common that it holds back the careers of millions of people. Black hair in particular is so frequently a source of discrimination that some US states have started to pass legislation protecting people who wear “natural” hairstyles, such as afros, twists, and locs. What are the hidden meanings of professional for you? What is its semantic framing for you? Its indexicality? Its flavor? You might want to examine what comes to mind when you think about the word professional and see if it encodes the same kind of hidden bias that Rebecca’s words showed us. What is your mental image of a professional person? If you’re asked to list five people who you think of as being very professional, who are they? What does a professional person sound like in terms of dialect and accent? What are they wearing? Do they have tattoos? Brightly colored hair? Who are examples of “professional” people in your field?

•••

I’ll be using the three concepts of semantic frames, indexicality, and flavor throughout the rest of the book to reveal what’s going on with problematic language. Now it’s time to jump in to the Six Principles of Inclusive Language, so you can learn more about how to shift to more inclusive options.

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2 Reflect Reality

ONYX STEPPED OUT the front door with four-year-old Jake and his mom, Tomoko. “Thanks so much, Onyx!” Tomoko said brightly. “We’ll see you tomorrow.” “Bye, Jake,” Onyx said, crouching down to his eye level. “It’s so fun to be your nanny. I’m glad your mom found me.” Tomoko smiled at them both. Daniel, Jake’s dad, was walking up the front path. He waved hello and goodbye at once. “Hey, Gigi,” he said. “See ya soon!” He turned to Jake and asked, “Did you have fun with her today?” Onyx winced a little, then walked away. As they moved down the path, they realized their heart was racing. It had been almost a month since Onyx had explained to Daniel and Tomoko that they were nonbinary. That they weren’t using the name Gigi anymore, and instead would now be called Onyx. That their pronouns weren’t she/her but actually they/them. But Daniel kept on using their birth name and the wrong pronouns. And especially since he was their employer and being out as nonbinary was so new, Onyx didn’t quite know how to correct him. But having their requests ignored and treated like they didn’t matter—it felt terrible.

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Onyx was surprised by just how strong their body’s response was to being deadnamed and misgendered. It felt like a punch to the stomach, a shock to the system. A nonbinary friend had recently said that when people used she instead of they for them, “it feels like a thousand bees are stabbing me in the chest. It hurts.” Onyx was starting to understand what they meant. Later that evening, Tomoko gave Onyx a call. “I’m so sorry that Daniel keeps deadnaming you. And using the wrong pronouns. I keep on explaining, but he just doesn’t seem to get it. He talks about how feminine you look, and how being nonbinary seems like just a phase that younger people go through to get attention. I’m so frustrated.” Onyx didn’t know what to say, so they sat in awkward silence. Tomoko went on. “Daniel’s usually such a nice guy. I don’t know why he’s okay with being so rude about this. I told him that if you quit because he can’t be polite enough to use your correct name and pronouns, then he’s going to be the one staying home from work to take care of Jake until we can find someone new. Really, I’m so sorry.” Onyx loved Jake, but if his house wasn’t going to be a safe place, they’d have to look for other work. It would be sad to leave him behind, but how much discomfort and disrespect were they supposed to put up with?

•••

Scenes like this one are happening way more frequently in the 2020s than they used to, even just a decade ago. We’re having discussions about gender identity, pronouns, and new names that many of us never expected—and aren’t really prepared for. Is it that there is a new reality? That suddenly there are more genders than male or female? That young people are declaring that they’re nonbinary because it’s trendy?

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In fact, the scientific reality of biology and gender hasn’t changed; it’s just that our social reality is finally catching up with the science and with people’s lived experiences. And now that we are moving to be in greater harmony with reality, we are using language in some new ways so we can do a better job of reflecting the world around us.

PRINCIPLE 1 Inclusive language reflects reality. Problematic language distorts, ignores, or manipulates reality.

PRONOUNS AND GENDER Pronouns may seem small, innocuous, and even dull. But they’re absolutely central to inclusive language. That’s because gender plays a major role in English when we are being polite, showing respect, and talking about people appropriately and accurately. When I went to high school and then college in the 1980s, gender was widely assumed to be based in biology and have just two categories. There were female people, there were male people, and that was it. It was understood that everyone fit in one of those two categories and that nature decided which category you belonged in. This is called the gender binary. We knew that a small number of people had “sex change” operations and “switched genders.” These people still fit into the binary and were now considered “the opposite sex.” (We no

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longer say “sex change operation,” and now say “gender-affirming surgery” and “gender-affirming care.”) The semantic frame for “the opposite sex” shows us how gender was seen as an all-or-nothing binary. In that frame, male and female are seen as opposite. As if gender was a coin, with one side female and one side male—it’s either heads or tails, one or the other. We also knew that some people would wear clothes associated with “the opposite sex.” They might be labeled “transvestites” (or the very derogatory “trannies”) or “cross-dressers,” and were seen as socially marginal—the flavor of these words out in the general culture wasn’t positive. Note that “trannies” in particular is a word to be avoided (unless you’re in-group and doing reclaiming work). Many cultures have known for a long time that gender is not a binary and have terminology that reflects that. This includes First Nations members and Native Americans, South Asians, Tongans, other Pacific Islanders, and many more.1 Terms like Cree aayahkwew, Inuktitut sipiniq, Kanien'keha onón:wat, Hindi hijra, Malagasay sekrata, Tongan fakaleiti, and Hawai’ian māhū show us that nonbinary people have long been recognized around the world.2 Now, in the 2020s, many English speakers are just coming to a new acceptance of this age-old reality. In order to be polite in today’s world, it’s important to use pronouns that reflect reality— along with gender terminology that is accurate and respectful.

New Etiquette There is a newly widespread standard when it comes to pronouns. I live in the Bay Area and have a lot of clients in tech. Both areas are at the forefront of this new etiquette. But I see it advancing at different rates elsewhere—and age, location, and community seem to play a big role in how quickly this new etiquette is adopted.

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For example, in 2019, I was back in New York and emailed a high school friend from my work account. When she picked me up at the train station she laughed and said, “What’s up with the pronouns in your email sig? Suzanne Wertheim (she/her)? You’re so Californian now. We don’t do that here.” (But I should note that there are plenty of people in many US states who have been presenting their pronouns for years.) And in 2021, I rented an Airbnb in the Sierra foothills for a weeklong retreat to outline this book. My host said, “What’s the book about?” After I explained a few of the things I’d be covering, she said, “Pronouns? Oh, like calling people they and stuff? I’m too old for that.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to learn it.” By contrast, the new etiquette is absolutely normal and standard for many people who were born in the ’90s and later, especially children. It was unremarkable to my friend’s six-year-old when before a playdate he mentioned both his friend’s food allergies and pronouns—no nuts, and please use they/them. What can you do if, like me, you were raised in a time and place that gave you an inaccurate understanding of gender, and some now-outdated grammatical rules on how to use they? Because you’re going to face some real challenges adapting to the new rules. The first step is unpacking the gender binary and understanding how this incredibly pervasive concept can be an obstacle to accurate and inclusive language.

Beyond the Gender Binary The gender binary shows up in all kinds of ways in the English-speaking world. Gender is what we call a salient aspect of someone’s identity. It’s notable, and it’s something we talk about explicitly. People pay attention to it, and they alter their behavior depending on what gender category they think someone fits into.

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Our ideas about gender extend way beyond a person’s body or appearance. Here’s a quick experiment. Name a masculine food. Now name a feminine food. (Was it masculine steak and feminine salad or tofu?) Name a masculine drink. Now name a feminine drink. Name a masculine color. Now name a feminine color. Name a masculine hobby. Now name a feminine hobby. Name a masculine movie. Now name a feminine movie. It wasn’t hard, was it? Even if you might disagree with the answer (“But I’m a woman and I love scotch!”), you know what the cultural expectations are. A friend of mine is a meat eater and her husband is vegetarian, and at restaurants they almost always put her steak in front of him. Another straight couple I know finds that her whiskey gets handed to him, while his sugary cocktail (lately he likes strawberry daiquiris) is placed in front of her. Think about your answers. Which of them would you say is “higher prestige” and which is “lower prestige”? Which is seen as something anyone might enjoy? And which feels limited to only some people, or like someone might get made fun of for enjoying it? After reflection, I suspect that you can see that gender is not just a pervasive category that gets applied to all kinds of things. It’s also that things associated with men and masculinity are seen as either universal or higher prestige—or both. This can create other challenges when it comes to inclusive language and will show up again in later chapters. If you’ve been trained since infancy that gender is both binary and a major factor in deciding what you wear, eat, watch, drive, and so much more, it can be challenging to shift your mental models so they reflect reality. (This training really does start in - 50 -

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infancy. People will say different things to babies they see as male and babies they see as female. Babies seen as boys are told how strong and smart they are. And babies seen as girls are told how pretty and nice they are.) I recently came across a small ad at the bottom of a website. It reads “15 Fresh Non-binary Haircuts for Women in 2022.” When I clicked through on the ad, I landed on shorthairmodels.com, where I found the same headline. This ad feels like a great representative of this transitioning moment. On the one hand, it recognizes that nonbinary people exist. On the other hand, it doesn’t apply the concept of nonbinary to the people who might want the haircut. Are nonbinary haircuts meant for women? Or are they for nonbinary people? In this very brief text, old categories clash with new ones. It’s like Daniel being able to say that his nanny is nonbinary but still calling them her. So, if inclusive language accurately reflects reality, what are the realities of gender you should keep in mind so you can be polite and respectful? A useful starting point is to separate out gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.

•••

Your gender identity is internal. It is how you see yourself, how you feel about yourself, how you would describe yourself. Gender identity might be aligned with biology. But it also might not be. And if you grew up with the kind of limited information I did, the biology involved might be more complicated than you think. For example, a single person can have both male and female anatomical features. Or they can have both male and female chromosomes—they might be XXY or have some cells that are XX and other cells that are XY. Or they might have hormonal characteristics that don’t “match” their anatomy, like androgen insensitivity. - 51 -

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The most common term we use for people with biological characteristics of more than one sex is intersex. Taking into account all the different biological variations, it’s estimated that 1.7 percent of the population is intersex in some way.3 When babies are born visibly intersex, doctors often decide for them at birth what their sex will be. These babies may even be forced to undergo surgery as infants to align their anatomy with the sex that has been decided for them. But biological sex and gender identity are not the same thing. And while they are sometimes in alignment, they are sometimes not in alignment. Those doctors assigning sex at birth in a way that promotes a single gender identity are sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect. When people are discussing gender, you will see phrases like assigned female at birth, often shortened to AFAB, and assigned male at birth, often shortened to AMAB. If you were assigned female at birth and your gender identity is female, you are considered cisgender. And if you were assigned male at birth and your gender identity is male, you are also considered cisgender. In other words, the prefix cis gets added to the word gender for people whose birth sex and gender identity are aligned. So, what about people whose birth sex and gender identity are not aligned? The most common terms used here are nonbinary and transgender. Nonbinary currently points to a range of gender identities. A nonbinary person might feel like they have both male and female characteristics or like they are a gender that is neither male nor female. Some nonbinary people are gender fluid, and their gender identity shifts over time—this could be a day or a week or longer. For example, I’ve done some work with Aaron, who is gender fluid. Some days Aaron shows up at work wearing “men’s clothes” and uses the pronouns he/him. Other days, Aaron - 52 -

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shows up at work wearing “women’s clothes” and uses the  pronouns she/her. Aaron’s colleagues have learned to ask about pronouns or to take their cues from the indexicality of Aaron’s clothes—for example, they’ll go with she and her on days when Aaron is wearing a dress and lipstick. Some people who don’t fit in a gender binary are transgender. Some transgender people feel like they were born in the “wrong body” and transition fully into a different gender. So, a person assigned female at birth may have a male gender identity and want to be seen and thought of as a man. (You are likely to see the term trans man to describe people in this category. But this is language that evolves quickly and there may be new terms that have become more popular by the time you read this book.) Other transgender people don’t have a gender identity that matches the sex they were assigned at birth but don’t want to fully transition into a different gender. Not all trans people want to “pass”—in other words, be perceived as straightforwardly male or female. You’ll also find terms like agender, for people who don’t see themselves as having a particular gender, and genderqueer, an umbrella term for people who don’t subscribe to or fit in the conventional gender binary. If you’re new to thinking about gender identity, the number of terms out there may feel overwhelming. But it looks like this number is only going to grow as people find themselves in community and get to define and describe themselves in more nuanced and specific ways. The best way to be inclusive is to mirror someone’s term for their gender identity. If they call themselves transgender, call them transgender. If they say they’re nonbinary, refer to them as nonbinary. And if they say they’re genderfluid and ask to be called he one week and she the next, then call them he or she as requested.

•••

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Gender identity is internal. It is a self-definition and a selfdescription. Gender expression is external. And it is all about indexicality, pointing to cultural meaning. Your gender expression or gender presentation is how you show up in the world and the signals you give people around your gender. What you wear on your body and your face, how you style your hair, how you carry yourself, how you act. Earlier in this chapter, you were probably able to easily name masculine and feminine food, drinks, colors, hobbies, and movies. Well, now you can think about conventionally masculine and feminine hairstyles, makeup, clothes, colors, and fabrics. For example, a conventionally feminine person might have long hair, visible makeup, and wear a pink silk dress—in my culture, none of these choices are seen as conventionally masculine. Your gender expression may or may not be aligned with your gender identity. And it may or may not be aligned with the sex you were assigned at birth. In the story I opened with, Daniel makes the mistake of confusing gender expression with gender identity. His nanny, Onyx, currently has a feminine gender expression. They look female to his eyes, and they also look feminine. So he assumes that their gender identity is also female. But just because a person looks a certain way, it doesn’t mean you know their gender. Because gender is so salient, is marked as so important by so many people, we are always scanning for and making assessments about people’s gender. But until someone has told you their internal gender identity, you’re just guessing based on external clues—that is, based on their gender expression. And so there is always the chance that you are misgendering someone. And misgendering can be really painful. In July of 2022, A. C. Folkes posted on LinkedIn about a recent upsetting experience at his doctor’s office.4 When scheduling his - 54 -

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appointment, he told them that he is transgender, that his pronouns are he/him, and that his chosen name is different from his birth name on file. But when he showed up for his appointment, he was consistently called “ma’am” and misgendered. He writes, “It happened over and over again. And each time was a fresh wound.” His post ends with a plea to do better, because he would “like to not avoid the healthcare system for fear of emotional harm.” So in order to be inclusive, don’t assume you know someone’s gender identity. Learning someone’s pronouns will help you be polite with them. In Chapter 3, we’ll go over other ways to be polite and avoid misgendering people.

•••

Sexual orientation is sometimes confused with gender identity and gender expression. But you can’t assume you know who someone is attracted to—or if they’re attracted to anyone at all—just by knowing their gender identity or looking at their gender expression. Some people are asexual or aromantic. This means they’re not sexually attracted to people or not interested in romantic relationships. When people are attracted to only one other gender, they may be heterosexual, lesbian, or gay. Terminology around sexuality can change pretty rapidly, so some people may find these terms outdated and use other terms for themselves, like queer or dyke. When someone is attracted to male and female people, they are bisexual. While some people use bisexual in ways that go beyond the gender binary, other people with a similar sexual orientation prefer the term pansexual, which highlights that their partners may be nonbinary, transgender, or otherwise genderqueer. Sexual orientation, declared or assumed, does not determine pronouns or gender. Marc, a client who is gay, told me about a - 55 -

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time he was at a meeting that was otherwise all women, and how offended he was when they said, “Since it’s just us girls here . . .” His gender identity is male, and even though the misgendering was meant in a joking way, pointing out that he was a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it still landed really badly. Marc was still angry telling me about it months later. I think part of the issue comes from the acronym LGBTQ+, which can be a bit confusing for some people. This acronym is used to describe a community of people who are all members of underrepresented or marginalized groups. What can be confusing to some is that the letters point to different kinds of identities. The LGB—Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual—point to sexual orientation. The T—Transgender—points to gender identity. And the Q— for Queer—can point to sexual orientation, gender identity, and more. There are new letters that sometimes appear after the Q, including I for Intersex (biology) and A for Asexual (sexual orientation) or Agender (gender identity). And the + stands for all kinds of other identities, including letters that will probably be added to the acronym in the future. With pointers to gender identity, sexual orientation, and biology in one acronym, it makes sense that some people can lose track of what kind of identity is relevant in the moment. To sum up:

• • •

There are more than two genders, and not everyone can be referred to as either she or he. You can’t assume you know someone’s gender identity based on their gender expression. You can’t assume what pronouns to use based on someone’s gender expression—it is such a nuanced and personal decision that you’ll need to be told. (But you can also ask respectfully, in a private setting, in a way that doesn’t force someone to share.) - 56 -

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Why Are “New” Pronouns Challenging? Using only she or he to refer to a single person doesn’t reflect the reality that many people are not definitively female or male. It erases people who are nonbinary or who have other gender identities. Throughout the years, a small number of English pronouns have been created to reflect these other gender identities. For example, you might encounter people who request that they be referred to as ze/zir, or xe/xem, or fae/faer.5 But currently, the pronoun that’s most popular is one that’s been around for a long time: it’s called the singular they. To be inclusive, you need to use the pronouns that accurately reflect a person’s reality. This can mean using they for anyone who says it’s their pronoun—even if to you, they look clearly male or clearly female. Again, just looking at someone isn’t enough to know the reality of their gender identity. On the one hand, you already know how to use they for a single person. For example, you might write a sentence like, “Somebody left their sweatshirt in the breakroom. They need to pick it up by the end of the day.” On the other hand, this use is for a nonspecific person. And chances are good that you haven’t had much practice using singular they for a specific person. So, becoming fluent in this new usage can be difficult.

••• Stacy was sitting next to me at a brunch for anti-bias folks. She turned to me and said, “Can I ask you about pronouns?” “Of course!” I said, always happy to nerd out and share some linguistic knowledge. “Well, you remember Ali at the conference a few weeks ago, right? I was so impressed by her, I mean them. So taken by the - 57 -

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things they said. So I’ve been talking about her a lot. But I’m having the hardest time using the right pronouns. I try to say they, my brain knows it’s they, but my tongue is at a different speed or something. And I’m so frustrated! Can you tell me what’s going on?” I could tell her. And by the time I was done explaining what was happening in her head, the whole table was listening. Someone said, “You two should turn that into a workshop.” And we did.

•••

Here’s what I told Stacy. Switching from she or he to they involves some real cognitive challenges. That’s because pronouns are what we call “grammar words.” And you store and access grammar words differently in your brain from other words, such as regular nouns (like bird), verbs (like fly), and adjectives (like small). What’s more, the rules for grammar words in your first language got pretty much fixed in place around puberty. This means that using they to refer to a specific person comes up against the weight of all the literally millions of times you have used she or he. And it comes up against the unspoken grammatical rule in your brain that a single known person is referred to using she or he. So, chances are excellent that you will make mistakes as you start to refer to a specific person using they. Because it takes time to acquire and become fluent in new grammatical rules. Instead of saying, “Oh yeah, they texted me yesterday,” you’re likely to say, “Oh yeah, she texted me yesterday.” When this happens, the best thing to do is quickly correct yourself and move on. This is just a basic introduction to pronouns like they. If you want to dive deeper, I highly recommend reading articles by Kirby Conrod, a linguist who specializes in clear explanations of language, gender, and pronouns.6

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Present Your Own Pronouns Jen and I were catching up on the phone. She was biking home from Jonathan’s house, where they had just had lunch. They are both in their early fifties. “Oh, you might have an answer for this,” she yelled. (Jen seems to always be biking by a fire engine or a honking horn when she calls me on the phone.) “Jonathan had a meeting with a new lawyers group the other day, and there were a lot of younger people there. He said there was a new protocol, and now they give their pronouns at the top of the meeting. And he was complaining to me about how irritating it is. He said, ‘I mean, I don’t announce at the start of a meeting what my religion is, or where my grandparents came from. It’s so personal and invasive and also it feels so silly.’ So, Suzanne, do you have an opinion?” Do I have an opinion about pronouns and inclusive language? Please. Being inclusive, and being polite, means using the pronouns she, he, and they appropriately. (And don’t forget that you might be asked to use pronouns like xe, ze, or fae with someone.) How can you learn which of these pronouns is the correct one to use with someone? And how can you also avoid forcing people to “out” themselves? One great way to make everybody feel seen and included is to make it standard to present your English pronouns. If only “unusual” people talk about their pronouns, then talking about pronouns acquires the flavor of being “weird.” I’ve heard from many people who use the pronouns they/them that it can feel really awkward and uncomfortable to be the only one talking about it. It can be especially uncomfortable to be the one starting a conversation. The subtle message is that they are “different,” and that “normal” people don’t have to talk about pronouns.

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So it’s helpful to have the conversation on pronouns already started, so people can jump in if they want to and make sure their identity is recognized. It’s also inclusive to normalize presenting your pronouns so it becomes the standard. If everyone is presenting their pronouns up front, it can make it a lot easier for people to jump in with their “unusual” requests. The flavor of presenting your pronouns then becomes “normal,” and it’s expected that people will be choosing from a variety of options. You don’t want to force someone to join the conversation if they don’t want to. So you shouldn’t ask someone you’ve just met, especially in a public space, “Hey, what are your pronouns?” This puts them on the spot, and they may not feel ready to tell you. Or they may not feel that it’s safe to tell you. As I write this, it’s still legal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in the majority of American states and the majority of countries in the world. And transgender people who want to “pass” may feel like they’re being singled out and unsafe. However, some people appreciate being asked respectfully in a private setting. You might say something like, “I don’t know your pronouns yet, and I’d like to use the correct ones if you’re willing to share. But it’s okay if you don’t want to.” (Note that there are some kinds of gatherings and organizations where it’s pretty much expected that everyone can be asked about and will present their pronouns. Context is everything! The pronoun etiquette at a genderqueer meetup in Portland, Oregon, is probably pretty different from a financial services networking event at a large national conference.) You also don’t want to use the phrase preferred pronouns. This implies that someone’s gender identity is a choice, and maybe not real. Just say pronouns. When meeting or discussing someone new, default to they and them. This means for everyone whose pronouns you don’t - 60 -

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know—not just people who you’re assessing as maybe having “unusual” pronouns. It’s best to also refer to someone as a person rather than a woman or a man—this can help you avoid accidentally misgendering someone. So you can say “a person like you . . .” instead of “a man like you . . .” And, if you hear someone being referred to with the wrong pronoun, like he instead of they, consider stepping in and making the correction yourself. This makes things much easier for the person being misgendered and can protect them from retaliation from people who get angry at being corrected, especially when it comes to expressions of bias. Now that we’ve gone over the basics of gender and pronouns, it’s time to look at other ways you can make sure that your language accurately reflects reality. The most effective way to inclusively reflect reality is by eliminating what I call distorting language.

WHEN LANGUAGE DISTORTS REALITY Much of my research focuses on identifying the specific ways that language distorts reality and amplifies bias and unfairness. I have named the three foundational ways that problematic language distorts reality masking language, inflating language, and softening language. Each of these distortions favors the perspective of people with power. Linguistic distortions affect our mental models and our decision-making. When our understanding of a particular scenario is based on distortions, then it’s hard to make good—or inclusive—decisions.

Masking Language An American colleague reached out to a group of us who do antibias work. She was adding new events to the company calendar, like - 61 -

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celebrations of Diwali, Pride, and Women’s History Month. And some employees wrote to tell her they were “uncomfortable with her candor,” and they wanted “more neutrality in the workplace.” (Bonus analysis! The semantic frame of candor sets up a scenario in which talking about Diwali or Pride is embarrassing or shameful.) My colleague was having difficulty figuring out how to answer them; she knew something about their comments was problematic, but she couldn’t quite articulate what. I emailed back and shared that their masking language was making it harder for her to come up with a good answer. Masking language is used by a dominant group to mask a social reality. People use this language to support and maintain the status quo when it benefits them. How does it work? Masking language sets up the dominant group and the status quo as neutral, normal, and natural. The way it always has been, and the way it should continue to be. Common phrases include:

• • •

“We should stay neutral.” “We need to keep it professional.” “That’s just PC.”

They all signal that discussions of and actions against bias are being framed as “out of bounds” or inappropriate or unnecessary.

•••

So what was being masked in this case? Here, the employees were using “neutrality” to hide that a supposedly neutral workplace, one where bias is never discussed, is actually inequitable, not inclusive, and unfair. One reality being concealed is that the standard American business calendar is not neutral, but in fact Christian. AD and - 62 -

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BC center the birth of Christ (AD is short for anno Domini, which means “Year of Our Lord,” and BC is short for Before Christ). And if you want to go to your house of worship on Sundays or Christmas, most offices automatically give those days off. But if you want to observe Diwali or Yom Kippur or Eid al-Fitr on a weekday, in most places you’ve got to use personal days. Neutrality sets up a framework where the current state of things is just fine. But it doesn’t actually reflect social reality. Because, in fact, things are just fine for only some of the people. The experience of the dominant group is usually not the experience for everyone. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, I started reading about American debates on slavery. And I learned that the US House of Representatives enforced a “gag rule” from 1836 to 1844. This gag rule prevented antislavery petitions from being read or discussed; instead, they were automatically tabled. Pro-slavery politicians argued that it wasn’t “appropriate” for the federal government to interfere with the domestic institutions of the states. Our present-day “let’s keep things professional” or “let’s stay neutral” is just an updated gag rule, automatically tabling the discussion of the very real systemic problems that permeate our world. Rather than claiming that it’s important to stay neutral or professional in order to shut down efforts to be more inclusive, let’s avoid masking language and instead have open discussions about bias and unfairness.

Inflating Language Olivia looked at the married couple holding hands one table over and said to her friend, “I have no problem with people being gay. I just don’t want them to shove it in our faces.” Jim said to his disabled report, who was asking for a few flexible hours a week so she could visit medical specialists, “I just don’t - 63 -

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see how you can do this job with all these doctor’s appointments.” (When she checked with an employment lawyer, he told her that the number of hours a week was so small that it might not even fit the definition of disability accommodation.) In the faculty meeting, Ming pointed out, “Actually, those course assignments won’t work. We need to take service commitments into account.” After the meeting, her chair pulled her aside. “You need to stop with these aggressive and unseemly outbursts!” he told her. “You’re just so difficult to work with.” “Shove it in our faces” to describe public hand holding. “Don’t see how you can do this job” to assess someone working early or late a few days a week to allow for necessary doctor visits. “Aggressive,” “unseemly,” and “difficult” to describe a brief, fact-based disagreement. These are all examples of what I have named inflating language. Inflating language is a linguistic distortion in which reasonable behavior is presented as problematic. Like we saw with looting vs. finding in Chapter 1, inflating language expresses a double standard—words and actions that are acceptable when produced by one person are labeled unacceptable when produced by another. Inflating language is most often applied to women of all races and ethnicities, people who are members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, disabled people, autistic people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. (And, of course, a person can be all of these things at once.) Who is allowed to disagree with someone? To speak with authority? To be openly affectionate with their romantic partner? To ask for flexibility or accommodations? Turns out, it’s not everybody. For example, a customer came up to a service counter and read the name tag of the transgender clerk about to serve him.

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“Graciela?” he scoffed. “She/her? Please, you look more like a Ramon.” And throughout the transaction, he called her “Ramon,” and referred to her as he and him. For Graciela, each time the customer said “Ramon” and “he” in his sneering tone, it felt like a slap in the face. But she had worked in customer service for a long time, so she kept her face smiling and her tone cool and even. “Please call me Graciela,” she asked. “And please use my correct pronouns. I would really appreciate it.” The customer’s face grew red. “MANAGER! NOW!” he yelled. When the manager approached, the customer went on a tirade. He told the manager that Graciela was angry and aggressive. That she had verbally attacked him. That he had felt unsafe. That she should be fired. In the customer’s inflating language, a request to use the correct name and pronouns was described as angry, aggressive, a verbal attack, and making him feel unsafe. Luckily for Graciela, the manager was able to review the security camera footage, which included audio. So he could see that her behavior was reasonable, professional, and appropriate. But many other people like Graciela, who are the targets of distortions and inflated language, aren’t as lucky. The people distorting their behavior are the ones who are believed. And their targets may be reprimanded, fired, or arrested for behavior that would not have been seen as problematic if it was done by someone else. Someone maybe whiter. Or maler. Someone cisgender or straight. Someone abled. Someone who is the boss and not the report. Someone who is the customer and not the service representative. Autistic social realities are often not understood by allistic people, so it is common to find the words and actions of autistic people described using inflating language. Autistic people may

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be called things like “rude” or “unempathetic” or “cold” simply for acting according to autistic communicative principles. This includes giving a data-oriented answer to the question, “Do I look okay in these pants?” or showing empathy by sharing a similar story about themselves rather than asking follow-up questions. Inflating language often means that we make inaccurate judgments and bad decisions. And punish people who haven’t done anything wrong.

Softening Language Aisha was frustrated. Her colleague Charles was seriously creepy with her, and she dreaded coming to work. He would stare at her chest, hug her from behind, and say things like, “Mmmm, you really fill out those jeans.” But the HR rep said, “Oh, that’s just how Charles is. You know, boys will be boys.” Marco started writing down his teammates’ inappropriate comments. Jokes about being “ghetto” and his family speaking “broken English.” Remarks about how he was just a “token hire” so nobody expected all that much from him. But his manager said, “Oh, they’re so young—they just don’t know any better. You should assume good intentions.” Lisa uses her lunch breaks to walk around the block and cry. It’s mostly because of her manager, Betsy, who constantly belittles and yells at and undermines her. Other people on her team also cry on their breaks. But the head of HR said, “Yeah, Betsy can be kind of tough. But it’s just that she has high expectations for her reports.” Tim has been surprised at the intrusive questions coming from his colleagues. “So, what happened to you?” “How do you put your pants on if you’re in a wheelchair?” “Can you have sex?” - 66 -

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But the HR person he went to said, “Oh, they’re just curious. You’re the only person in a wheelchair at this company, so they just want to learn more about you.”

• • • • •

Boys will be boys. They don’t know any better. Assume good intentions. She just has high expectations. They’re just curious.

These are all examples of what I call softening language. It’s a handy label for language that presents problematic behavior as appropriate and acceptable. Softening language is the reverse of inflating language. In my research, I’ve found that softening language is generally used for people with power. Institutional power, like being an executive. Or social power, like, in the US, being white or male or abled (especially for people who are all three at once). Softening language is used to shift the focus away from someone’s harmful impact and work to create empathy for them. To minimize or dismiss the harm they have caused. When I hear softening language, I’m reminded of the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Surrounded by the bones of people he has killed, the rabbit is underestimated as a “harmless little bunny.” Only when he kills three more people right in front of our heroes is he suddenly taken seriously. Don’t describe the problematic people around you as harmless little bunnies. It’s important to use accurate terminology when describing someone’s words and actions. This is a necessary part of holding people accountable. The terminology doesn’t have to be exaggerated. Just accurate. - 67 -

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Using the previous examples, let’s move out of softening language and shift the focus to the behavior or its impact.

• • • • •

Boys will be boys. → He is engaging in sexual harassment. They don’t know any better. → They haven’t been held accountable.

Assume good intentions. → Biased behavior has had a

negative impact.

She just has high expectations. → Abusive managing has

demoralized the team.

They’re just curious. → They’re asking work-inappropri-

ate, intrusive, and demeaning questions.

Softening language disguises problematic behavior. It’s saying, “that sounds like a you problem.” It’s saying, “Bad behavior doesn’t matter—at least not when the person behaving badly is someone in a position of power.” Or it’s pretending that there isn’t a problem at all. I have collected many examples of softening language used to minimize or invalidate someone’s experience. For example:

• • • • • • •

“That’s just how they are.” “He’s just really friendly.” “We don’t tolerate gender bias. I’m sure he’s taking all factors into consideration.” “Don’t take it personally. She didn’t mean it that way.” “He’s actually a good guy.” “It’s not a big deal. I think you’re being too sensitive here.” “But we’ve already given you so many accommodations.”

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These were comments made in response to reports of sexualized remarks, biased work allocations, toxic bullying, racist comments, ableism, and pervasive sexual harassment. In therapeutic psychology, these kinds of statements are called invalidation and disconfirmation. In popular culture, they are called gaslighting. Comments like these show up a lot as part of problematic parenting. Children whose experiences, problems, and emotions are consistently invalidated by their caretakers often end up with psychological damage—and engaging in self-harm.7 And employees whose experiences, problems, and complaints are consistently invalidated by leadership also end up damaged. In my work, I’ve found a strong correlation between invalidation and low employee morale, low psychological safety, low levels of trust, and high turnover. Minimizing and invalidating comments tell people who have been harmed in some way that their experiences don’t matter. That their injuries don’t matter. That they don’t matter. And, adding insult to injury, they are often told that they should focus on their own behavior. That it is their job to do better. This shows up in comments like:

• • •

“You should be more polite.” “Be the bigger person.” “Don’t make a big deal out of this.”

So be on the lookout for invalidating and minimizing comments. Because they protect people who are behaving badly. And they tell people who are being treated badly, “Sorry, we just don’t care.”

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“Just Joking” “. . . and it was all thanks to the Kung Flu!” Cathy finished her story and laughed. Mei sat up in surprise. She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “You know, Cathy? It isn’t okay to say ‘the Kung Flu.’ It’s actually pretty racist.” Cathy frowned and crossed her arms. “Jeez, Mei, I’m just joking. There’s nothing wrong with making Kung Flu jokes. Lighten up, you know? You don’t have to be so sensitive all the time.” Cathy was joking. But was she “just joking”?

•••

“Just joking” is a common way people deflect criticism for something they’ve said. That something might be an expression of bias, like “the Kung Flu.” Or it might be making fun of someone’s haircut, or height, or the car they drive. When someone like Mei points out that someone like Cathy has said something that crosses a line, that’s inappropriate in some way, “just joking” is a common defense tactic. It suggests that because there is a humorous framing, nothing is inappropriate. So if someone says there’s a problem, it’s actually their problem. They’re “oversensitive.” They need to “lighten up.” This logic fits right in with a common defense tactic used by people who say and do abusive or inappropriate things: DARVO. DARVO stands for Deny, Argue, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Here’s how it played out in Cathy’s words. Deny: Cathy said, “I’m just joking.” In other words, “I didn’t do anything wrong. When you’re joking,

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everything is appropriate, and nothing can be seen as a problem.” Argue: Cathy said, “There’s nothing wrong with making Kung Flu jokes.” In other words, “I refuse to accept your critical feedback. I am right, and you are wrong.” Reverse victim and offender: Cathy said, “Lighten up, you know? You don’t have to be so sensitive all the time.” In other words, “Why are you attacking me? The problem here is you. I’m just fine, and the things I say are just fine, and here you are attacking me.” In my work with clients, I encounter DARVO responses all the time. What’s especially interesting to me is that DARVO was originally used to describe the behavior of sexual offenders and is commonly used in discussions of psychological abusers and narcissists. That’s right. The same tactics that show up as “just joking” and “lighten up” in defense of things like racist jokes are used by rapists and abusers to defend their actions. Does this mean that you’re never allowed to joke? That you can’t use humor anymore? That the “PC Police” will jump down your throat if you say something edgy? Not at all! I’m being pretty serious in this book, but I genuinely love comedy. I wrote my undergrad thesis on comedy and social commentary in Oscar Wilde’s work. After college I wrote to Ben Stiller to see how I might get a job writing for his show. (Unfortunately, by the time he got my letter, his show had been cancelled.) Before I left academia, I was researching a book on comedy in Los Angeles and going to one or more live comedy shows each week. Comedy is great. And I want people to be funny!

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Please, joke away! Just make sure that your jokes don’t violate any of the Six Principles of Inclusive Language. And then you’re good to go. Two final notes on joking. 1. When it comes to humor, be on the alert for communica-

tion clashes between autistic and allistic people. Humor that may be seen as violating a Principle of Inclusive Language for one group may be just fine for the other. The best thing to do is ask for an explanation. 2. There are different rules for in-group people making

jokes among themselves. This is too complicated for me to actually cover in any depth here. But say, for example, a group of Jews want to make Holocaust jokes with each other, or some Irish people want to make potato famine jokes. I’m not going to point my finger and say it’s wrong or inappropriate. But if it wasn’t an in-group conversation, these jokes would likely violate Principle 6, Recognize pain points.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. Don’t assume you know someone’s gender identity

or pronouns just by looking at them. Instead of saying things like “a man like you” or “a woman like you,” you can say “a person like you.” 2. When you are given someone’s pronouns, like on a

name tag or at the bottom of a Zoom window, use those pronouns. Even if they don’t feel natural or they seem at odds with that person’s appearance. Use the correct pronouns. And instead of calling them preferred pronouns, just call them pronouns. 3. Instead of language that suggests gender is binary,

use language that reflects the more complex reality. For example, instead of the opposite sex, you can say another gender. And instead of using phrases like he or she to mean everybody, say everyone or they. 4. When talking to babies, avoid gender stereotypes.

Don’t tell only AMAB (assigned male at birth) babies that they are strong and smart—tell all babies! And don’t tell only AFAB (assigned female at birth) babies that they are well-behaved or good-looking— again, tell all babies! 5. Use current terminology to refer to transgender

people and transitioning. For example, transgender rather than transsexual. And transitioning or getting gender-affirming care instead of getting a sex change operation. (continued)

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(continued)

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE The only way to acquire new language skills is to practice them. Here are three activities you can do to practice and activate your new knowledge. If you spend one month focusing on these three activities (along with the preceding five quick wins), you will end up with new and more-inclusive language habits. Just like learning another language, if you find a practice partner, it’ll be even easier to do these activities and get more fluent.

Activity 1. Practice talking and writing about nonbinary people. Because we can feel so much shame and embarrassment when we make inclusive language mistakes, it’s nice to practice in safe ways. A great way to become more fluent talking about nonbinary people is to talk and write in private conversations about celebrities. Find a few nonbinary celebrities who use pronouns that don’t 100 percent match the gender they were assigned at birth. Like a public figure who was assigned male at birth and alternates between he/him and she/her. Or a celebrity who was assigned female at birth and uses they/them pronouns. A few examples are Janelle Monáe, Elliot Page, Indya Moore, Sam Smith, and Amandla Stenberg. Now, spend at least five minutes a day writing or talking about them. Not in a public forum, but just with friends or family—or your practice partner, if you have one. People also report that it’s great practice to talk to their pets. For example, “Hey, Fluffy, can I tell you about Janelle Monáe’s 2022 Halloween costume? They were dressed as the alien

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diva from The Fifth Element and looked amazing. They really bring it to the red carpet—they’re serious about their fashion.” If you mess up and use the wrong pronoun, just correct yourself and move forward. Again, you are going against the weight of the millions of times you have not used pronouns this way. So the more practice you get, the more fluent you’ll become and the fewer mistakes you will make.

Activity 2. Present your pronouns. As I noted earlier in this chapter, when everyone presents their pronouns, it changes the flavor of pronoun presentation. When only “unusual” people talk about and give their pronouns, the flavor of talking about pronouns is “unusual,” “marked,” and “different.” When everyone talks about their pronouns, the flavor of talking about pronouns becomes more like “business as usual” and “standard etiquette.” First, get your pronoun presentation in order for all the platforms you use to interact with people. (You only need to list your pronouns for languages that have gendered pronouns. So if you’re also interacting with people in a language like Turkish or Finnish or Yoruba or Chinese or Swahili, there’s no need to present pronouns for that language as well.) Put your pronouns in the signature of your email. On your Slack profile. In your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram bios. In your YouTube and TikTok bios. In your bio on whatever other social media platforms you are using. Go into your Zoom and Google Meet and Microsoft Teams settings and make it so your pronouns show up along (continued) - 75 -

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(continued)

with your name. For example, any video call I make says “Suzanne Wertheim (she/her)” at the bottom of my video window. When you go to a conference or a networking event, put your pronouns on your name tag, even if there isn’t a row for them. If you’re organizing an in-person event, get nametags with a space for pronouns on them. And when you’re meeting someone for the first time and give your name, also give your pronouns. This is the one that will require ongoing practice. You might say, “Hi, I’m Jonathan, and my pronouns are he/him.” But do not ask for someone’s pronouns in return. We never, ever want to force someone to out themselves. So, practice giving your pronouns and not asking for anyone else’s. This creates space for people to share their pronouns if they want to but to also keep quiet about them for whatever reasons they might have.

Activity 3. Teach people about inflating language and softening language. When you teach a new concept to someone else, it really helps you cement your new knowledge. So this month, teach four people—one person per week—about inflating language and softening language. It can be as short as five minutes. The two most important things are: 1. Use your own words as much as possible. 2. Collect your own examples of inflating language

and softening language to use for your teaching.

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Here are some tips on where to find examples. For inflating language, look for language describing women of all races and ethnicities; people in marginalized racial and ethnic groups—especially when they have been shot by police; members of the LGBTQ+ community; disabled people asking for accommodations; and people from any group protesting some kind of unfairness. For softening language, look for descriptions of sexual harassment, bullying, or other bad behavior by people in power positions. That power could come from their role in an institution, such as being an executive, a university dean, or a high-ranking politician. Or it could come from the power of being in dominant social groups—especially the dominant racial or ethnic group and the dominant gender. For example, “Can I tell you about this useful concept called softening language?” And after a brief explanation, “For example, my friend went to HR because her teammate keeps staring at her chest and looking down her shirt. Instead of helping her out, though, the HR rep just said, ‘Oh, boys will be boys. You know, that’s just how men are. Maybe wear looser shirts with higher necklines.’”

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3 Show Respect

IN 2003, A JOURNALIST named Katherine Rosman went to a fancy New York publishing party. She ended up talking to one of the few Black men there—they both were outsiders at the party and didn’t know many other attendees. The man turned out to be so charismatic and so interesting that she took down his information so she could pitch a story about him. Not long after that conversation, another party guest, an established author, pulled her aside and asked who the man was. When she asked why, the author said something like, “I thought he was a waiter, and asked him to get me a drink from the bar.” (The phrase she reports him using is actually “fetch a drink.” But the word fetch is so very loaded when it comes to Black Americans that I don’t want to claim that he said it without 100 percent certainty.) As it turns out, that Black party guest in 2003 had not been a waiter. He had, in fact, been a state senator. And when this anecdote was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2008, he was President Elect of the United States.1

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Barack Obama had been on the receiving end of an incredibly common expression of bias and disrespect that I have named an unconscious demotion. Unconscious demotions violate my second Principle of Inclusive Language.

PRINCIPLE 2 Inclusive language shows respect for other people. Problematic language expresses disrespect.

AVOID UNCONSCIOUS DEMOTIONS When someone is unconsciously demoted, a person has made a snap judgment about them and assumed that they hold a different job than they actually do. The job they have been demoted to seems to always have the same relationship to their actual job. It is lower status and lower in technical expertise. It requires less education, and that education is less prestigious. And it is usually lower paid. Cameron Bailey is the creative director of the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. He reports that he gets mistaken for a parking valet or a security guard (and given how beautifully he dresses, I suspect this happens even when he’s wearing an expensive suit).2 Mellody Hobson is a prominent investor and business leader. She once organized a political fundraiser in her home city of Chicago. When she arrived to host it, all dressed up (and when I lived in Chicago, I only dreamed of shopping at the boutiques where she bought her clothes), she was mistaken for catering staff, and taken to a back room to change into her uniform.3 - 80 -

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Carolina Huaranca is a venture capitalist. She went to a catered party in Silicon Valley, and at the end, someone handed her their used plate. They assumed she was there to clean up.4 Yen Ha is an architect. She said in the New York Times, “Every single day I have to remind someone that I am, in fact, an architect. Every new job site means a contractor who will assume I am the assistant, decorator, or intern. It usually isn’t until the third meeting that the project team looks to me for the answers to the architectural problems.”5 Bailey and Hobson are Black. Huaranca is Latine. And Ha is Chinese American. For the Black and Latine examples I just gave, each of the very high-status professionals was assumed to be a person who was there to serve white people—fetch their cars, bring them food, and clean up after them. This is not a coincidence. I am not saying that it is bad to be waitstaff or cleaning staff or an admin. I have myself worked as a restaurant host and waitstaff, a receptionist, a temp secretary, and an administrative assistant. These are jobs that require real skill and competency! And I was constantly condescended to and underestimated when I worked those jobs. But the fact is that workplaces and professions have hierarchies. And in unconscious demotions, people with professional degrees and high-prestige jobs are consistently assumed to work in lower-prestige jobs.

Who Gets Unconsciously Demoted? In my research, I’ve found that in the US the recipients of unconscious demotions are most often

• • • •

women of color; other people of color; white women; and people with perceptible disabilities.

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Every once in a while, a white man who looks really young will get unconsciously demoted. But it’s qualitatively different. For example, I’ve found that white female doctors are commonly demoted to nurse, but young-looking white male doctors get demoted to medical student. The prestige of the track is different; the young male doctor is assumed to be on the high-prestige track of eventually becoming a doctor, even if he isn’t there yet. Meanwhile, the young female doctor is assumed to be on the lower-prestige nursing track. (I am not trying to say that doctors are better than nurses. I have great respect for the knowledge and competency of nurses! But the hierarchy of hospitals and medical offices has doctors at the top of the pyramid and nurses at a lower level. I’ve worked at a hospital and seen the difference in respect level in person.) When you factor in race, the magnitude of the demotion becomes even more profound: many Black medical students and doctors report that they have been mistaken for cleaning staff. Even when in lab coats. In addition, when people correct the demotion and say something like “No, I’m actually a doctor/game designer/mechanical engineer,” then they are often faced with what I call “the credential check.” The demoter will ask for proof that they are who they claim to be. Ask them to explain where they went to school, what programming languages they’ve learned, the last three companies where they’ve worked. I’ve heard about more than one Black doctor who keeps a laminated version of their medical license on them at all times because of the endless disbelief and credential checks they face.

Categories and Prototypes In 2016, sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom basically live-tweeted an unconscious demotion that took place in her own campus office.6 “There was a textbook rep at my door. She told me - 82 -

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she was ‘waiting for the professor.’ I said, ‘okay!’ And let her wait. At my office door.” She added in the comments: “I hope the professor eventually shows up. I am in my office. I am the professor.” A few tweets later, the episode concluded this way: “After a while she knocked and said, ‘Sorry. I, uh, didn’t recognize you.’” One commenter wrote, “Code for ‘I was not expecting you to be Black.’” This “I didn’t recognize you” is the key to unconscious demotions: certain kinds of people are not being recognized.

•••

The human brain is incredibly good at pattern recognition. From our very first months of life, our brains are working to sort out patterns and categories that let us create meaning from the world around us. We’re learning things like what we eat and what we don’t eat. What’s safe and what’s dangerous. What we wear, who we trust, who has authority, who we should ignore. In addition, we sort our natural and cultural surroundings into categories where some things are more central than others. In other words, some things are more prototypical than others. I’d like you to pause for a minute and reflect. What picture appears in your head when you read the following words? Bird. Furniture. Doctor. If you’re reading this in North America, chances are good that for you a robin is a more prototypical bird than an ostrich. A chair or table is a more prototypical piece of furniture than a bookshelf. And a man is a more prototypical doctor than a woman (or any other gender). Our categorizations for professions and jobs come from years of sorting and making sense of data from the world around us. They are based on what we see and hear on television and in movies, - 83 -

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what we read in the paper and online, and what we encounter in person in our everyday lives. The widespread categorization of only men as prototypical doctors is what makes this riddle still puzzling to many: A man and his son are in a car crash, and when the son is brought to the operating room, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How is this possible? the riddle concludes. In a 2014 study done at Boston University, just 14 percent of college students presented with the riddle guessed that the surgeon was the boy’s mother.7 (And if you’re wondering, only 2 percent suggested that he had two dads.) The category of doctors was so strongly male that for the remaining 84 percent of college-aged participants, it apparently didn’t even occur to them that the surgeon might be female. This is where bias comes in and causes real issues. A major problem is that our categories, and the snap judgments we make based on them, can be wrong when they don’t take into account the real diversity of the world. This is because the world hasn’t been represented accurately to us, so our pattern recognition is based on inaccurate data. What’s more, our mental categories and the patterns that formed them can override the information that’s right in front of our eyes. For example, one day a Black doctor named Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu was in her patient’s room in the hospital, wearing her white coat, wearing her doctor’s ID, holding a reflex hammer, examining the patient. The patient was also a Black woman. In the middle of the exam, a white hospital employee walked up to her and asked about the patient’s meal. He had assumed she was a family member and was shocked to learn she was the doctor.8 It seems clear that his cultural programming, the way he had been taught to see and interpret the world, had had some pretty - 84 -

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biased input. And this cultural programming resulted in a category of doctors in his head that did not include Black women. His programming was so strong that it overrode all those incredibly obvious contextual clues: doctor’s coat, doctor ID, holding a doctor’s tool, performing a medical exam, talking like a doctor. This hospital employee even demoted Okwerekwu right out of the medical field or hospital staff entirely. Although mistaking a doctor for a nurse or an investor for waitstaff may feel like just a small mistake, the negative effects on the person being unconsciously demoted can be real and long lasting. The unspoken messages of “it’s obvious you don’t really belong” and “you can’t possibly be competent enough to do this job” sink in. They contribute to impostor syndrome. They push people out of companies. They drive people out of entire fields.

The Most Dangerous Unconscious Demotions Unconscious demotions aren’t limited to the workplace. They’re also found in everyday interactions out in public spaces—for example, on the street, in cafes, and in apartment building hallways. Because this is where we find the most dangerous kind of unconscious demotion. I’ve read story after story where a person is just going about their day but for some reason, they are perceived as threatening. And often, they are demoted from innocent, everyday person to presumed criminal. You may remember hearing about Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks who were just waiting for a business meeting when an employee called the cops on them for trespassing. How long do you think they were there before she made the call? Less than five minutes. And they ended up arrested. In 2018, two Native American teenagers were taking a college tour at Colorado State University, their dream school. While - 85 -

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they were on the tour, the mother of another prospective student called the cops on them, saying that they were creepy, that they stood out, that it made her feel sick to have them there. They ended up interrogated by campus police and pulled off the tour. They had saved up for months to take that trip and see if CSU was a place they could attend and feel comfortable.9 In 2021, comedian Eric André, who was at the time starring in two hit movies on Netflix, was boarding a plane in Atlanta with the other business-class passengers. County police detained him on the jetway that leads to the plane and started interrogating him about drugs he might be carrying and asked to search his luggage. They did not detain anyone else in business class. André is Black and Jewish. Everyone else in business class appeared to be white.10 These kinds of unconscious demotion, where someone is seen as a threat, can end up with innocent people in jail or dead. It happens all the time. Even if someone isn’t taken to jail, interactions with the police can be humiliating and traumatizing. And as has become even clearer since I started educating about unconscious demotions in 2015, in the US, people of color, especially Black, Latine, and Native American people, are shot and killed by police at much higher rates than anyone else in this country.11 In some respects, this is the ultimate unconscious demotion. From a person just going around and living life—like playing with a toy gun, eating chicken in the backyard, carrying a cell phone, sleeping in bed, eating a burrito in the park, driving a car—to a person who is so dangerous that it is okay to shoot, choke, or beat them to death.

How to Avoid Giving Unconscious Demotions Even though unconscious demotions can range from unpleasant to life-threatening, it isn’t that hard to stop yourself from

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unconsciously demoting someone. For example, in a work scenario, when you’re meeting someone new: 1. Be mindful. Are you assuming something about the posi-

tion of the person you’ve just started talking to? 2. Start with an open-ended question. For example, “So what

do you do?” Or “what brings you here?” This will help you avoid potentially problematic questions like “Oh, are you a personal assistant?” Even if you’ve made an assumption in your head, you’ve avoided letting the other person know— and you’ve avoided the harm that comes from making that demotion explicit. 3. Avoid expressions of surprise. “No, wait, you’re a profes-

sor? You don’t look like a professor.” 4. Avoid the credential check. Believe what they tell you

about their position. And that’s it! Demotion avoided. You may have thought biased things in your head, but you avoided transmitting them to other people. And that’s a real accomplishment. What’s more, you’ve gotten great new data that helps you create more realistic mental models. Out in public spaces, such as cafes or parks or the halls of an apartment building, if you find yourself perceiving someone as threatening or criminal, ask yourself: 1. Is this person really a threat? 2. Would I be thinking of them as a threat or calling the cops

if they were white? 3. What are the contextual clues? Is the person bringing

boxes into an apartment? Are they standing quietly and

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listening to the tour guide? Are they sitting with notepads and talking about their upcoming meeting? These are all important contextual clues that have been ignored when someone decided to call the police on Black, Native, and Latine people. By avoiding unconscious demotions, you’re not just being more respectful of people—you may be saving a life.

TREAT NAMES WITH RESPECT The barista held the marker to the cup and looked at me. “Name?” they asked. “Valerie,” I replied firmly. My new colleague turned to me in surprise. “Valerie? What now?” “Oh yeah, Valerie is my coffee shop name. Because it was my nickname for like a month in high school. And sometimes I feel like if I get called Susan one more time instead of Suzanne, I might get stabby.”12 Here in the US, Suzanne is a low-frequency name. And Susan, a closely related name, is much more common. So I understand why people say and write my name as Susan, even though it bothers me. A common type of problematic language is being careless or disrespectful of names. Sometimes it’s by not putting in the time and energy to say or spell the name correctly. And sometimes it’s by using nicknames or pet names without checking to see if it’s okay. Low-frequency names seem to be the biggest stumbling blocks. Sometimes, like with my name, these are names in your language that are just less common. And other times, they are names in a language you didn’t grow up speaking. For those of - 88 -

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you who speak oral languages (as opposed to sign languages), these “foreign” names may have sounds that your tongue isn’t used to producing, or sounds or tones that are hard for your ears to hear and then replicate. But it’s important to be careful with a person’s name. Because this care is a sign of respect, an important component of inclusion. And the lack of care can be genuinely problematic, causing both emotional damage and real harm to relationships.

Say and Spell Names Correctly When you have a “difficult” or “unusual” name, you learn to expect that people will not say and spell your name correctly. (For Deaf speakers, the focus in this section is only on spelling and not on oral pronunciation.) “Yesterday, I was in a meeting . . . and I knew it was time for them to say my name because they started the sentence with ‘I might butcher this . . . ’ and then proceeded to do exactly that, ‘butcher’ my name,” posted Damneet Kaur.13 As I turned on my microphone to introduce myself, my pronouns, and the correct pronunciation of my name, I felt the same embarrassing energy I have felt since moving to the US at the age of 5, where it has always felt like no one knows how to say my name. My name is a Sikh name. My name is sacred. . . . My name is an ‘immigrant name’ in this country. My name requires you to be uncomfortable. . . . I have gone my whole life with people butchering parts of me. . . ” What is the flavor of butchering someone’s name? It’s of something bloody and unpleasant. Looking at the semantic framing, the name maps onto something raw and unclean and a bit dangerous to touch. This isn’t a great way to conceptualize someone’s name. - 89 -

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I’ve talked to multiple people with foreign names who have told me that their coworkers not only avoid saying their names, but that they also seem to avoid talking to them or sometimes even making eye contact. Their coworkers’ discomfort with an unusual name leads to their being left out and marginalized. This aversion to low-frequency or “difficult” names can lead to negative outcomes in the workplace. A 2012 study in Australia showed that having an unusual name that pointed to a non-­ European ethnicity meant you’d have to apply for way more jobs than your “regularly” named fellow applicants. For example, in order to get the same number of interviews, fictional candidates with ethnically Chinese names like Ping Chang or ethnically Middle Eastern names like Fatima Baghdadi had to submit 64 percent or 68 percent more applications than a fictional candidate named something like Sarah Johnson.14 Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan laid out some of the professional consequences of having an unusual name in a series of 2019 tweets.15 Toward the end of his PhD, Narayanan ran into a colleague, and they started talking about his work. The colleague was shocked to realize that Narayanan was first author of three different articles he had read and admired. (First author is the most prestigious position when articles are coauthored.) Narayanan wrote, “I knew that my name tends to register as ‘generic Indian name with too many A’s.’ I was used to jokes and many, many misspelled name tags.” But he was surprised and unhappy to learn that this colleague’s failure to process his name had probably cost him a job offer. He’d seen and liked my papers, but the name hadn’t registered. He didn’t realize the 3 papers had the same first author and that it was someone he knew. He was embarrassed and apologetic. If he’d known, he said, he’d have advocated for me at his school for a faculty position(!)

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Not putting in the effort to correctly pronounce or fully process a name can have negative consequences. A person can feel so frustrated that they’d rather use a fake name than hear their name mispronounced yet again—or even disrespected to the point where they feel butchered. Or, they might be denied recognition or credit for their work—or even a job offer—simply because their name is “too hard,” and people have just given up.

•••

You’re pretty much guaranteed to encounter at least one unfamiliar name in your lifetime—and if you’ve got a job such as teacher or recruiter, a whole lot more. So what can you do? For people who will pronounce names orally, if you’ve got some time to prepare, you can take a few minutes to do some research. A few years ago, I had to interview someone in London named Ciaran. I’d never seen this name before, but I knew enough about the spelling of Irish names to realize I would need help pronouncing it correctly. So, I searched “how to pronounce Ciaran” and compared a few videos and baby name entries. Because I’m a linguist, I could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to write his name phonetically, but otherwise I would have written “KEE-rin.” When he hopped on Zoom, I said, “Hi, you’re [KEE-rin], right? I’m Suzanne, nice to meet you.” He broke out into a huge smile. And then the next five minutes were spent with him asking me how I knew how to say his name right, thanking me for taking the time, and telling me horror stories involving his name. Only after this outpouring of emotion and stories could I get to my interview questions. If you encounter a new name in the moment, you can ask how to pronounce and spell that name. And remember, even if you think you know the pronunciation, you might not. For example,

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the name Maurice is pronounced one way in the US (maw-REES) and another way in the UK (MAW-rihs). If you’ll be encountering that person again, you can make a note of the pronunciation so you’ll get it right the next time. For example, the name Andrea is pronounced two ways, so if you meet an Andrea with the less frequent pronunciation (in the US), you might write “an-DRAY-uh.” And for the more frequent version, you could write “ANN-dree-uh.” (If you’ve got time and energy and are both hearing and sighted, consider learning the International Phonetic Alphabet! There are lots of good tutorials and guides out there on the internet. And it’s a super handy tool.) For speakers of oral languages, some names may be so far away from the sound system of the language(s) you grew up speaking that you simply won’t be able to pronounce them perfectly. They may have sounds your vocal tract can’t quite make because you haven’t had years of practice. You also might not be able to hear the unusual sounds very well. For example, monolingual speakers of English usually have problems with the different sounds represented by the letter r in other languages, along with tones in languages like Mandarin, Shona, and Thai. In these cases, the best thing to do is practice and get as close as you can to the original pronunciation. Even if you don’t make it all the way to the fully correct pronunciation, people will appreciate the effort. When you put in effort to pronounce and spell someone’s low-­ frequency name correctly, they feel seen, valued, and respected. The implied message is—you’re worth my time and effort. You and your name matter.

Nicknames and Pet Names When I was a kid, I used to watch a TV show called MASH. One of the very few female characters was an army nurse named Margaret Houlihan who was called Hot Lips by most of her male - 92 -

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coworkers. I was too young to understand how inappropriate this was for a workplace, but I could see her frustration with the nickname. Some nicknames and most pet names at work violate the principles of inclusive language. In particular, they do not show respect. In a survey put out by the Florida Bar, female lawyers reported that in the courtroom they are called things like dear, honey, sweetie, little lady, and darling. They were called these pet names not only by men who were opposing counsel, but sometimes even by the judges themselves. One lawyer even reported that a federal magistrate called her Blondie in front of the entire courtroom.16 These are disrespectful ways to address and refer to a colleague. They are demeaning. And in the case of these lawyers, they’re probably being used as a subtle form of domination. Pet names like honey and sweetie suggest that the female colleague isn’t there in a professional capacity. These names marginalize her and her work. They suggest that she isn’t competent, and that she maybe should return to the domestic domains where she “belongs.” (If sweetie and darlin’ are used to add flavor to your workplace because it’s a diner or a restaurant in the American South, then that’s a different story.) What’s more, pet names for women like Hot Lips can also be inappropriately sexualizing. Being called things like kitten and hot stuff at work is well down the path to sexual harassment. One woman reported on a situation at her ad agency: We hired a new receptionist, and the leadership team (all men) suggested her name was too difficult to pronounce, so they gave her a sexual nickname instead, which they used behind her back and to her face. Whenever I would point stuff like this out as being hugely inappropriate, they’d call me “the fembot” and tell me to chill out.17

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(Note that calling the author of the post “fembot” is an example of inflating language—presenting her reasonable behavior calling out sexual harassment as unacceptable.) Less charged but still problematic is jumping right to a nickname when that is not how someone has been introduced. For example, I have never once said, “My name is Suzanne, but you can call me Sue (or Suzie),” because I do not use either of those nicknames. And yet, plenty of people have started calling me Sue or Suzie right after being introduced to me. And it can be awkward and uncomfortable to correct them. I can feel like a killjoy, or any of the other unpleasant names for women who shut down seemingly harmless fun. (Note that there are four people on the planet who are allowed to call me Suzie. They know who they are. But no one will ever be added to their ranks.) The indexicality of nickname use is something like closeness, friendliness, and informality. But that’s only when someone is licensed to use that nickname—when they are a person who is actually close and friendly and informal with you. And, most importantly, when they have your consent. Otherwise, the flavor of an unwanted nickname is more like disrespect and disregard for your feelings and wishes. It’s a verbal version of forcing a long hug or shoulder rub on someone who didn’t ask for or consent to it. People with complex or “foreign” names also often find themselves nicknamed against their will. For example, when actor Quvenzhané Wallis was on tour promoting the Annie reboot in which she was starring, she was called things like “Little Q” and “Annie” by entertainment reporters. She is an Oscar nominee. But people in the business couldn’t be bothered to say her name right. Care and attention were being paid to difficult European names (for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger), but not to low-frequency names of darker-skinned people. Uzo Adubo was asked in a 2014 interview if she had considered changing her name when - 94 -

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she became an actor. She replied that she had not, because in grade school, when she came home asking if she could go by Zoe, her mother had said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”18 A Mexican woman named Xóchitl told me about an interview for a job where the recruiter said, “Your name is too hard. I’m just going to call you Chita.” She chose to not work for that company. A colleague once told me how bad he felt for his mother-inlaw. She grew up in Korea as Eun-Joo. But once she moved to the US, she found that so many people had so much trouble with her name, butchered it so often, that she gave up on it. For the last five decades, she’s been Paula instead. He felt so much sympathy for her—she had already given up so much in her move from Korea, and he could see how sad she felt that she hadn’t even been able to keep her name. I hear stories like this all the time about people who grew up in East or Southeast Asia and then moved to the US. So it’s best to only use nicknames if they’re freely offered to you. For example, if somebody tells you, “My name is Xóchitl, but you can call me Xoch,” then go for it. Otherwise, take the time to learn and use their real name. It’s respectful and it takes into account both their identity and their wishes. Using someone’s real name—and pronouncing it correctly—is one of the most fundamental ways of showing respect for that person. And it’s well worth whatever effort it might take you to do so.

Address People Respectfully “It was literally beaten into me that I should always use sir and ma’am with adults,” Dani said. “But I’m nonbinary. And I really don’t want to misgender people. Lord knows, I get how upsetting that is. So, what do I do?” Dani is in a bind, and chances are good that you are too. In English, gender makes it complicated to address people respectfully. The English language has developed so that gender - 95 -

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almost always plays a role when you decide which words of respect to use. One way this shows up is with honorifics. Honorific is the term for a word or word part that signals respect and politeness. You might have heard of san being added after Japanese names, or in K-dramas, seen people addressed with the polite nim after their name or job title. Think about the standard honorifics that until recently were the only English options to use before someone’s name to show respect. Male

Female

Mr.

Miss, Mrs.

If someone appeared to be male, you chose Mr. Here, gender was the only factor. But it was more complicated if someone appeared to be female. Until recently, to be polite you needed to know not only their gender but also their marital status. Female and not married? Miss. Female and married? Mrs. In the 1950s, people got frustrated that marital status came into play only when addressing women. And they came up with a new honorific that was equivalent to Mr.—Ms. The honorific Ms. removes marital status from the politeness equation. But now that we are finally taking into account the realities of gender, Mr. and Ms. aren’t enough. Because some people are nonbinary and don’t feel comfortable with a male honorific or a female honorific. And some other people fit in the gender binary but feel that gender, like marital status, should be irrelevant to politeness. So now there is also Mx., which is pronounced like the word mix by some people and like the word mucks by others. Mx. is a way to remove both marital status and gender identity from - 96 -

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politeness. (There are also other, less frequently used gender-­ neutral honorifics in English. They include M, Misc, Mre, Msr, Myr, Pr, Sai, and Ser.)19 It’s best to ask what honorific people prefer, and then use it. On my company’s website, when someone fills out the contact form, we have them choose an honorific from a drop-down list. They can also choose “go right to my first name” or put a different honorific in the notes field. Then, when we email them back, we know how to address them in a way that respects their wishes. This is especially helpful for names where the gender isn’t clear— like Italian men named Michele, Americans named Cameron or Lindsey, or Koreans named Ji-ho or See-hee. In the US, there has been a move over the last few decades away from honorifics and toward first names only. So you might be someone who almost never says Mr. or Ms. Being aware of people’s preferences—for more or less formality, and which honorific to use when being formal—is an important way of showing respect. For example, if someone doesn’t want to be called Mr. Lastname but instead Firstname only, then the respectful thing to do is call him by his first name only. It’s also good to be on the alert for the common “respect gap” when it comes to gender and honorifics. People seen as female are often presented or referred to using their first name only, while people seen as male are presented with their title and last name. “Please meet Kate, one of our most popular professors. And this is Dr. Smith, who just got that big grant I was telling you about.” The same is true for disabled people, who are also frequently presented without their titles. To close the respect gap, use Title Lastname for all genders and for both abled and disabled people.

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gender neutral. I wish I had an easy solution that I could present with a flourish right here. But I don’t. But even so, we always want to avoid misgendering people. So what do you do if you’re on the street and want to politely get someone’s attention to ask for directions? You could try skipping address terms like sir and ma’am altogether and showing your politeness with your tone and other words. Or you might say something like “Excuse me, friend.” Or “Excuse me, kind person.” Or something else you feel comfortable with. If you’re in retail or hospitality, you might say “Can I help the next guest?” Or, “I believe the person in the green shirt was next.” Because when we are trying to be polite with someone and show them respect, we want to make sure that we are also respecting their gender identity, no matter what it might be.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. When you meet someone with a low-frequency

name that you might not remember how to pronounce or spell, make a note of the pronunciation or spelling in a place you can easily check later. (Like in the Notes field in your phone contacts.) 2. If you’re using a nickname for someone, check in

with them and make sure that nickname is okay. And don’t jump to a nickname for someone new without making sure it’s acceptable to them. 3. Make a habit of asking people which honorific they

prefer. They may prefer one beyond the usual Mr., Ms., or Mrs. Then make a note of that honorific and use it. 4. Spend a few minutes brainstorming polite and

gender-neutral ways you can address someone unknown. (“Excuse me, kind person.”) Then practice them so you’re more fluent in the moment. 5. Be on the alert for times when people perceived as

women are presented using their first name only while people seen as men are presented with their title. Close the “respect gap” by using Title Lastname for everybody. (continued)

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(continued)

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE Activity 1. Put in effort for “difficult” names. This month, you can do a big name cleanup. 1. Every time you encounter someone with a low-fre-

quency or “difficult” name, ask them to help you say and spell it correctly. Avoid the word butcher! Instead, say something like, “I want to make sure I say and spell your name right. Can you help me?” 2. Every day, check five names of people you interact

with (for example, by email or Slack) and make sure that you are spelling their name correctly when you write it. 3. If you speak an oral language, when you meet some-

one with a lower-frequency name, make a new habit of pausing and repeating that name back to them. Then ask, “Am I saying that right?” Giving them the opportunity to correct you right away can save a lot of awkwardness down the road.

Activity 2. Teach about unconscious demotions. This month, teach at least four people—one person per week—about unconscious demotions. The teaching session can be as short as five minutes. Use the theory from this chapter, but illustrate using a few examples that you find yourself. That Barack Obama anecdote is a good starting point, and if you search on “Barack Obama mistaken for” you should be able to find even more unconscious

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demotions he’s dealt with. (For many of you reading this, you will be able to easily find examples from your own life.) Bonus points! Collect stories of unconscious demotions from the people around you. The more stories you encounter, the better your pattern recognition will get.

Activity 3. Prep yourself to avoid unconscious demotions. Make a list of the kinds of people you think you’re most likely to unconsciously demote. Then put the list somewhere you can easily access. 1. Figure out a way to look at the list before you go to a

place where you might unconsciously demote someone. For example, if you put a networking event in your calendar, add another event thirty minutes before that tells you, “Check the unconscious demotions list!” A quick reminder of your danger zones should really prime you to be more mindful at your event. 2. Make a list of open-ended questions you can ask

that will help you avoid demotions. Like, “what brings you here?” and “can tell me more about that?” (As opposed to assuming you know someone’s job or insisting on a credential check.) Some role-play where you practice those questions can really help.

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4 Draw People In

CRYSTAL HANA KIM was in second grade art class. The assignment? Draw a portrait of your partner.1 “Now let’s do the eyes,” said her art teacher. “See the line over your partner’s eye? That’s called a crease. It’s important to have the crease or your person won’t look real.” But Kim, who is Korean American, didn’t have a crease over her eyes—she had the ssangapeul, or “monolid,” eyes common in Korea and many other East Asian countries. Her partner yelled out, “But Crystal doesn’t have any lines!” The teacher’s face turned red. Kim writes, “I understood that this was an awkward situation . . . She had made a mistake, and yet I felt as if I were the one to blame.” “If I didn’t have a crease,” she wondered, “did I still look real?” This was the start of Kim realizing that she looked different from her classmates. Later, she would notice how the language of makeup and beauty left her out entirely—assuming that everyone had an eye crease, a “natural line.” Who gets to have an eye that is just called an eye? And who has an eye that is highlighted as different and unusual? Given a name that Kim notes “sounds clinical, alien: monolid.”

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Who is taken into consideration when we’re talking about faces, art, and beauty? And who gets left out? The language used by that long-ago art teacher—and so many other people talking and writing about makeup and beauty—had marginalized and excluded Kim and people with eyes like hers. It violated my third Principle of Inclusive Language.

PRINCIPLE 3 Inclusive language draws people in. Problematic language inappropriately excludes or ­marginalizes people.

DISABILITY One major category that presents real challenges for inclusive language is disability. Disability is a word that maps to many kinds of conditions and many kinds of people. More than a billion people around the world can be classified as disabled.2 So many kinds of disabilities show up in so many ways that it’s hard to make broad generalizations. Each disabled person has their own perspective and experiences. For many of us who don’t live with a disability, it is a category we don’t really think about all that much. But according to the CDC, one in four American adults has a disability of some kind.3 And this doesn’t include those of us who wear glasses or contacts since our vision impairment accommodations are so common that they aren’t even seen as disability accommodations. - 104 -

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Disability is an identity category that people can move into overnight—just one accident or illness can shift a person from not living with a disability to living with one. Although less than 1 percent of Americans under the age of five are disabled, about 35 percent of people sixty-four and older have a disability of some kind.4 In addition, as of 2023, long-haul Covid has affected between seven and twenty-three million Americans, including one million people who can no longer work.5 One of the longterm results of the pandemic will be a significant increase in the numbers of disabled people. Here are common ways we categorize disability:

• • • • • • • •

Mobility: includes issues with walking and standing, such as cerebral palsy, paralysis, amputation, and Parkinson’s Physical: such as chronic fatigue, chronic migraines, diabetes Hearing: such as deafness and being hard of hearing Vision: such as blindness, color-blindness, impaired vision Speech: such as muteness and stuttering Cognitive: such as Down syndrome, developmental delays Neurology: such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s, dyspraxia Mental health: such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder

Some disabilities are perceptible, while others are invisible. But they all have something in common: when disability is part of the conversation, problematic language is incredibly frequent. This problematic language shows up both when talking about disabled people and talking with disabled people.

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TALKING ABOUT DISABILITY The Vice President of the financial services firm had a problem. “I’m trying to get our people to use the correct terms when it comes to disability, but I’m encountering a lot of resistance. People are telling me that there are too many new words coming at them, and that it’s just us being the PC Police. That we’re being ‘too sensitive.’ Or that it’s ‘just semantics.’ Can you help?” In fact, I could help. Let me share with you what I shared with her.

•••

There are real linguistic and cultural reasons why language around disability seems to shift more than language involving other topics. At the heart of this is what I call the cycle of pejoration. (You may have heard this concept referred to as the euphemism treadmill.) Cultural attitudes change the flavor of words that describe disabilities. That’s because disabilities, and by association disabled people, are stigmatized.6 In other words, many people hold negative and unfair beliefs about disabled people, who are “disqualified from full social acceptance.”7 This broad social stigma means that terms that describe disabilities very frequently start out with a scientific or descriptive flavor, and then, because of how they are used, end up with a negative flavor. Eventually, the term may come to mean something negative or insulting, while the original scientific flavor and meaning is lost to history. This is called pejoration. Pejoration is the process in which a word’s meaning gets downgraded from positive or neutral to negative (in other words, it can become a pejorative, an insult). For example, the word silly now means “foolish.” But originally it meant “blessed” or “fortunate.” It then had a phase when it meant - 106 -

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“pious” or “innocent.” And then it shifted to the mildly insulting meaning it has today. Once a formerly scientific or neutral word has become an insult, people need to come up with a new word to replace it. Because you don’t want to use a word that’s insulting as a scientific description. We see pejoration for identities that are less prestigious or have some kind of stigma. For example, the word hussy once simply meant “housewife,” but through pejoration became a sexualized insult. It was then replaced by housewife, which can now have negative connotations, and so the more “neutral” homemaker is sometimes used. And the word spinster, which used to refer to an unmarried woman, acquired such a negative flavor that in the 1970s, American game show creators coined a new word—bachelorette. They took the term bachelor, meaning “unmarried man,” and threw a feminine (and diminutive) French-derived suffix on it to create a more positive way to refer to their unmarried female contestants. When negative cultural attitudes toward a person stay the same, then the new word that replaced the pejorative will start to taste like something unpleasant, negative, shameful. Once the flavor is bad enough and the usage shifts, the new word will become yet another pejorative, a term with an insulting meaning. In other words, if you use a “regular” word in an insulting way long enough, it just becomes an insult. This is what I call the cycle of pejoration. As long as the negative attitudes stay in place, the cycle will continue. The issue isn’t with the words—it’s with the culture.

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some words that are used as insults in English today but began as scientific or descriptive terminology:

• • • • • • •

Moron: originally meant mental age of eight to twelve. Imbecile: originally meant mental age of six to nine. Idiot: originally meant mental age of two or less.8 Cripple, crip: originally, a cripple was a person with a physical impairment that prohibited walking or made it difficult. Spaz: from spastic, originally used to describe issues of muscle tone, muscle stiffness, or muscle contractions that caused discomfort, pain, and mobility issues.9 Spastic is still in use as a scientific term today. Lame: originally used to describe people with a body part that was paralyzed or weak and impaired mobility. Dumb: originally used for mute people.

Note that the terms moron, imbecile, and idiot, while considered scientific at the time, actually originated with early twentiethcentury eugenicists. So these terms were always problematic, given the eugenicist agenda. Also, like the word queer, the word crip has been “reclaimed” by the in-group. Disabled people may use the term to describe themselves and others in the community. This is a different use than the Southern California association of gangs known as the Crips (who originally used canes to signal affiliation with pimps). A word can move from being a technical term to a slur that renders it no longer viable in just a few decades. For example, my mom worked as a “special education” teacher in New York. And I am pretty sure I remember children in her classroom being classified as retarded. So in the process of writing this chapter, I - 108 -

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became curious—how recently did New York state use the term retarded as an official classification? And I was genuinely surprised by the answer I found. It was only in July 2022 that New York state signed into law a bill removing “mentally retarded” from all state laws.10 This came a full twelve years after a federal law was enacted that removed all references to “mentally retarded” from federal policy and use.11 When I was young, the word retarded was used as a schoolyard insult, but it also still had enough of a technical flavor to be used by people like school administrators. But by the 2010s, the word retarded had become so strong a slur that I was shocked to learn that it was still being used in any official capacity. In fact, retarded has moved all the way into a taboo word that many people won’t say or spell. Some people call it “the R-word.” (This is parallel to “the N-word.” It’s seen as that insulting.) Others won’t spell it out and use asterisks to replace most of the letters. Our cultural attitudes toward disability still create real stigma, and that ongoing stigma leads to many disability-related words acquiring a negative flavor. This cycle of pejoration is why you can expect to read and hear new words about disability in the future. Until we change our attitudes, the cycle will keep on going. So, using new terminology is not being “oversensitive” or “politically correct.” It’s appropriately responding to the semantic shift that comes from problematic language use. It’s recognizing that some words have reached a point where they have become so negative, so insulting, that they can’t be used as technical or descriptive terms anymore and need to be replaced with new words.

•••

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like “people with disabilities?” Or is it better to use identity-first language and say things like “disabled people”? The most inclusive practice is to use the terminology that an individual person prefers. You can listen to or read the terminology they use and mirror it. (But don’t use reclaimed insults if you’re not in-group! For example, if on someone’s blog they refer to themselves both as a crip and as a disabled person, if you yourself are not disabled, then the language you should mirror is only disabled person.) But then the questions arise: How do you refer to an entire category or group of people if you don’t know all their individual preferences? Or if you know that they have preferences that conflict? Some groups of people seem to have generally established that they prefer identity-first language—for example, Deaf people and many autistic people. Deaf people have a cultural identity (this is what the capital D means, that a person is part of the Deaf community and culture). And autistic people in favor of identity-first language note that their condition is different from many other disabilities, such as chronic migraines. It feels more accurate to say a person with chronic migraines than a chronic migraine person. But autistic people, who have autistic brains, have always been and will always be autistic. Being autistic shapes both a person’s experiences and interactions with others. It is integral to identity. Even so, some people prefer person with autism or person with ASD, and when they do, then that is the terminology to use with them. Author Emily Ladau notes that her attitude toward which terminology to use has been influenced by disrespect for her own choices. She used to be very strongly in favor of identity-first language, in part because “. . . I was tired of mostly nondisabled people telling me that PFL [person-first language] was right and IFL [identity-first language] was wrong. I was tired of calling myself ‘disabled’ and being told ‘oh, you shouldn’t talk about yourself like that,’ or ‘I don’t even think of you as disabled.’”12 - 110 -

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You can feel that lingering stigma around disability—“you shouldn’t talk about yourself like that” can be translated as “don’t describe yourself using insulting and negative language.” “I don’t even think of you as [identity]” shows the negative flavor of that identity. I’ve had Black friends tell me about parallel experiences with friends or colleagues who said, “I don’t even think of you as Black,” and meant it as a compliment. In general, my rule of thumb is to use the terminology preferred by in-group activists. Because they have taken the time to think through the language from an inclusive standpoint and also have the benefit of lived experience. The overall impression I get is that American disability activists generally prefer identity-first language for themselves, and that for them, person-first language has the flavor of being language used by the out-group, the flavor of being advocated for mostly by people who aren’t disabled. So in this book, I have made the choice to use identity-first language when talking about groups and write things like disabled people. But for individuals who prefer otherwise, or for groups for which there seems to be a consensus that person-first language is better, I use that terminology instead. A final note is that we absolutely want to avoid addressing or referring to people by their disability or mobility device. I’ve heard stories of people addressed as “Hey, Wheelchair,” or who have overheard themselves referred to as Wheelchair. (“Wheelchair is coming to the bar, so I guess we have to make sure there’s a ramp.”) I’ve also heard stories in which people were called Crutches or The Autistic. This is the opposite of drawing people in. It’s dehumanizing and disrespectful. And it’s problematic language to be avoided.

INTERACTING WITH DISABLED PEOPLE I was in Los Angeles and had just finished giving a legal education workshop on gender bias when one of the lawyers came over to - 111 -

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talk. “Me too,” he said. “For all the ways you told us that women are ignored or spoken down to or talked over? Me too.” I looked at him more closely. He seemed to belong to almost all dominant-group categories, categories that would ordinarily mean he’d be treated with respect. He was white, he was male, and his suit and job suggested he made real money. He was middleaged, conventionally good looking, and he spoke with a standard American dialect. So there seemed to be just one explanation for his experiences. “Because of the wheelchair?” I asked. “Yes, because of the wheelchair,” he replied. He told me stories of restaurant hosts and waitstaff who ignored him and talked only to his wife. About being ignored and interrupted in meetings. And how he was often presumed incompetent, with people expressing surprise that he did very regular things, like pick up dry cleaning. (Let alone that he worked as a lawyer.) If this person wasn’t a wheelchair user, none of this would be happening. He was just as competent as if he had been born a person who didn’t use a wheelchair. But his competencies went consistently unrecognized. Because I had almost no perceptibly disabled family or friends (and my disabled family members weren’t people I spent time with out and about in the world), I hadn’t heard about or witnessed encounters like these. But as I moved further into antibias research and education, I learned that experiences like his happened every day. And everywhere.

•••

Inclusive language draws all kinds of people in and avoids marginalizing them just because they are different in some way. Some people are able to move through the world with bodies that don’t elicit commentary. Other people, who are visibly different

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from the dominant group, have bodies that many people seem compelled to comment on. I’ve collected lots of stories involving comments on skin tone, hair texture and style, eye shape, height, weight, and specific body parts. As human beings, we often feel compelled to comment on difference. It can be innocuous when you find yourself saying, “Oh, new haircut!” even as you are thinking, “don’t mention the haircut, don’t mention the haircut.” It’s a bit less innocuous when it’s about height—ask anyone very tall or very short how they feel about comments on how tall or how short they are. My research suggests that disabled people deal with more problematic comments involving difference than anyone else. First, disabled people experience a higher frequency of comments about their bodies or disabilities. Second, those comments are more inappropriate than most comments on difference aimed at other types of people. (Not to mention how intrusive questions related to disabilities can be.) Here are just a few of the comments and questions addressed to Sassy Wyatt, a disability awareness consultant who is blind:

• • • • • • • •

Wow, you look/dress really well for a blind person. You’re using a phone; you’re faking your blindness! Why do you watch TV if you can’t see it? Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up? But you don’t LOOK blind! Why do your eyes move/look like that? Do you want to feel my face? Oh, I didn’t realize people like you could work.13

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Comments on someone’s disability suggest that they are “the other.” They highlight and reinforce stigma around disability, and present disability as “remarkable.” (As in, people feel compelled to remark on it.) Another issue is that these kinds of comments tend to focus on individuals and what is seen as individual limitations, rather than on places and systems that refuse to shift and become more inclusive. To quote a tweet from activist Elena Hung, if you say, “She can’t get inside the building because of her wheelchair,” the focus is on the wrong thing. Instead, Hung suggests that we shift our attention: “She can’t get inside because the building is not accessible. The building has a barrier that does not let her in. The wheelchair is not the problem; the building’s lack of access is the problem.”14 In a comment on this tweet, Tatiana Prowell, a medical doctor, pointed out we should go one step further: “The building didn’t cause this. People did. Planners who did not think about access for people who use wheelchairs & did not bother to consult any. Able-bodied people who use the bldg & do not demand accessibility. We caused this problem.”15 The lawyer using the wheelchair had told me about how often he was ignored and interrupted in meetings. Issues like inaccessible buildings, including architecturally significant buildings like the new Hunters Point Library in New York (which met ADA requirements but made popular departments functionally inaccessible), show that again and again disabled people are ignored to the point where they aren’t even in the meetings.16 Designing spaces, websites, and events that are meant to include everyone and then not speaking with disabled people about accessibility is problematic.

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Lesa Bradshaw, an HR consultant, gave a TEDx talk that included examples of the condescending and patronizing ways people speak to her. . . . Why is it that people still approach me with that singsong pity voice and give me the cognitive credibility of a 5-year-old? And they come and say, “Hello. And what’s your name?” I mean just the other day I’m flying up to Jo-berg . . . I get lifted off the little skinny chair and I get put onto the seat and they take the wheelchair away and a lady leans over and goes, “Shame, lovey, are you okay?” So, I said, “Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” She goes, “Ah, shame.” And then she says, “Are you going to Johannesburg on holiday?” And I said, “No, no, I’m going up on business just for the day.” “Wa-wa . . . you work?” And I said, “I do.” And she goes, “You know, it just shows you. You people are so brave.” And I look and I think, “Really? I’m not a firefighter. I’m just going to work, really.” . . . Why is it that I’m getting credibility here for not doing much? So, you give it a bit of thought and you realize it’s because people have set very low benchmarks and expectations for people with disabilities. So, if you do something normal people go, “Wow! You champion!”17 A handy label I use for one type of problematic language I encounter is presumed incompetent. In the stories I collect from the US, I

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find that women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) are often presumed incompetent in their workplaces. Especially when those workplaces are technical, they are often assumed to not have technical knowledge or skills. (I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve encountered where a woman answers a technical help hotline or steps up to the counter at the electronics or computer store and the male customer says, “No, stop. I want a man to help me.”) But the presumed incompetent stories I collect that involve disabled people often go a step further—the disabled person is assumed to be not competent in the most basic life skills. In other words, a physically disabled person is assumed to have an intellectual disability. (This seems to be especially true for people who communicate through a device rather than with their vocal tracts or sign language.) If you’re not disabled, you’ll want to make sure that when you’re speaking with disabled people, you draw them in by talking with them as people. That you’re not unconsciously demoting them and presuming that they’re incompetent, but rather, you’re treating them with the same respect that you treat people without disabilities. When it comes to drawing people in, inclusive language practices for disability can be applied more generally. Don’t use a term that describes someone’s identity as an insult. Avoid making inappropriate comments that highlight someone’s difference. Avoid unconscious demotions that were triggered because someone doesn’t fit your mental models. And think about shifting your focus from a marginalized individual to the system that isn’t supporting them.

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forget, we’re getting pressure from HR. So we have to make sure at least one diverse candidate makes it to the final round,” he said. The team members nodded and made notes in their files. No one asked him what he meant by a “diverse candidate”—they all knew.

•••

When someone says, “a diverse candidate,” who do they mean? If they’re in the US, they usually mean someone who isn’t a white man. Less frequently, they mean someone who isn’t heterosexual or cisgender. And they may sometimes mean someone who isn’t abled. This use of the word diverse is problematic. Until very recently, when referring to people, the adjective diverse was only used with nouns or phrases that represent groups. For example:

• • •

A diverse workforce A diverse candidate pool A diverse employee base

That’s because, when referencing people, the semantic framing of diverse points to a scenario involving difference within a group of people. In this scenario, some people are one way, and other people are another way. Together, the individual differences make up a diverse group. But in the last few years, I’ve seen the rise of diverse to refer to a single person. Most frequently in the context of hiring. So, what’s going on? Today, diverse is often being used as a euphemism for

• •

a person who is white and female, or a person of color of any gender.

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And, less frequently,

• •

a person who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, or a person who is perceptibly disabled.

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because it presents whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and abledness as the default—as if they are the “normal” ways of being, the central core by which everyone else is defined as “other.” There’s a really useful linguistic concept that helps explain why this happens. It’s called markedness. You can sort a lot of the world into two categories: unmarked and marked. The unmarked thing is the default, the dominant form, the form that requires less effort. And the marked thing is seen as nontypical, special, divergent—a form that requires more effort. It is often defined in opposition to or different from the “default” or unmarked form rather than its own thing. In the US, when it comes to race, the unmarked category is people who are white, and the marked category is people who are not white. When it comes to gender, the unmarked category is male. And the marked category is people who are not male. When it comes to sexuality, the unmarked category is heterosexual. And the marked category is people who are not heterosexual. And when it comes to ability, the unmarked category is abled. And the marked category is disabled. Linguistic patterns give us insight into the mental models we use to sort out and assign value to the world around us. For example, in English, most words that point to the male version of something are the default, the bare root. And in order

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to point to the female version of something, you add an extra word or word part, usually a suffix, to show that you’re talking about something divergent, something marked. Unmarked

Marked

lion

lioness

actor

actress

waiter

waitress

engineer

female engineer

rapper

female rapper

Carl

Carla

Brian

Brianna

For all of these words, the unmarked form is shorter. The male form is the base form, the default form. And then, the default form is marked with something additional to turn it into the female version. The feminine suffix -ess is added, or the profession is prefaced with female, or a name has an -a added to the end to make a female version. You’ll find similar markedness with race. For example, in the mid-2000s I used to spend a lot of time reading a website called Overheard in New York. And this markedness would show up all the time in the way overheard people were described. Unmarked

Marked

hipster

Black hipster, Asian hipster

grandma

Hispanic grandma, Asian grandma

dude

Spanish dude, Black dude

The reader was led to assume that a “regular” hipster, grandma, or dude was white. People who weren’t white were marked with additional words to describe them.

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You can check this out yourself by looking at Wikipedia pages for people. If you go to the Early Life section, you’ll find that white people very frequently do not have their ethnic or racial background mentioned. But people of color (and Jewish people of all skin tones) do. The same is true for many novels written by white people. In these novels, white characters don’t have their race mentioned, but people of color are marked with ethnic or racial descriptors. Think about the eye descriptions from Crystal Hana Kim’s story at the beginning of this chapter: everyone else in the class had an unmarked eye, but she had a marked monolid eye. Throughout this book, I use some marked names for the US, like Tomoko, and some unmarked names, like Daniel. How have you been picturing the people with unmarked names? Are they all white? And if you, reader, are not white, have they all been the same race/ethnicity as you? In the US, when we talk about race, whiteness as a racial category is often erased. For many white people, race is about other people. For example, what is plain old American history? It is presented from a white point of view. So every February is Black History Month. It’s marked as different. But, as many people have noted, in the US (and other places colonized by white Europeans), Black history is also white history. To claim, for example, that slavery is specifically Black history erases the role that white people played in the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery.

•••

When people say “diverse candidate” to mean “a person who isn’t perceived as white,” they’re leaving white people out of the diversity equation.

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They’re suggesting that diversity is only about the marked people. That a “diverse” person is someone defined as different from the dominant group. Someone who isn’t white. Someone who isn’t male. Someone who isn’t straight. Someone who isn’t abled. Someone who is “different.” But everyone plays a role in diversity. So it’s better to avoid language that suggests that creating diversity is only the responsibility of people who have been traditionally marginalized, overlooked, and kept away from power. Which is ironic, because they are exactly the people with the least power and least access to make systemic and top-down changes. I recommend only using diverse to reference groups of people and not individuals. If you want to highlight that you’re looking to diversify a group, one handy way to characterize people is underrepresented and overrepresented. For example, the hiring manager could have said something like this: “Okay, for the open position, we want to make sure we look for candidates from underrepresented groups so we can balance things out on our team.” Diversity is about everybody. And when you make sure everyone is part of the equation, you can move past the idea that one kind of person is “regular” and everyone else is different, peculiar, divergent. And you can be genuinely inclusive instead.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. Use neutral language to describe accessibility aids

and accommodations. For example, instead of describing someone as “confined to a wheelchair,” describe them as someone who “uses a wheelchair” or is “a wheelchair user.” Instead of saying “she’s stuck with hearing aids” you can say “she uses hearing aids.” (Note that a wheelchair provides physical mobility instead of confinement, and hearing aids can facilitate auditory perception for people who are hard of hearing.) 2. Avoid calling a person a spaz and avoid calling

people or things lame. And avoid the phrase spaz out. Instead of lame, you can call something boring or unoriginal or unexciting or sad. Instead of spaz out you can say flip out or lose it. 3. Avoid expressing surprise (both in and out of their

presence) that disabled people are competent and capable of doing things like holding a job or flying on a plane. 4. Only use diverse to describe groups of people. If

you want to point out that someone is a member of the dominant group, you can call them dominant group or overrepresented. If you want to point out that someone isn’t a member of the dominant group, you can refer to them as underrepresented or marginalized.

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5. Avoid using racial or ethnic terms to describe only

people of color. If you are going to mention someone’s race or ethnicity, then mention it for everyone involved—don’t mark only people of color as having a race.

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE Activity 1. Improve comments said to disabled people. This month, spend a little time each week searching online for inappropriate or problematic comments directed at disabled people. For example, you can search on “problematic things said to wheelchair users.” Once you’ve found a problematic comment, see if you can rephrase that comment in a way that might draw that person in instead. One thing you’re likely to find is that it is common for female wheelchair users to hear “You’re really pretty for someone in a wheelchair.” For which you might come up with an alternative compliment like “I like that shirt! The color really suits you.”

Activity 2. Teach people about markedness and diversity. Each week this month, spend a little time looking up the Wikipedia pages of famous people. Go to the Early Life section, which is where race and ethnicity will be mentioned if they come up at all. For example, the page for actor Jeff (continued)

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(continued)

Bridges does not mention race or ethnicity, while the page for actor Tony Shalhoub does. Then share your findings with someone either in person or in writing. For example, you could send a short email to a friend that includes something like this (but in your own words): “Can I share something I learned recently? It’s that in the US, white people almost never have their race mentioned, while people from any other racial group almost always do. For example, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Jeff Bridges, and here’s the one on Tony Shalhoub.” Bonus points! Keep your eyes open for discussions of diversity and look for how often they do and do not mention people from unmarked categories. For example, you might keep track of how many times diversity is described only as related to people who aren’t white, aren’t male, aren’t heterosexual, aren’t cisgender, or aren’t abled. And then compare that how many times people such as white, heterosexual, cisgender men are also explicitly included in the discussion.

Activity 3. Notice and work on accessibility. Improvements can always be made to increase accessibility and accommodations for disabled people. Here are a few suggestions of how you can make things more accessible (many more suggestions are out there on the internet). 1. Supply alt-text and captions for all photos that you

use that may be read by electronic readers. This includes all posts on social media. 2. Use large fonts and high-contrast colors for slide

presentations. Some presentation software has integrated tools that improve accessibility.

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3. Consider using a hyperlegible font for your online

and written materials. For example, you can download the Atkinson Hyperlegible font for free from the Braille Institute. 4. For online meetings and webinars, make live cap-

tioning an option. And offer it to participants in advance so they don’t feel awkward requesting it. 5. At live meetings and events, always use the

­microphone if you are speaking orally. Your “my voice is loud enough” might not actually be loud or clear enough for someone who is hard of hearing. 6. Make sure all videos are captioned. For example,

onboarding and training videos. Or videos you put out as a content creator. If you have used auto captioning for your content, you’ll want to check the accuracy of those captions, especially if the content is highly technical. 7. Use emojis like

instead of emoticons like :-) for

anything that might be read by a text reader for visually impaired people. Also, avoid using lots of emojis in a row for anything that will be read by a text reader, as it reads each emoji out loud. 8. Put fields on event registration forms where people

can mark disabilities and necessary accommodations. And it’s better to allow people to request accommodations on the original form instead of having to go through an additional process. (continued) - 125 -

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(continued)

9. Make sure there are ASL interpreters for public

events. If you’re a celebrity, consider following musician Olivia Rodrigo’s lead and bringing your own ASL interpreter to places like the Grammys red carpet. 10. For events, put accessibility information in the

event footer. For example, are there ramps? Reserved spots for wheelchair users? In areas with public transit, you can check for accessible routes and list them after making sure accommodations are in place—is that subway elevator actually working?

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5 Incorporate Other Perspectives

IN 2015, A PERSON whose name seems to be Tobi learned that his company’s upcoming corporate retreat was going to be held on a plantation in Alabama.1 What’s more, the retreat organizers had scheduled a “period-appropriate” costume ball for one of the evenings. His colleagues were putting together outfits, including a few people who planned to come dressed as Confederate officers. “But they apparently forgot about me, their lone Black employee,” he wrote in a Reddit post. “I am often forgotten about. The moment I saw the theme of the party, I realized I had once again been overlooked.” So, Tobi decided to teach them a lesson. A lesson that would remind them that there was more than one perspective when it came to southern plantations and plantation life. And, as a top performer in the company who usually “keeps all my shenanigans segregated separate from work,” he felt like he was in a safe enough position to do it. (I’ve seen and heard about so much retaliation against people pointing out bias that reading his story, I got really nervous on his behalf. But it sounds like things turned out okay for him.) Tobi put together a costume that mirrored what an enslaved person of the period might wear—a roughly woven hat, tan

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shirt open almost to his waist, suspenders made of coarse rope, rolled-up pants legs, and no shoes. Shortly before arriving, he went to a nearby field, picked some cotton, and put a large sprig in his shirt pocket. (Apparently, his wife asked him to not include his planned name tag, which would have read MY NAME IS: Kunta Kinte TOBI. She felt this would push his costume one step too far.) Tobi showed up early at the party site in his costume and waited as one of his fellow employees walked down the grand staircase, modeling her own costume—a floor-length blue dress with a large, ruffled skirt. A dress that she probably thought was romantic and glamorous. A dress that reflected “plantation life.” And then she saw Tobi at the foot of the stairs, and her face changed in shock. There are photos. You see her pointing to Tobi and, according to the caption, saying, “OMG . . . Did you see what [Tobi] is wearing? Omg . . . I can’t even . . . . . . . . .*silence*.”2 Management quickly cancelled the party, citing “inclement weather” as the reason. And the CEO, who was supposed to be there for the celebration, ended up a no-show. The company did not acknowledge the more likely reason for the cancellation and the no-show—the organizers’ and management’s sudden embarrassment and realization that the retreat location and party theme might have been problematic. Tobi reported, “The climate definitely got palpably stiff and awkward for the rest of the retreat. I was clearly avoided, on more than one occasion. Apparently, an off-color person with matching humor was a bit much for them, lol.” He had a few close friends who were bummed he wasn’t going to mess with the “Confederate officers” at the party, but otherwise the response was mostly silence. (At least that weekend. Not long after the retreat, Tobi got a promotion, a raise, and better benefits. One Redditor commented that Tobi was the only Black person they’d ever heard of who had “successfully received reparations from the white man.”) - 128 -

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What does this story tell us about perspective? For one group of people, a group that surely includes the retreat organizers, plantations have the flavor of the romantic past. They envision people who look like them in big-skirted gowns and with fluttering fans, or wearing droopy bowties and drinking mint juleps on the shaded porch, or being served elaborate dinners by smiling and deferential dark people. It’s Gone with the Wind. It’s a romance novel. It’s an earlier and gentler time, a golden age, part of the proud heritage of the South. From the perspective of people who are white. Who are safe. Who are being served and tended and catered to. Where is Tobi in this scenario? What is his heritage? What is his role at the plantation? At the party? The organizers and attendees didn’t just ignore their lone Black employee. They ignored the perspective of Black people altogether. Instead of quietly going along with this oversight, Tobi used his costume to bring it front and center. He might have gone along with their vision—a vision that conveniently forgot about what his 1850s plantation reality would have been like—and shown up in the kind of “period-appropriate” costume they were envisioning for male employees. Like maybe a vest, frock coat, and cravat. But instead, he made it impossible to ignore the reality that they had, up to that point, entirely neglected to incorporate into their vision—the existence and presence of enslaved people. Because for the descendants of enslaved people, plantations have an entirely different flavor. For stolen and enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants, plantations were essentially concentration camps. Locations of forced labor, torture, and the deprivation of almost all human rights. Of systemic rape and forced reproduction. Places where labor and knowledge were stolen and used to enrich others. (Can you imagine a company holding an on-site “concentration camp” party? Where you dressed up as a guard or an experimental doctor or an SS officer - 129 -

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and remembered with gentle nostalgia their contribution to your heritage?) These people were not wearing beautiful gowns and frock coats and walking around a beautiful plantation house being catered to. They were the ones doing the catering—and not by choice. People in power positions often forget that their experience isn’t everyone’s experience. That their lived reality isn’t everyone’s lived reality. That the flavor for them isn’t the flavor for everyone. So you end up with situations like this terribly planned corporate retreat. An American example that has parallels in other places where European colonial conquest is romanticized, whitewashed, and presented only from the perspective of the white colonial rulers. When we forget to incorporate other perspectives, we run the risk of erasing people, of forgetting about people, of causing pain for people. And forgetting about other perspectives makes it harder for us to make good choices, or choices that signal our good intentions.

PRINCIPLE 4 Inclusive language incorporates other perspectives. Problematic language presents a single perspective, especially the perspective of people with power, as if it is universal.

WHAT IS PERSPECTIVE TAKING? Have you ever found yourself thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me”? Like Rob in Chapter 1, who couldn’t

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understand why his work friend Shirin was so touchy, seemed so “oversensitive,” about being called exotic. (Or like me, before I did my dissertation research and really dug into language and social meaning.) This response can be a real blocker to inclusive language and is usually a failure of perspective taking. Perspective taking is a cognitive skill that involves projecting into another person’s point of view. There are two major components: 1. Role switch. Here, you look at the situation from the

other person’s perspective. You’re saying something like, “if it was me in that position, how would I feel?” 2. Lived experience. Here, you take into account potential

differences in experiences, norms, and values. “If I had had that person’s experiences and I was in that position, how would I feel?” It is very common for people to skip this second step. But if you do, you’re likely to make suboptimal choices when it comes to inclusion. Because even small changes in position can really change your life experience. Like height, hair texture, or your place in the birth order. Bigger changes in position can cause even bigger differences. For example, many of those dimensions of human identity that I laid out in the Introduction, such as gender, religion, race, disability, neurotypicality, class, and sexuality, can lead to very different life experiences. And different lived experiences can lead to different reactions to the same situation. For every category where you’re the dominant group, you’ll probably have to do a little extra work to understand the life experiences of people in other groups. That’s because you’ve probably

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grown up with a data deficit, where you just didn’t get enough information on other kinds of people to have accurate mental models or databases. For example, if you’re male (and were assigned male at birth), you might have to do some research to understand the life experiences of people who aren’t male. If you’re allistic, you’ll probably need to learn more about autistic experiences to do that important second step of perspective taking. If you’re a dominant race or ethnicity, you might have to put in some effort to learn more about the experiences of other races and ethnicities. And if you are and have always been abled, you might need to learn more about the experiences of—and challenges faced by—disabled people. So, when you say “I wouldn’t mind if someone said that to me,” you’re only taking the first step in perspective taking. You’re missing that crucial second step, where different experiences can lead to different reactions to the same situation. You may get stuck in your intent. You may try to explain why there isn’t a problem, saying things like:

• • •

“But there’s nothing wrong with that word.” “You shouldn’t take it personally.” “I’m sorry if you took it the wrong way.”

This is a failure of perspective taking. You’re not going the whole way. You’re getting stuck in your own experience. So the next time someone tells you they have a problem with a word, now you know you need to take both steps in perspective taking. How does that person’s lived experience differ from yours? How has that caused the flavor of that word to be different for them than it is for you? Is there an article or social media post you can read to learn more?

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WHO IS IN THE PRONOUN CIRCLE? It was Mother’s Day, and the cashier turned to Layla and asked, “Are you a mother?” The tears Layla had been holding back spilled out of her eyes, and she could barely get out the words that were stuck in her throat. “No, I’m not,” she whispered hoarsely. “And I don’t think you should be asking people that question today.” The cashier looked surprised and uncomfortable. “Oh, sorry,” he mumbled. “I was told that I’m supposed to wish everyone a Happy Mother’s Day if it seems appropriate.” He was clearly upset at the distress he had inadvertently caused by just following the orders his manager had given him. Mother’s Day was already a difficult day for Layla. It was a day that she was reminded of her miscarriages and failed IVF treatments. Of her desperate longing to be a mother, and of the heartache she felt that all their attempts so far had failed. So, to have someone ask her, point blank, “are you a mother?” when she was simply trying to buy groceries? It was just too much. Layla resolved that next year she would just hide out at home. Because who knew how much pain interacting with other people might cause, even if she was just running a mundane errand like going to the supermarket.

•••

What went wrong here? In this case, we can trace the trouble back to the pronoun everyone. There are a small number of pronouns that turn out to be problematic if you use them unthinkingly. If you don’t actively work to incorporate other perspectives when using these pronouns, you might be forgetting about people. And causing them real distress, like with Layla, who was brought to tears by what was meant as a simple, friendly question.

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These pronouns are:

• • • • •

You We Us Everyone Everybody

How does this play out with Mother’s Day? Here in the US, I see companies of all kinds sending out messages like “This Sunday, we all honor our mothers” and “Wishing you a Happy Mother’s Day.” But not everybody finds Mother’s Day a day of celebration. Like Layla, some people want to be mothers but aren’t, and it is incredibly painful for them—they’ve had fertility issues or miscarriages or stillbirths. Other people have a child who has died. And some people have chosen to be child free. So when a manager tells a cashier, “I want you to wish everyone a Happy Mother’s Day if it seems appropriate,” they are setting up that cashier for trouble. The manager means that the cashier should say “Happy Mother’s Day” to every customer who appears to be female and old enough to have children. They are not being careful with who is a part of that everyone and who isn’t. Not every female customer in a particular age range will welcome questions about their parental status or be happy to be told “Happy Mother’s Day.” There are also issues with language that suggests that “we all” honor our mother on Mother’s Day. Some people were raised without a mother—they might have two dads, or have been raised by their grandparents or some other family configuration, or have been raised in foster care. Some people were raised by abusive mothers and have cut contact. Other people have mothers who have died. - 134 -

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So, when companies put messages like “We all honor our mothers” into their external communications, they are guaranteed to make some people feel forgotten about. Or to cause sorrow, as some people think about the good mother they never had or the good mother who is now gone.

•••

Let’s picture who is being pointed to by a pronoun. You can think of the people being referred to as being inside the circle. Let’s call this the pronoun circle. When you use we in a sentence in which you are addressing an audience, you probably want the pronoun circle to include everybody reading or hearing that sentence. But, unless you’ve been proactive and extremely careful, there is always the chance that someone is getting left out. There may be groups of people who are not actually getting mapped to the set of people inside your current pronoun circle. Because their perspectives haven’t been considered, and they have been left out. The goal is to make sure that either 1) everybody in your intended audience is included within the boundaries of the pronoun circle or 2) you change your language to be more precise. You don’t have to try and shove everyone into a pronoun circle; sometimes it’s better to write or say additional words that acknowledge that your statement doesn’t apply to everyone. You probably wouldn’t write, “Having problems finding just the right furniture for your second home? We’ve all been there.” (Unless you’re writing for a magazine or website specifically aimed at people known to have second homes.) Because it’s probably obvious that there are many people who don’t have second homes, and so they don’t fit in that pronoun circle. If you work in internal communications, you probably wouldn’t write “We’ve all dealt with difficult clients” in a message going out to everyone in your organization. Because people - 135 -

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who do back-office work or internal services aren’t dealing with clients. But in spring of 2020, in the early months of the pandemic in the US, I read articles that said things like “Now that we’re stuck at home and we have more free time . . .” Here, the authors were forgetting about people taking care of young children and doing remote work at the same time. And they were also forgetting about essential workers—medical staff, supermarket workers, gas station attendants, and more—who were risking their lives and physically leaving home to go to work. I see things like “Worried you’ve put on weight after the holidays? We’ve all been there.” But some people don’t worry about their weight. Or have eating disorders that mean they are dangerously underweight and are being encouraged to gain weight. Or have cancer and wish they could have enjoyed holiday food the way they used to. So if you’re writing something like “We’ve all been there,” you really want to make sure it’s true. And that everyone in your audience has actually been there. Otherwise, the implication is that either you haven’t remembered that there are people who don’t fit in the pronoun circle—or that you’ve thought about them and decided that they don’t really matter. In the late 2010s, I was struck by an Ancestry.com ad every time I saw it on the internet. The short ad asked readers, “What does your English last name mean?” And if you went to the blog on Ancestry.com, you could read a 2014 article explaining the seven types of English last names.3 As a reader, you could learn that your English last name originally described an ancestor’s occupation (Carpenter), personal characteristic (Swift), location (Burton), estate (Staunton), father’s name (Richardson), nearby landscape feature (Lake), or patron (Kilpatrick). But, like the organizers of Tobi’s plantation retreat and period ball, the authors of this ad and blog post - 136 -

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seemed to have forgotten about another category: the descendants of enslaved Africans. For millions of people in the US and elsewhere, their English last name means that their ancestor was owned by someone with an English last name. If you’re a Black person named Washington, you’re not tracing your heritage back to a charming town in England that lent its name to your ancestor. You’re tracing it back to a slave owner named Washington who forced his family name onto enslaved people as a sign of his ownership. So what can you do to avoid mistakes like these? One of the easiest fixes is to add language that shows that you recognize that not everyone is included in the pronoun circle. Instead of “We all honor our mothers on Mother’s Day,” you can write, “For those of you celebrating Mother’s Day this Sunday . . .” Instead of “Remember your time in your college dorm?” you can show that you recognize that not everyone went to college, and that even people who did go to college might not have gone away or lived in a dorm. “If you lived in a college dorm, you might remember . . .” And instead of, “You’ve been dreaming about your wedding since you were young,” you can use language that includes other perspectives—because not everyone wants to get married, has historically had the opportunity to get married, or has been focused on their wedding day. “If you’re the kind of person who has been dreaming about your wedding since you were young . . .” Before you send out a piece of writing or video—like a widely distributed email or press release or article or ad campaign—it’s a good idea to take the time to quickly think through the pronoun circle for each time you have used you, we, us, everyone, and everybody. Are people being left out of that pronoun circle? If so, then you can make your language more precise and show that you have thought about and incorporated multiple positions. - 137 -

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REMEMBER THE PERSON WHO HAS BEEN HARMED Content warning: sexual assault. Brock Turner was in his first year at Stanford, an elite university in Northern California. In January of 2015, he was found behind a dumpster with a fellow student who was unconscious. Instead of helping her—like using her phone to call a friend or bringing her to a campus office—he was found brutally sexually assaulting her. The graduate students who found him, tackled him when he tried to run, and then restrained him were so upset by what they had seen that one of them was crying when the police arrived.4 But both the letter of support that Turner’s father sent to the court and the judge’s comments during the case focused almost entirely on the perspective of the rapist. And not the victim. When it comes to problematic behavior, including harassment and assault, it is common to find a focus on the perspective of the perpetrator when that person is in a position of power. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, can mean either institutional power, like being a dean of a law school, or social power, like being male and a member of the dominant race or ethnicity. In these cases, the perpetrator is often extensively humanized and empathized with. Treated with compassion. With care and concern for their career, their education, their life. And their victim’s perspective is ignored. In his letter, Turner’s father wrote about how his son was “absolutely devastated by the events of January 17th . . .” but fails to mention what those events were—his violent rape of an unconscious woman and his attempt to flee. And he mentions that “this incident” has had a “devastating impact” on his son. But there is no mention of the devastating impact that his son’s brutal assault had on his victim. - 138 -

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In his comments and his ruling, the judge, Aaron Persky, said things that continuously humanized and sympathized with Turner. Persky pointed out that a character letter in support of Turner “just rang true” and that his character “up until the night of the incident” was positive. The judge was especially concerned that this student athlete studying at an elite school would be unduly harmed by a long prison sentence, worried that it would have “a severe effect” on him. In the end, Turner was sentenced to just six months in prison, and was released after serving only three months. Almost entirely absent from the judge’s comments, and seemingly from his consideration, was the perspective of the assault victim. Even though in the victim impact letter she read to the court, she said she wanted to “take my body off like a jacket.” And she pointed out how Turner had taken “my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice . . .” When the ruling was made public, there was real outrage in response to Persky’s extreme concern for the sexual assaulter and minimal concern for the victim of his assault. Failing to consider who in your audience doesn’t share your experience is a general type of exclusion, as we saw with Tobi and Layla, both of whom were hurt when people didn’t consider things from the perspective of people in their group. But in cases such as sexual assault, someone very specific is often excluded from consideration: the actual victim of the assault. And the legal consequences—or lack of consequences—can be even more frustrating and have more problematic outcomes. In Chapter 2, I wrote about the linguistic distortion I call softening language. One major way softening language can cause problems is by getting a reader or listener stuck in one perspective and erasing or ignoring other perspectives. And that preferred perspective is almost always of the person in a power position. For Brock Turner, it was being white, male, an athlete, and at an elite college. - 139 -

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When it comes to sexual assault, it is common to find softening language used to describe the actions of the perpetrator, the person causing harm. For example, 2020 headlines reporting the death of former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau were filled with softening language. Such as “Mary Kay Letourneau, who made headlines for her relationship with underage student, dies.”5 This summary doesn’t tell us what kind of headlines Letourneau made, although by the end of the sentence you can assume they weren’t good ones. And “underage” is vague, so you might think the student in question was maybe just below the age of consent. But the word “relationship” in particular is deeply problematic and distorting. Think about the standard semantic frame for a romantic relationship. There are probably two people, both of them consenting, and an ongoing emotional connection and possible sexual activity. The more accurate term to use for Letourneau’s “relationship” with her underage student is rape. A child cannot have consensual sex with an adult. And the student was indeed a child. He was in sixth grade and twelve years old; she was thirty-four. In the end, Letourneau was convicted and jailed for two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child. At the time of her trial, Letourneau was young and white and pretty. Even decades later, at her death, the softening language that so often describes problematic behavior by pretty white women was still being used. A more accurate and unsoftened version of the headline might be “Mary Kay Letourneau, who went to prison for raping her 12-year-old student, dies.” This headline is no longer stuck in the sympathetic perspective of the sexual assaulter and better reflects the world. When it comes to public descriptions of sexual assault by people with power, softening language seems to be more common - 140 -

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than accurate descriptions. In a tweet from August 2022, a church member wrote, I remember when a youth pastor was fired for “inappropriate texting” w/ a teen. Of course, they never gave details. 6 yrs later I heard what the text said. I felt physically ill and furious. I learned that day when a church says “inappropriate” it is almost never the right word.6 In a later tweet, she added, “Only the survivors know how horrific it was. It’s still going on but at another church now. The leader has never shown any remorse. The damage is incalculable.” So, when we’re aiming to be more inclusive, it’s important to pause and remember the person who has been harmed. Is their perspective being incorporated? Is their voice being heard? Is softening language masking the amount of harm that was done to them? If you find softening language, it’s useful to take the time to translate the sentence into a more accurate reflection of reality. This will help counteract distortions and create more accurate mental models.

WHO IS CENTERED? I love watching house tours on YouTube, especially the ones where you get sneak peaks into the homes of interior designers. One day, I watched a house tour on one of my favorite channels. When the homeowner opened a door off the bedroom, the host exclaimed, “Oh, a master bathroom! . . . And you’ve got Oriental rugs instead of bathmats, I love that.” It’s time to stop saying Oriental. Let me break down why even a way to refer to a rug can have deeper and more unpleasant meanings that you might realize. (It’s also time to stop saying master bathroom, but I’ll talk about that in Chapter 7.) - 141 -

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•••

So what’s wrong with Oriental? It’s just an innocuous word that means “Eastern” or “Asian,” right? Well, like a lot of other problematic words, once you dig a bit deeper, you start to find the complications. Oriental comes from Latin and means “from the east,” originally, the place where the sun rises. So then the big question is: To the east of what? Who is at the center? The answer is, of course, originally Europe. (Note that from where I am sitting in California, Asia is actually due west.) Let’s look at the semantic framing for Oriental and the scenario it invokes. The base scenario is a European person defining places to the east in relationship to themselves. In this scenario, many different locations, ethnic groups, art styles, cuisines, and objects are being lumped together under one giant umbrella—Oriental. In addition to “incorporate other perspectives,” this use of Oriental violates a few more of the Six Principles: show respect, draw people in, and prevent erasure. It’s not respectful to define more than four billion people only in relation to yourself. It is marginalizing to use a monolithic label to refer to billions of people and seventeen million square miles of territory. Using a single term erases all kinds of differences and suggests that the group is much more homogenous than it is—flattening out more than two thousand languages, various histories, and greatly different cultures. You may have heard of the male gaze.7 The term comes from theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 analysis of gender in cinema. She noted that most films and television shows were set up in a way that implied that the watcher—both the person behind the camera and the eventual viewer—was a heterosexual man. And that women (and often girls) were presented as passive objects of - 142 -

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desire and constantly sexualized. That they were seen as objects, and unlike the male viewer, not as fully individual people. With Oriental, what we’re seeing is the “white gaze.” Where whiteness is at the center. And where the presumed speaker and audience are white. It’s like when people say “a diverse candidate” to mean a person who isn’t white or isn’t male or abled. Who is the default? Who is a “regular” person? Who is at the center? Who is universal? As I noted in Chapter 4, diversity is a word that refers to more than one person; everyone contributes to diversity. Phrases like diverse candidate suggest that whiteness is normal and the assumed center point—the perspective from which the world is observed, catalogued, and talked about. In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, a book that has been influential for decades.8 He pointed out many problems in European depictions of “the Orient,” which covered territory from North Africa through the Middle East and over to East Asia. Orientalism fetishized people from these places, especially women and young boys. Orientalism lumped together traditions and ethnicities and relied on vague and inaccurate stereotypes. Orientalism was contemptuous of people from these places and presented Europeans as inherently superior. And Orientalism was part of a world view that presented white Europeans as the “saviors” and rightful conquerors of the immoral, inferior, and primitive inhabitants of the Orient. With this additional perspective, the term Oriental doesn’t seem that innocuous. Or like it’s just a neutral way to refer to a carpet or a chicken salad. In fact, Oriental is a term that promotes and centers whiteness. So I recommend being more precise with your terminology. Want to talk about a rug? Be specific. Is it Moroccan? Turkish? Afghan? Chinese? - 143 -

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Want to talk about a cuisine or object or ritual or person? Use a nation or ethnicity. Like Kurdish. Hmong. Tuareg. People and objects shouldn’t be inherently defined in relation to Europe or whiteness. When we work to incorporate all kinds of other perspectives, we can do a better job of including, respecting, and centering people with backgrounds different from our own.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. If you’re in the US, avoid romanticizing plantations

and Spanish missions. Don’t present them as aspirational—like a romantic “plantation wedding” or “plantation shutters.” For descendants of enslaved Africans and for Native Americans, these are the sites of atrocities. 2. When talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, avoid

language like “When we were all staying at home and had extra time on our hands.” Use language that includes the perspectives of a) essential workers who did not stay home, and b) people taking care of small children who had anything but extra time on their hands. 3. Don’t offer a blanket “Happy Mother’s Day” or

“Happy Father’s Day.” For many people, these holidays are a point of pain or are simply not relevant. Make sure you know enough about a person and their circumstances before you say or write “Happy Mother’s Day” or “Happy Father’s Day” to them. 4. Instead of Oriental, say Asian. And, whenever pos-

sible, be more precise—for example, say Chinese or Pakistani or Cambodian. 5. When you see headlines like “Police officer had sex

with underage girl in the back of his car,” translate them to be more accurate. (This is a real headline; I have just removed the identifying specifics.) Rape (continued)

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(continued)

is an unpleasant word, but the actually appropriate term, as children cannot consent to sex with adults. And if you’re someone who writes headlines, then you can avoid softening language that takes the perspective of the perpetrator.

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE Activity 1. Diversify your media consumption. One of the easiest ways to get access to other perspectives is to diversify your media consumption. Each week, think about a group of people you don’t know that much about. Then spend 5 to 10 minutes a day adding people from that group to your social media feeds on whatever platforms you are using. Watch videos by people from that group on your preferred platform. Watch TV shows and movies featuring that group of people (but make sure that in-group members were writers and producers). And if you like to read books, look for fiction and nonfiction written by members of that group. For example, let’s say you want to learn more about disabled people. You can watch the documentary Crip Camp and you can read Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Tausig. And if you’re on social media, you can follow Imani Barbarin, Alice Wong, and Nyle DiMarco—and then look at the people they follow or quote and add them to the list of people you follow.

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Activity 2. Map out some pronoun circles. It’s a good idea to do this activity for 10 minutes twice a week. Go through a text that is easy to search. Look for times the author uses the pronouns you, we, us, everyone, and everybody. Using the Dimensions of Human Identity at the end of the Introduction as a prompt, look for people who might be left out of the pronoun circle that is being pointed to. If you find an example in which a type of person is being excluded from the pronoun circle, rewrite the sentence to acknowledge that the pronoun doesn’t actually point to everybody. For example, if you find, “We all love taking walks in the woods . . .” you can rephrase it as “For those of you who love taking walks in the woods . . .” Now people with mobility issues or chronic illnesses or other conditions that may prevent them from going on walks in the woods are being taken into consideration.

Activity 3. Rewrite softening language. Consider doing this activity for 15 minutes once a week. Look for softening language in reporting or commentary on problematic behavior. Some easy places to find softening language are reports on sexual harassment or sexual assault by people with power (power in an organization or social power), reports on police violence against unarmed people, and reports on how large companies treat their employees. (continued)

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(continued)

Then rewrite the softening language so it is more accurate. Bonus points if you write a sentence about the impact on a person who was harmed and whose perspective wasn’t included in or was minimized by the reporting. For example, if you find the (real) headline, “A male suspect did not survive Saturday night’s police-involved shooting,” you can rewrite it as, “Police shot and killed a male suspect Saturday night.” And if you find the (also real) headline, “An off-duty officer is under investigation after a dispute with his wife resulted in a handgun being discharged and her being shot,” you can rewrite it as, “An off-duty police officer is under investigation after shooting his wife during a dispute.”

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6 Prevent Erasure

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, and my new colleague Lauren had a slight smile that kept on shifting into a wider one. “Hey, you look happy,” I said. “Did you have a good weekend?” “Yeah, I did.” She paused. “I had a really good first date. It feels . . . promising.” “Oh, good for you. So exciting! Tell me, what’s he like?” She stopped for a good few seconds, her smile now gone. Finally, with a very small sigh, she said, “Actually . . . it’s she. What’s she like. I date women.” It’s more than a decade later, and I still wince at the memory. Just one tiny word had told Lauren that I didn’t see her. That I hadn’t considered the various possibilities of who she might be. That I hadn’t been inclusive or remembered to pay attention to the fact that there are people out there who aren’t like me. Lauren hadn’t given clues, like wearing rainbow earrings or a Pride shirt, but she shouldn’t have had to. I had put Lauren in an awkward position where she had to make a snap decision. Could I be trusted? I’m relieved to this day that she decided the answer was “yes” and trusted me enough to just make that gentle correction and move forward. I hope that I had been inclusive in other ways that let her take that leap of faith.

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It is painful to not be seen. To be erased. In this chapter, you’ll learn more about how you can avoid causing this kind of pain.

PRINCIPLE 5 Inclusive language prevents erasure. Problematic language erases people and histories.

HEY, GUYS Mike opened the meeting the way he likes to, with praise for his team. “You guys, you did such great work this week!” And throughout the meeting, he said things like “Hey, guys, let’s move on to Q3” and “Guys! This is what we have to focus on.” Later that day, Mike and Nayeli were in their weekly one-onone meeting when she paused and said, “Hey, Mike? I’ve been talking with the other women on the team, and we’d appreciate it if you stopped calling us all guys. It’s just not inclusive.” Mike was surprised—and a little hurt. He prided himself on his easygoing and relaxed management style. “But guys means everyone!” he protested. “You know I’m including you when I say, ‘you guys’ to the whole team.” So, was Mike being inclusive? Do phrases like you guys actually refer to everyone? Remember how semantic frames map a word to the world around us? Well, it turns out that male-specific words create male-specific mental models. There is a classic study where people were asked to choose illustrations for a textbook. One group was given gender-specific

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titles, like Industrial Man. The other group was given gender-neutral titles, like The Industrial Age. As you might expect, the Industrial Man group chose photos of men way more frequently than the Industrial Age group.1 Experiments like these show that words like man have a male-specific framing and help create and reinforce mental models that are also male-specific. We can do some easy semantic testing to see if guy and guys are universal when it comes to gender, or if they are gender specific. 1. Nayeli, who is female, is in a restaurant and needs to use

the bathroom. The first restroom door she walks by says Guys on it. Does she decide this is the bathroom for her? Or does she keep walking down the hall and look for a door that says something like Girls or Gals or Dolls? (She’s probably not going to find a restroom labeled Gender Inclusive at this restaurant.) 2. Nayeli and Mike are sitting outside. Mike points at two

people sitting at a table in the distance and says, “Hey, Nayeli, who is that guy over there?” Does she think he’s referring to the person at the table who appears to be male? Or the person at the table who appears to be female? 3. Mike is straight. Diego asks him, “So, since you moved to

town, how many guys have you dated? I know it can be hard to meet people here.” Does Mike think that Diego is asking about all the people he has gone out on dates with, regardless of gender? Does this sound like a usual question to ask a straight man?

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Or does it sound like Diego thinks that Mike dates men and is asking only about men he has dated since moving to town? The semantic testing for 1, 2, and 3 tells us that the common semantic framing for guy and guys is male. Not gender neutral. Not universal. But specifically male. So, when people use guys and you guys and hey, guys to address mixed-gender groups of people (and, sometimes, all-female groups of people), there is a real mismatch—even though their intention is to include everybody. The semantic framing points to male people only. Using guys as if it represents everyone erases people who aren’t male.

•••

During just a single week while writing this chapter, I saw several museum labels describing the craftmanship of pieces that were created by women. I read about the fate of mankind in a time of climate crisis. I heard about manmade materials. I read about manned space flights. I heard about freshman year in college. I saw someone described as the middleman. I read a statement from a committee chairman. These are all examples of gender-specific language. In particular, masculine words are frequently used as if they represent everybody. But, as we saw with that semantic testing for the word guys, gender-specific words only represent some people. And they erase others. English speakers—and speakers of many other languages— will often treat male-specific words as if they are universal. As if maleness is the default state. As if every human fits under the umbrella of words like man and mankind. And as if every animal you see, unless obviously female, is a male animal. (I can’t tell you how many wild animals on the internet I see referred to as “this little guy” or “this fella.”) - 152 -

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But this is demonstrably false. So, to be more inclusive, you can shift to gender-neutral language, which avoids the erasure that comes with gender-specific language. See the suggested substitutions in the Resources section at the end of this book for some gender-neutral substitutes. Shifting from gender-specific language to gender-neutral language is an important way to prevent erasure.

AVOID MISNAMING PEOPLE A few years ago, a woman named Tina wrote to Reddit to get advice. She was the only Black person in her office, and for a full year, her colleagues had been saying her name wrong—calling her Tiana, Tiara, or Tia. After a year of politely correcting them, she’d had enough. And she was considering calling her colleagues wrong names in return. Like if Charles and Jennifer called her Tiana, calling them Chad and Jessica in response. It may seem like a small thing to get someone’s name wrong. But imagine how Tina felt after a year of her teammates repeatedly saying her name wrong, even after being corrected. The message she received is clear:

• • •

You’re not important enough for me to put in effort. You don’t matter enough for me to be careful with you. You’re different, so I’m going to highlight your difference with an “exotic” name like Tiana, not a “normal” name like Tina.

These are all the opposite of the messages you send with inclusive language. Inclusive language tells people that you see them. That you’re paying attention to them. Names are a foundational part of inclusive language. When we misname people, we are erasing an important part of - 153 -

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their identity. And sometimes we erase their unique identity altogether. For example, in the 1860s, George M. Pullman started hiring Black men as porters for his luxury railroad cars. He specifically hired men who were dark-skinned, reasoning that this would make them “more invisible” to his white passengers, who were middle class and upper class.2 Instead of being called by their names, these Black porters were usually addressed as either “George” or “boy” by those passengers. In Chapter 5, I pointed out that many Black Americans with English family names don’t trace their ancestry back to England but instead to an ancestor who was named after a man who “owned” them—in other words, enslaved people were forced to take on their owner’s family name as a sign of his ownership. When train passengers called the Black men serving them George, they were following that same tradition of erasing individual identities and naming someone after their “owner”—here, company head George Pullman. Calling these porters George and boy instead of their names was dehumanizing and a sign of disrespect that was meant to put them in their place. Porters were called George well into the twentieth century. American actor Mr. T once explained why he had chosen that name for himself: I watched my father being called “boy” . . . A Black man could be 86 years old and the White guy could be 22; the White guy would call the Black man, “boy.” So I selfordained myself Mr. T in 1970, when I was old enough to go to the Army and fight and die for my country. I said I’m old enough to do that, I’m old enough to be called a man. I changed my name to Mr. T so the first word out of everybody’s mouth would be, “Mister.” That’s a sign of respect.3 - 154 -

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Being misnamed, or not being named at all, is really quite common for people from underrepresented groups. Here in the US, most of the examples I see come from situations when there are very few—maybe even just two—of a particular kind of person. I call this kind of misnaming the other one. In March 2022, I was reading my Sunday New York Times when I came across an article with the headline “Tennis Star’s Venture Firm Has Raised $111 Million.” The article was about Serena Williams, so I wasn’t surprised to see that she wasn’t named in the headline—leaving women’s names out of headlines is a common journalistic practice. (This is a subtler kind of erasure.) But I was surprised to see the article illustrated with a photo of Serena’s older sister, Venus Williams—here, labeled as Serena Williams. “Oh, the other one!” I said and took a photo to upload to my database. On Twitter, Williams called out the New York Times for their mistake.4 She noted that her fund was specifically “to support the founders who are overlooked” by people who are “woefully unaware of their biases.” Because, as she pointed out, “even I am overlooked.” I hear similar stories of misnaming and erasure from my clients. A senior manager once came to me with a problem. His team used to have just one Latine man, Miguel, until Miguel left for another company. A few months later, he hired Antonio, who had also grown up in Mexico. And people on his team, especially the ones working in satellite offices, kept on calling the new hire, Antonio, the name of their old teammate, Miguel. This made Antonio seriously unhappy. “What, are all Mexicans the same to them?” he asked his manager, who was mortified. When a team or a department or a company has just two people from the same underrepresented group, those two people are often confused for each other and called the other one’s name. - 155 -

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In fact, it’s so common that pretty much every time I talk about this kind of misnaming in an in-person workshop, at least one person will come up at the end and give me a new example. I used to think this was only an issue for people who weren’t very high up in the org chart. But at one workshop, a woman stood up to talk about her own experience, and her story gave me new insights. She was South Asian and was constantly being called the name of another South Asian woman in her organization. But what was genuinely surprising to me was that both of these people were Vice Presidents. Why was this so surprising? Because when you misname someone, you’re not really paying attention to them. And we usually pay a lot of attention to people in power. So I had assumed that being a Vice President would mean that people paid enough attention to get your name right. But it turned out I was wrong. Being female, brown-skinned, from an underrepresented group, and with an unusual name— these were all factors that combined to outrank the status of Vice President. And when people are misnamed at work, there are negative outcomes that go beyond how disrespected and excluded they feel. For example, what happens when it comes time to evaluate a misnamed person’s work performance? If two people are being mistaken for each other and misnamed all the time, how do you know who should actually get credit for something? And if just one of them is saying or doing problematic things, how do you know who to give feedback to? Another important kind of misnaming is deadnaming. This is when someone changes their name, usually when changing their gender presentation, and instead of the new chosen name, they are called by their old name. Their deadname. I’ve heard stories where people are deadnamed by their colleagues, by their friends, and by their family. If you grew up thinking someone named - 156 -

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Tony was male and then they tell you, “Actually, I’m female, and now I go by Isabella,” then the only polite thing to do is call that person Isabella from that point onward. Some people find it hard to accept that a person’s gender isn’t what they thought. And that this person’s new name, which better reflects their gender, is the only name for them now. Or people just slip up and use the deadname because they aren’t used to the new name. But using someone’s deadname erases their gender identity, their perspective, and their reality. And being deadnamed can be extremely traumatic for a transgender person. It can bring them back to a time of gender dysphoria (feeling a mismatch between your biological sex and your gender identity), which for many is a time of depression and anxiety.5 Or possibly even a time when they were suicidal: it is estimated that 82 percent of transgender people have had suicidal thoughts and that fully 40 percent of transgender people have actually attempted suicide.6 So it’s important to use someone’s correct name. In headlines, in emails, and in conversations. Even if they look like someone who you feel should have a different name, or used to look different, the respectful thing to do is pay attention to what a person wants to be called and then call them that. Being careful with names will help you prevent erasure and avoid causing people unnecessary pain.

FLESH-COLORED, SKIN-TONED, AND NUDE Have you ever thought about what it means for a bandage to be flesh-colored? Or for clothing to be called skin-toned or nude? Back in the day, I had a crayon called flesh color. I used to sometimes wear nude hose when I was dressing up for work as a temp secretary or for fancy events. And my bandages were skin-toned. - 157 -

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These phrases described basically one color, a sort of peachy tan. Mapping flesh and skin to just one color suggested that this was everybody’s skin tone. It certainly wasn’t my skin tone, even though I’m technically considered white—my skin is tan with olive undertones, so the bandages were paler and pinker than skin surrounding them. This usage erased people who didn’t have skin that matched a sort of peachy tan. In general, it erased people with darker skin. They weren’t part of the group that the products were being designed for. And what’s worse, the non-inclusive language suggested that they didn’t even exist. In the early twenty-first century, large manufacturers finally started to create makeup, underwear, and bandages for the actual diversity of skin tones in the world. People who aren’t a peachy tan are now able to spend their money on products that were actually designed for them. And their joy in something as simple as a bandage purchase is palpable. In 2019, Dominique Apollon, a darker-skinned man, tweeted two photos of his hand with a bandage on it. He wrote, “For the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a band-aid in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it . . . For real I’m holding back tears.”7 When we use inclusive language that prevents erasure, it reminds us that more than one kind of person exists. For example, I now regularly see skin tones talked about in the plural, in a way that better reflects reality. And this use of the plural can help remind us of different perspectives, different experiences, and different needs.

HISTORY BEGINS WITH US In 2019, I went to Denver to co-run a workshop on inclusive language and race. Before I went, I did something I like to do before - 158 -

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I travel somewhere in the US; I googled “when was Denver settled?” This is what popped up as the first result: NOVEMBER 1858

Located on the banks of the South Platte River close to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Denver was founded in November 1858 as a gold mining town . . . Google let me know that this text came from the History of Denver Wikipedia page. In 2019, if you clicked through and read the full entry, you would have seen that the history of Denver apparently started in the 1850s. You’d have to already know there is more history and do extra work to learn that the land where Denver is located has actually been inhabited since at least 1500 BCE, and that in 1851, the land where I delivered the workshop belonged to the Arapaho nation. (Given recent archeological findings a little further south in New Mexico, it is likely that the area has been inhabited for at least tens of thousands of years.)8 White settlers started arriving in the 1850s, and after an 1864 massacre, both the Arapahos and Cheyennes were brutally and forcibly relocated out of Colorado, “clearing the way” for today’s towns and cities. For the casual internet searcher, this history has been erased. It is as if the history of people on the land begins with white people. With settlers of European descent. Of course, that’s not true. The territory that is now the United States was fully inhabited, coast to coast, when the first European colonists arrived. (It was also fully inhabited centuries earlier, when Vikings reached the coast of what is today Canada but got pushed back to Greenland by the local Inuits.) If you are reading this in the US and are not Native, I’d like you to take a moment and find out what percentage of the local population where you live is Native American. (By local, I mean your town or city—something smaller than a county.) - 159 -

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And if you’re reading this outside the US, you can play along by picking a location that’s interesting to you and then going through the same steps. If you’re in a country that was settled by European colonizers, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, you can go through the exercise using your own town or city (or other small region). Okay, do you have the percentage of Native (or other indigenous) people in your location? Now I’d like you to think about what percentage of the local population was Native American in 1491. (Or the year before European colonizers arrived in the country you’re looking at.) In the US, unless you’re in Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, or Arizona—or on a reservation or pueblo or rancheria—chances are excellent that the local Native population is 1 percent or less. How did the places where almost all US residents live go from 100 percent Native American population to 1 percent or under in the last five hundred years? You might think the answer is European diseases, but that gets you only part of the way there. If you grew up in the US, did you learn about the role of white people in the genocidal removal of Native people from their lands? I sure didn’t. I grew up in a town in New York called Commack, an abbreviation of Winnecomac, a name meaning “pleasant lands” in the language spoken by the local Secatogue people. My elementary school was called Indian Hollow, and the occasional lucky kid might find an arrowhead in the schoolyard or the small woods behind it. But we never, not once, talked about where those “Indians” now were. Or why we were living on their land. And we certainly weren’t led to consider whether or not they should still be there. I didn’t even learn the name of the Secatogue nation until decades later, when I was living nearly eight hundred miles away. I had to dig to get this information, and one of the challenges I faced was due to another form of erasure: in many places where - 160 -

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I encountered information about the original inhabitants of the places I lived, the different nations were simply called Indians or Native Americans. This is a form of erasure I still encounter all the time, even in museums, which really should know better. I’m taking a cavern tour, and the tour guide says, “The Native Americans used to . . .” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Miwoks?” I’m in a museum reading about local history and it says, “The Native Americans used to . . .” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Ohlones?” I’m reading a tourist brochure, and it says, “The local Native Americans used to . . .” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Modocs?” As I pointed out in Chapter 5 with the word Oriental, talking about people who are culturally distinct and geographically widespread as if they’re all the same group is insulting. It erases the ways that each group is distinctive and suggests that their distinctiveness is unimportant and uninteresting. I hear something similar from people who grew up in places like El Salvador and Honduras, who are often assumed to be Mexican, and people from Korea and Thailand, who are assumed to be Chinese. And I see people and objects described as simply “African” all the time, which erases vast geographical and cultural differences.9 When I was in grad school, I used to do some volunteer work on language revitalization with people from California nations. Language revitalization is work that people do to push back at what is known as language contraction or language endangerment. A group in which everyone used to speak a language has now been backed into a corner by a whole range of societal pressures, and now only a small percentage of the group—maybe even just a few people—speak it. Language revitalization work pushes out from that corner and makes it possible for more people to use the language and bring it back to places it has disappeared from. For a week, people from all over California would come to UC Berkeley, and grad students would assist them with a language - 161 -

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project. I’d help people learn to read the International Phonetic Alphabet so they could access grammatical knowledge that had been written up when their language was more widely spoken. I’d help people compose new prayers and ritual language. And I’d hang out with them during lunches and campfires and hear just a little about what it was like to be a California Native. A lot of what I’d hear in casual conversation was workshop participants talking about the ways they felt erased. I learned from a Wiyot woman about the 1860 massacre by white people of almost every person on the island called Tuluwat, where her family lived. She was descended from one of the few children who had survived the attack. Through tears, she told us how it felt like outside of the Wiyot nation the memory of this massacre had been erased. “For them, it’s like it never happened.” And Chochenyo, Rumsen, and Mutsun Ohlones, whose families had settled in Northern California many centuries before the Europeans arrived, would tell me how people were shocked to realize there were still Natives living here. “They think we’re a myth,” one told me. “Or all long dead and gone,” another added. “I feel invisible on my own land,” said a third. The Ohlones in the Bay Area are consistently denied access to their sacred sites, some of which now have malls and radio towers sitting on them. There is a constant and ongoing erasure of indigenous people, both here in the US and elsewhere. Many non-Native people write about places as if their history begins with white people. And use umbrella terms like Indians or Native Americans instead of recognizing cultural and ethnic differences. To be more inclusive, those of us who aren’t indigenous to the places where we live need to put in more time, more attention, and more effort to remember and correctly name the people who were here first. In addition, the more we uncover the hidden and erased histories of the people indigenous to our area, the more we - 162 -

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can also reflect their reality, show them respect, and draw them into the conversations we shouldn’t be having without them.

INVISIBLE LESBIANS The erasure of women from domains like history, product design, and public discussion is incredibly common.10 So is the erasure of people who aren’t heterosexual, which is one way of being heteronormative. (Heteronormative describes a world view in which heterosexuality is the only—or the only “normal”—sexual orientation.) So what do you get when you combine the two? A greater likelihood of being forgotten. On the one hand, it makes sense for there to be some ambiguity when it comes to identifying if someone is female and lesbian. (Or a dyke, or queer, or bisexual, or pansexual. There are many sexual orientations, and a range of words that people use to describe themselves. Even when you look at just the set of women who date only women, there isn’t a single umbrella term out there that everyone uses to self-identify. Preferences are often generational, like in the debates on what to call Dyke Day LA.)11 For example, in the US and many other countries, physical affection between women is way more socially acceptable than it is between men. On the other hand, women who are lesbian and queer and bisexual and pansexual genuinely do exist. And we need to make sure they are not forgotten or rendered invisible by the language we use. I’m subscribed to a subreddit called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which highlights the erasure of women who are romantically involved with other women. The subreddit name is itself a joke that references one of the most common kinds of erasure—labeling two women who are romantically involved as friends, best friends, or roommates. (In case you don’t know, Sappho was an - 163 -

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ancient Greek poet who lived on the island of Lesbos and wrote highly esteemed lyric poetry that includes homoerotic content. The word sapphic derives from her name, and the word lesbian derives from her home island.) Despite the ongoing jokes, it’s clearly distressing to the group’s members that they are considered so outlandish, so irrelevant, so marginal, that people continuously forget that they exist. Here are just a few examples of erasure that have been posted: 1. A photograph of a wooden plaque that reads “Women will

never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.” This is problematic for a few reasons, but what I’ll highlight here is that it assumes that a) there are no women with wives, and b) all men have wives. Heteronormativity in action! 2. A photograph of a touchscreen kiosk for patient intake at

a medical office. The kiosk screen asks the question, “In regards to sexual orientation, do you think of yourself as:” and then gives the following set of options for the patient to choose:

• • • • •

Straight or heterosexual I do not understand the question Prefer to discuss with my doctor or practitioner Prefer not to answer More options

What is noticeably missing is a straightforward option for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual, or asexual. (Or other options, as the list of words

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we have to describe sexual orientations keeps on expanding to better reflect reality.) 3. A Skeletor meme in which Skeletor says, “Every hand

you’ve ever shaken, male or female, has had a dick in it at one point.” The person who posted the meme added, “Lesbians don’t exist, I guess.” So, to return to the story from the beginning of this chapter, when I asked Lauren to tell me about her date, saying “what’s he like?” I was in good company. Good company in that there is a lot of erasure out there of women who date other women. But, of course, it’s also bad company, in that every one of us engaging in erasure has made at least one person—and usually, a lot more— feel bad.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. Welcoming a group of adults? Avoid “ladies and

gentlemen,” which erases nonbinary people. Good alternatives include “Welcome, everyone!” or calling people “colleagues” or “friends” or “esteemed guests.” For children, avoid “boys and girls.” Instead, there’s “students,” or “children,” or “­everyone,” and so on. 2. Switch out from “hey, guys” and “you guys” to

­gender-neutral ways to address people. It doesn’t have to be the same word all the time; most people like to switch it up a bit. “Hey, team” can be followed later by “Okay, everyone.” Some people are comfortable with y’all, which is a handy word. (Pittsburgh! You go and enjoy your yinz. And Philly up to the New York metro region, lean in to that youse! [But not youse guys, please.] And England— keep it going with your you lot! Etc.) 3. Switch words with man and men in them for gender-

neutral equivalents. A committee chair. A business­ person. Humanity instead of mankind. Synthetic instead of manmade. For more examples, see the suggested substitutions in the Resources section at the end of this book. 4. Avoid writing about the original inhabitants of your

location as if they are all dead and gone without

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doing some research on their status. Although some Native (or otherwise indigenous) groups didn’t survive colonization as functioning communities, many others did. Let’s say you’re in Northern California and want to write about original place names. Instead of writing something like (the real sentence) “The Pomos once called this mountain Konocti,” you can write, “The Pomos, who have lived near Clear Lake for more than ten thousand years, call this mountain Konocti.” 5. Avoid deadnaming people. This includes saying

things like “Isabella, who used to go by Tony.” If you have known someone a long time, you’ll probably slip up in the early days of a name switch. You can just quickly correct yourself—“Sorry, I meant ­Isabella.”—and move on.

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE Activity 1. Rewrite gender-specific language. This month, keep a running list of masculine words that are used as if they represent everybody. Each time you encounter a sentence with a genderspecific word, write it down. Then, rewrite the sentence with a gender-neutral word. For example: “The workmanship on this boat is amazing.” → “The artisanship on this boat is amazing.” (continued)

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(continued)

“The manmade lake fills with swimmers in the

summer.” → “The artificial lake fills with swimmers in the summer.” “We need more manpower on this project.” → “We need more people to staff this project.”

Activity 2. Look for “the other one.” If you have a hard time correctly naming people who are coworkers, make a list of things that distinguish them. (For physical features, avoid sexualizing them.) Then put in some extra effort when you interact with them and make sure you are using the correct name. If you have a hard time telling two celebrities apart, make a list of things that distinguish them. Then look for photos and videos of them and say or write their name, reminding yourself of their distinguishing features. For example, people (including journalists) frequently misname the American actors Regina King and Regina Hall.12 If you are one of these people, these actors are a great place to start.

Activity 3. Incorporate precolonial history. Once a week for four weeks, choose a place that was settled by European colonizers—either in your country or in another country. Then do an internet search with questions like, “When was [location] founded?” or “When did people arrive in [location]?” Did you find the original inhabitants mentioned? That’s good. But are they named specifically? Using the nation names that they prefer? If not, keep digging until you get

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down to specific names, like Potawatomi, Yurok, Choctaw, and Seminole. If you don’t find indigenous history mentioned, search again and use new search terms to find it, like “Native Americans [location]” or “First Nations [location]” or “Māori [location].” Learn when the location was first inhabited. When talking about that location in the future, use language that doesn’t erase indigenous people. “The area that is now Denver was first settled by Arapahos and Cheyennes. European settlers arrived in the 1850s.” Bonus points! If the local government website erases indigenous history, find a contact person, write to them, and ask them to update it so it is more accurate.

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7 Recognize Pain Points

AFTER RAYMOND FINISHED his presentation, his new colleague Madeline came up to the front of the room. “Wow, I didn’t expect you to know all that European history,” she said. “And you’re so articulate! I’m really impressed.” Raymond gave her a tight smile and muttered, “Thanks.” He couldn’t believe that he was hearing the same pseudo-compliments once again. First was the surprise that someone like him, a Black man, could actually have deep knowledge of European history. Was that sort of knowledge supposed to be limited to people of European descent? Was he expected to have studied African history? Or African American history? And second was the surprise encoded in the phrase “you’re so articulate.” Sure, he had kept the jargon minimal, but he hadn’t said anything particularly fancy. It wasn’t like he had just given a dramatic slam poetry performance or come up with elaborate and lyrical phrases. Raymond had heard this “compliment” so many times that he had known for decades that there was an unspoken second part. What Madeline had said out loud was, “You’re so articulate.” The

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less complimentary and implicit follow-up was “. . . for a Black person.” Madeline probably thought she was being genuinely complimentary when she went up to Raymond to say these things to him. But they landed badly. Because her compliments were actually rooted in stereotypes and bias. And they hit sore spots that had been bruised many times before.

PRINCIPLE 6 Inclusive language recognizes pain points and avoids them whenever possible. Problematic language ignores or lightly references painful history and experiences and itself causes pain.

COMPLIMENTS SHOULD LAND WELL In principle, a compliment should be one of the most positive and pleasant things you can say to someone. Research by neuroscientists shows that compliments and monetary rewards are processed in similar ways by our brains—in other words, getting a compliment can feel as good as getting free money.1 Compliments are an example of prosocial behavior.2 The opposite of antisocial behavior, prosocial behavior involves helping others, what you might call acts of kindness. These include assisting, sharing with, comforting, and protecting people. Prosocial behavior builds and strengthens relationships. And it benefits everyone—both the people on the receiving end and the people on the giving end.3 - 172 -

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But not all compliments are as prosocial as you might think. That’s because some compliments, like “you’re so articulate!” aren’t straightforward praise. Instead, they encode bias. Bias that the person giving the compliment often doesn’t realize they’re expressing.

•••

Let’s dig a little deeper into articulate and why Madeline’s pseudo-compliment was so unpleasant for Raymond. Language reflects our mental models of the world. How we categorize things and how we categorize people. Bias is everywhere in our mental models. And in a commonly found mental model, the category of people who are able to speak coherently, fluently, and in the standard dialect does not include people who are Black. We tend to comment on things that are surprising. And when someone Black speaks coherently, fluently, and in the standard dialect, it can be a surprise to people with that biased categorization. I bring up the example of articulate as a problematic compliment all the time in workshops and office hours. And I get the same kinds of volunteered responses, again and again, from Black attendees who have been called articulate in pseudo-compliments. They fall into two categories. 1. Education. For example, “I can’t tell you how often people

are shocked to learn I have not only a college degree, I also have a master’s. I think they assume someone who looks like me is uneducated.” 2. Language variety. For example, “People are often sur-

prised by how well I speak. And how white I sound to them. I think they expect me to speak ‘broken English’ or use slang all the time.” - 173 -

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In Chapter 3, I talked about unconscious demotions. This is my label for the snap judgment people make when they assume someone has a lower-level job than their real position. In my data collection, which is centered on the US, I’ve found that Black people get unconsciously demoted more than anyone else. What’s more, they get demoted to lower assumed positions than anyone else. For example, down to cleaning staff instead of doctor, or down to criminal defendant instead of lawyer. These demotions point to the same biased mental models and the same lowered expectations that produce compliments like “you’re so articulate.” In these mental models, Black folks aren’t showing up in the set of people who are doctors and lawyers. Who are educated. Who hold high-prestige and high-powered jobs. So that’s the education component. It’s pretty easy to disprove the biased assumption that Black people aren’t educated. But when it comes to dialects and language varieties, things can get a little more complicated. That’s because it’s common for people to make judgments about language based on what we call language ideologies. In other words, when we’re growing up, we don’t just learn the grammar of our language. We also learn a set of beliefs about languages and dialects and speakers. Things like what kind of language is “good” or “bad,” what’s “grammatical” or “ungrammatical,” what’s “appropriate” or “inappropriate.” In linguistic anthropology, we spend a lot of time examining these sets of beliefs and mapping out how they relate to the scientific realities of language. What we usually find is that people walk around with a lot of false assumptions and make value judgments that seem to be, but actually aren’t, about language. (This is true for every country and every language I’ve ever read about in the study of language ideologies.) Instead, our judgments tend to be based on cultural biases that are then applied to language. In recent years, a new field called raciolinguistics has been focusing on how language shapes our ideas about race, and how - 174 -

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race plays a role in how we interpret, judge, and value different language varieties.4 (Similarly, a new field known as crip linguistics looks at the same kinds of interpretations, judgments, and values for disabled ways of communicating.) In the US, the standard dialects of English, which are high prestige, are associated with whiteness. So, when Black people speak standard English, they are often told they “sound white.” Or white people express surprise that they speak that high-prestige dialect. Barack Obama, who is articulate in every possible sense of the word, was often called “articulate” simply because he spoke the standard dialect. Meanwhile, his white colleagues and political opponents who also spoke the standard dialect did not have their language variety commented on at all. What’s more, ways of speaking that index Black Americans are often falsely judged as ungrammatical. As “broken English” or “a collection of errors.” Or as being “just slang.” But the dialects known as African American English are just as grammatical, just as systematic, and just as “good” as standard dialects of English. (Note that African American English is also called African American Language, a term that I actually prefer for linguistic reasons I don’t have the space to get into here.) Let’s say aliens arrived and one of the first things they wanted to know was the grammatical rules of all the dialects of English. (It could happen.) If linguists wrote up descriptions of all the different dialects of English and didn’t say which ones were the standard in their region, the aliens would never be able to guess. If you went by grammatical description only, each dialect would be clearly seen as equally complex and equally valid. It’s only cultural context and bias that lead people to judge some dialects as inferior. For people who weren’t raised speaking African American English, it can be hard to recognize that there are rules. For example, they might not see that speakers aren’t randomly using be. - 175 -

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In the sentence, “It be like that,” the verb be isn’t random or an error. It’s being used to grammatically express that something is invariant or habitual. People who don’t speak this variety of English also usually believe it’s a mistake to say something like “I’da been said leave.” (This was famously said in a Missy Elliot song to a fictionalized Beyoncé about her fictional boyfriend.) But that been is expressing what linguists call remote aspect. Here, it means that an action or a state started a long time ago and is still relevant. The standard English equivalent might be, “I would have started telling you to leave a long time ago and would have continued to this day.” That been is doing a lot of heavy grammatical lifting in a very tidy and efficient package. When people who don’t speak this language variety try and “speak Black,” they often make real grammatical mistakes. The same kind of mistakes people make when they’re learning another language, like Spanish or Mandarin, and haven’t learned the new grammar yet. Saying “you’re so articulate” is based on these two biased and inaccurate mental models: 1) Black people aren’t educated, and 2) Black language varieties are ungrammatical and not legitimate ways of speaking. So, when someone expresses surprise that a person is educated and can speak in the standard dialect? That’s an expression of bias and not a real compliment.

•••

A man gives a conference talk from his wheelchair. Afterward, several people stop him and say, “Your talk was so inspiring!” A woman with cerebral palsy is told by her office mate, “Oh, you take the subway to work each morning? Aren’t you brave!” A person is working out at the gym. Their shorts reveal two prosthetic legs. The guy next to them turns and says, “Look at you

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here, working out. You’re an inspiration to us all. No excuses for the rest of us!” In principle, these are all compliments. So why are they problematic? In Chapter 4, I covered a few issues that arise when people talk with or about a disabled person. How disabled people are often ignored, insulted, or presumed incompetent. The lowered expectations that come with being presumed incompetent are related to another form of problematic language called inspiration porn, a term coined by disability activist Stella Young.5 In brief, perceptibly disabled people are often called inspirational or brave just for doing regular, everyday things. In addition, people living without disabilities are often portrayed as heroes or charitable when they do things for disabled people— like electing a girl with Down syndrome to be prom queen or taking a man with cerebral palsy for a ride in a Lamborghini. When a disabled person does something a “typical” person does, like give a conference talk, take a subway to work, or exercise at a gym, this can feel surprising for many, and they might say something like “Oh, you’re such an inspiration!” Which tells us that they don’t expect a disabled person to be competent or capable. The truth is, disabled folks often have to navigate a whole host of obstacles that people without disabilities never face (or even consider) just to do “regular” things. Like get takeout, take public transit to a concert, or access and use a company website. And telling someone with cerebral palsy that they’re brave to take the train might be intended to acknowledge that fact. But that’s not how this kind of compliment usually comes across. Instead, it seems to imply to someone that they’re not actually competent. And that it is surprising that they can manage even the most basic tasks.

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When it comes to pseudo-compliments that point to inappropriately low expectations, it’s a good idea to “flip it to test it.” If the person you’re going to compliment had a different identity, would you still compliment them in the same way? For example, if you’re going to tell someone Black that they’re articulate, would you say the same thing if they were white or East Asian? Or if you’re going to tell someone disabled they’re an inspiration, would you say the same thing if they weren’t living with a disability? Chances are good that you wouldn’t. Which means you can limit your compliments to things that are actually praiseworthy; this way, you won’t upset people by unintentionally expressing your lowered expectations. “I love how you articulated such a complex idea so clearly, using terms that everybody could understand. I came in not getting this and thanks to you, I feel like I really get it now.” “I can’t believe you managed to write a book while raising two kids and working full time. Not to mention all the obstacles you have to deal with as a wheelchair user. You’re so impressive.” These are compliments that are about actually impressive things, and they are the kinds of compliments that should land well. But if you want to err on the side of safety, maybe just avoid articulate and inspiration altogether.

THINK BEYOND WHITE AND WESTERN HISTORY On Valentine’s Day of 2022, I got an unexpected Valentine’s-related email in my business account. “Suzanne, this was posted on our Slack channel today as an example of humor. Even after the anti-bias training we just finished up with you! I can’t believe they didn’t realize how inappropriate this is.” - 178 -

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The sender works at one of my client sites, and her parents grew up in China and survived the Cultural Revolution. She had attached a screenshot of a Slack post where her colleague had written this: . . . I share this every year because I think it’s ridiculously funny. Dictators aren’t funny. Dictator valentines are the best and are my favorite because my sense of humor is all wrong. Happy Valentine’s Day friends. Below the text was an image of Dictator Valentines. When I posted about this on LinkedIn and used the image, a few people DMed me to say that it was too upsetting to just see it in their feed, and I should replace it with something else. So instead of the image, I’ll just describe to you. There are eight black and white photos of “dictators” overlaid with a pink or red filter and white meme-style text. (San serif, all caps. I don’t want to shout, so I’ll write out the text without using all caps like the original.) Photo

Text

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky thinks you’re hotsky.

Adolf Hitler

Be Mein.

Joseph Stalin

Quit Stalin. Be my valentine.

Mao Zedong

You are most honorable chairman of my heart.

Fidel Castro

Don’t embargo my love.

Kim Jong-Il

You’re the Kim Jong Illest.

Idi Amin

Amin love with you.

Karl Marx

Roses are red, so is the state, let us be comrades because you are great.

This is problematic from a historical perspective because neither Trotsky nor Marx were dictators. So it shows a real lack of knowledge when it comes to European history and the Soviet Union. - 179 -

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It’s also problematic from an inclusive language perspective because these Dictator Valentines lightly reference painful history and themselves cause pain. I’m almost positive that these Valentines were created and posted by people who were not personally affected by any of the dictators in question. (Again, Trotsky and Marx were never autocratic heads of state.) The coworker who put this up in Slack probably hasn’t lost whole branches of their family to genocidal murder. Or to famine forced by the state. They haven’t seen the anguish in their parents’ faces when they talk about how they survived the Cultural Revolution—and about the people who didn’t. They don’t have aunts and uncles lost behind the borders of North Korea, possibly starving or in forced labor camps. They haven’t lost relatives to escape attempts via raft or to Cuban prisons. And they haven’t lost grandparents to ethnic massacres in Uganda or had family who uprooted their entire lives and fled when Indians were expelled from the country. Instead, this coworker was someone who was “just joking.” Back in Chapter 2, I wrote about what is happening with “just joking.” To sum up, “just joking” suggests that because there is a humorous framing, nothing is inappropriate. So if someone says there’s a problem, it’s actually their problem. They’re oversensitive. They need to lighten up. This is a failure of perspective taking. Let’s say you learn a really funny joke about a plane crash. You’ve never lost anyone to a plane crash, so for you it’s just funny. You might tell the joke to close friends who you know haven’t been affected by plane crashes. But if, right as you’re about to tell the joke, a friend shows up who lost a sibling in a plane crash, you’re probably not going to tell the joke anymore.

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And if you live in a place where a lot of people were affected by a plane crash, you might stop telling the joke altogether, because you never know who it would be painful for. “I don’t want to remind someone of a terribly upsetting thing just for the sake of a joke,” you might think as you decide to put it on the shelf for a while. Well, same thing for jokes like Dictator Valentines. They weren’t distressing to the person who posted them. But you can’t assume that your own experience is universal: “This isn’t upsetting for me, so it must not be upsetting for anyone else.” This is a failure of perspective taking. And it caused some real people real distress on a morning that they just expected to log in, check their Slack, and get to work. There is a difference between in-group comedy and comedy like this. If people who were affected by a dictator or genocide or famine or expulsion want to use “dark humor” to cope with it, I’m all for it. Humor is powerful in all kinds of ways. But comedy that lightly references other people’s pain isn’t funny. And it certainly has no place at work.

••• In 2003, vendors who provided equipment to LA County received a message about terminology. The message noted that the county was committed to a “work environment that is free of any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived.” And, with that goal in mind, they asked their vendors to make a change: One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words “Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.6

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The tech industry in the US has long been dominated by white people, for whom the flavor of master/slave was unproblematic. It had no relation to their lives and tasted neutral. So, it became standard terminology for a configuration in which one device or one module controls another. But LA County had a far more diverse employee base than the tech industry. And many county workers were descendants of enslaved people. For them, the term master/slave didn’t have a neutral flavor. It had the flavor of slavery. Of brutality. Of lack of bodily autonomy. Of torture. Of oppression. And of a system of exploitation that was responsible for economic and cultural disparities that are still in place to this day. Using the terminology master/slave to describe a technical configuration lightly references painful history and experiences. And it causes distress that could be easily avoided. For LA County, it had caused pain to the point where a Black county employee had filed an official complaint after seeing “master” and “slave” labels on a videotape machine. There is even a piece of musical equipment called a “universal slave driver.” Here, the driver is referencing communication capabilities, but even so, the phrase “slave driver” has the distinct flavor of enslavement. So, it is time to move away from master when it is used in the sense of dominating and controlling someone or something else. And to replace slave whenever possible. (When it comes to mastery of a subject or a skill, then the flavor is different. So master class or master a subject or masterful playing are still okay. Although there may come a point in the future where the overall flavor has been so tainted that people start to move away from the word in this sense as well.) Want to talk about a master/slave technical configuration? You can use primary/secondary instead, or main/secondary. Or leader/ follower. Or source/replica. Sometimes the issue is one of scope, so - 182 -

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there is global/local. Avoiding problematic terminology often has the additional benefit of greater technical precision. Want to talk about a master bedroom or master bathroom? You can say primary or main instead. Want to say someone is a slave driver? You can say stickler or maybe toxic boss. A quick switch of terminology can avoid unnecessary pain and give texts the neutral or positive flavor you’re looking for.

BE CAREFUL WITH MENTAL HEALTH TERMS We’re at a moment of increasing sensitivity to mental health and mental illness. But in English, we currently use mental health terms extremely loosely, usually to add intensity to a description. So you might call someone behaving badly psycho. Or describe an unexpected situation as totally insane. Or call someone doing contradictory things schizophrenic. One reason you might use these words is because there’s a strong stigma around mental health issues. (This is related to the stigma faced by all kinds of disabled people, which I touched on in Chapter 4.) So the flavor of these words involves something like “out of bounds” and “possibly dangerous” and “maybe should be discredited.” But it’s time to stop casually using mental health terms in a disparaging way. Because it has a negative impact. It trivializes the struggles of people grappling with mental health issues. And it blurs the scientific descriptions of real diagnoses. For example, let’s say your colleague Amy likes to keep her desk super neat and organized. It helps her concentrate on her work. When talking about Amy, and how much she dislikes when things are out of place, you might say, “You know Amy, she’s so OCD.” But this does a real disservice to people who actually suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder—which is serious and can - 183 -

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be completely debilitating. OCD involves anxiety and an elevated risk of suicide. And it can push people out of the workforce. Misusing terms like OCD simply to criticize behavior you find annoying or problematic can make it extra difficult for people who have those disorders to seek help. They might not recognize that they’re dealing with something clinical because the  term has been used so loosely that people don’t know what  the actual symptoms are. And, once diagnosed, they might not be believed or given accommodations because they don’t “act OCD enough.” In my research, I’ve found a widespread human urge to use really intense intensifiers. An intensifier is a word or phrase that gives emphasis. In English, some common intensifiers are really, very, and extremely. If you say, “I’m tired,” that’s one level of fatigue, and if you say, “I’m really tired,” that’s a more intense level of fatigue. Once a word becomes an intensifier, it can lose some of its original meaning, its original punch. That’s because it’s becoming a grammar word, kind of like a number or a preposition. And when “regular” words become grammar words, they undergo what’s called semantic bleaching. Most or all of the original meaning gets bleached away. Terribly doesn’t have any terror left in it, and horribly has very little horror remaining. In the US, we have regional intensifiers like hella and wicked. These words have very little flavor left of hell and wickedness, although the flavor is a bit stronger than in older intensifiers like awfully, where the awe has gone away. Because we’re looking for intensity to really amplify what we’re saying, that semantic bleaching is an issue. When speakers use words because of their powerful meaning and then that meaning gets bleached away, they start reaching for new words to replace them.

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And the intensity and flavor of “out of bounds” and “possibly dangerous” that comes with mental health terminology can be appealing. So you might hear that the waffles at that place are crazy good. Or that someone’s got mad skills or deserves mad props. When you want to pack a punch, to use language that feels intense, then mental health terminology really fits the bill. The problem is that it’s not inclusive. It often promotes misinformation and misconceptions. And it touches on genuinely distressing experiences for many, many people. So, even though we may have that human urge to make things super intense with powerful language, it’s best to use less painful alternatives instead. Instead of crazy good there’s super good. Instead of totally insane there’s incredibly chaotic. Instead of schizo there’s wildly unpredictable. You can play with new combinations until you find one that you like. Because the more you can come up with alternatives to language that causes pain, the more inclusive you will be.

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FIVE QUICK WINS 1. Avoid telling Black people that they are articulate

in ways that suggests it is a surprise. If someone has been impressively articulate by any standard, then be specific about what was remarkable about their performance. 2. Avoid telling disabled people that they are brave

or courageous or a hero or an inspiration just for going about their day. For example, if you see someone with a prosthetic leg working out at the gym, instead of saying, “You’re so inspirational!” you can say something like “Hi. Good workout today?” 3. Instead of master bedroom, you can say primary bed-

room or main bedroom. Same with master bathroom. 4. Instead of slave driver, you can describe someone as

a stickler or tough manager or toxic boss. 5. Avoid using mental health terms to describe people

behaving in ways you don’t like. Instead of psycho, schizo, or OCD, you can say things like capricious, unpredictable, or fanatic about neatness.

ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE Activity 1. Move past “surprisingly articulate.” Each week, choose one Black person known for their language skills—such as a good orator, poet, novelist, or rapper. Watch, listen to, or read performances of theirs—such as

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a speech, some poetry, part of a novel, or rap songs. Then, spend 5 minutes or so making a list of a few specific ways that they were articulate. In ways that go above and beyond the problematic “I had low expectations, and they were coherent and used a standard dialect.” For example, you can read a novel by author Octavia Butler or watch/listen to songs by D Smoke and then make some notes. What phrases were especially appealing? What ways of presenting ideas were notably effective? What is something new that you are taking away?

Activity 2. Move past inspiration porn. NOTE    If you’re disabled, you may already have the skills and knowledge base this activity is designed to provide. Each week, spend some time learning more about accessibility and accommodation issues for disabled people. A great place to start is Sheri Byrne-Haber’s blog, the Disability Visibility Project, or Imani Barbarin’s Crutches and Spice.7 You can also use search engines to look for things like “accessibility issues for blind people” and see what comes up. As you read, make a list of the obstacles faced by a disabled person because the world is made inaccessible to them—obstacles that you might not face yourself. For example, if you are not visually impaired and are reading about blind people, you can look into the problem of more and more flat-surfaced touch screen devices instead of having knobs and buttons that can be differentiated by touch. An obstacle in your list might be: “I can easily turn my stove on and off because I can see the buttons that read (continued) - 187 -

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(continued)

Bake and Start and Cancel. But a blind person wouldn’t be able to use this stove because the flat surface doesn’t tell them where the different functions are and where they should press.” As a last step, write up an alternative to a compliment that tells a person with this disability that they are brave or courageous or an example to us all. An inspiration porn comment might be, “Oh, you cook! You’re such an inspiration!” And an inclusive alternative might be, “Your food is delicious. Do you have a system for figuring out what’s in cans and jars? I bet it’s a real challenge.”

Activity 3. Get intense in an inclusive way. Look at a list of mental health terms and pull out the ones you use yourself in the too loose, technically inaccurate way.8 (In general, people aren’t great at accurately assessing what they do when they talk, so you might want to check in with someone who knows you well and see if there are any terms that you have missed.) As a next step, come up with an alternative for each of those terms. Then practice using them. For example, come up with a scenario in which you might use one of those mental health terms and talk or write about it using one of your more inclusive substitutes. Let’s say you have a colleague who you might call a psycho. Instead, you can write up a short list of alternatives that feel like things you would actually say. (Not every suggested substitution out there is going to feel right.) Then, either talk to yourself or write a paragraph about them using the inclusive terms. “Sheila has been so unpredictable lately. It’s been brutal. She said one thing and then

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a day later denied it and completely switched sides. She’s so destabilizing. And untrustworthy. I wish she wasn’t our boss.” The more you practice, the easier it will be to avoid problematic use of mental health terms and use inclusive and more accurate substitutions instead.

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8 Look to the Future

BECAUSE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE are always changing, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by new terms, new phrases, and new protocols. With the Six Principles of Inclusive Language in hand, you’re now equipped to navigate the uncharted waters ahead. This means you should be able to spot problematic language as it arises, and, by using concepts in your new linguistic toolkit, understand exactly why that language is problematic. For example, problems might be hidden in a word’s semantic frame—like calling one person “bossy” and another “assertive” for the same behavior. Or the problem might lie in a word’s flavor—what tastes fine to you might taste bitter or unpleasant to someone else. And sometimes the issue lies in the indexicality—like when perfectly grammatical (but nonstandard) words get harshly judged as unprofessional or as broken English just because of who is saying them. As you navigate inclusive language in the future, you can refer back to the Six Principles to spot potential problems and diagnose some of the most common issues that arise in day-to-day communications. The examples I’ve given you in this book are both practical and high-impact applications of the Six Principles.

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1. Reflect reality. Look for distortions like inflating lan-

guage, which presents reasonable behavior as inappropriate or threatening, and softening language, which presents problematic behavior (usually by people with power) as acceptable. This includes the defense of “just joking,” which falsely claims that a humorous framing makes anything acceptable. Avoid language that presents gender as a binary, use the correct pronouns to refer to people, and don’t assume you know someone’s gender. 2. Show respect. Avoid giving unconscious demotions when

you meet someone who doesn’t match your mental models. When you encounter an unusual name, take the time to make sure you are spelling and saying it correctly. (This includes finger spelling.) Don’t use nicknames or pet names without permission. And avoid saying “sir” and “ma’am” when you’re not sure of someone’s gender. 3. Draw people in. Use requested identity terms, and when

a disability (or other) term becomes unpleasantly negative due to pejoration, use the new requested term instead. Speak respectfully to disabled people, and don’t unconsciously demote them or presume they’re incompetent. Don’t casually point out the ways people are different and avoid using diverse in ways that suggest that diversity only involves people who are in marked categories. 4. Incorporate other perspectives. Don’t assume that your

experience is everyone else’s experience, especially for situations in which you’re in the dominant group. When taking perspective, follow through with that second step—“what would this be like if I had that person’s lived experiences?” Make sure you’re not accidentally leaving people out of the pronoun circle with words like you, us,

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and everyone. And don’t focus only on the perspectives of white people or of powerful people who do deeply problematic and antisocial things (rather than their targets). 5. Prevent erasure. Use gender-neutral language to include

people who aren’t male—because words like mankind, guys, and manpower aren’t universal. Avoid misnaming people and put in the effort so you don’t mistake one underrepresented person for “the other one.” Use language that reflects the real variety of skin tones, don’t forget that women who love women exist, and when creating or updating historical narratives, make sure you incorporate indigenous history. 6. Recognize pain points. Phrase your compliments so

they’ll land well and avoid compliments that reveal lowered expectations. Avoid jokes and terminology that lightly reference history or painful experiences for other people, including words like master/slave or master bedroom. And be careful with mental health terminology— avoid using terms like crazy or schizophrenic or OCD just to describe problematic behavior.

PRACTICE The number one way to internalize new ideas, acquire new skills, and create new habits is practice. If you practice—especially with a friend or accountability partner—what felt hard at first should start to feel like second nature. To prepare for scheduled events, like press releases or ad campaigns or videos or talks, you can use the inclusion checklist in the Resources section as a starter template. (This is like the checklist you’d make for a cookout or party, where you think through

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the guests and their needs.) The more you practice using a checklist, the more you’ll start to make inclusive choices without even being reminded—like gender-neutral language to address and refer to people. Where practice comes in especially handy is as preparation for on-the-fly events. (This is like having a well-stocked fridge and pantry so you’re ready for anyone who might drop by your place.) In everyday conversations with people ranging from colleagues to family to people you’ve just met, you’ll be able to use your new habits to communicate with appropriate warmth and respect. For example, you’ll know how to avoid misgendering people, pay attention to and use names correctly, and give good compliments. And be ready to shift modalities! For example, if you speak an oral language but no sign languages, if you always have something on hand to write with and on, you’ll be able to communicate with people who are Deaf or have other situations where they will need to communicate with you via writing. Your inclusive language habits will make the people you speak with feel taken into consideration and valued. At the end of each chapter that covers a Principle of Inclusive Language (Chapters 2 through 7), you’ve got five quick wins and three more in-depth activities. If you focus on the quick wins and activities in each chapter for a full month, you should end up in good shape for internalizing that Inclusive Language Principle. By the end of six months, you will have a whole set of inclusive language insights and habits that will feel increasingly normal and natural for you. If you find a person or a group to do your inclusive language activities with, you can check in with each other every few weeks. Here are some useful questions you can ask each other: 1. Is there something you’re finding really challenging or dif-

ficult about this activity?

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2. Is there something that has been surprisingly easy? 3. Do you feel like you’ve seen positive outcomes? Or maybe

that you’ve avoided a mistake you might have made earlier? 4. Is there something you wish you’d said or done better?

What could you do in the future so you feel better about it? Like any other skill you work to acquire, the more you practice and the more you focus on the places that could improve, the better your outcomes will be.

GET READY TO MAKE MISTAKES As you move forward with inclusive language, you’re bound to make a mistake now and then. It can be easy to feel like this is the end of the world—like people will think you’re a terrible person, that you’ll feel shame forever. Or that you’ve permanently damaged a relationship. But when people know that you’re doing your best to stay up to date, and that you’re inviting corrections and feedback, most mistakes you make won’t matter that much. Because you’ve shown that you care not only about your good intentions, but also about your good impact. What’s more, when you own your mistakes, apologize, and move to fix things, you usually end up strengthening relationships. The cycle of making a mistake, taking responsibility for it, and fixing it can actually foster more trust in you than if you’d never made a mistake at all. Here’s an example from the summer of 2022. The singer, rapper, flautist, and entrepreneur Lizzo released a single called “GRRRLS” that included the line, “Do you see this shit? I’m a spaz.”

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In Chapter 4, I talked about the cycle of pejoration and the ways that scientific and technical terms about disability often become more negative. Spaz, the shortened version of spastic, is one of these words. Spasticity is a term used to describe abnormal muscle tightness from contraction and involves muscle stiffness, muscle spasms, and involuntary contractions. Millions of people with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and strokes have to deal with spastic muscles that are painful, make it difficult to move, and are visually apparent.1 But like so many other disability words, spastic and spaz have also moved into more general usage as an insult for someone who isn’t in good physical control of their body or maybe emotions. Someone inept or hyperactive or otherwise unpleasantly chaotic. Spaz is considered by many people in the disability community to be too pejorative to use in slangy ways. (Note that for many Black Americans, spaz doesn’t have this kind of negative flavor— another way we can see how complex and context-dependent language can be.) So when Lizzo—whose lyrics and performances are usually extremely inclusive—used the word spaz, many people were surprised and hurt. There was a huge outcry on social media. People tweeted about their own spastic diagnoses and physical pain. They said that in 2022, we should know and do better. That there should be no place for words like these in Lizzo’s music. It made news. It was bad publicity. It was a public embarrassment. And Lizzo turned around and did exactly the right things. Just days after the original release of “GRRRLS,” Lizzo made a public apology and announcement: It’s been brought to my attention that there is a harmful word in my new song “GRRRLS.” Let me make one thing clear: I never want to promote derogatory language. As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words - 196 -

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used against me, so I overstand the power words can have (whether intentionally or in my case, unintentionally). I’m proud to say there’s a new version of GRRRLS with a lyric change. This is the result of me listening and taking action. As an influential artist I’m dedicated to being part of the change I’ve been waiting to see in the world. Xoxo, Lizzo.2 (Note that plenty of other musical artists have had ableist language in their music, but at the time I wrote this, only Lizzo had been called out to such an extent. This is surely because Lizzo is Black—as I mentioned in Chapter 2, the actions of people of color are more likely to be described using inflating language, even when those actions are perfectly reasonable. So when we’re pointing out problematic language, we want to make sure that we’re pointing it out for everyone who is using it, across the board.) We often see apologies when a public figure says or does something problematic. What is far less common is seeing a public figure make an apology that is backed up by actions that actually repair the problem. At what was surely considerable expense, Lizzo rewrote the line, hopped into the studio, recorded a new version, and oversaw the distribution of the new version of the song. And all of this in less than a week. I see Lizzo as an inclusivity role model (for example, in her reality competition show, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls), and this incident is a great example of best practices when it comes to inclusive language mistakes. Would it have been better for her to understand in advance that spaz is a problematic word in other communities and avoid using it? Sure. But you can’t know everything in advance, and there are always going to be words you don’t know are problematic. So once you’ve made a mistake, you can use the same best practices: 1. Make a real apology that shows that you understand

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commitment to inclusive language. (If you don’t show that you know why something was a mistake or problematic, people may have a hard time believing that you want to do better.) Instead of focusing on how bad you feel, focus on what was problematic about your language. 2. Do what you can to fix the problem. If it’s an ad or press

release or video or something similar, redo it with the problematic language fixed and then re-release it. If it’s more casual or spoken words that can’t be unspoken, then the apology should include examples of how you will avoid making the same mistake again in the future. For example, you might say, “I’m committed to avoiding ableist language in the future, and I welcome feedback on how to do this.” We all know that to err is human. So acknowledging that you make mistakes and that you will make a real effort to fix them demonstrates that you are realistic, sincere, and committed. Inclusive language mistakes aren’t the end of the world, even if you’re famous. They’re just a part of building and maintaining relationships.

STAY UP TO DATE AND ELICIT FEEDBACK Language is a collaborative project. And so is inclusive language. We collectively decide what is and isn’t appropriate. What’s old-fashioned and what’s modern. What’s respectful and what’s impolite. As the culture changes, our language changes. You’ve probably seen how some words that were acceptable when you were growing up are no longer appropriate today. What’s more, there are words that are acceptable today that in a few years may be considered problematic.

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This is one of the main reasons why this book is centered on Principles of Inclusive Language and not just a long list of “bad words” and “good words.” The principles will stay the same—but some of the words that are relevant to the principles will change. Like any complicated machine, inclusive language requires regular maintenance and tune-ups. You can do this by: 1. staying up to date on inclusive language, and 2. eliciting feedback on your language use.

One of the best things you can do to stay up to date is to look into what people in other groups are saying. You can search for what they are saying about language specifically, and you can immerse yourself in their culture and learn the language more organically. For example, you can choose a group of interest and then:

• • •

follow people from this group on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media sites; read blogs, listen to podcasts, and subscribe to newsletters put out by members of this group; and read novels and watch movies by members of the group. You’ll want to be careful and make sure that it is actually in-group members who have written the books and made the movies. Gatekeeping by publishing houses and Hollywood means that a lot of American books and movies involving underrepresented people have been produced by people who aren’t members of those groups.

If you’ve made checklists for yourself, schedule regular tuneups for those checklists and make sure the words you have in the “inclusive” column are still good. As time goes on, there is a good chance you’ll see changes in terms involving race and ethnicity,

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terms involving disability, and terms involving gender and sexual orientation. Another great way to stay up to date is to let people know that you’re invested in improving your inclusive language fluency and that you’d like feedback. Getting feedback is especially useful when you’re leading a team, giving a presentation, or doing any other kind of public speaking. Is there someone in your life who can give you good feedback about inclusive language? Make a plan to reach out and ask them for advice. But be careful that you’re not going to overburden them, and make sure that your power dynamic won’t be an issue. For example, if this person is someone you know from work, they shouldn’t be your report. You’ll also want to avoid asking people from an impacted group to persuade you that inclusive language is necessary. For example, don’t ask a nonbinary person to explain and justify pronouns or an Asian person to convince you that you should stop saying “Oriental.” If you keep on learning about other cultures and other groups, keep yourself open to feedback, and keep on applying the Six Principles, you will be able to easily navigate the inclusive language changes that lie ahead.

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DID YOU READ this book as part of a group? Here are some questions you can use to facilitate your discussion of the material— and your responses to it. Please remember that everyone in your discussion group will have had different lived experiences and may have different flavors or indexicality for certain words. The more your group can listen in a gently curious and nonjudgmental way about everyone’s experiences with language, the better the conversation should go. 1. What’s the most surprising or unexpected or impactful

thing you encountered in this book? 2. Can you remember a time when someone said something

problematic or hurtful? What’s the story? What was the end result? 3. Can you remember a time when someone said something

especially inclusive or welcoming? What’s the story? What was the end result? 4. How do you feel about the new twenty-first-century eti-

quette when it comes to language? What’s your personal relationship with it so far? 5. Do you have any skills or tricks you use for “regular event”

planning that you can apply to “communication event” planning?

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6. Is there one of the Six Principles of Inclusive Language

that feels most relevant to your life? Which one, and why? 7. What do you think about the fact that professional is a word

that can keep people out of jobs and promotions and workplaces because they aren’t white? Have you seen this play out yourself? 8. Have you ever seen the same behavior described in two

different ways depending on who is doing it? Who ended up with the short end of the stick? 9. Have you ever seen someone who is reporting a problem

dismissed as just being emotional? How did that play out? 10. Is there something that you wear or have hung on your

walls that indexes (points to) a social meaning that someone could easily read? What would they learn about you? 11. Is there a word or song or food or location that has a differ-

ent flavor for you than for other people? Do people try to convince you that their flavor is the right one? 12. What’s your experience with the words exotic, Oriental,

articulate, and inspirational? What is their flavor for you? 13. Is there something about gender identity, gender presen-

tation, or sexual orientation that feels new and like you don’t quite get it? What could you do to learn more? 14. What’s an example of inflating language or softening lan-

guage that has really bothered you? How did it present reasonable behavior as unacceptable, or problematic behavior as just fine? 15. Can you think of examples of DARVO (Deny, Argue, and

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

16. Have you ever been part of or witnessed an unconscious

demotion? How did that play out, and how do you feel about it now? 17. Do you, or any of your friends or colleagues, struggle with

having your name said or spelled correctly? How does that feel? How about nicknames that people just drop on you without your permission? 18. What do you think about the ways the cycle of pejoration

is related to social stigma and cultural attitudes? Do you think there’s a chance of changing things? 19. Have you ever been presumed incompetent? Or known

someone who was? How did it play out? How did it feel? 20. Who are some groups you should probably learn more

about so you can do a better job with that second step of perspective taking? How do you plan on doing it? Can you share resources with each other? 21. What’s your relationship with the original inhabitants of

the territory where you currently live? 22. Do you know anyone who has had to deal with some kind

of erasure? For example, perhaps their history got erased, or their sexual orientation, or their skin tone, or the difference between them and “the other one”? 23. Making inclusive language mistakes can feel embarrass-

ing. Do you have a game plan for trying out new language despite the fact that you might make mistakes? 24. It’s common to have a defensive reaction to new informa-

tion that goes against language myths (examples of language myths include some dialects are better than others; some languages are better than others; words have the - 203 -

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

same meaning for everyone). When you were reading the book, was there anything that just felt wrong? How do you feel about it now that you finished? 25. Do you have someone in your life you can rely on to give

you honest (and constructive) feedback on your inclusive language use? How could you work with them? 26. How can you as a group support each other in a shift to

more inclusive language moving forward?

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1

Jorn Bettin, “Social—The Big Misunderstanding,” Autistic Collaboration, September 30, 2017, https://autcollab.org/2017/09/30/social/.

2

See, for example, Gwendolyn Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (New York: Routledge, 1994); Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, trans. Kirsi Stjedna (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).

3

“What Is Linguistic Anthropology, and How Can It Help?” Worthwhile Research & Consulting, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.worth whileconsulting.com/what-is-linguistic-anthropology.

CHAPTER 1 1

This summary is drawn from definitions found at Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional), Dictionary.com (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/professional), Cambridge dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/professional), and Collins dictionary (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english /professional).

2

Here’s a nice introduction to Simard’s work: Ferris Jabr, “The Social Life of Forests,” New York Times, December 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com /interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/tree-communication-mycorrhiza.html.

3

The “finding” photo is attributed to AFP/Getty Images/Chris Raythen. The caption reads, “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” The “looting” photo is attributed to AP Photo/Dave Martin. The caption reads, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug 30, 2005.” I am grateful to a 2020 presentation by the African American Policy Forum that pointed me to these two photos and their problematic captions.

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4

See, for example: Gina Denny, “‘Go Easy on Yourself, Mama,’ Is White Privilege at Its Peak,” April 28, 2022, https://ginadenny.medium.com /go-easy-on-yourself-mama-is-white-privilege-at-its-finest-fa47518c76d8.

5

US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, “Civil Rights Data Collection. Data Snapshot: School Discipline,” Issue Brief No. 1, March 2014.

6

Libby Nelson and Dara Lind, “The School-to-Prison Pipeline, Explained,” Vox, February 24, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school -discipline-race.

7

Kieran Snyder, “The Abrasiveness Trap: High-Achieving Men and Women Are Described Differently in Reviews,” Fortune, August 26, 2014, https://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/.

8

FrameNet, accessed February 2, 2023, https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu /fndrupal/.

9

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981).

10 Ilion7am, “Same. Not commonly used words in sentences are triggers or when I hear a word that feels out of context in the story being told. Last time this happened at work . . .,” Reddit comment, October 2022, https:// www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/xuxm22/comment/iqy1i2o/.

CHAPTER 2 1

See, for example, Gregory D. Smithers, “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits’: Gender, Rituality, and Spirituality in the Native South,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 626–651; Kira Hall, “Intertextual Sexuality: Parodies of Class, Identity and Desire in Liminal Delhi,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2005): 125–144; Niko Besnier, “Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy Beauty Pageant in Tonga,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 3 (August 2002): 534–566; Khalia Strong, “Western Gender Labels Don’t Work for Pasifika,” Pacific Media Network, August 9, 2022, https:// pacificmedianetwork.com/articles/western-gender-labels-dont-work-for -pasifika-1.

2

Angela Sterritt, “Indigenous Languages Recognize Gender States Not Even Named in English,” The Globe and Mail, March 10, 2016, https://www .theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/indigenous-languages -recognize-gender-states-not-even-named-in-english/article29130778/; Tiffanysong, “Transnational Sexualities: Sekrata,” Introduction to Queer Studies in the Humanities, February 12, 2015, https://introtoqueerstudies .wordpress.com/2015/02/12/sekrata/; Besnier, “Transgenderism,” 524–566; Strong, “Western Gender Labels.”

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3

“Intersex Population Figures,” Intersex Human Rights Australia, September 28, 2013, https://ihra.org.au/16601/intersex-numbers/.

4

A. C. Fowlkes, “I Did Everything Right . . .,” LinkedIn post, July 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/a-c-fowlkes-phd-he-him-21193a107 _transgender-transman-followmyjourney-activity-6956699886092177408 -7igc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop.

5

Elizabeth Yuko, “Beyond They/Them: What are Neopronouns?,” Rolling Stone, June 29, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture -features/neopronouns-they-them-pronoun-alternative-1190069/.

6

For example: Kirby Conrod, “Ask a Linguist about . . . Pronouns!,” January 20, 2021, https://kconrod.medium.com/ask-a-linguist-about-pronouns -8add318fbd67; Kirby Conrod, “Intermediate Pronoun Studies: Multiple Pronouns,” January 29, 2021, https://kconrod.medium.com/intermediate -pronoun-studies-multiple-pronouns-71e34cd28c54; Kirby Conrod, “Intermediate Pronoun Studies: Themselves and Themself,” March 26, 2022, https://kconrod.medium.com/intermediate-pronoun-studies-themselves -and-themself-d900e49c8990.

7

See, for example, Molly Adrian et al., “Parental Validation and Invalidation Predict Adolescent Self-Harm,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 49, no. 4 (August 2018): 274–281.

CHAPTER 3 1

Susan Davis, “Before He Was President, Mistaken for a Waiter: A 2003 Obama Meeting,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2008, https://www.wsj .com/articles/BL-WB-6757.

2

Cameron Bailey, “What’s been your fave #unconsciousdemotion? Mine: parking valet, security guard – solid jobs but not mine.” Twitter post, June 1, 2016, https://twitter.com/cameron_tiff/status/737979169804406786?s =46&t=PyoeNvKOkRlkLKBioFm_6g.

3

Mellody Hobson, “Color Blind or Color Brave?,” TED, May 5, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKtALHe3Y9Q.

4

Latinovations staff, “The Latina Who Is Fixing Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem,” Latinovations, April 13, 2016, https://www.latinovations.com /2016/04/13/the-latina-who-is-fixing-silicon-valleys-diversity-problem/.

5

Robin Pogrebin, “I Am Not the Decorator: Female Architects Speak Out,” New York Times, April 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/arts /design/female-architects-speak-out-on-sexism-unequal-pay-and-more.html.

6

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “There was a textbook rep at my door. She told me she was ‘waiting for the professor.’ I said, ‘okay!’ And let her wait. At my office door.” Twitter thread, November 11, 2015, https:// twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/664529116390162432.

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7

Rich Barlow, “BU Research: A Riddle Reveals Depth of Gender Bias,” BU Today, January 16, 2014, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2014/bu-research -riddle-reveals-the-depth-of-gender-bias.

8

Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu, “I’m a Young Black Woman. Why Do So Many People Assume I’m Not a Doctor?” STAT, October 15, 2016, https:// www.statnews.com/2016/10/15/black-woman-doctor-racism/.

9

Sam Levin, “‘They Don’t Belong’: Police Called on Native American Teens on College Tour,” The Guardian, May 4, 2018, https://www .theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/04/native-american-students -colorado-state-college-tour-police.

10 Jordan Moreau, “Eric André Alleges He Was Racially Profiled, Drug Searched by Police in Airport,” Variety, April 21, 2021, https://variety .com/2021/film/news/eric-andre-racial-profiling-police-airport-1234957271/. 11 “Fatal Police Shootings of Unarmed Black People in US More Than 3 Times as High as in Whites,” BMJ, October 27, 2020, https://www.bmj.com /company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-of-unarmed-black-people-in -us-more-than-3-times-as-high-as-in-whites/; “1,110 People Have Been Shot and Killed by Police in the Past 12 Months,” Washington Post, updated January 25, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics /investigations/police-shootings-database/; “Fatal Encounters: A Step Towards Creating an Impartial, Comprehensive, and Searchable National Database of People Killed during Interactions with Police,” accessed February 2, 2023, https://fatalencounters.org/. 12 Scott Aukerman, Bobby Moynihan, and Paul F. Tompkins, “Episode 150: Time Bobby,” Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast, March 26, 2012, https://www .earwolf.com/episode/time-bobby/. 13 Damneet Kaur, “Good Morning, LinkedIn! My name is Damneet Kaur [Duhm-neet Core], not Damn-neet,” LinkedIn post, January 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/damneet-kaur_dei-names-community -activity-6887103475923189760-m9SE?utm_source=share&utm_medium =member_desktop. 14 Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh, and Elena Varganova, “Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 74, no. 4 (August 2012): 547–573. 15 Arvind Narayanan, “Today I want to take a break from sharing research to share a personal story instead. It’s a story about my name, why I once decided to quit academia, why I came back, what I learnt from it . . .,” Twitter thread, November 26, 2019, https://twitter.com/random_walker /status/1199301468941160450. 16 The Florida Bar, Results of the YLD Survey on Women in the Legal Profession, 2015.

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17 Zoe Scaman, “Mad Men. Furious Women,” Musings of a Wandering Mind, July 4, 2021, https://zoescaman.substack.com/p/mad-men-furious-women. 18 Jonathan Soroff, “The Eyes Have It,” The Improper Bostonian, May 23, 2014, https://www.improper.com/arts-culture/the-eyes-have-it/. 19 “Gender Neutral Titles and Why They Matter,” Equality Institute, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.theequalityinstitute.com/equality-insights -blog/non-traditional-honorifics-and-why-they-matter.

CHAPTER 4 1

Crystal Hana Kim, “On Monolids and the Language of Beauty,” Nylon, July 24, 2018, https://www.nylon.com/articles/monolids-beauty-language.

2

Emily Ladau, Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally (Emeryville, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2021).

3

“CDC: 1 in 4 US Adults Live with a Disability,” CDC Press Release, August 16, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0816-disability.html.

4

L. Kraus, E. Lauer, R. Coleman, and A. Houtenville, 2017 Disability Statistics Annual Report (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire, 2018).

5

Frances Stead Sellers, “How Long Covid Could Change the Way We Think about Disability,” Washington Post, Updated July 23, 2022, https://www .washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/06/long-covid-disability-advocacy/.

6

Livia Gershon, “The Rise of Disability Stigma,” JSTOR Daily, October 9, 2020, https://daily.jstor.org/the-rise-of-disability-stigma/; NCALL Staff, “Destigmatizing Disability,” NCALL, July 19, 2021, https://www.ncall.us /2021/07/19/destigmatizing-disability/; K. Wang and L. Ashburn-Nardo, “Disability Stigma: Causes, Consequences, and Strategies for Change,” in Understanding the Experience of Disability: Perspectives from Social and Rehabilitation Psychology, ed. D. S. Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 11–23.

7

Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 3.

8

Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

9 “Spasticity,” NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information /disorders/spasticity. 10 “On 32nd Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Governor Hochul Signs Legislative Package to Uphold and Strengthen Rights of People with Disabilities,” New York State website, July 26, 2022, https:// www.governor.ny.gov/news/32nd-anniversary-americans-disabilities-act -governor-hochul-signs-legislative-package-uphold.

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11 “Remarks by the President at the Signing of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010,” The White House Office of the Press Secretary, October 8, 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives .gov/the-press-office/2010/10/08/remarks-president-signing-21st-century -communications-and-video-accessib. 12 Ladau, Demystifying Disability, 12. 13 Sassy Wyatt, “Micro aggressions against blind/visually impaired people: A thread,” Twitter thread, April 5, 2021, https://twitter.com/sassywyatt /status/1379141397681410055. 14 Elena Hung, “She can’t get inside the building because of her wheelchair,” Twitter post, October 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/ElenaHung202 /status/1577400344329719809. 15 Tatiana Prowell, MD, “I would take it one step further. The building didn’t cause this. People did. Planners who did not think about access for people who use wheelchairs . . .,” Twitter post, October 5, 2022, https:// twitter.com/tmprowell/status/1577682752119492616. 16 Aaron Randle, “When an Architectural Gem Is Not Accessible to All,” New York Times, November 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07 /nyregion/long-island-city-library.html. 17 Lesa Bradshaw, “Disability vs. the Workplace,” TEDx Lyttleton Women, March 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3_RjJtd6Eo.

CHAPTER 5 1

BisFitty, “I am BisFitty, the ‘period appropriate’ corporate costume party slave… AMAA,” Reddit post, accessed February 2, 2023, https:// www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/3r7oeh/i_am_bisfitty_the_period _appropriate_corporate/.

2

Photos of his outfit, picking cotton, and the staircase incident can be seen at: BisFitty, “As requested, The complete saga of BisFitty, the ‘period appropriate’ corporate Halloween party slave,” Reddit post, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3r4h8d/as _requested_the_complete_saga_of_bisfitty_the/.

3

“What Does Your Last Name Say About You?,” Ancestry.com, July 1, 2014, https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/there-are-7-types-of-english-surnames -which-one-is-yours/.

4

Lindsey Bever, “The Swedish Stanford Students Who Rescued an Unconscious Sexual Assault Victim Speak Out,” June 8, 2016, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/07/the-swedish -stanford-students-who-rescued-an-unconscious-sexual-assault-victim -speak-out/.

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5

Alfred Charles, “Mary Kay Letourneau, Who Made Headlines for Her Relationships with Underage Student, Dies,” ABC 33/40 News, July 7, 2020, https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/mary-kay-letourneau-who -made-headlines-for-an-affair-with-her-underage-student-dies.

6

Lauren @laurchastain22, “I remember when a youth pastor was fired for ‘inappropriate texting’ with a teen . . .” Twitter post, August 28, 2022, https://twitter.com/laurchastain22/status/1564042655578968065.

7

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1975] 2014), 359–370.

8

Edward Said. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

CHAPTER 6 1

Joseph W. Schneider and Sally L. Hacker, “Sex Role Imagery and Use of the Generic ‘Man’ in Introductory Texts: A Case in the Sociology of Sociology,” The American Sociologist 8 (February 1973): 12–18.

2

“Pullman Porters,” History.com, February 11, 2019, https://www.history .com/topics/black-history/pullman-porters.

3

“Mr. T: ‘Tough and Tender’ in Barbara Walters TV Interview,” Jet Magazine, March 5, 1984, 56–60.

4

Serena Williams, “No matter how far we come, we get reminded that it’s not enough. This is why I raised $111M for @serenaventures . . .” Twitter post, March 2, 2022, https://twitter.com/serenawilliams/status /1499058086165639169.

5

A good source on gender dysphoria, and transgender people in general, is: “Frequently Asked Questions about Transgender People,” National Center for Transgender Equality, July 9, 2016, https://transequality.org/ issues/resources/frequently-asked-questions-about-transgender-people.

6

A. Austin, S. Craig, S. D’Souza, and L. McInroy. “Suicidality among Transgender Youth: Elucidating the Role of Interpersonal Risk Factors,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 37, no. 5–6 (March 2022).

7

Dominique Apollon, “It’s taken me 45 trips around the sun, but for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a ‘band-aid’ in my own skin tone…’ Twitter post, April 19, 2019, https://twitter.com /apollontweets/status/1119276463016951808?lang=en.

8

Climate Research and Development Program, “The Discovery of Ancient Human Footprints in White Sands National Park and Their Link to Abrupt Climate Change,” USGS, November 30, 2021, https://www.usgs .gov/programs/climate-research-and-development-program/news/discovery -ancient-human-footprints-white.

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9

For more on just how massive Africa is, see: Mark Fischetti, “Africa Is Way Bigger Than You Think,” Scientific American, June 16, 2015, https:// blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/africa-is-way-bigger-than -you-think/.

10 See C. Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (London: Chatto and Windus, 2019). 11 Anna Furman, “Not Your Average Pride Event,” New York Times, June 17, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/style/dyke-day-los-angeles -pride.html. 12 Pod Save America, “Regina Hall on When People Confuse Her with Regina King,” YouTube video, June 12, 2019, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=7u9UPfMU_Uw.

CHAPTER 7 1

Keise Izuma, Daisuke N. Saito, and Norihiro Sadato, “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum,” Neuron 58, no. 2 (April 2008): 284–294.

2

Duane Rudy and Joan Grusec. “Praise and Prosocial Behavior,” in Psychological Perspectives on Praise, ed. E. Brummelman (London: Routledge, 2020).

3

E. B. Raposa, H. B. Laws, and E. B. Ansel, “Prosocial Behavior Mitigates the Negative Effects of Stress in Everyday Life,” Clinical Psychological Science 4, no. 4 (July 2016): 691–698; O. S. Curry, L. A. Rowland, C. J. Van Lissa, S. Zlotowitz, J. McAlaney, and H. Whitehouse, “Happy to Help? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Performing Acts of Kindness on the Well-Being of the Actor,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 76 (May 2018): 320–329.

4

See eds. H. Samy Alim, John Rickford, and Arnetha Ball, Raciolinguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also work by Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, for example: Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), and Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 85, no 2. (2015): 149–171.

5

Stella Young, “I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much,” TEDxSydney video, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.ted.com/talks /stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much/transcript ?language=en.

6

David Mikkelson, “Fact Check: Master/Slave,” Snopes, November 24, 2003, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave.

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7

Sheri Byrne-Haber’s Blog, accessed February 2, 2023, https://sheribyrne haber.com/; Disability Visibility Project, accessed February 2, 2023, https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/; Crutches and Spice, accessed February 2, 2023, https://crutchesandspice.com/.

8

For example, “Alphabetical List of Mental Disorders,” Mental Health Center of America, accessed February 2, 2023, https://mentalhealthcenter .com/alphabetical-list-of-mental-disorders/.

CHAPTER 8 1

“Spasticity,” Johns Hopkins Health, accessed February 2, 2023, https:// www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/spasticity.

2

@lizzobeeating, “It’s been brought to my attention that there is a harmful word in my new song ‘GRRRLS,’” Instagram post, June 13, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cew0HrlPhEq/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig _rid=976386e7-cd5f-4321-bd2e-560a3855a265.

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RESOURCES

HERE ARE TWO RESOURCES you can use moving forward. The Suggested Substitutions can help you move from problematic words and phrases to more inclusive substitutes. And if you’re somebody who produces communications, you can use the Inclusion Checklist Template to create your own inclusion checklists. These checklists can be used at any point in production, from planning to writing to copy editing, to make sure that your texts and scripts are as inclusive as possible.

SUGGESTED SUBSTITUTIONS In the introduction to this book, I said that I wished I could just give you a list of bad words and good words, but that language was too complicated. But now that you’ve read the book (hopefully!) and have learned the Six Principles of Inclusive Language, you can make use of a Suggested Substitutions guide. The words in this guide are organized in alphabetical order, which should make it easy to check when you are thinking about using a particular word or phrase and want to see if it’s problematic. You can also use the Suggested Substitutions guide when you already know a word is problematic but aren’t quite sure of what a good inclusive alternative might be. This reference list includes some of the most common examples of problematic language in American English and

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RESOURCES

recommendations for inclusive language substitutes that were appropriate in 2023. I’ve included words here that I didn’t have space to discuss in the main text of the book—for the most part, these words don’t reflect reality or show respect. The list includes problematic uses of ethnic names (for example, gypsy and welsh on a bet); words for meaningful objects and activities that are used inappropriately by people who aren’t in-group (for example, powwow and low man on the totem pole); and ableist language (for example, blind spot and fall on deaf ears). The list also includes current best practices for talking about disabled people and disabilities. This list is not evergreen! It is guaranteed to change. The list of problematic words will expand, and some of the currently acceptable substitutes will change. In addition, the words in the Inclusive column are not exhaustive—you may come up with your own, better alternative for a given context. Bonus Activity! If you want to strengthen your inclusive language muscles, figure out which Principles of Inclusive Language are being violated by the words and phrases in the Problematic column and which dimensions of human identity are involved. It will often be more than just one principle.

Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

A diverse candidate

A candidate from an underrepresented group

We’re looking to get more candidates from underrepresented groups into our pipeline.

A female (used to refer to a person), females (used to refer to people)

A woman, women, a girl, girls

In general, women have been overlooked when it comes to product design.

A man like you

A person like you

A person like you should relish the challenges in this position.

A transgender (used as a noun)

Transgender person/ She noted that as a transgender man/woman woman, social media can feel unsafe.

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RESOURCES

Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

A woman like you

A person like you

A person like you could really thrive at this company.

AD

CE

The university was founded in 1088 CE.

ADD, ADHD (when not a real diagnosis)

Distracted, scattered

I’m a little scattered today—tell me again?

Afflicted with, by (disease, condition)

Has, have

They have Crohn’s disease.

An illegal (used as a noun)

Undocumented person, undocumented immigrant

When he first arrived, he was an undocumented person.

Bad guys

Bad people, bad ones

They’re the bad ones in this scenario.

BC

BCE

The ruins date to 70 BCE.

Bible (to mean any holy text)

Specific: Bible, Quran, Koran, Pentateuch, Torah, Vedas, Avesta, Guru Granth Sahib, Agamas, etc.

The ceremony included readings from religious texts.

General: holy book, religious text Blacklist

Blocklist, deny list

Put it on the blocklist.

Blind leading the blind

The helpless being led by the clueless

This project has turned into the helpless being led by the clueless.

Blind spot

Blinders, area of weakness

In my experience, they’ve got blinders on when it comes to this issue.

Blind to

Oblivious to

He was oblivious to their shortcomings.

Bossy

Assertive, decisive, self-assured

Her self-assured response let the client know we had it under control.

Boys and girls

Children

The children played for the full lunch hour.

Bury the hatchet

Extend an olive branch, end the quarrel, let bygones be bygones

After they cleared the air, they decided to let bygones be bygones.

Businessman

Businessperson, proprietor, entrepreneur

She’s a businessperson in town who contributed to the campaign.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Businessmen

Businesspeople, business community, entrepreneurs

The local business community has been highly involved in the beautification project.

Cameraman

Camera operator

This shoot needs at least three camera operators.

Chairman

Chair, chairperson

The chair declared the meeting concluded.

Christian name

Personal name, first Mr. Sanders’ first name is Bernard. name

Church (to mean any house of worship)

Specific: church, temple, synagogue, mosque

The county has an unusually high number of houses of worship.

General: house of worship Circle the wagons

Band together, present a united front

It’s time to present a united front.

Confined to a wheelchair

Uses a wheelchair, is a wheelchair user

She uses a wheelchair.

Craftsman, craftsmanship

Artisan, craftsperson, artisanship

The leather was hand-tooled by a Paris-based artisan.

Crazy (as intensifier)

Super, extremely, incredibly, outrageously, etc.

The samosas here are super good.

Crazy (to describe someone)

Wild, irrational, over the top, outrageous, absurd

Their behavior last night was totally outrageous.

Deaf (to concerns)

Uninterested in, unmoved by

She was uninterested in responding to any of the issues I brought up.

Developed/ developing (for countries)

Name the countries This medicine is more widely available or regions in Western Europe than West Africa.

Differently abled

Disabled, [specific disability term]

This theater seat is for people with mobility-related disabilities.

Disabled parking spot

Accessible parking spot

There are three accessible spots in front of the building.

Disabled restroom

Accessible restroom The accessible restroom is down the hall.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Double-blind study

Double-­ anonymized study, double-masked study

This peer-reviewed paper covered two double-anonymized studies.

Elderly, the elderly

Older, older people

We’ve found that many of our older clients enjoy low-impact activities like kayaking.

Eskimo

Inuit

I’ve been collecting prints by Inuit artists.

Ethnic foods, restaurants

International foods, Devon Avenue is the best for lunch restaurants because of all the international restaurants.

Fall on deaf ears

The mic is off, is immune to, meet resistance, go unheard

They seemed immune to my suggestions.

Fireman, firemen

Firefighter(s)

The firefighters showed up for the parade in a firetruck.

Freshman, freshmen

First year, first-year student(s)

In her first year at college, she switched majors twice.

Geronimo!

Let’s go! [Or a similar exclamation of your choice.]

“Let’s go!” she shouted as she bungeed off the bridge.

Ghetto (behavior)

Uncouth, crass, impolite

You know that’s just crass.

Good guys

Good people, good ones

Hey, we’re the good ones here.

Guys (to address people)

Everyone, team, folks

Hey, everyone! The meeting is about to start.

Guys (to refer to people)

People, folks

Those people over there were the ones causing trouble.

Gyp, gypped, jip, jipped

Cheat, cheated

We got cheated by the vendor.

Gypsy

Romani, Roma (not The movie soundtrack was filled with all Romani identify amazing Romani music. as Roma)

Half-breed

Mixed race

She’s mixed race—her father is Armenian, and her mother is Cherokee.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Handicapped

Disabled (person), accessible (place)

The first stall in that bathroom is accessible.

Have a senior moment

Forget

He briefly forgot where he had put the hotel room key.

He or she

They

If anyone has a solution, they can come to me.

He, his (to represent a generic person)

They, their

Each attendee should fill out their registration form upon arrival.

His or her

Their

Each attendee should fill out their name tag.

Hold down the fort

Keep things running

Keep things running while I’m at the conference, okay?

Homeless

Unhoused

The unhoused population grew significantly during the pandemic.

Husband or wife

Spouse

Your spouse can be included in your benefits.

Illegal alien

Undocumented person, undocumented immigrant

The new senator’s wife is a formerly undocumented person.

Illegal immigrant, illegal alien

Undocumented immigrant, undocumented person

Undocumented immigrants make significant contributions to both local and state revenue.

Indian giver

Untrustworthy, not trustworthy

Meh, she’s not trustworthy. I’d pick someone else.

Indian style

Cross-legged

Okay, now we’ll sit cross-legged on our mats.

Indian summer

Second summer

We hit a brief second summer in the middle of October.

Insane

Outrageous, over the top, extreme, etc.

That party was totally over the top.

Insanely (as intensifier)

Totally, completely, outrageously, ridiculously, etc.

I’m ridiculously busy this week.

Jew down

Bargain down

They tried to bargain me down on the price.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Ladies and gentlemen

Colleagues, friends, esteemed guests

Esteemed guests, it is time for our ceremony to begin.

Lame

Not great, boring, dull, sad

The party was kind of sad.

Lost a battle with

Died from, died of

He died of pancreatic cancer.

Low man on the totem pole

Least seniority, lowest rank

I’ve got the least seniority here, so I guess I’ll have to do it.

Male, female (as only options in forms)

Male, female, nonbinary, self-describe, prefer not to say

Please select your gender: male, female, nonbinary, self-describe, prefer not to say.

Man (as generic person)

Human, person, individual

If they could put a person on the moon . . .

Man and wife

Husband and wife

I now pronounce you husband and wife.

Man hours

Person hours, work hours

It’ll take at least forty person hours to get it done.

Man, mankind (as species)

Humanity, humankind, humans

They’re talking about humanity colonizing Mars.

Man’s best friend

Human’s best friend, person’s best friend

A dog really can be a person’s best friend.

Manmade

Synthetic, artificial, humanmade

It’s next to the artificial lake.

Manned

Staffed, crewed

This is the third crewed ship to launch this year.

Manpower

Staff, people

We’ll need some extra staff to get the project done in time.

Master (someone who owns slaves)

Slave owner, enslaver

James Madison was a slave owner and brought enslaved people with him to Washington, DC.

Master bedroom/ bathroom

Primary, main The fancy tile is going in the primary bedroom/bathroom bathroom.

Maternity leave

Parental leave

They’re both out on parental leave until June.

Mentally handicapped, mentally challenged

With an intellectual disability

It’s a class for people with intellectual disabilities.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Middleman

Intermediary, go-between

Everything in this supply chain depends on the intermediaries right now.

Midget

Little person, person of short stature, [if diagnosis known] person with dwarfism

They were filming an episode of that reality show about little people.

Minority group

Marginalized, underrepresented group

The scholarship is for students from marginalized groups.

Mongoloid

Down syndrome

The barista has Down syndrome.

New World

The Americas, Western Hemisphere, so-called New World

Those newly found footprints show that the Americas have been inhabited for at least twenty-three thousand years.

Ninja (to describe highly competent person)

Expert

They’re looking for a coding expert.

Nursing mother

Lactating person, someone lactating

This includes breaks for lactating people who need to express milk.

Nursing mothers’ room

Lactation room

We’re setting up a lactation room near the restrooms.

Nut job

Unpredictable, irrational

That guy is totally irrational.

OCD (to criticize behavior, not as a diagnosis)

Meticulous, detail-oriented, incredibly neat

Mark’s super detail-oriented, so we’ll need to proofread that report really well.

Off the reservation

Questionable, a bad decision, not rational

This might be a bad decision, but what if we added a new section here?

On the warpath

Enraged, livid, incensed, ready to fight

They’re ready to fight.

Open the kimono

Take a closer look at, get information on the inner workings of

Let’s get information on the inner workings of that company before we move forward.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Opposite sex

Another gender, a different gender, other genders

He wasn’t worried about his daughter living in a dorm with people of other genders.

Oriental

Asian, [specific nation or ethnicity]

I’m looking for a Persian or Afghan carpet for that room.

Other (in forms)

Self-describe

If none of the above options fits, please self-describe here:

Pastor, reverend (to mean any religious leader)

Specific: pastor, reverend, priest, rabbi, imam, etc.

Religious leaders from three different houses of worship will come together on Monday night for an interfaith panel.

General: religious leader Peace pipe

Olive branch, offer of peace

I see it as a genuine olive branch.

Physically challenged

Disabled, has a physical disability

She’s disabled, so we’ll need to make sure the site is accessible.

Policeman

Police officer

The police officers walked away.

Powwow

Meeting, conversation

Let’s have a meeting about it.

Preferred pronouns

Pronouns

Onyx’s pronouns are they/them.

Prostitute, prostitution

Sex worker, sex work

He earned his college tuition through sex work.

Psycho, psychotic (to criticize behavior, not as a diagnosis)

Dangerous, unpredictable, menacing, erratic

He’s a really unpredictable and dangerous manager. I’d be careful if I were you.

Rain dance

Ritual

Let’s do our lucky ritual and hope that it happens.

Redskin (you may see written as red***n)

Native, specific nation name, [for sports teams, the new team name]

The Cherokee nation uses an alphabet that is actually a syllabary, which means each symbol represents a syllable.

Retarded (you may see written as r******d)

Developmentally delayed, with intellectual disabilities

It’s a classroom for people who are developmentally delayed.

Sanity check

Check

Can I have you check this out?

Schizo

Unpredictable, erratic, capricious

She’s totally unpredictable.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Schizophrenic (to criticize behavior, not as a diagnosis)

Of two minds

She’s swinging back and forth on this one—she’s really of two minds about it.

Senile

Has dementia

They’re visiting their father, who has dementia.

Sex (in forms)

Gender, gender identity

Please select your gender: male, female, nonbinary, self-describe, prefer not to say.

Sex change operation

Gender-affirming surgery, gender-­ affirming care

She’ll be out of the office for a few weeks for her gender-affirming surgery.

Sex with an underage person

Rape, statutory rape

The thirty-two-year-old defendant was convicted of statutory rape of the fifteen-year-old who he claimed was his girlfriend.

Sexual preference

Sexual orientation

This church welcomes people of all sexual orientations.

Slave

Enslaved person

Thirty enslaved people were separated from their families on that day.

Slave driver

Stickler, toxic boss

He wanted them to work all weekend? That’s toxic boss behavior.

Sold down the river

Used, betrayed

We were betrayed.

Spaceman

Astronaut

I love the astronaut decorations on Abdul’s showstopper cake.

Spaz

Klutz, clumsy person

He’s such a klutz.

Spaz out

Flip out, wig out, lose it

When his favorite song comes on, he flips out and has to start dancing, every time.

Spirit animal

Role model, secret Eat a whole rotisserie chicken in one twin, soulmate, sitting? This guy is my personal icon. inspiration, personal icon (for Wiccans, animal guide)

Spokesman

Spokesperson

The company spokesperson highlighted the new features.

Squaw (you may see written as squ*w)

Native American woman, [specific nation name] woman

This riverside site is where Yowlumne women would grind acorns.

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Suffers from [disease, disability]

Has, has been diagnosed with

He has Type 1 diabetes.

Suffragette

Suffragist

Some hunger-striking suffragists were force-fed while in jail.

The [identity term]s, [identity term] e.g., the Blacks, the people, e.g., Black autistics, the gays people, autistic people, gay people

Autistic people often see patterns that aren’t visible to allistic people.

The aged

Older people

The town is a destination for older people.

The less fortunate

People experiencing poverty, low-income

The food bank serves people currently experiencing poverty.

The needy

People experiencing poverty, low-income

They’re setting up Christmas gifts for people experiencing poverty.

The Orient

Asia, the Middle East, [specific region or country name]

In the ’70s, they picked up some great pieces when traveling around Central and East Asia.

Third world

[Name the specific country, region, or relevant category, like income or health stats]

Malaria is a significant problem in low-income countries that lack robust healthcare systems.

Tone deaf

In poor taste

Given the recent tragedy, that joke was in poor taste.

Too many chiefs and not enough Indians

Too many managers, We’ve got too many managers on this not enough workers; project and not enough workers to too many cooks actually get it done.

Tranny

Transgender

I learned last week that he’s transgender.

Transvestite

Cross-dressing (if referring to clothing), transgender (if referring to gender)

The club was filled with genderqueer people and lots of fun cross-dressing.

Tribalism

Sectarianism, chau- The ongoing chauvinism brought all vinism, in-group hopes of a compromise to an end. loyalty

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Problematic

Inclusive

In a sentence

Turn a blind eye

Ignore, take no notice of

The higher-ups ignored his repeated bad behavior.

Unmanned

Uncrewed, autonomous

The flight is uncrewed, so it requires fewer resources.

Unskilled labor, low-skill work

Lower-wage work, [job name]

They’ve got a lot of openings for ­lower-wage workers.

Victim (of bias)

Target of

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Asian Americans have been repeated targets of bias.

Victim (of disease, condition)

Has, has been diagnosed with

He has Parkinson’s.

Vision quest

Spiritual journey, spiritual ritual, retreat

The desert spa offered an additional two-day spiritual retreat.

Voodoo (when not talking about religious practices)

Magic

Can you do some of your magic and fix this stew?

War paint

Makeup

She’ll be ready once she’s put on her makeup.

War room

Strategy room, operations center

It’s time to head to the strategy room and come up with a good response.

Welsh on a bet

Go back on a bet

He went back on the bet.

Wheelchair-bound

Uses a wheelchair, is a wheelchair user

She uses a wheelchair.

Whitelist

Allowlist, acceptlist, Those websites are on the allowlist. safelist, welcome list

Workmanship

Artisanship

The artisanship on this boat is amazing.

You guys

You all, everyone, [local variants like y’all, yinz, youse, you’uns, you lot]

Hey, everyone, great job setting things up!

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INCLUSION CHECKLIST TEMPLATE If you’re planning out a communication event (like a press release, video, ad campaign, company-wide email, or speech), you can use an inclusion checklist to think through your audience and their experiences. This will make it easier to apply the Six Principles of Inclusive Language. The following is a starter template for an inclusion checklist that you can customize for your own communication needs. As you get more practice applying inclusion checklists to your work, you’ll be able to create more streamlined versions for each communication event you’re preparing—and fill in some of the specific identities you want to make sure you’re keeping in mind. No matter how streamlined your checklist gets, you’ll always want to monitor your pronoun use for whatever communications you’re creating. You can use your checklist to help you map out the pronoun circles for each time you use pronouns like you, we, us, everyone, and everybody. (Information and exercises on how to map out pronoun circles are found in Chapter 5.) In other words, if you’re using words like everybody, you can use the checklist to make sure you’re actually including everyone in your audience— and if you’re not, change your language accordingly. For example, if you’ve written “We wish everybody a Happy Father’s Day” and then go through the checklist, the Family and Parental Status questions should remind you that not everybody was raised by a father, and that some people come from abusive family situations and don’t want to celebrate their parents. After this reminder, you might remove the everybody from your sentence, and rephase it to begin, “For those of you celebrating Father’s Day this Sunday . . . ” By using the checklist, you can avoid common violations of the Principles of Inclusive Language, and instead reflect reality, draw people in, incorporate other perspectives, and recognize pain points.

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Who Is in My Audience? CHARACTERISTICS OF INDIVIDUALS 1. What races and ethnicities are the people in my

audience? a. Am I considering the perspectives, histories, expe-

riences, and pain points of all the racial and ethnic groups in my audience? b. Is my language avoiding the erasure of a particular race

or ethnicity, such as indigenous people? c. Am I using the most up-to-date terminology for the

group(s) I’m writing about? Have I checked in with the person I’m profiling and asked what terminology they prefer? 2. What genders are the people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding problematic language that presents

gender as a binary? b. Am I using the correct pronouns to refer to people? c. Am I using people’s preferred honorifics? d. Am I referring to people’s gender using their preferred

terminology? e. Am I avoiding using gender-specific language that

erases people, such as using he or mankind as if it represents everyone in my audience? f. Am I quoting people in a gender-balanced way? Or are

men significantly overrepresented?

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g. Am I closing the respect gap? Or are only men given

titles like Dr. and Mr. while other people are presented using just their first name? h. Am I avoiding talking about women’s male partners

and children when it isn’t relevant? i. Am I presenting accomplishments by people of differ-

ent genders in the same quantity and in a similar way? 3. What are the sexual orientations of people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding heteronormative language that suggests

that everyone is heterosexual? b. Am I avoiding erasing anyone or forgetting about pain

points? c. Am I using people’s preferred identity terms for sexual

orientation? 4. What are the physical abilities and disabilities of the

people in my audience? a. Will my communications be accessible to people who

are deaf or hard of hearing? Blind or otherwise visually impaired? b. For events, are my communications giving an accurate

representation of the physical accessibility of the space and event? c. Am I using preferred disability terminology for my

audience members or people who are being quoted or described? d. Am I avoiding erasing anyone in the disabled commu-

nity and remembering pain points?

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e. Am I avoiding ableist language, like blind leading the

blind? f. Am I avoiding language that suggests lowered expecta-

tions of disabled people or that has the characteristics of inspiration porn? 5. What is the neurodiversity of the people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding language that suggests that everyone is

neurotypical? b. Am I talking about language and life experiences in

ways that include autistic people? Am I presenting autistic forms of communication (such as being more literal) as equally valid? c. Am I avoiding pain points for neurodivergent people?

For example, have I avoided loosely using terms such as ADD, ADHD, OCD, and Tourette’s? 6. What are the ages of my audience members? a. Am I using language that is respectful of older people

and their capabilities? b. Am I respecting the bodily autonomy and capacities of

children? 7. What are the weights of my audience members? a. Am I avoiding erasure and remembering people of dif-

ferent sizes? b. Am I using respectful language to refer to larger and

smaller people?

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SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS 1. What are the geographic locations of people in my

audience? a. Am I including different time zones? b. Am I avoiding language that assumes everyone is in my

country? c. Am I using language that includes both northern and

southern hemispheres (when relevant)? 2. What are the languages and dialects of people in my

audience? a. Am I avoiding language that suggests that everyone is

monolingual? b. Am I avoiding language that isn’t respectful of “mixed”

varieties like Spanglish or Konglish? c. Am I using language that is respectful of nonstandard

language varieties (like African American English)? d. Am I using language that is respectful of nonstandard

accents? e. When I talk about language, am I including sign

languages? 3. What are the countries of origin and immigrant status for

people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding language that suggests that everyone

was born in my country?

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b. Am I using respectful language for people who have

immigrated to my country, regardless of documentation status? c. Am I including indigenous people in my history? In my

present-day descriptions? 4. What are the socioeconomic classes and income levels for

people in my audience? a. Am I using language that represents all the socioeco-

nomic classes of audience members and takes into account their perspectives and pain points? b. Am I using language that represents the range of incomes

and buying capacities for people in my audience? 5. What are the educational backgrounds of people in my

audience? Am I using language that takes into account that not everyone has finished high school or attended a four-year college? 6. What are the religions of people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding language that centers Christianity or

assumes that everyone is Christian? (Or another dominant religion?) b. Am I incorporating the perspectives of and avoid-

ing pain points for audience members of all relevant religions? 7. What is the marital status of people in my audience? a. Am I avoiding language that presents all marriages as

heterosexual? b. Am I including people with different marital statuses

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8. What is the parental status and family status of people in

my audience? a. Am I avoiding language that suggests that everyone of a

certain age is a parent? b. Am I avoiding language that suggests that everyone

has been or is being raised by one male and one female parent? c. Am I avoiding language that assumes that family

households are made up of nuclear families? d. Am I using language that takes into account that some

people come from abusive family situations? e. Am I using language that includes the perspectives and

experiences of people raised in foster care and people who were adopted as children? 9. What are the political affiliations of the people in my audi-

ence? Am I using language that includes the perspectives and experiences of all audience members? 10. What is the military experience of people in my audience?

Am I using language that incorporates the experience and perspectives of veterans?

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AS I WROTE THIS BOOK, I worked hard to incorporate the Six Principles of Inclusive Language into the text itself. My biggest goal for this book was that it reflect reality and show people new ways of understanding how language works in context. But I also wanted to make sure that the book showed respect to all different kinds of readers, drew all of them in, and didn’t inadvertently erase anybody. To do that, I had to incorporate different perspectives and make sure I was recognizing and avoiding pain points for different people. So I needed input from a whole lot of people to make sure that the text wasn’t problematic. I am grateful to the many people who shared their expertise with me and reviewed different components of this book. Dr. Jon Henner gave guidance and insight for Deaf inclusion along with other aspects of disability, ableism, and exclusion. I’m also grateful to disability expert Jessie Wusthoff, who reviewed and improved the disability-related content in this book (and who introduced me to the fantastic Lesa Bradshaw TEDx talk that I excerpt in Chapter 4). Ayden Parrish and Rachel Cullen were absolutely crucial to the creation and refinement of text relating to autistic people. And Dr. Kirby Conrod made sure my descriptions of gender and pronoun usage were up to the mark. I’d also like to thank the people who reviewed the book from the perspective of their own lived experience and guided me to improvements so readers of all kinds would feel acknowledged

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and welcomed by the text. Cynthia Overton, Bryan Banisaba, Calysta Watson, Nimkiins MikZaabii (Dmetri Hayes), and Jared Boyce—thank you! My agent, John Willig, was insightful enough to bring me to Berrett-Koehler, my publisher, which has “improving the world” at the heart of its business model—to the point where it is actually a certified B Corp, which makes Berrett-Koehler my kind of publisher. My in-house editors Neal Maillet and Sarah Modlin were integral in reshaping my original proposal—which I will kindly call “completist” but might also be described as “way too big” and “no one will buy or read the book in this format.” Their insights and guidance throughout the process helped turn the book into what it is today. And I am eternally grateful to my fantastic developmental editor, Susan Defreitas. Not only did our sessions keep me on schedule (literally getting words on the page can be one of the hardest parts of writing), but her feedback and suggestions were invaluable for restructuring chapters, removing the “linguistic digressions” I really wanted to share but would maybe be a lot less compelling for readers, and rephrasing sentences so they were as clean (and empathetic) as possible. It takes a lot to write a book—and even though I’d planned to write this book for a while, I never thought I’d write it while dealing with long-haul Covid. So I also want to thank the medical practitioners who kept me (mostly) functional enough to write: Dr. Marie Biek and Wanda Dabkowska. Without them, I honestly couldn’t have done it. And I’m grateful to the many scholars and thinkers who have come before me, paving the way to see and make sense of the patterns of the world. My graduate education was a paradigm shift for me and drastically changed how I see the world around me. The global accumulation of knowledge, theory, and analysis that I have had access to has been a bountiful gift that keeps on giving.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am also grateful to the many people who, over the years, have shared their stories with me in both official interviews and unofficial conversations and have given me fantastic data that I could run analyses on. And I’m thankful for the many people out there who share their experiences, stories, insights, and suggestions on social media—their posts on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn in particular have been incredibly helpful. My hyperefficient project coordinator Alex Athens provided invaluable assistance with research, data organization and management, and the willingness to jump in and do whatever I needed at any given moment. I can’t underestimate the support of friends and family, from the earliest seeds of the book (“You totally should write it!!!”) all the way to its completion (“You did it!”). Calysta Watson, Charlie Levin, Donna Hunter, Helen Faller, Jill Slater, and Stefan Bucher in particular have been supportive and loving cheerleaders. The always fantastic Sacramento Wertheims—Steve, Abbie, Marlena, and Gwendolyn—also provided laughs and respite, and sometimes a house to use as a writing retreat. Finally, my partner Todd E. Feldman has been just the best— both throughout this whole process and long before it. It isn’t easy to find someone who genuinely supports and celebrates your achievements and success. From lawyerly debates on words and their meaning to check-ins on how concepts might land to picking up the slack as I grappled with both illness and book writing, he’s always been there. Thank you.

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INDEX

A

accountability, 67, 193, 194–195 address, terms of, 95–99, 150–153 anxiety, 3–4, 105, 157, 184 apologies, 197–198 appropriateness changing norms of, 3–8, 18 of compliments, 176–178 contextual clues for, 7 dominant-group-determined, 37 double standards about, 63–64 as personal, 40 softening language about, 66–67 updating your knowledge of, 198–200 “articulate,” 171–173, 176, 178, 186–187 asexual/aromantic people, 55 assigned female/male at birth (AFAB/ AMAB), 52, 73 audience, 135, 136, 227–230 autistic/allisic conversation changing norms of, 5 context sensitivity in, 6–7 “flavor” of words in, 41–42 humor in, 72 identity-first terms for, 110 indexicality and, 36 inflating language and, 65–66 length of, 12 monologuing in, 7

via compliments, 171–172, 173 grammatical, 173–176 identifying “hot spots,” 9 in mental models, 173 open discussions about, 63 via prototyping, 82 via semantic frames, 30–33 See also discrimination binary, gender, 47-53, 73 bisexuality, 55, 56, 163, 164 Black people as “articulate,” 171–172, 176, 178, 186–187 career restraints for, 44 dehumanization of, 154 dialects of, 9, 35, 173–176 incorporating perspectives of, 127–130 inflating language about, 197 last names of some, 137 master/slave terminology, 182 semantic framing of, 30–31 “skin-toned” norms and, 157–158 unconscious demotions of, 79–82, 85–86, 174 “unprofessional” hair of, 25, 42–44 vs. white normativity, 43–44 bleaching, semantic, 184 blind people, 113, 125

B

C

babies, 50–52, 73, 73 “bad,” 17, 174 behavior, 31, 32, 49, 63–65 behavior, problematic, 66–69, 70, 140 belonging, 38–41, 84 bias about “professional,” 25–26, 44 avoid expressing, 87

InclusiveLanguageFieldGuide.indd 237

children gender binary training for, 50–51 inclusive language for, 73, 166 “Oriental” boys, 143 rape of, 140 softening language use with, 68 students of color, 31 cisgender, 52

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INDEX

cognitive challenges, 58, 83, 116 colonization, European, 159–160 compliments, 111, 171–178, 188 context in autistic/allistic conversation, 6–7, 11–12 vs. dictionary definition, 27 “flavor” of, 38–42 pronoun presentation in, 60 reading, to avoid demotions, 87 words out of, 28–29 critiques, 32, 37, 70 culture(s) cultural programming, 83, 84–85 cycle of pejoration in, 106–107 education on other, 199–200 erasure of differences in, 161 inappropriate event sites, 127–130, 145 Native American, 167 US, as Christian, 62–63 Western-centric, 142 cycle of pejoration, 106–109, 196

D

DARVO (Deny, Argue, and Reverse Victim and Offender), 70–71 deadnaming, 46, 156, 167 deaf speakers, 18, 89, 105, 110, 194, 229 defensiveness, 70, 71, 192, 203 dialects, 9, 35, 173–175 dictionary definitions, 18, 27, 33, 38 difference-making, 33, 112–114, 116–121 disability accessibility and, 114, 124–126 compulsion to comment on, 112–113 crip linguistics, 175 historic terms for, 108 inclusive language on, 22, 104, 116 intrusive questions about, 113 and marked/unmarked terms, 118 media on, 146 and pejoration cycle, 19, 106–109 practice with inclusion of, 187–188 presumed incompetent, 116 respect gap and, 96 spasticity, 196 terms of address, 109–110, 111 types of, 105 unconscious demotions and, 81, 177 discrimination, 33, 44, 60. See also bias disrespect, 88, 94, 111, 112, 154

distorting language, 19, 61–72, 141 “diversity,” 116–121, 122, 124, 143 dominant groups appearance of, 112–113 centering, 141–144 greater allowances for, 64–65 ignoring other perspectives, 130 masking language for/by, 61–63 as “normal,” 37 perspective taking by, 131–132 references to, 122 reinforced via reality distortion, 61 softening language by, 66–68, 138 as unmarked neutral, 118–121 double standards, 31, 32, 64 drawing people in disabled people, 104–116 “diversity” vs., 116–121 inclusive principle of, 18, 104, 192 practicing, 19, 122–126

E

education, 1–3, 132, 173, 176 empathy, 66, 138, 140 English language, 17–18, 136–137, 152, 175 erasure, 3, 57, 130, 149 erasure, preventing avoiding misnaming, 153–157 via gender-neutral terms, 150–153 how to, 19 inclusive principle of, 18, 193 of Indigenous history, 158–163 of lesbians, 163–165 “Oriental” and, 142 practicing, 166–169 ethnic bias, 32, 43, 90, 103–104, 141–142 euphemism treadmill, 106 Europe, 142, 159, 179–180 “everyone,” 133–135, 147, 227 exclusion via beauty standards, 103–104 via gender binary, 50 via gender-specific terms, 150–153 via “professional,” 43 from pronoun circle, 133–137 in the workplace, 44 “exotic,” 38–41, 131 expectations cultural, gendered, 50 low, 20, 115, 122, 171–173, 176–177 softening language about, 66

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INDEX

experience, lived, 131, 158, 181 expression, gender, 54–55, 56

“Oriental,” 142 pointing to identity within, 35 “guys,” 150–153, 166

F

H

feedback, 200 “flavor” of words about disability, 106 “butchering” names, 89 cycle of pejoration, 106, 107, 109 learning about varying, 132 “master,” 182 mental health terms, 183 overview of, 19, 29, 38–42 pet names, 94 “professional,” 43–44 pronoun presentation, 60 foreignness, 38–41

G

gender binary, 47–48, 49–51 critical indexing of, 37 dysphoria, 157 honorifics and, 95–98 importance of inclusion on, 21 indexing, 35 male gaze, 142 marked/unmarked, 118 “passing” as, 53, 60 semantic framing and, 32–33 sexual orientation vs., 55 specific vs. neutral terms, 150–153, 166, 167 gender fluid people, 52, 53 gender identity(ies) acceptance of, 157 appearance and, 56, 57 don’t presume, 73 and honorifics, 98 importance of, 49 in LGBTQ+ acronym, 56 “outing” someone’s, 59 overview of, 51–54 gender-neutral language, 19, 97, 99, 151, 153, 193 “good,” 17, 25, 174, 175 grammar, 49, 58, 175–176, 184 groups “diverse” to reference, 118, 121 education on other, 199–200 erasing distinctions in, 161 erasing indigenous, 161, 162

habits, inclusive, 9–10, 17 harassment, 33, 66–68, 71 harm via misnaming, 89 non-dominant perspectives on, 138–141 relational, via language, 10 of softening language, 68 of unconscious demotions, 84, 85–86, 88 heteronormativity, 163–165 heterosexuality, 55, 118, 142–143, 149 history pain points in, 20, 178–183 pre-colonial, 158–159, 166–167 slavery, 120, 127–130, 145 homosexuality, 149, 163–165 honorifics, 95–98, 99, 154 humor, 72, 181

I

identity(ies) ambiguity about, 163 gender. See gender identity(ies) identity-first terminology, 110, 111 important dimensions of, 20–23, 49 indexing, 34–35, 37 via names, 153–154 pejorative terms based on, 107 perspective taking on other, 131 pronoun circles based on, 147 impact, 68, 195 inappropriateness, 70, 92–94, 113, 172–178 inclusion, 53, 59, 89, 133–137 inclusive language about diversity, 121 changing norms for, 198–200 contextual clues, 7, 47 for disability, 116 draws people in, 104 on the fly, 10, 17, 194 incorporates perspectives, 130 for marginalized groups, 3, 16 mistakes, 195–198 practicing, 23–24, 193

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INDEX

inclusive language (continued) prevents erasure, 150 principles of, vi, 8, 17–20, 191–193 recognizes pain points, 172 substitutions, 215–226 indexicality for Black dialects, 175 of gender expression, 52–53, 54–55 meaning via, 29 of nicknames, 94 overview of, 34–37 of “professional,” 43, 191 inequality, 62–65 inflating language, 63–66, 76, 94, 192 in-group conversation humor in, 72, 181 in social media, 146 taking cues from, 199 term reclamation in, 108, 110 terminology cues from, 111 inspiration porn, 177, 187–188 institutional power, 138 insults, 106–108, 116, 183 intensifiers, 184, 188–189 intentions, good, 66, 152, 195 International Phonetic Alphabet, 91, 92, 162 intersex, 51–52 invisibility, 162, 163

J

jobs, 1–3, 80–83, 90–91, 174 jokes, 70–72, 164, 180–181, 192 judgements vs. identity, 32 via inflating language, 66 via semantic frames, 31 snap, 19, 80, 84, 174

L

language twenty-first-century, 3 distorting, 19, 61–72, 141 of/for dominant group, 21 gender-specific vs. -neutral, 152–153 ideologies, 8, 173, 174 neurotype processing of, 36 precise, 135, 137, 143–144, 145, 161 revitalization, 161 as social action, 10–11 US English, 17–18

LGBTQ+ people discrimination against, 60 gender expression for, 54–55 gender identity and, 52–54 language including, 3 lesbians, 55, 163–165 and sexual orientation, 55–56 “lighten up,” 70, 71 linguistic anthropology, 9, 18, 29, 174 literal interpretation, 12, 36, 42, 66 low-frequency names, 88

M

majority/minority, 21 maleness gender-specific/-neutral terms, 150–153 honorifics for, 96 male gaze, 142 perspective of, 138, 139 as unmarked neutral, 118–119 marginalized groups centering identities of, 21–23 inflating language about, 64–65, 77 intentionally including, 16, 121 lesbians, 164 LGBTQ+ people, 56 as marked, 118–121 misnaming, 155–156 “Oriental,” 142 pejorative terms for, 107 presumed incompetent, 116 via problematic language, 104 references to, 122 unconscious demotions of, 79–83 with “unusual” names, 90 markedness, 118–121, 123–124 masking language, 61–63 master/slave terminology, 181–183, 186 meaning cycle of pejoration in, 106–109 dictionary definitions, 8, 27 examining personal, 44 via eye contact, 36 out of context, 29 personal, subjective, 38 semantic framing of, 30–33 social, 35 men “boys will be boys,” 66 as doctor prototype, 82, 83, 84 in gender binary, 47–48, 50

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INDEX

gender-specific terms, 150–153, 166 people perceived as, 32 as “professional,” 37 unconscious demotions of, 82 mental health, 157, 183–186, 188–189 minimizing Black people, 174 capacity of disabled people, 114–115 via “just joking,” 70 via softening language, 67, 139–141 victim perspectives, 139 minority(ies), 21, 107, 112–113 misgendering case study of, 45–46 correcting, 61 as disrespect, 19, 46 via gender expression, 54 via honorifics, 95, 97–98, 99 how to avoid, 4, 61 with inflating language, 65 pain of, 54–55 practice to correct, 74–75 misnaming, 19–20, 153–157 mistakes accidentally offensive, 3–4 preparing for/healing from, 195–198 private practice for, 74 unconscious demotions, 84 misunderstandings, 11, 36, 66 monoculture, fragility of, 28 monologuing, 7, 12 Mother’s Day, 133–135

N

names correct use of, 19, 153–157 low-frequency aversion, 89–90 marked/unmarked, 120 pronunciation queries, 91–92 respectful use of, 88–98, 100 narcissism, 71 Native Americans, 85–86, 158–163, 168–169 neurotypical/neurodiverse, 11, 12, 22, 36 neutrality in addressing disabled people, 122 dominant group as determining, 37 gender-specific/-neutral terms, 150–153 masking language and, 62 of master/slave terms, 182

there is no, 38–42, 43 as unmarked, 118–121 and the white gaze, 143 nicknames, 19, 88, 92–95, 99 nonbinary defined, 52 history of, 9 including, 166 misgendering, 45–46, 50 non-English terms for, 48 practicing fluency around, 74 pronouns, 4–5 reality of, 19, 48 “normal” as dominant group, 37 heteronormativity, 163–165 via masking language, 61–63 white, heterosexual, men as, 37, 50, 118, 124 whiteness as, 143 norms autistic/allistic conversational, 12 changing inclusive, 198–200 internalized, vi–vii new, 3–8 New York vs. California, 11 white, middle-class, 43

O

OCD, 183–184, 186 oppression, 182 “Oriental,” 141–142, 145, 161 “othering,” 39–41, 59, 113–114 “the other one,” 155, 168, 193, 203 “outing” someone, 59 “oversensitivity” and DARVO tactic, 70 vs. “I wouldn’t mind,” 8, 40, 131, 132 vs. perspective taking, 180 and terms for disability, 109

P

pain points, recognizing from erasure, 150 five tips for, 186 historic, 178–183 how to, 19 humor and, 72 inappropriate compliments, 172–178 inclusive principle of, 18, 193 via incorporating perspectives, 130, 145

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INDEX

pain points, recognizing (continued) mental health terms, 183–185 of misgendering, 46 practice, 186–189 from problematic language, 8 pansexuality, 55, 163 pattern recognition, 83 pejoration, 19, 106–109, 122, 196 people of color biased judgements about, 87–88 incorporating perspectives of, 127–130 presumed incompetent, 116 semantic frames as denigrating, 31, 43 “skin-toned” norms and, 157–158 unconscious demotions of, 79–81, 85–86 performance reviews, 32 perspective taking, 130–132, 180 perspectives, incorporating other case study in, 127–130 vs. centering dominant group, 141–144 five tips for, 145–146 of harmed people, 138–141 how to, 19 inclusive principle of, 18, 130, 192 perspective taking, 130–132 via plural skin tones, 158 practicing, 146–148 planning, 12–15, 16 plantations, 127–130, 145 politeness, 3, 36, 55, 95–96 politics, indexicality in, 36 population statistics, 159–160 power dynamics misnaming and, 156 norm shifts based on, 6 perspective-ignoring, 130, 138, 139 and softening language, 66–68 practice drawing people in, 123–126 for on-the-fly events, 17 incorporating all perspectives, 146–148 need for, 23–24 recognizing pain points, 186–189 reflecting reality, 75–77 showing respect, 100–101 tips for, 193–195

presentation, gender, 54–55 prestige, 50, 80–82, 85–86 problematic language via cycle of pejoration, 106–109 disrespecting names as, 88 distorts reality, 47 “diverse” people, 116–121 effect of context on, 7, 8 erases people/history, 150 “everyone” as, 133–135 as excluding/marginalizing, 104 ignores pain points, 172 ignoring other perspectives, 130 inspiration porn, 177 majority/minority, 21 making mistakes, 195–198 pain caused by, 8 “professional” as, 25–27 reality distortion by, 61–72 recognizing, 191 semantic framing, 30–33 substitutions for, 215–226 tools for eliminating, vii, 17, 18 towards disabled people, 113 unintentional, vi “we”/“us,” 19 “professional,” 25–27, 29, 37, 42, 63 pronouns correcting, 61 learning, 55, 73 misused, 4–5 nonbinary, 9 presenting your, 59, 75–76 privacy around, 60, 76 pronoun circles, 133–137, 147, 227 singular they, 57 twenty-first-century etiquette on, 4–5, 49 “we” as problematic, 19 pronunciation, 91–92, 95, 99, 100 pseudo-compliments, 172–178 punishment, 65, 85–86

Q

“queer,” 53, 55, 56, 108, 163

R

racial bias Black language stereotypes, 173–175 via marked categories, 118, 119–121 “professional” as, 27

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INDEX

via semantic frames, 30–32 vs. white normativity, 19 racial identity, 21, 35, 37 raciolinguistics, 174 rape, 138, 140, 145–146 reality, reflecting how to, 19, 73 inclusive principle of, 18, 47, 192 “new” pronoun challenges, 56–61 practicing, 75–77 pronouns and gender, 47–56 reality distortions, 61–72 without softening language, 141 relationships building healthy, vii, 18, 24 closeness and norm changes to, 6 compliments as strengthening, 172 effects of language on, 10 event planning for healthy, 12–15 interpretive differences in, 42 linguistic missteps in, 4–5, 195, 198 as softening language, 140 respect, 12–15, 48, 96–97, 99 respect, showing for autistic listeners, 36 avoiding unconscious demotions, 80–88 correct name use for, 88–98, 157 to disabled people, 116 education on, vi five tips for, 99 via honorifics, 95–96 how to, 19 inclusive principle of, 18, 80, 192 for indigenous groups, 162 “Oriental” and, 142 practice, 100–101 via specificity, 143–144 “retarded,” 108–109

S

safety, 4, 18, 60 semantic framing of candor, 63 for “diverse,” 117 double standards in, 31, 32, 191 of gendered terms of address, 150–153 linguistic tool of, 19, 29 of “the opposite sex,” 47–48 of “Oriental,” 142

overview of, 30–33 “professional” in, 42–43 sexual assault, 138–141, 145–146 sexual harassment, 66–68, 71, 77, 93, 94 sexual orientation, 22, 55–56, 163 sexualization, 39–41, 92–94, 142–143 sign language, 10, 15, 18, 126, 194 singular they, 57, 58, 61–61 Six Principles of Inclusive Language, 17–20 skin color, 157–158 slavery gag rule to enforce, 63 incorporating perspective of, 127–130 master/slave tech terms, 181–183 names descended from, 136–137, 154 role of white people in, 120 social action, 10–11 social context excluding disabled people from, 106 important identities in, 22 inclusion checklist for, 231–233 language addressing, 47 meaning indexing, 34–37 non-Christian, 63 pattern recognition, 83 power in, 138 softening language about sexual assault, 138–141, 145–146 overview of, 66–69 perspectives ignored by, 139–141 practicing to learn, 76–77 vs. reflecting reality, 192 rewriting, 147–148 “spaz,” 108, 122, 195–197, 224 specificity, 135, 137, 143 spelling, 91–92, 99, 100 spontaneous conversations, 17, 194 status, 50, 80–81, 156 status quo, 61–63 stereotypes bias-based compliments, 171–172 of Black people, 9, 173 “boys will be boys,” 66 gender, 50–51, 73 “professional” hair, 25–26 “skin-toned,” 157–158

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INDEX

stigma, disability, 106, 107–109, 114, 183 suicide, 157, 184

T

tech industry master/slave terminology in, 181–183 new etiquette in, 48 women as “incompetent” in, 116 terminology cycle of pejoration in, 107–109 flesh-color/nude, 157–158 gender, 48, 166, 167–168 from historic pain points, 178–183 master/slave, 181–183 mental health terms, 183–185 precision of, 143–144, 161 using accurate, 67, 73 “the opposite sex,” 73 they/them, 57, 58, 60–61, 73 thoughtfulness, 12–15 threats, presumed, 85–88 transgender, 52, 53, 73, 156–157 trust, 4, 18, 195

U

unconscious demotions avoiding, 19 of Black people, 174 of disabled people, 116 practice teaching about, 100–101 recipients of, 80–88 underrepresented groups. See marginalized groups United States, 62–63, 159–160 unmarked things, 118–121, 123–124

W

“we”/“us,” 133–135, 147, 227

white people centering, 139, 141–144, 158–163 “race” as other people to, 120, 182 “sounding white,” 173–175 women erasing names of, 155 erasure of lesbian, 163 “female” as marked category, 118–119 fetishization of “Oriental,” 143 in gender binary, 47–48, 50 pejorative terms for, 107 people perceived as, 32 pet names for, 92–94 unconscious demotions of, 81 words “exotic,” 38–41, 131 “flavor” of, 38–42 grammar, 58, 184 importance of context, 28–29 intensifiers, 184 “Oriental,” 141–142 as pointing to/indexing, 34 roots of, 118–119 safe and dangerous, 12 workplace issues company/client relationships, 18 cost of accidental gaffes, 4 disability and, 114 hiring “diverse” people, 116–117, 121 identities to include, 22–23 inflating language, 64–65 misnaming, 155–156 name-based career restraints, 90 “professional” hair, 25–26, 42–44 pronoun circle inclusion, 135–136 semantic framing bias, 30–32 unconscious demotions, 84, 87 use of “exotic,” 39–41 without softening, 147–148

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DR. SUZANNE WERTHEIM is a national expert in inclusive language and a leader in applying the science of linguistic anthropology to workplace communications. After getting her PhD in linguistics from UC Berkeley, Dr. Wertheim held faculty positions at Northwestern, University of Maryland, and UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system to found Worthwhile Research & Consulting, a boutique firm that offers anti-bias, inclusive language, and inclusive leadership services. Today, her clients include major players in tech, finance, healthcare, travel, hospitality, and journalism. Dr. Wertheim has done research in three languages on two continents. During her dissertation fieldwork, she was under secret police surveillance in Russia, and when doing research for US government clients, she held top-secret security clearance. Dr. Wertheim’s research projects have ranged from the language of Tatar nationalists in provincial Russia to the performances of LA-based comedians to the computational processing of metaphor in four languages to the work challenges faced by female engineers in Bay Area tech. She is frequently asked to speak about her research and to lead workshops on inclusive language, language and bias, unconscious demotions, inclusive leadership, and ally skills. For more information, please visit suzannewertheim.com.

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