How do you avoid linguistic racism and exploitative storytelling in your organization's communication?

Last Tuesday, we attended Blue Avocado’s webinar: Social Transformation for Your Nonprofit with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The panelists were engaging and informative and the dialogue centered around the idea that for anti-racism work to be more than a shingle that’s been hung outside your organization in the last couple of years, you must take accountability within the organization (and Board!) for how exactly you are reinforcing systemic racism, as well as have organizational principles that will guide your organization’s work around undoing racism.

One thing that really struck us was how they addressed grantwriting in particular as a place where *linguistic racism* exists. Examples of things to avoid included the terms “minority neighborhoods” and “at-risk.” KDS loves the Progressive Style Guide that was created in 2016 and we hope another updated version will be created soon. In the meantime, this is a topic we’ll continue to explore and revisit.

Watch the whole webinar here.