I’ve been recently helping some wonderful people with various projects related to development and entrepreneurialism in the global south and specifically on the African subcontinent. A recent back-and-forth I had regarding the use of language really elevated a point that I think it’s worth sharing in our ongoing quest to be as equitable and inclusive in our missions as we can.
This exchange also reminded me of something I’d discussed with members of my women’s cohort back in the spring; in that case, it was around the word “empower.” Now for many people that sounds like a wonderful word: empower. You are giving people the power to do something important useful, or significant to them their cause or community.
However, let’s break it down from the point of view of decolonialist and equitable thinking. “Empower” implies that one party has the power and is imparting that power to another party — ostensibly through the goodness of their heart and their (praiseworthy) generosity.
No One is Saying You Don’t Mean Well
The trickiness of empowerment is always on my mind. I just completed a site visit with a development team for a community-based organization serving elderly people with housing instability (that reminder that philanthropy and citizen action are also needed right here in our own backyards) and we also grappled with this concept behind the origin of “charity” – which we get into at length in my course.
Without veering too far off track, the gist of both of these conversations is: when navigating across power, resourcing, and especially capital flows, one must be vigilant. The road from wanting to do good to minimizing or even infantilizing the “other” can be a short hop. And part of my advisory work is just supporting our joint efforts to steer clear of mindsets and situations that create distance and hierarchy. We have seen this a lot recently around paternalistic, patriarchal “promises” to protect women “whether we like it or not.”
This System and Its Expectations, Have Us ALL Turned ‘Round
In our zeal to do the right thing, to “help,” words really matter. Even the word “aid.” I was reminded of a time when a former colleague told me about a dilemma she faced when on a site visit to a former French colony nation. A woman who had done a fair amount of decolonizing and antiracist work, she was pretty clear in her mind that she did not want to show up as a white savior—but, darnit, everyone in the room was entreating her for “help.” Connections to US university admissions officers (whom she didn’t even know), instant funding, media opportunities, things she couldn’t even deliver, and in her heart, felt was an inverted and dystopian example of favoritism.
But her hosts felt differently, and I get them, because our world works on relationships. From their perspective, she is a white American; certainly, she has access to powerful people — at least more than they did. It’s a tricky needle to thread.
She and I discussed how awkward it felt, how lose-lose. I also counseled her that being able to just sit with that discomfort and irony, as opposed to running away from it or applying some kind of quick-fix salve, was an important part of her continued growth as an equitable collaborator. But we were both left a bit agog in the moment because there is also a built-in and almost mandatory and certainly saddening element of complicity, favoritism, gladhanding and desperation in the request of local people for the big powerful westerner to come in and save the day.
Look, we all do it. We call in favors and beseech our networks for avenues into opportunity. The piece I’m chewing on is the calamity of the additional layer of geopolitics, colonial history, and capital flows, and how that makes the stakes just so high and so unfair.
For my former colleague, the experience had stayed with her months and years after the fact — clearly demonstrating just how hard it is to actually live and operate in a decolonizing way. Yet it’s the work we all signed up to do and we have to sustain and maintain.
Words and Lords
Anyway, back to the words. Last spring, I had mentioned to my cohort participants that the word “empower” should raise eyebrows in our day and age, given the unfortunate legacy of white feminism, and frankly, the origin of the concept of charity anyway, all the way back to the concept of “alms for the poor.” (You know the alms-givers thought this act would gain them ingress into the Kingdom of Heaven, even while they exploited and demeaned the serfs and urban destitute they festooned alms upon? I don’t know of any Medieval Era Intersectional Rights Activists who would have spoken to this, but if you do, let me know!)
There’s a troublesome, longstanding, and hierarchy-inducing subtext in handing out to Les Miserables that pretty quickly devolves, in many cases into “and now that I’ve given you this, you OWE me [insert tribute, fealty, or posture].
This was how the Lords and Popes did it (now you will give your heart to God); this is what Carnegie and Rockefeller required (because if they hadn’t most of our most venerable 20th-century halls and institutions wouldn’t exist). This is what I and many others had to deal with as a fundraiser for arts organizations where the big donors demanded their name on the “produced by” line, but also engraved into the signage on scenery doors, carpets, and the back of patron chairs. But beyone that, they expected to be treated like demigods or at least Popes, from every staffer, from the CEO to the mailroom clerk—some places had the photos of their wealthiest donors on “cheat sheet” posters in case these patrons were ever to show up unexpected at our office.
Ah, if only folks gave away their wealth without the request for fanfare (as many, thankfully, are doing more and more).
In its most gruesome iteration, this demand for fealty transmorgrifies into the photo op, or as Bad Bunny recently reminded us, the ignominy of throwing roles of paper towels at Puerto Ricans who just lost over 4,000 of their loved ones to a hurricane. But I digress
Did We Stick the Landing?
Back to the brochure. We messaged different verbs back and forth. “Enable” was troublesome because of the fraught connotations in the US culture around sexual grooming, abuse, and enablers of bad behavior.
How about “strengthening”? Well maybe, but is it really about giving them strength? Don’t they already have the strength and wisdom they need, and really what they require is that legacy barriers (such as access to funding) be removed? Are we not implying that debt-cancellation is the actual answer? (That was a question I only posed to myself!)
Phrases like “further strengthening” or “removing barriers to” or “undoing legacy inequities” are more accurate, but do not a pithy headline make!
The go-tos like “helping” or “assisting” still get caught up in the implicit power imbalance conundrum. They really just don’t land well with some readers but more importantly, I think they can risk undermining the intentionality and event manifestation of the kind of decolonized approach we are wanting to take in our work.
Oh man, so much agonizing over two or three words! But isn’t this the deeper kind of inclusive and equitable practice that we want to normalize? No one will disagree that because we’re talking about money, it gets doubly complicated. We all know that money is going to be the last element of society to really shift at scale from a colonized, power hoarding, top-down approach to an abundance and liberatory model. (But that’s no reason to stop pushing.)
I got into the online thesaurus, looking for a succinct way of conveying the “localized, in service-to” approach as opposed to the old status quo of Sisters of Mercy way of doing the work. “Mobilizing” was almost there. “Galvanizing” is is a word I like a lot, as well as “igniting” and “fueling,” but those all have really unfortunate connotations for a climate-focused mission—too close to the language of the extractive industries and fossil fuel economies!
And the Winner Is…
Maybe by now you’re thinking, “oh come on, this is all so soft and pandering,” but is it, really?
I’ll offer a different prism for your reflection. No woman wants to be called a “chick” or a “bird” anymore, do they (maybe ironically). We have blasted “Negro” and “Oriental” out of the lexicon (please do the same with “Caucasian; unless your people hail from the Republic of Georgia, you have nothing to do with Caucasus Mountains area; “white” works just fine.)
Would you feel happy hearing an innocent quip like “I was just dead,” when your parent had just passed away? (This happened to me in the 80s after my father died. The other person didn’t know when he jokingly said a phrase I’ve used a billions times even since: “I was just dying,” but in the moment, it was a blow to the sternum that I had to hide. And sorry Gen Z, but the word “slay” is hard to hear for a lot of folks.)
And with apologies to Prince and Patsy Cline, it’s not a good look for people dealing with developmental disabilities, neurological difference, or psychological challenges to hear that everything is so “crazy,” “nutso,” “spastic,” et. cetera. If ya didn’t know, now, ya know!
But anyway, I get it, slang is sexy and messy at once. At least we can do better in official documents and brand materials. The request is to think before you speak, and also certainly before you print!
“Bolstering”? “Augmenting”? “Invigorating”? closer, closer.
Finally, I came upon the phrase “partnering for the…” and like Goldilocks, it was just right. Not partnering for the enabling, just simply partnering. Co-creators at the table, each bringing what we have most access to, in order to solve big problems.
What an invigorating exercise, undertaken across 12 time zones (hats off to Canva and its collaborative, comment-able feature!)
In sum: words matter, and in our shared journey to ever-improve in our equitable approaches to … darn near everything, we can help each other test and unearth the right way to say the things we need to convey without harming, hurting, othering, or diminishing anyone.
If you’d like some guidance, resourcing (and even entertainment) in your work, check out my course, follow me here, and let me know if you have some words you’re grappling with!
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