In June, outgoing Gill Foundation CEO Brad Clark gave early voice to what has since evolved into a growing chorus of concerns in philanthropic and political circles: a worry that the language of social justice movements, as mediated by funders and nonprofits, has become an impediment to changemaking.
The fear is that as much as such language can build allyship and coalitions in the service of narrative and material change, it also can alienate those outside the in-groups from which funders and activists hail. And that could devastate the prospects of aligned politicians who might otherwise gain the power to ratify the very changes funders seek.
The institutions of philanthropy are “dominated by the wealthy and highly educated” and “have become rigid in tone, exclusive in culture, and ineffective in tactics,” Clark wrote in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “It’s not working!”
“Real progress happens when we choose to see people as neighbors, not opponents,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, too often today, we’re unwilling to make room at the table. We use language that’s completely inaccessible to many in the public — ‘microaggressions,’ ‘power shifting,’ ‘asset mapping,’ ‘intersectionality.’ We need to use words that you’re more likely to hear in your local Walmart or community meeting than in my liberal arts gender studies class or philanthropy roundtables.”
Since his June op-ed, politicians from across the spectrum of Democratic politics — from upstarts elected from the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America in New York to the Clintonite heirs of Washington, D.C.’s Third Way — have echoed those concerns.
In mid-July, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a centrist Democrat, repeatedly drove the point home during a swing through South Carolina (now the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary state, thanks to changes implemented under President Joe Biden). Democrats’ “inclusive” language has led them to mistake linguistic shifts for real change, he said: “We don’t change minds by changing words.”
One example: the term “justice-involved population.” “Anybody know what that is? Those are inmates,” Beshear told an audience of politically inclined South Carolinians, according to a Semafor report. “You know what our inmates call themselves? Inmates! We’ve got to get back to talking to people like we talk to our friends, like we talk each and every day in our life.”
“I understand where a lot of the advocacy speak came from. It was meant to lessen stigma, but you don’t lessen stigma by changing words. You lessen stigma by changing hearts,” Beshear said, according to Louisville Public Media. Another example he gave was how people now talk about cuts to food programs. “We can’t say it’s going to make people ‘food insecure.’ What it’s gonna make people do is go hungry,” Beshear said.
While hunger and food insecurity are technically different problems, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, such niceties of policymaking tend to get lost in the heat of political debate.
In late August, the centrist Washington, D.C., think tank Third Way amplified these concerns in a memo calling on the Democrats to eschew certain neologisms and phrases commonly found in the academy — and in philanthropic circles. “For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness,” the memo said. “To please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.
“In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions,” the memo continued. “But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths — words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.”
The words Third Way flagged include everything from “privilege,” “othering” and “microaggression” to “food insecurity,” “birthing person” and “pregnant people” (as opposed to “pregnant women”).
Political reporter David Weigel observed in a Semafor article just days after the Third Way memo came out, “The story Republicans are telling is that the Democratic Party is a hollowed-out vehicle for the most obnoxious liberalism you can imagine.” He was talking about left-of-center activists, to be sure. But Trump has increasingly set his sights on philanthropic organizations, as well — the Open Society Foundations and the Soros family in particular, but also the Ford Foundation, Tides, Arabella Advisors and more — and sought to paint the entire progressive activist and advocacy ecosystem as a dark-money-backed astroturf operation fed by big philanthropy. As affordability and economic precarity have grown in salience and self-avowed anti-woke leaders rise to power everywhere from Silicon Valley to D.C., the finely attuned, culturally sensitive language of philanthropy has never faced more high-profile doubters.
It’s not just centrists trying to win in purple southern states who are saying it’s time to eschew culture war contretemps and sidestep strategies that failed in 2024, either. “We as Democrats got our asses handed to us in November of last year…. They were running on this platform of economic populism, whether they believed in that economic populism or not… and a lot of that was lost within the Democratic Party. We were fighting these culture wars, you know, these social issues that didn’t really put money into the pockets of Americans,” said New York City Council Member Chi Ossé on The Perez Notes Podcast in July, just a few days after Beshear’s remarks and in the wake of Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani’s historic New York City mayoral primary win on a message of affordability.
The remarks were especially notable as Ossé, just 27 and entering his second term, first gained prominence and won office on the heels of work as a Brooklyn-based leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. In June, Mamdani won one of his highest victory margins in Ossé’s diverse and rapidly gentrifying Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights council district, which also had the highest voter turnout among Brooklyn city council districts.
The Bed-Stuy tie is an interesting one, as it turns out that some of the language changes we’ve seen adopted across the philanthrosphere came out of efforts in Bed-Stuy during the era of peak imprisonment as men who had served time sought to reclaim their dignity in the face of social stigma. In 2005, Edwin “Eddie” Ellis, founder of the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, penned “An Open Letter to Our Friends on the Question of Language” that urged people to “Stop using the terms offender, felon, prisoner, inmate and convict.”
An advocacy and training center “founded, directed and staffed” by the formerly incarcerated, the Central Bed-Stuy group described itself at launch as “the first and only one of its kind in the United States.” The letter on language was designed, Ellis wrote, “to respond to the negative public perception about our population as expressed in the language and concepts used to describe us. When we are not called mad dogs, animals, predators, offenders and other derogatory terms, we are referred to as inmates, convicts, prisoners and felons. All terms devoid of humanness, which identify us as ‘things’ rather than as people. These terms are accepted as the ‘official’ language of the media, law enforcement, prison industrial complex and public policy agencies. However, they are no longer acceptable for us and we are asking people to stop using them.”
Ellis, a former member of the Black Panther Party who served 25 years in prison, including at the notorious Attica Correctional Facility, for a murder he maintained he did not commit, died in 2014 — but not before seeing his demands gain support in the philanthrosphere, political world and mainstream media. “Lately, the [Obama] administration has also recognized that the vocabulary of incarceration — the permanently stigmatizing way we speak about people who have served time — presents a significant barrier to reintegration,” the New York Times Editorial Board wrote in 2016. “Federal officials have set out to change that lexicon, so that people who have committed crimes have a better chance of being seen not as faceless abstractions, but as human beings worthy of being back in society.”
The Center for NuLeadership is still active and has received funding from Brooklyn Org Foundation, Borealis Philanthropy, the Tow Foundation and the Open Society Foundations (then the Open Society Institute), among others. Along the way, Ellis also served as a senior consultant for the Open Society Institute and was a leading figure in the criminal justice reform movement of his day.
The backlash against the language changes Ellis fought for and the criminal justice reforms implemented during the Obama era and through 2020’s racial reckoning have gone hand in hand. Language and policy, it turns out, are inseparable. But for now, even if those language changes were previously helpful in the effort to reintegrate the formerly incarcerated, with a GOP trifecta in Washington and a Supreme Court that has ruled over and over in Trump’s favor, the path forward many are recommending is to let go of the focus on linguistic correctness in order to build new coalitions across difference with the ultimate aim of preserving hard-won rights, building new alliances and regaining electoral power.
Another unexpected proponent of this viewpoint is the first trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride of Delaware, elected in 2024 even as Trump ran hard against the provision of trans medical care in prisons and as public sentiment around trans rights started to nosedive. “Changemaking is hard and I think that social media has lulled us into this perception that strategy is weakness. That discipline is compromise. And I think that’s a really dangerous and corrosive and I think fundamentally counterproductive perception,” McBride told the audience after the June Tribeca Film Festival premiere of the documentary about her bid for office, “State of Firsts,” funded by Ruth Ann Harnisch and the Harnisch Foundation.
“We need people who can go out there and meet people where they are. Candidly, it means we need grace,” she said. “We need imperfect allies. Both because we need numbers but also because you cannot change people’s hearts and minds if you exclude anyone who isn’t already 100% with you. Yes, changemaking is hard and it’s often unfair. The reality is that absolutism, whether on the left or the right, is only possible in authoritarianism, and marginalization is not going to cease in the process of overcoming marginalization.”
McBride knows a thing or two about that, having been barred from using the women’s restroom in the U.S. Capitol by GOP leaders and having been repeatedly misgendered in committee meetings. She doubled down on doing the work of governing and building alliances, rather than responding to each instance of linguistic negation, and over time, has watched some colleagues move from calling her “the gentleman from Delaware” to “the representative from Delaware.”
Other political leaders are also seeking a pivot on how Democrats talk — and, perhaps by extension, how politically-correct-to-a-fault philanthropic leaders might choose to express their priorities. Then-congressman Ruben Gallego famously banned the use of the word “Latinx” from campaign materials as early as 2021, writing, “When Latino politicos use the term, it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.” He won Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024 by going after Latino voters at boxing matches instead. And Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii has questioned whether the language of climate advocates and funders, not to mention legislators, is up to the moment. “You could talk about the planetary emergency and mitigation and adaptation, and you could throw in some environmental justice rhetoric, and by the time you’re done talking, people think you don’t care about them,” he said at the New York Times Climate Forward gathering during Climate Week NYC. “The way to victory is to talk about price,” he said, noting that “regular people … are watching their utility bills spike like a hockey stick.”
Now the movement is coming full circle, with communications professional Matt Watkins launching a column in the Chronicle of Philanthropy “to help nonprofit professionals reduce jargon and communicate in ways that build trust and understanding of the sector.”
Watkins in June had warned, “The nonprofit sector’s language has become increasingly coded, more abstract, and — ironically — less meaningful…. Amid heightened public distrust of institutions, rising inequality, and growing hostility to nonprofits, such communication isn’t just ineffective. It’s dangerous.” Now, he’s hoping to help nonprofits find a new way to talk about their work and avoid what he calls “distortion triggers: language that signals professionalism but severs connection.”
Those who’ve been in the nonprofit, philanthropic or political spaces long enough may recall a different generation of political communicators working through similar issues three decades ago. David Kusnet, a former Mondale-Dukakis speechwriter who would go on to work for Bill Clinton, famously called it “Speaking American” in his 1992 book. George Lakoff voiced similar concerns in 2004’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.”
At each of these moments, many of the cultural changes — such as support for gay marriage and trans dignity — now normalized in much of the philanthropic and political space would have been, if not inconceivable, at least very far in the future. As a new generation of communicators and changemakers confronts a moment of retrenchment, there may be something to be learned from those who struggled with these issues in the past.
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