Inclusive Language in Writing

These inclusive language guidelines are written for those working to champion equity, diversity, and inclusion in the spaces where they learn, teach, work, or conduct research. This includes, but is not limited to, Germanna faculty and staff, volunteer leaders, members, students, affiliated organizations, and EDI professionals working across various campuses.

General Terms Related to Equity and Power

• access
  • The elimination of discrimination and other barriers that contribute to inequitable opportunities to join and be a part of a work group, organization, or community (APA, 2021b).
• ally/allies
  • People who recognize the unearned privilege they receive from society’s patterns of injustice and take responsibility for changing these patterns. Being an ally is more than being sympathetic and feeling bad for those who experience discrimination. An ally is willing to act with, and for, others in pursuit of ending oppression and creating equality. Real allies are willing to step out of their comfort zones. Those who decide to undertake the ally role must recognize and understand the power and privileges that one receives, accepts, and experiences and they use that position to act for justice (Akbar, 2020).
• bias
  • APA defines bias as partiality: an inclination or predisposition for or against something. Motivational and cognitive biases are two main categories studied in decision-making analysis. Motivational biases are conclusions drawn due to selfinterest, social pressures, or organization-based needs, whereas cognitive biases are judgments that go against what is considered rational, and some of these are attributed to implicit reasoning (APA, 2021b).
• climate
  • The degree to which community members feel included or excluded in the work group, organization, or community (APA, 2021b).
• cultural competence
  • Ability to collaborate effectively with individuals from different cultures; such competence improves health care experiences and outcomes (Nair & Adetayo, 2019)
• discrimination
  • The unjust and differential treatment of the members of different age, gender, racial, ethnic, religious, national, ability identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, and other groups at the individual level (e.g., behavioral manifestation of prejudice involving negative, hostile, and injurious treatment of the members of targeted groups; APA, 2021b) and the institutional/structural level (e.g., operating procedures, laws, and policies) that favor certain groups over others and has the effect of restricting opportunities for other groups.
• diverse
  • Involving the representation or composition of various social identity groups in a work group, organization, or community. The focus is on social identities that correspond to societal differences in power and privilege, and thus to the marginalization of some groups based on specific attributes—for example, race, ethnicity, culture, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, spirituality, disability, age, national origin, immigration status, and language. There is a recognition that people have multiple identities and that social identities are intersectional and have different salience and impact in different contexts (APA, 2021b).
• equity
  • Providing resources according to the need to help diverse populations achieve their highest state of health and other functioning. Equity is an ongoing process of assessing needs, correcting historical inequities, and creating conditions for optimal outcomes by members of all social identity groups (APA, 2021b).
• generalization
  • The process of deriving a concept, judgment, principle, or theory from a limited number of specific cases and applying it more widely, often to an entire class of objects, events, or people (APA, n.d.).
• global citizenship
  • The umbrella term for social, political, environmental, and economic actions of globally minded individuals and communities on a worldwide scale. The term can refer to the belief that individuals are members of multiple, diverse, local, and nonlocal networks rather than single actors affecting isolated societies (United Nations, n.d.).
• global majority
  • Also known as people of the global majority (PGM), a collective term that encourages those of African, Asian, Latin American, and Arab descent to recognize that together they comprise the vast majority (around 80 percent) of people in the world. Understanding the truth that Whiteness is not the global norm has the power to disrupt and reframe our conversations on race (Maharaj & Campbell-Stephens, 2021).
• health equity
  • Ensuring that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care (Braveman et al., 2017).
• human rights
  • Rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. In response to widespread, horrific violations of human rights in the first half of the 20th century, the international community established The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and international human rights laws that lay down the obligations of governments to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights (APA, 2015b). Human rights are defined by the United Nations as “universal legal rights that protect individuals and groups from those behaviors that interfere with freedom and human dignity” (APA, 2021b).
• inclusion
  • An environment that offers affirmation, celebration, and appreciation of different approaches, styles, perspectives, and experiences, thus allowing all individuals to bring in their whole selves (and all their identities) and to demonstrate their strengths and capacity (APA, 2021b)
• intergenerational trauma
  • The transmission of trauma or its legacy, in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth, from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations. The transference of this effect is believed to be epigenetic—that is, the transmission affects the chemical marker for a gene rather than the gene itself. The trauma experienced by the older generation is translated into a genetic adaptation that can be passed on to successive generations (Akbar, 2017; APA, 2017a; Menakem, 2017; Whitbeck et al., 2004).
• intersectionality
  • The complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups to produce and sustain complex inequities. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality in a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum (Crenshaw, 1989), the idea that when it comes to thinking about how inequalities persist, categories like gender, race, and class are best understood as overlapping and mutually constitutive rather than isolated and distinct(Grzanka et al., 2017, 2020).
• marginalization
  • Relegation to or placement in an unimportant or a depowered position in society (APA, 2017a).
• microaggressions
  • Commonly occurring, brief, verbal or nonverbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities that communicate derogatory attitudes or notions toward a different “other.” Microaggressions may be intentional or unintentional, and the perpetrators may possibly be unaware of their behavior (APA, 2017a). Microaggressions can accumulate over time and lead to severe harm.
• minority
  • A minority group is a population subgroup (e.g., ethnic, racial, social, religious, or other group) with differential power than those deemed to hold the majority power in the population. The relevance of this term is outdated and has changed as the demographics of the population change. Thus, refrain from using the term “minority” and use the specific name of the group or groups to which you are referring (e.g., people of color or communities of color vs. ethnic and racial minorities; APA, 2020b).
• oppression
  • Occurs when one subgroup has more access to power and privilege than another subgroup, and when that power and privilege are used to dominate the other to maintain the status quo. Thus, oppression is both a state and a process, with the state of oppression being unequal group access to power and privilege, and the process of oppression being the ways in which that inequality is maintained (APA, 2021b).
• pathway programs
  • Programs (e.g., in secondary schools and colleges) that foster increased access by marginalized groups to education, training, or a profession. It is preferable to use this term rather than “pipeline” (see definition of pipeline for explanation; APA, 2021b).
• performative allyship
  • Also known as optical allyship, this term refers to someone from a nonmarginalized group professing support and solidarity with a marginalized group but in a way that is not helpful. Worse yet, the allyship is done in a way that may actually be harmful to “the cause.” The “ally” is motivated by some type of reward. On social media, that reward is a virtual pat on the back for being a “good person” or for being “on the right side” of a cause, or “on the right side of history” (Kalina, 2020)
• population health
  • The health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group. Population health includes health outcomes, patterns of health determinants, and policies and interventions that link these two. Attention to social and environmental, as well as medical, determinants of health is essential (Silberberg et al., 2019).
• positionality
  • Our social position or place in a given society in relation to race, ethnicity, and other statuses (e.g., social class, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, religion) within systems of power and oppression. Positionality refers to our individual identities and the intersection of those identities and statuses with systems of privilege and oppression. Positionality shapes our psychological experiences, worldview, perceptions others have of us, social relationships, and access to resources (Muhammad et al., 2015). Positionality therefore means actively understanding and negotiating the systemic processes and hierarchy of power and the ways that our statuses affect our relationships because of power dynamics related to privilege and oppression (APA, 2019b).
• prejudice
  • A negative attitude toward another person or group formed in advance of any experience with that person or group. Prejudices can include an affective component (e.g., nervousness, anger, contempt, pity, hatred) and a cognitive component (assumptions and beliefs about groups, including stereotypes). Prejudice is typically manifested behaviorally through discriminatory behavior. Prejudicial attitudes tend to be resistant to change because they distort our perception of information about the target group. Prejudice based on racial grouping is racism; prejudice based on perceived sexual orientation is homophobia and biphobia; prejudice based on sex or gender (including transphobia) is sexism; prejudice based on chronological age is ageism; and prejudice based on disability is ableism (APA, 2021b).
• privilege
  • Unearned power that is afforded to some but not others based on status rather than earned merit; such power may come in the form of rights, benefits, social comfort, opportunities, or the ability to define what is normative or valued (Bailey, 1998; Johnson, 2018; McIntosh, 1989). Privilege arises in relation to systems of oppression. A person has privilege not because they desire to have privilege or promote inequity but because they exist within a system where biased values, attitudes, and behaviors have become integrated and normalized (APA, 2019b). See racial privilege or White privilege.
• social justice
  • Commitment to creating fairness and equity in resources, rights, and treatment of marginalized individuals and groups of people who do not share equal power in society (APA, 2021b).
• stereotype
  • A set of cognitive generalizations (e.g., beliefs, expectations) about the qualities and characteristics of the members of a group or social category. Stereotypes, like schemas, simplify and expedite perceptions and judgments, but they are often exaggerated, negative rather than positive, and resistant to revision even when perceivers encounter individuals with qualities that are not congruent with the stereotype (APA, n.d.).
• structural competency
  • The trained ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases (e.g., depression, hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication noncompliance, trauma, psychosis) also represent the downstream implications of a number of upstream decisions about such matters as health care and food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban and rural infrastructures, medicalization, or even about the very definitions of illness and health (Metzl & Hansen, 2014).