Mapping out the micro-aggressions minefield may have seemed like a good move amidst the plague of protests at University of Missouri’s Columbia campus last fall. But they were bound to miss some: Sure enough Mizzou’s glossary of inclusive language has failed to meet its own standards for inclusion.
An instructive guide to diversity newspeak that was last updated on the school’s diversity homepage at the time of the November protests, “The Language of Identity: Using inclusive terminology at Mizzou,” had to be taken down over the weekend—because it wasn’t inclusive enough.
The guide told students how to navigate verbal interactions without offending anyone, instructing counterintuitively, “Sticks and stones are not the only things that can be hurtful.” But when it came to people of faith, the guide acknowledged only Judaism and Islam—and made no mention of major world religions Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity.
According to Campus Reform report, Hindu leader Rajan Zed pointed out his community’s exclusion, and Mizzou pulled the terminology guide in response to his concerns.
Campus Reform reported June 26:
Christian Basi, a spokesman for Mizzou, told me in an email that the inclusive terminology guide will undergo review “to see how it might be improved.” But he also clarified that it was a starting point, “never meant to be comprehensive.”
The ditched guide addressed various semantic challenges of modern campus life: It explained how to talk to your friends of minority races without “minoritizing” them; what words are acceptable for disabled people (or are they differently abled?); and included a useful guide to acceptable pronouns for the differently gendered.
In the meantime, it might be best that students on campus for summer session avoid talking to or about anyone not exactly like them—at least until the revised terminology guide goes up.
