If we truly want to shift power, create change, and implement learning and growth around racism and anti-Blackness we have to be aware of the strategic, justice-themed words that are being deployed that actually work to normalize oppression far more than they fight against it.

To cultivate effective spaces and environments around anti-racism and anti-oppression, we also need to talk about how language shapes, perpetuates, and maintains violence in our everyday lives.

There are specific language white people have systematically appropriated to create a false sense of change and inclusivity, and in actuality they maintain white supremacist capitalism within our interpersonal and institutional engagements.

The term/word diversity: Does not guarantee action, change, or addresses violence & erasure in our society. It only keeps white people comfortable, while maintaining power, violence & control. It remains interwoven in the mythologies of whiteness.

If we don’t name the violence, how do we address it? Do Black Indigneous and other racialized folks in your institutions signify diversity if everything else stays the same?

The term/word diversity: speaks to the reality that normalize whiteness. It maintains that white folks can integrate the rest of us on their terms – rather than contextualizing white supremacy which created conditions that require us to have said “diversity.”

Naming the structural & interpersonal racist violence behind the concept, word or term "diversity" is the way to help cultivate anti-racist spaces and anti-racist rhetoric. Understand how words are deployed & used to maintain status quo, and also to make white folks comfortable.