Charities should be open to fair criticism, but the reaction to our inclusive language guide was offensive and divisive
- Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is the chief executive of Oxfam GB
Last week, we updated Oxfam’s inclusive language guide, an internal document intended to help our staff speak about our work. The guide explores the role of language in tackling poverty and the words we choose to use when talking about, for example, gender, migration, race and disability. Like many other progressive organisations taking this approach, we faced an onslaught of criticism.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we were quickly accused of “wokery” of the worst kind, of wasting money, banning words and being ashamed of Britain’s heritage. The Daily Mail splashed “Beyond Parody” across its front page (its anti-wokery almost beyond parody in itself); Piers Morgan weighed in with a sarcastic tweet that “very poor people” really wanted “to be addressed by the right preferred pronoun”; and, before we knew it, our own tweet had been viewed more than 5m times.
Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is the chief executive of Oxfam GB, and a former secretary general of Civicus, a global alliance of civil society organisations
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