Words Matter: A Language Guide for Centring Racial Equity

What it means: Race is not a biological fact; it is a social and historical process. Racialisation describes how society assigns racial categories, meanings, and power levels to different groups.

Why we use it: Everyone is racialised—including white people. Describing someone as "racialised as a majority" makes visible the privileges and default norms attached to Whiteness in UK institutions. Describing someone as "racialised as a minority" highlights that their racial status is something imposed by external systems rather than a personal trait.

What it means: Refers to Black, Asian, Brown, Indigenous, dual-heritage, and those not racialised as white who represent over 80% of the world’s population.

Why we use it: It fundamentally reframes the narrative. In the UK, racialised communities are frequently referred to as “minorities”. Centring the term Global Majority replaces isolation or marginality with global presence and demographic reality.

What it means: Using minoritised as a verb or adjective (e.g., “minoritised communities” or “minoritised groups”) shows that institutional structures, policies, and power relationships have actively pushed groups into minority status.

Why we use it: Unlike the static noun “minority,” minoritised explicitly addresses the action of external systems and institutions. It shifts the focus from “who people are” to “what is being done to them.”

What it means: Describes individuals, communities, and forms of knowledge that institutional processes, funding models, and governance structures have actively kept out.

Why we use it: It directly challenges deficit labels like "hard-to-reach" or "disengaged," which subtly blame communities for their absence. It puts accountability back on institutions, making clear that missing voices result from institutional barriers we have a responsibility to dismantle.

What it means: Using self-chosen and specific terms when referring to individuals or distinct communities (e.g., Somaliland community, British-Pakistani heritage, Afro-Caribbean diaspora).

Why we use it: It acknowledges broad cultural, linguistic, and historical differences. In public engagement, specificity ensures activities respond to lived experiences rather than generalised stereotypes.

What it means: Explicitly naming whiteness as a racial identity rather than treating it as the invisible, default norm.

Why we use it: When whiteness remains unnamed, people treat white perspectives as “neutral,” “objective,” or “universal,” while marking all other perspectives as “diverse” or “other.” Naming whiteness allows us to examine white normativity and privilege in research and public engagement.

What it means: Clear, everyday language that avoids unnecessary academic jargon and institutional buzzwords.

Why we use it: Theoretical jargon around race can create barriers for non-specialists. Plain language ensures racial equity conversations remain accessible, actionable, and usable for everyone.

Why we avoid it: These acronyms collapse wildly diverse populations into a single monolithic bucket. They mask specific inequalities, such as anti-Blackness or anti-Muslim racism, and allow institutions to claim “diversity success” while failing to address differences in structural inequalities.

What we use instead: Global majority, racially minoritised or specific heritage descriptors.

Why we avoid it in the UK context: While BIPOC originated in the United States to highlight specific histories of Native American displacement and African enslavement, importing it uncritically into the UK misaligns with British colonial, imperial, and immigration histories.

What we use instead: Global Majority or racialised minority groups.

Why we avoid it: These terms act as passive labels that describe a state of being without identifying the cause. They make it sound as though a community spontaneously exists in a state of marginality.

What we use instead: Structurally excluded or systemically minoritised

Why we avoid it: Without context, these terms carry a deficit-based implication, suggesting the problem lies with communities who “fail to engage” or “lack interest” in science and research.

What we use instead: Explicitly state institutional failure, e.g., “communities our institution has historically excluded or failed to build trust with.”

Why we avoid it: Caucasian comes from an old, false idea from the 1700s that people from the Caucasus region were the “perfect” example of humans. This term was used to support racist beliefs that some groups of people were better than others based on biology. Unlike terms that reflect someone’s real background or culture, “Caucasian” has no real cultural or linguistic meaning today.

What we use instead: White or racialised majority.

Why we avoid it: The word "micro" makes these acts sound small, minor, or harmless—but they're not. Being constantly targeted by subtle racial put-downs, exclusions, and insults builds up over time. This steady build-up causes real mental, emotional, and physical harm, leading to chronic stress, anxiety, and burnout. Calling this harm "micro" makes it too easy for people and institutions to dismiss these incidents as small, one-off mistakes rather than recognising them as part of everyday structural racism.

What we use instead: Everyday racial harm, subtle racial attacks, racial violence, or everyday racism

Why we avoid it: Expressions like “Discover,” “Explore,” “Pioneer,” “Frontier,” “Uncharted territory,” or framing academic spaces as “Professional” versus community spaces as “Savage” draw directly on colonial tropes. As Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s concepts of Endarkenment show, standard narratives usually glorify extractive “heroic discovery” while casting global majority knowledge as archaic or non-existent.

What we use instead: Partner, learn alongside, co-create.

Why we avoid it: Be vigilant against bad-faith framing and dog-whistle politics (e.g., “remigration,” “cultural Marxism,” or weaponised claims of “reverse racism” when racial equity measures are introduced). These terms are designed to rebrand racial hostility as legitimate political discourse.

What we use instead: Name these tactics clearly as bad-faith pushback, racial harassment, or structural resistance.

Why we avoid it: Terms like "Third World" and "Underdeveloped" impose hierarchical, deficit-based classifications rooted in Cold War politics and economic paternalism. Geographic terms like "Middle East" or "Orient" are Eurocentric—they define regions purely by their spatial relationship to Western Europe. These labels collapse distinct sovereign nations, cultural histories, and languages into monolithic, exoticised, or subordinate categories.

What we use instead: Use specific country or regional names (e.g., Somaliland, South Asia), or geography-centred acronyms like SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) or WANA (West Asia and North Africa). When discussing global economic disparities, use Global South / Global North while acknowledging their limitations.