President Donald Trump’s administration is cracking down on the usage of language that could be perceived as “woke.”
The New York Times reported about the new shift on Friday, finding that the administration has been removing or otherwise limiting usage of terms seen as woke from agency websites, government documents, and even school curricula, among other sources.
The terms include “antiracist,” “BIPOC,” “climate crisis,” “DEI,” “gender diversity,” “gender-affirming care,” “Latinx,” “LGBTQ,” “marginalized,” “non-binary,” “pregnant persons,”, and “unconscious bias,” among others.
The Times provided examples of specific documents, including a 2021 Head Start memo, out of which the following passage was removed: “The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disparate impact on under-resourced communities including many of those served by Head Start programs. There has also been heightened attention to racial injustice in our country, which has led to calls for major reforms to address long-standing societal inequities.”
The Key topics page of State Department’s Office of Global Change also saw the following passage removed: “The climate crisis knows no boundaries, and both the challenge and its solutions range from local to global in scale.”
The terms targeted by the Trump administration have seen increasing usage in higher education.
For example, many colleges and universities have been using the term “Latinx” as a gender-neutral alternative to “Latinos” and “Latinas,” even though most Latinos either dislike or feel neutral about the term.
The term “pregnant person” has also seen usage in certain quarters of higher education, as a way to suggest that men can become pregnant as well.
Despite the popularity of such terms in higher education, a YouGov poll published in November found that very few Americans have heard of, or use, such terms as “Latinx” and other similar words.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
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