The Pointless “Language Wars” (Semantics) Are Empowering The Opposition

Why do we care so much about letter and acronyms?

Ted Bauer
5 min readFeb 2, 2023

Diversity initiatives have long had a problem with being focused on acronyms, letters, and semantics as opposed to action:

We don’t think enough about the potential backlash that diversity training causes. To wit (same link as above):

Princeton University political psychologist Karen Stenner has long argued that people with authoritarian personalities — those valuing strong and forceful control of situations and society, a trait more common in senior leaders — can ultimately become more racist when faced with the inclusion message, not less.

Indeed. Now, there’s an argument here that we shouldn’t think of what old white guy senior leaders think. We should bash down that model. I could see some merit…

--

--

Ted Bauer

Mostly write about work, leadership, friendship, masculinity, male infertility, and some other stuff along the way. It's a pleasure to be here.