By Dr. Kirk Adams
Executive Director, The Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion
https://i4sdi.org
Editor’s Note — September 2026: The Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion officially launched! What began as a vision is now a growing community of people committed to fairness, inclusion, equal opportunity, and human dignity for all. Together, we are moving beyond reactive, isolated efforts toward strategic, sustainable, collective power, grounded in courageous communication, shared learning, and meaningful action.
Your voice, experience, and participation can help shape what comes next. Join the Coalition today and stand shoulder to shoulder with people working to build a more just, inclusive, and connected world.
Learn more and become a member today at: https://community.i4sdi.org/coalition-founder.
Language, human rights, and the community we need to build
Language tells us who matters. It tells us whose history deserves attention, whose experience counts as knowledge, and who gets to define what is normal.
Sometimes a change in language opens a door. Sometimes it conceals a retreat. Understanding the difference takes history, context, curiosity, and conversation.
That is one reason we are building the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, and why I invite you to join as a Founding Member.
From naming injustice to demanding accountability
The awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay invites us to reflect on nearly six decades of human rights work. Pillay opened her law practice in South Africa in 1967, under apartheid, and went on to serve in international courts and as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Across that career, the language through which institutions recognize injustice has evolved. Consider sexual violence in war. Pillay served on the tribunal that delivered the landmark 1998 Akayesu judgment, establishing that rape and sexual violence can constitute genocide when committed with the required intent to destroy a protected group.
That development was much more than a change in vocabulary. It changed how atrocities could be understood, prosecuted, and answered with demands for accountability.
Her career reminds me that words become consequential when they change what institutions recognize and what people can demand.
Whose history does a holiday tell?
Monday, October 12, offers another opportunity to examine language. Across many U.S. communities, including Washington State where I live, Indigenous Peoples’ Day shifts attention from the familiar celebration of Columbus to the histories, cultures, sovereignty, and continuing lives of Indigenous peoples. Columbus Day remains a federal holiday; the change has not happened everywhere.
For generations, the language of “discovery” encouraged a story in which Europeans were the central actors and Indigenous peoples barely appeared. That story obscured conquest, exploitation, dispossession, and the devastating consequences of colonization.
Calling the day Indigenous Peoples’ Day changes the questions we ask. Who was already here? What knowledge and societies flourished? Whose voices were excluded from the history we learned? What responsibilities follow from learning a fuller history?
A renamed holiday cannot return stolen land or restore a lost life. It can help create an opening for truth, learning, and action, especially when Indigenous people lead the conversation.
September 30 offered a related moment: Orange Shirt Day, observed alongside Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It honors residential school survivors, their families and communities, and the children who never returned home.
The orange shirt comes from Phyllis Webstad’s experience: the new shirt she wore to residential school as a child was taken from her. Her story became a powerful symbol of a system that separated Indigenous children from their families and sought to suppress their languages, cultures, and identities.
Language itself was among the things those institutions tried to take away. A language carries relationships, memory, knowledge, and ways of understanding the world. Supporting its survival and renewal is part of addressing the harm.
A word I grew up with
For me, this discussion is personal.
As a blind child, every time I opened a library book, I encountered the word “handicapped.” That word meant me. Alongside the stories I was reading came an institutional label describing the kind of person I supposedly was.
The service many of us knew as the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped became the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled on October 1, 2019.
“Print disabled” communicates more clearly the range of people who encounter barriers to reading conventional print: blind people, people with qualifying reading disabilities such as dyslexia, and people whose physical disabilities prevent them from holding a book or turning its pages. The new name better describes people already served; it did not itself create new eligibility.
To my ear, it also makes room for a more useful question: What does this reader need to access the book?
The employment language of my childhood carried a similar message. The “Hire the Handicapped” campaigns familiar in the 1960s urged employers to give people like me a chance. However well intended, that framing typically left us positioned as recipients of charity.
My book, The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom-Line Through Disability Inclusion, asks employers to recognize the value they have been overlooking. Navigating inaccessible environments can help people develop resourcefulness, adaptability, problem-solving skills, and insights that strengthen organizations.
Disabled people are individuals, with different talents and experiences. We deserve opportunity and dignity whether or not we demonstrate an extraordinary business benefit. But employers also need to understand what exclusion costs them.
Purchase The Disability Dividend on Amazon.
What happens when we call the work human rights?
When I heard Loretta J. Ross speak at Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum about her Calling In framework, one idea stayed with me: her invitation to describe diversity, equity and inclusion work as human rights.
That framing connects workplace inclusion to a larger commitment to human dignity. It asks us to consider whose rights are respected, whose participation is restricted, and how we can build relationships capable of producing change.
Calling In also offers a way to have difficult conversations without making humiliation the price of admission. We need room to question, learn, disagree, and take responsibility.
The vocabulary, the language, of our field has developed through overlapping civil rights, equal opportunity, and organizational change efforts. Equal opportunity challenges discriminatory barriers. Diversity asks who is represented. Equity asks how rules and resources shape opportunity. Inclusion asks whether people can participate, contribute, and influence decisions. Belonging asks whether people experience acceptance and connection.
These concepts do different work. Each can deepen the others. Being present in a room does not necessarily mean having influence over what happens there.
A new name—or a quieter retreat?
Today, federal attacks on DEI have intensified the pressure to change language. The administration’s January 2025 executive order directed the termination of federal DEI programs. Organizations have responded in different ways, including changing the names and scope of their efforts.
Some now emphasize people, culture, engagement, or belonging. Citi, for example, renamed its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Talent Management team “Talent Management and Engagement,” while also announcing program changes in response to federal policy.
At ISDI, we made an intentional choice to retain diversity and inclusion in the names of both our Institute and our Coalition. We did not want intimidation to determine how we named our commitments.
Does that mean every organization choosing a different name is taking a cowardly way out? I am unwilling to reach that conclusion from a label alone.
A new name might help people connect with the work, protect an effective effort, or express a deeper understanding. It might also camouflage the withdrawal of resources and accountability.
We should examine what happens afterward. Do people still have access to opportunity? Are barriers being removed? Are resources sustained? Can affected communities influence decisions? Does “belonging” come with the power to challenge exclusion?
Our own names deserve the same scrutiny. Keeping the words is a commitment we must demonstrate through action.
Bring your questions. Help shape what comes next.
The Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion is a place to explore these questions together: to discuss history, context, evolving language, and the ways people make meaning.
It is also a place to examine power, privilege, and influence. Who gets to choose the language? Who is expected to adapt? What becomes possible when people previously excluded can help define the conversation?
We need intellectual discourse grounded in lived experience and connected to practical action. We need people willing to listen across differences, test assumptions, share knowledge, and imagine a more inclusive future.
As a Founding Member, you can help shape that community: bring a question to a discussion, contribute a resource, share an experience, and build relationships with others committed to fairness, inclusion, equal opportunity, and human dignity for all.
Your voice belongs in this work. Your curiosity can move it forward.
Join the Coalition as a Founding Member.
The words we choose help shape the world we build. Let’s choose them thoughtfully and build together.
Kirk Adams, PhD
Executive Director
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion
www.i4sdi.org
We can’t wait to see you at the next workshop.
Until then, please share this post with anyone you think would be interested.
LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Bluesky Threads