Cal State East Bay has woke language guide, warns not to use ‘non-inclusive’ terms like ‘Civilized,’ ‘Illegal Alien,’ ‘Native’

California State University, East Bay’s communications website includes an “Inclusive Language Guide” that aims to police a wide variety of terms and how they are used.

The university describes the guide as an “evolving guide of phrases and information” for community members meant to provide “best practices” for adopting “inclusive language into your daily practice at work.” 

The guide covers the following areas: Gender & Sexual Identity, Race & Ethnicity, People with Disabilities, Citizenship Status, and Additional Topics.

It warns, for example, to avoid “medical diagnostic terms, such as gender identity disorder, homosexuality, transsexual,” because “[m]any of these terms were used to classify LGBTQ+ identities as mental illnesses.”

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The guide also condemns words that are supposedly “rooted in colonization” that have been allegedly used “to actively subigate [sic], oppress, and exotify different communities.” For example, it claims the words “Oriental,” “Third-world country,” and “Primitive” are “non-inclusive,” and goes further to state that “Savage” and “Civilized” should not be used at all. 

Using the word “native” to describe someone from a particular locality is also insulting, according to the guide, because this “contributes to the erasure of Native Americans and indigenous people.”

Illegal aliens, meanwhile, should not be referred to as such, because “No human being is illegal.” Instead, community members are to use the “positive and affirming” term “undocumented.”

The university instructs readers to “not hyphenate racial ethnicities”, stating that referring to someone as “Chinese-American,” for example, is “non inclusive,” while referring to someone as “Chinese American” is “positive and affirming.”

The language guide also tells readers to “Capitalize Black” but “avoid capitalizing dominant identities such as white,” citing the article “Why we will lowercase white” by the AP Style Guide Blog. 

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Terms like “disabled people” and “the homeless” can be “used to dehumanize marginalized communities,” and must be replaced with “people with disabilities” and “people experiencing homelessness.” 

In the same vein, “turn a blind eye” and “fell on deaf ears” are “ableist microaggressions.” Similarly supposedly offensive terms are “Handicap parking” and “On the spectrum,” which should be replaced by “Accessible parking” and “Neurodiverse” in order to not “perpetuate ableism discrimination.”

The guide also condemns a news video that shows a high school football player proposing to his girlfriend who has special needs, because the man “is described as a kind and charitable football player” while the girl is “essentially described as a burden and a problem because the reporter took a deficit-based approach to the interview.”

Campus Reform has reached out to California State University, East Bay for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.