Easier Said Than Done : When PC Equals BS

If your organization is fighting an ugly enemy, don’t make it harder to fight by being too squeamish to talk about it.

My first leper: I was riding in a cab in crawling traffic from the airport into Calcutta, India, thrilled to be there and mesmerized by the sensory overload I was experiencing.

I’d been in India all of 20 minutes when I saw him: a small man, sitting by the road, his feet stretched out almost into traffic. My first impression was that something was wrong with the shape of his face — as if one eye and the cheek below had been scooped away. Then my gaze was drawn to his foot. Swollen, mottled pink, surrounded by a visible cloud of flies. It looked not at all like a foot, more like an underinflated football, oozing, with toenails sticking out of it like blades.

He was probably three feet away from me. Then traffic moved again, and he was out of my sight.

In India, you see a lot of things that you never see in other places. Disfigured, suffering lepers are a fairly common sight, and the shock eventually fades.

But another shock comes when you find out that leprosy is completely treatable and curable. It’s not even expensive. There doesn’t need to be even one leper like those you see in India or anywhere else. If you or I were somehow to contract leprosy, it wouldn’t be a problem; we’d walk away unscarred, with little more than a wild anecdote for our more edgy friends: “Hey, you won’t believe this, but I actually once had leprosy!” “No way, dude!”

Say. The. Words.
Some years after that trip to India, I got the chance to work with an organization dedicated to fighting leprosy. Sign me up, I thought. As causes go, you can hardly beat that one.

Problem was, the leadership of that organization was dedicated to removing the word “leprosy” from its vocabulary in favor of “Hansen’s disease,” the condition’s medical name.

That sounds awfully civil for a disease that can literally make you scratch out your own eyes and, in many places, will make everyone you love utterly reject you. I know what “The Merck Manual” says, but Hansen’s disease sounds more like some mild, Scandinavian affliction than the leprosy I’ve seen.

As you can probably imagine, getting people to rally around the cause of saving people from Hansen’s disease was a bit rough.

Leprosy is an ugly word, with an ancient and ugly history. “Leper” is even worse. It hardly even means someone who has contracted leprosy anymore; the secondary meaning of a detestable person who should be avoided has pretty much taken over.

I almost can’t blame the professionals who shrink from throwing around such ugly words. But let’s be realistic: Hardly anyone outside the medical community has a clue what Hansen’s disease is. And nearly everyone at least has some idea what leprosy is — and that it’s a horrendous affliction anyone would be happy to see removed from the face of the earth.

A lot of nonprofits struggle with this issue, seeking colorless, uncontroversial, low-impact ways of describing the issues they’re involved with.

When they mandate that kind of language in their fundraising, they’re choosing to motivate fewer donors, raise less revenue and do less good. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is way too high a price for being able to feel good about the way you talk. To put it bluntly: How many people have leprosy right now because we couldn’t bring ourselves to say “leprosy”?

Overly sensitive?
What makes us think that way? I might have figured it out a while ago when I saw a strange list labeled “Sensitivities.” Published by a health charity, it was a list of forbidden ways of talking about “their” disease. The committee that created the list clearly wanted to maintain tight control over discourse about it.

Its motivation was a lot like that of the folks at the leprosy organization, but more so because the people who will read its material are not just involved in the cause of fighting the disease — many of them actually have the disease.

You don’t want to insult, marginalize or be oafish toward the people you serve. Especially when they’re also your donors. The problem is, nearly every term on that sensitivities list was an ordinary, colloquial way of describing the disease and its symptoms. The alternatives given were mostly convoluted constructions that virtually defined the disease out of existence.

If you stuck to that list, you could have an entire conversation about that disease without ever naming it directly, mentioning that having the disease is undesirable or noting that fighting it is a struggle.

That kind of leaves you high and dry when it comes to issuing battle cries for fighting the disease. And the kicker is, hardly anybody — especially anyone 60 and older — would take offense at the forbidden terms.

Whose “sensitivities” were the list makers protecting? I doubt they fully realize it, but they’re worried about the fine-tuned sensitivities of prissy 29-year-olds who were reared on diets of self-esteem and political correctness — that is, their own employees. Wrong audience. Most donors are mature adults who’ve been through some of life’s battering. They aren’t sensitive flowers that will wilt at the sound of an undisguised naming of something unpleasant. Let the sensitive nonprofit staffers adjust to that reality. They’ll get over the shock.

Of course, nobody should be an insensitive jerk. But don’t muffle your meaning with layers of avoidance. That’s just rude to the people you’re trying to communicate with. And it always makes for less effective fundraising. FS

Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle and keeper of the Donor Power Blog. Reach him at jbrooks@merkleinc.com