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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.

April 2009 By Jeff Brooks
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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.

 

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COMMENTS

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Most Recent Comments:
Rebecca - Posted on April 21, 2009
I appreciated this article and, as you can imagine, it stirred up an old conversation. In creating our Mission, our group struggled with the use of the word "poor".

When the people you are serving wouldn't refer to themselves with the same terms you are, or would be offended by it, then it would seem that a more appropriate term is necessary. Unlike a medical condition, our terminology was also argued based on relativity. For instance, poor in relationship to what standard?

All that to say that this article is making me ponder and I was hoping for input.

We ended up going a different direction with our mission but as we build out our business plan, the insight would be helpful.

Thanks!
Jason Lewis - Posted on April 18, 2009
I once raised major gifts for a national health charity and I remember the situations wherein people would not use particular language for fear of being offensive or distasteful. As a person who also suffered from the same disease I was often taken back by those who could not "say the words" that may not have been PC but certainly were motivating and a call to action.
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Archived Comments:
Rebecca - Posted on April 21, 2009
I appreciated this article and, as you can imagine, it stirred up an old conversation. In creating our Mission, our group struggled with the use of the word "poor".

When the people you are serving wouldn't refer to themselves with the same terms you are, or would be offended by it, then it would seem that a more appropriate term is necessary. Unlike a medical condition, our terminology was also argued based on relativity. For instance, poor in relationship to what standard?

All that to say that this article is making me ponder and I was hoping for input.

We ended up going a different direction with our mission but as we build out our business plan, the insight would be helpful.

Thanks!
Jason Lewis - Posted on April 18, 2009
I once raised major gifts for a national health charity and I remember the situations wherein people would not use particular language for fear of being offensive or distasteful. As a person who also suffered from the same disease I was often taken back by those who could not "say the words" that may not have been PC but certainly were motivating and a call to action.