This essay (link above) talks about the workplace, but lessons can be drawn for any community around the important, and impactful, use of language. Here is the first paragraph:

It may seem like a harmless figure of speech or creative, clever hyperbole, but misusing mental health language can be harmful and non-inclusive. We’ve all heard it, maybe even said it:

• “Last night’s episode made me so depressed,”

• “I like my desk set up like this, I’m so OCD.”

• “I still have PTSD from that.”

The use of mental health language to describe everyday—and sometimes undesirable—behaviors trivializes and stigmatizes the real-life experience of people living with a mental health disorder.

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Paula Stone Williams illuminates with humor, grace and humility, the different experiences of women and men. She concludes with some words of advice for everyone.

Below is an excerpt from this article: “What it means to be an Anti-racist Teacher.” 

In the interview, Lorena Germán defines some concepts, such as "white supremacy," and suggests the flip side of that is to be "culturally sustaining." There's alot of great food for thought! Think about our children’s education at Odyssey in terms of social justice. Lorena Germán is speaking from her own experience and her own needs as a child, but how could all children benefit from a "culturally sustaining" education? What parts of the Odyssey experience are culturally sustaining?

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What do you see that needs changing? How do you see white supremacy showing up in curriculum and instruction today?

It looks like this overwhelming sense of urgency to meet particular deadlines that don’t necessarily speak to actual student growth. It’s like, “Well, we have to cover this book because that’s what’s on the test and we have more, more, more.” It’s about quantity over quality. I think it’s really hard for English teachers to consider, “Oh, we will just read two books this year.” If an English teacher said that, somebody somewhere would faint. That would be dope, that the whole first semester you go so deep into a rich book and you [work just] with that book. Young people learn it, and you use it to not just read the word but read the world.

This value for individualism, this idea of “you pull yourself up by the bootstraps”—we see that in classrooms, that you do the work all by yourself, you got the A and you’re at the top of your class. Instead of, “Look, this group took on this work together, and everyone explored their strengths, improved in their areas of growth and there was learning that was both curricular and extracurricular.” That’s the real world; that’s professional life, and we don’t necessarily value that in classrooms. It requires stepping back, being honest and reevaluating a lot of the things that we’ve taken as orthodox practices.

Why is it necessary to talk about these things? Folks will say, “Why are we talking about this when we have actual work to do?”

Because that is the work to do. These are not mutually exclusive.  A lot of people who say, “Just teach the standards” or “Just teach your content” don’t understand that I’m already doing political work just by saying that I teach the standards. I am already indoctrinating, if you will. For example, in the English field, this whole pedestal that we have the five-paragraph essay on—it’s problematic! Continuing to demand that students perfect this five-paragraph essay is actually not preparing them for college, which is what we think we’re doing. In college, you don’t need to write five-paragraph essays, number one. Number two, what we’re doing is this factory-model approach where everybody can crank out the same thing. It’s very much an American social construct. If I go to Turkey, they’re not telling me to write in five paragraphs. If I go to Brazil, they’re just writing! If I go to the Cochiti people in New Mexico, they’re not even writing. They’re like, “We’re a storytelling people, so you can take your paper and put it in the trash.”

This overemphasis on some of this is, in fact, indoctrination. We have to revisit it. We have to.