By Trabian Shorters
Founder of BMe Community
This article is the fourth of a new series called “Looking Ahead: the Future of Communications for Good,” produced in collaboration with the Communications Network. Look for additional pieces every other Wednesday, and add your thoughts in the comments. Read the other articles in the series.
Have you noticed that social-impact organizations working with black people often describe them in language that is so offensive that we wouldn’t dare use it to their faces?
The “at-risk, low-income, minorities in high-crime, high-poverty, disadvantaged communities whom we seek to empower and transform” have far more going on in their lives than our denigrating short-hand acknowledges.
In fact, cognitive science and longitudinal studies strongly suggest that consistently defining people in denigrating terms is one way that racist narratives become institutionalized and part of the culture. Old-school philanthropy, social-justice, and social-innovation organizations that are wed to that old way do more harm than they realize.
While they are right to point out injustices, disparities, and needs, they are dead wrong to do it by deeply associating all these problems with the people who experience them. This unintentionally but categorically lets systemic instigators off the hook.
Fortunately, there is a vanguard of leaders choosing instead to define people by their aspirations and contributions before noting their challenges, which makes it much easier to see the systemic causes behind their struggles. Here’s why:
You can’t lift people up by putting them down. For at least 50 years, governments, nonprofits, and foundations have collaborated to wage the War on Poverty, as well as wars on drugs and crime, by making black people the poster children for these menaces to society.
Today, it’s painfully clear that our 50-plus years of declaring ourselves the saviors and allies of people striving to get out of poverty or defying a racist society hasn’t convinced either group that we are in fact their saviors or even their allies.
Adventures of a Bald Canadian 
This is very true, and may take a few years to erase, as ideas and philosophies transfer from one generation to the next. I look forward to hearing more.