On 19th January 2024, The Telegraph published an article about the Inclusive Terminology Glossary titled “Taxpayer-funded charity shares guidance that calls Hamas freedom fighters’,” which misleadingly suggested that Collections Trust had funded my resource. In its attempt to stir up hatred, the right-wing newspaper falsely claimed that the Glossary “calls Hamas freedom fighters”, omitting sections where the guidance condemns the 7th October attacks as well as the entry’s citations from the Jewish-led heritage organisation The Promised Land Museum: The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience. Setting me up for accusations of anti-Semitism, moreover, the article did not mention the fact that the Glossary contains a section on the History of Anti-Semitism and published my name and a photograph of my face without consent, which has since left me vulnerable to personal attacks and racial and Islamophobic abuse.
As a collaborative, open-access resource, the Inclusive Terminology Glossary offers information about discriminatory language that has been used to describe people from marginalised communities in the past and present. Rooted in decolonial practice, it aims to centre marginalised people’s voices and represent multiple perspectives on terminology discrepancies. Regarding its scope, it aims to be as comprehensive and inclusive as possible, but it relies on public contributions to do so. It would be discriminatory to purposefully exclude terminology debates regarding Palestinian experiences of marginalisation as well as Jewish social justice perspectives. With South Africa’s genocide case against Israel having gone to the International Court of Justice, for example, it would an erasure of history if the Glossary intentionally excluded international debates that have arisen in response to the State of Israel having killed of 22,000 Palestinians since 7th October 2023 (including over 10,000 children). Although “1.9 Palestine” as a separate section is one of the more recent additions, the Glossary has from its very inception included guidance regarding colonialism, racism, indigenous rights, and Islamophobia.
On 20th January 2024, Collections Trust (who are funded by Arts Council England) released a statement, accompanied by a tweet, announcing their removal of the Inclusive Terminology Glossary from their “best practice” resources page in response to The Telegraph’s false claims about my guidance. I remain deeply disappointed by Collection Trust’s failure to communicate with me prior to publishing this statement, especially given that they have not be transparent about our working relationship and the fact that they used my training and resources to promote their own institution’s “inclusivity” and “anti-racist” practice in 2023 when I conducted the following three paid workshops for them, all of which were fully booked with a waiting list:
- “Auditing heritage collections for racist language and imagery,” 7 September 2023
- “Creating an inclusive language policy,” 28 September, 2023
- “Creating cataloguing advisory notices for racist materials,” 19 October 2023
Dating further back, I gave a paid talk at their 2021 Dealing with Complexity Conference, which was titled “The language dilemma: ethical cataloguing and inclusive description in practice.” I would also like to take the opportunity to call out Collections Trust for their claim that they were “not even aware of [Section 1.9’s] existence”, given that this addition was announced on 28th November 2023 via the Cultural Heritage Terminology Network Mailing List, Mastodon, and Twitter, of which more than one member of the Collections Trust team subscribe/follow.
I urge Collections Trust to revisit their decision to remove the Glossary, given the value of the resource which was developed with the National Library of Scotland, and to issue me a public apology so we can move forward in our shared aims to improve sector-wide cataloguing standards. After all, the Glossary provides importance guidance regarding the decolonisation of language, including issues related to anti-racism in a sector where more than 90 percent of the workforce are white. You don’t have to agree with every single source that is cited in the Glossary to recognise the value of a resource that collates marginalised people’s perspectives and forces heritage professionals to think twice about the words they choose. Plus, if you disagree with something it says or think something is missing, you can add to it yourself.
As a young woman of colour, working freelance as an Inclusive Metadata Consultant in the heritage sector leaves me vulnerable to this kind of employment discrimination. Without having given me a contract, Collections Trust have been able to “drop” me from future work (which had previously been discussed to take place in Spring 2024) simply because my crowd-sourced inclusive language guide includes marginalised Palestinian and Jewish social justice perspectives. With Collections Trust failing to resolve the issue internally, the recommended course of action is for me to make an official complaint about their handling of the matter through Arts Council England who, in January 2024, issued a “warning that ‘political statements’ made by individuals linked to an organisation can cause ‘reputational risk’, breaching funding agreements”, as paraphrased in a tweet by Arts Professional (and can be read in full in their published policy here). In such a hostile climate where artists and heritage workers are being censored for speaking up against the ongoing slaughter of civilians and people of colour are being personally condemned for doing the DEI work that their white bosses hired them to do, I have therefore chosen not waste my time with a complaints procedure within a sector that is institutionally racist.
If you wish to support my work, please contribute to and share Section 1.9 Palestine of the Inclusive Terminology Glossary.
CHTNUK 