By Deborah Sosin
In the face of right-wing attacks on diversity, many progressive writers, including me, are doubling down on our use of respectful and sensitive language. But for those of us who value inclusivity, navigating the rapidly changing landscape of “correct” language is increasingly anxiety-provoking.
What’s the proper pronoun? What’s the appropriate demographic label?
One misstep into this minefield and boom , even the most well-meaning writers are criticized, ostracized, or canceled altogether.
In June, I sent in final edits on a self-help workbook for people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, or the now-preferred term, “substance use disorders” (I use these words interchangeably here). My book features short exercises such as “Noticing Your Urges and Cravings,” “Reasons Not to Use,” “Reexamining Your Relationships,” and “What Are Your Triggers?”
When I began, I thought creating case vignettes would be the most fun part of the process. As a nonfiction writer, I never get to make stuff up. Now I could play in the fiction playground by adapting and disguising real-life scenarios drawn from my 20 years of clinical work in the addiction field. In each 100-word (or so) profile, my goal was to present some bare-bones demographics and connect the story to its accompanying exercise.
Among the 45 vignettes, I wanted to cover a spectrum of age, substance of choice, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and ethnicity. I’d vary references to relationship status and socioeconomic standing as needed.
I sought to show diversity among these categories because addiction, as we know, or should know, crosses all sociological boundaries. And as a white ( note lowercase “w”) cisgender heterosexual single senior Jewish woman (!), I felt a responsibility to expand the conversation beyond my own identities and communities.
But with such a tight word count, I had little room for elaboration, much less nuance. And, as you can imagine, writing about people in recovery is already fraught, demanding careful word choice to avoid stigma or judgment.
First up: Age range. No problem. My vignettes spanned the decades from teens to elders, though I had to be mindful of the sad fact that we rarely find people with an active opioid use disorder who live into their forties or fifties.
Substance of choice? Not hard to spread out the alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy, benzodiazepines, opioids, narcotics, and so on.
For sexual orientation, I could refer to “Jennifer and her wife” or “Hakeem and his boyfriend.” Not long ago, those choices in a general-audience self-help book might have raised a few biased eyebrows. I hope that, in our current culture, identifying LGBTQ+ (itself an evolving designation ) characters can finally register without a blip.
For gender identity, representation matters too. I wrote a mix of male and female characters as well as the fictional “Jamie,” who identifies as neither male nor female. I’ve worked with nonbinary clients who have told me they felt “different” in the recovery community, partly because of its historical use of gender-based designations. However, programs like Alcoholics Anonymous have begun to address gender identity more openly, promoting gender-neutral pronouns and other inclusive terminology.
Now, what about my characters’ race and ethnicity? I suppose I could simply have labeled each person’s category, but doing so seemed inelegant and potentially distracting, not to mention reductive. Plus, certain terms are hotly contested (e.g., “Latino/a” vs. “Latinx” or “Native American” vs. “Indigenous” ). I wanted to use some names that could be considered “neutral” and others that might safely signal “person of color,” inviting nonwhite ( another charged word ) readers to feel seen and represented while, ideally, avoiding stereotypes.
I grappled with this dilemma by approaching it through my own ethnic lens. For instance, if an identifiably non-Jewish author in a hypothetically loaded literary context used the Jewish-associated names “Shlomo” or “Golda,” say, would I be offended? Possibly. What Jewish-associated names would pass my personal muster? Esther? Joshua? Rachel? Ezra?
Oy! No easy answers.
More tricky territory: Which substance-related scenario to pair with which characters without offending? I could risk having “John” abandon his children as a result of alcohol use but likely not “Juan.” Maybe “Carol” could struggle with cocaine but not “Carmela.” And “Linda” but not “Leilani” could steal Percocet from her grandfather’s medicine cabinet.
In creating a character with an arrest record for marijuana possession, I faced an even more nuanced dilemma: a white-associated name like “Doug” might be safer than “Dewayne,” which to culturally trained ears is arguably more “Black-associated.” But—and here’s the sad, paradoxical truth—because of clear racial bias in our criminal justice system, a real-world “Dewayne” would be far more apt to have a drug arrest record than a “Doug.” So, would choosing the name “Dewayne” be conceding a painful reality or imputing a racist stereotype?
You see the problem.
I’m just an author-clinician with no agenda except to educate and inform—and, hopefully, do no harm. But might my honest efforts at inclusivity be perceived as mere tokenism? By what standard is acceptability measured and by whom?
As a final check before submitting my book manuscript, I created a separate document to compare all the vignettes and solicited sensitivity readers in my network, who gave me the thumbs-up.
In the end, all I can do is commit to examining my own biases, stay open to learning, and continue to give it my best shot. Given our culture’s ever-evolving linguistic conventions, there can be no perfect way to keep up—and maybe, in attempting to do so, we risk perpetuating the very harms we hope to avoid. But wouldn’t it be worse not to try?
___
Deborah Sosin, LICSW, is a Boston-based writer, editor, clinical social worker, and GrubStreet instructor. She is the author of The Sober Starting Today Workbook: Powerful Mindfulness and CBT Tools to Help You Break Free from Addiction (New Harbinger Publications, March 2024). Debbie specialized in addictions as a staff therapist at Sameem Associates and was a clinical supervisor at North Charles Institute for the Addictions, both in the Boston area. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, Brevity Blog, Salon, Cognoscenti, The Writer’s Chronicle, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and elsewhere. Her mindfulness-themed picture book, Charlotte and the Quiet Place, illustrated by Sara Woolley (Parallax Press, 2015), won several awards. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She regularly offers “Write It Like It Is” freewriting groups on Zoom. Read more on Debbie’s website .
All Rights Reserved Book Blog