About the commons
A cross-referenced omnibus of progressive equity-language guidance, built so you can see every source organization's rule side-by-side and decide what fits your audience.
Why it says beta
Everything published here is verified and ready to use: every quote is checked against its source, and every page cites org, year, and page reference. Beta means the collection is still growing. More terms and chapters are being added, and the corpus of source guides keeps expanding as new ones are published.
It also means corrections are wanted. If a quote is wrong, a source is missing, or a synthesis reads unfairly to the organization it describes, say so and it gets fixed.
What's here
The commons collects equity-language guidance from progressive nonprofits, journalism associations, advocacy organizations, and scholars who have published style guides. For each term, every source organization's ruling appears together: their quote, their year, their page reference, and a position badge that summarizes where they landed.
The commons does not issue its own rulings. The synthesis paragraphs identify cross-source patterns, where guides agree, where they diverge, what's shifting, but they don't override any source organization's own published position.
Why a commons, not a guide
"A Progressive's Style Guide" already exists: Hanna Thomas and Anna Hirsch (SumOfUs, 2016) wrote the spiritual predecessor to this resource. SumOfUs renamed itself Ekō in 2023. The commons preserves SumOfUs as one source among many and treats it with the same cross-reference logic as every other source.
Single-author style guides are inevitably one author's view at one moment in time. A commons makes the multi-source nature of equity language visible: readers can see that source organizations do disagree, and on what.
License
The cross-reference layer (the synthesis, per-term composition, schema, and chapter framing) is licensed under CC BY 4.0: attribute and reuse freely.
The source guides themselves remain © their respective publishers. Each quoted passage is under 50 words (fair-use safety margin). For reuse beyond fair-use citation, contact the source organization directly: links are on each source page.
Editorial principles
- Self-identification is primary across every term in the commons.
- No blame-leaning language about source-guide authors. Every style-guide author was doing the best they could with what was available at the time. The commons describes what each guide does and lets chronology speak: never "outdated" or "behind."
- Editorial synthesis is welcome. Editorial judgment of individual authors is not.
Contributing
See How to contribute for the full guide. The short version: open an issue or a discussion on GitHub, submit a pull request if you're git-fluent, or email us at hello@equitylanguagecommons.org. New to GitHub? The Contribute page includes a step-by-step onboarding section that links to GitHub's own beginner walkthroughs.