How to Use 197 Forbidden Words and Still Get a Government Grant

This piece is in honor of those who write government grants and now are losing them. We are trained to pay special attention to key words in requests for proposals - RFPs. When I saw the 197 forbidden words, many of which we have deployed in past proposals, I had to use them all.

Dear Elon,

On behalf of the Diversified Organization of Grant Enablers, (the original DOGE), thank you for ordering the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to flag proposals that contain certain oppressive “woke” words you don’t like. We’re not wild about them either.

Forbes leaked the list of the 197 terms, rendered here in bold italics. (Kudos for not banning George Carlin’s seven dirty words!)

BTW, the biased media is inflating the number of forbidden words, trying to make you look bad. For example, it counts the following as ten words instead of one: diverse, diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse community, diverse group, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, and diversity. Fake news, is it not?

But we have a suggestion. Rather than ban them, giving the liberals something easy to roast you with, why not put them to work in an anti-woke context? That’s what our professional team of DOGE grant writers has done in this culturally appropriate proposal. You will love it, even though it uses just about all the barred terms. (Sorry, we failed to squeeze in people + uterus.)

We don’t want to brag, but this can’t-miss proposal will shake up the lunatic left. You will want to immediately fund it, even while chain-sawing so many others into sawdust. And when you spread the word on X, your popularity with anti-woke key groups is sure to skyrocket! Even Steve Bannon will snuggle up to you.

.

Thanks for purifying our thoughts and bringing your antiracist Afrikaner sensibility to our great nation. Stop di snert!

Reparations for the Descendants of Slave Owners (DSO): Introduction

Britain abolished slavery in 1833 and provided former slave owners 20 million British pounds as compensation, (the equivalent today of $22.1 billion US dollars). Racial justice demands a similar response from the U.S. federal government for the descendants of U.S. slave owners.

In South Africa today, oppressed white farmers face land confiscation without compensation from its reckless government, BIPOC to the core. Slave owners in the U.S. were victims of a similar injustice after the Civil War, punished for their identity. Without reparations, which have been too long denied, their descendants are victimized again generation after generation.

To promote a truly inclusive society based on equity, equality, and diversity, we must recognize and celebrate our cultural differences. While we are a nation of immigrants, we also are a nation of slaveowners and their descendants.

For too long implicit bias and hate speech have been used against those who who were born into slave-owning families, due to no fault of their own. These key populations, labeled DSO here, should be considered at risk minorities. They helped create our national identity and contributed significantly to our cultural heritage. Racism in America would have little meaning without them.

Our proposal is a multicultural exploration of race and ethnicity among the slave-owning class, and their extended contact with indigenous communities and the Hispanic minority along the Gulf of Mexico. These marginalized non-white groups, including females, also owned slaves and suffered losses due to emancipation.

We must put aside our stereotypes about the plantation class. This underappreciated and undervalued population is difficult to analyze due to our own unconscious bias against all aspects of slavery. The DSO have lost their voice and their once fearsome power, since some ancestors of slaveowners are burdened by a crippling sense of guilt and so are underrepresented in modern political discourse.

To advocate for reparations for DSO members is not to whitewash their faults. Slave-owners promoted systemic racism, segregation, and white privilege— even for white non-slave-owners— but we should acknowledge their genuine sense of belonging formed though the intersectionality of sociocultural and socioeconomic factors in plantation society.

Even though white women were systematically placed on a pedestal, they were never excluded from institutional slave-owning power. They adored their narrow gender identity. These women of high status were never marginalized by aggressive feminists. They were totally at ease with being biologically female and with the gender they were assigned at birth.

Also, we can find no transgender and transexual members of slave-owning society and the DSO. Women did not run domestic plantation life in order to overcome disparities or spew meaningless pronouns in polite society. This wholesome tradition has been carried on by the DSO and provides another reason for just compensation.

A key, but seldom discussed factor, is the gender-based violence suffered at the hands of marauding Yankee soldiers. The DSO may deserve additional compensation for the trauma suffered as well as any resulting mental disabilities of their forebearers.

Meanwhile, slave-owning men were real men, biologically males with no wanton legacy of men having sex with men (MSM). And please forgive us for a personal judgement: These god-fearing slaveowners left their descendants with not the faintest expressions of non-binary awareness, thank goodness.

Because of the uncompensated destruction of the slave-holding structures, we regret to report that more than a few white plantation women became commercial sex workers in order to survive the marauding armies. The anguish and mental health problems facing white plantation prostitutes should be considered when awarding reparations. While it is too late to do something for them, our unconscious bias about sex should not distract us from a path of justice for their descendants.

Another important thread connects the slave owners to the climate crisis they and their descendants experienced. Monocrops repeatedly planted to raise cash in trade depleted the soil on Southern farms, creating pollution in their drinking water and a more generally degraded environmental quality. Westward expansion of slavery took more and more land from Native American tribes. Without climate science to inform them, effective solutions were missed and succeeding generations paid the price. We compensate farmers today for crop failures and tariff losses, why not do the same for the DSO, including tribal DSO?

We hope that grant reviewers will look beyond anti-slaveowner confirmation bias, as well as their preconceived notions about race and ethnicity. It’s time to hone our cultural sensitivity and embrace a true cultural diversity, one that includes both descendants of slaves and slave owners. Our all-inclusive proposed project will make plain the biases we hold against this DSO class.

Since the Civil War, polarization has led to oppression and vilification of our great but marginalized plantation heritage. This injustice can only be rectified by fair and equitable compensation for the undervalued and underserved, whose relatives had their Black human capital stripped from them.

Our project asks only that we adjust our orientation and increase the diversity of those considered the victims of slavery. We must foster inclusiveness, devising just and equitable compensation programs for all descendants of slavery, including the DSO.

Social justice requires that we overcome our own prejudices and promote diversity of thought. By doing so, we all should recognize that slave-owning descendants too should be considered among our most vulnerable populations, entitled to equal opportunities when reparations are considered.

Now is the time to rectify the historical inequity faced by the DSO.

Now is the time to enhance the diversity of reparations recipients and the way they are viewed.

Now is the time to fund our bold proposal which strives, like no other, to bring community equity to all our people.

Cc Robert Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, and the descendants of Robert E. Lee