NC writers protest the Trump administration’s purging of words it doesn’t like
About 30 people gathered on the south side of the State Capitol building at midday Monday, most of them older, many of them writers and educators, and all of them opposed to the Trump administration’s purge of words.
Since President Trump took office in January, various federal agencies and departments have been scrubbing federal websites of certain verboten words and denying or ending grants and contracts that mention them.
“We are just trying to bring together people in defense of freedom of speech and place emphasis on these words that the administration is attempting to remove,” said Jill McCorkle, a novelist and creative writing professor at N.C. State University. She helped organize the protest which was hosted by the North Carolina chapter of Writers for Democratic Action.
It’s well known that the words “Gulf of Mexico” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” are on the outs under Trump. What’s getting less attention is that they are on a growing list of suspect or banned words and phrases that include “advocacy,” “bias,” “Black,” “feminism,” “racism.,” “social justice” and even basic words such as “belong,” “accessible” and “women.”
In an article listing nearly 200 words disappearing under the Trump administration, the New York Times said, “The words and phrases listed here represent a marked — and remarkable — shift in the corpus of language being used both in the federal government’s corridors of power and among its rank and file.”
The writers group PEN America has identified more than 250 words and phrases “no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration.”
McCorkle said, “What they are really banning are thoughts, ideas and beliefs.”
Bland Simpson, a UNC-Chapel Hill English professor and the author of several books, said writers need to defend “a language that is more than 1,000 years old, the language of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, Emily Dickinson and the Gettysburg Address.”
Banning words “is ludicrous, but it could not be more serious,” he said. “If we don’t say, ‘Look at this awful thing,’ we are not doing our job, we are not protecting our means of communication.”
Also at the event was North Carolina’s Poet Laureate Jackie Shelton Green and former state Court of Appeals Judge Lucy Inman.
The banned words were at the center of the protest. Speakers took turns saying each one. Without intentional irony, they spoke in front of the memorial of Zebulon Vance, a slave-owning, Civil War-era governor and a one-time member of the “Know Nothing” party whose surname is the same as the current vice president.
Halfway through the protest, the word defenders were drowned out by a Black man carrying a backpack and using a portable loudspeaker. He shouted profanities and condemned white people for stealing the land from Native Americans. The protest speakers gamely kept talking over him until State Capitol Police persuaded the man to move on.
Defending free speech means tolerating even a disruptive shouter on public property. The protesters endured the ranting, but when it ended McCorkle said with chagrin, “We kind of had in mind a quiet Quaker meeting.”
Along with the speeches there was a poem written by North Carolina poet Joanne Durham and read by Margaret Bauer, an East Carolina University English professor.
The poem, entitled “Executive Order to Purge Federal Workers of the Notion of Justice,” contains many of the banned words. It starts with “Abandon activism and advocacy for advancing America / Brutalize Black and Latinx bodies with blatant bias.”
But it ends with rejecting that order: “Our voices will valiantly verify/ Words with which we Woke Up/ eXtricating ourselves from the /Yoke of oppression of these xenophobic/ Zealots who can’t zero out what spells a just/ America.”
As the protest neared its end, rain fell and the word defenders departed.
This story was originally published May 6, 2025 at 11:13 AM.