as small as a world and as large as alone

5:36pm July 27, 2012

twocentsormore:

Ableism in the autism community

youneedacat:

squidids:

goldenheartedrose:

Autistic Hoya gets it right once again.

Trigger warning for ableism and ableist slurs.

I say “crazy” and “nuts,” etc. Most people I know with mental illness use these words, are ok with people using these words, and in fact find them very useful as long as they’re used the “right” way (as in, not to categorize a human being’s thoughts as not valid or worth caring about, simply by virtue if the fact that it’s that particular human being wins thinking them). These words preceded the modern concept of mental illness and describe a useful range of concepts that many people with mental illness NEED to be able to express.

Sorry it’s just… this feels roughly equivalent to being schooled on prior first language. I know it’s not intended. But that’s what it’s like to me.

I feel similar about that half of the post. I’m a former mental patient, as are most of my friends (and some currently are, too) and we use these words. 

Besides that, I am one of the very few people who can say that within the last two decades, idiot is a word that was actually written on my diagnostic paperwork. As in idiot savant qualities. And I am not offended by most usages of idiot, stupid, etc. 

Here is a rough guide to what I find offensive, and what I don’t. Note that what I find offensive isn’t the word itself, but the intentions and concepts beneath the word, that the particular context reveals. 

The r-word is a slur all but a tiny percentage of the time.  Idiot and stupid are not usually slurs, though some people treat them as such.

When people clearly use the word idiot the same way they use the r-word, I have problems with it.  Like, when they make their voice grow dull, flap their hand against their chest with a bent wrist, and use the word idiot.  In that context I see it (and any other word, no matter how innocent in other contexts) as clearly ableist. 

I’ve actually been trying to write a post (trying and failing for several months, as I do with a lot of other things) about how, among other things, I didn’t actually know what the words retard or retarded meant until I was 10, when I read a book with an intellectually disabled character in it.  Despite having been called by those names by my peers ever since I entered formal schooling. 

The only thing I knew, or thought I knew, was that whatever these words meant, it must be something horrible.  Because of the whole attitude that people used them with.  Because when people called me a retard, it was like… there was something beneath it that felt like, anyone who was this thing, this thing that the word described, was lower than shit and piss and vomit and maybe didn’t even deserve to exist at all. 

And part of it was that they’d come up to me and do the thing you described, where they’d shove me around and go “REE-TARD, REE-TARD” in this voice, that was always the same no matter who did it, at places hundreds of miles apart and among groups of people who had never met each other, and get in my face and make these noises that sounded like “DAAAUUU AUUUU DOIIIII” and hit their chestswith their wrists bent, and make these expressions with their eyes rolled back and their mouth open, and they’d go “That’s you! That’s what retards look like! That’s what you look like!”

And I actually ended up becoming selectively mute in some of my classes because every single time I said anything, no matter what it was, they’d start repeating it in the “ree-tard voice,” or “imitate” me saying it with all those gestures.  Like there were kids who’d start flapping their hands against their chests with their mouths hanging open and that look on their face every time I said anything, even if they didn’t imitate my voice, and there was no question about what that “meant.”

And I’m not trying to suggest I got this treatment especially above and beyond other autistic people or anything.  In fact, I tend to assume that most autistic people have experienced it at some point in their life.  But it’s like… there’s this whole mythology around the idea of what “ree-tards” are like that is disturbingly similar across most of the English-speaking world, from what I can tell (not sure about other countries, other people with experience will have to fill in the details there).  You can call people stupid and idiots and all sorts of other names but calling them retards has that whole thing attached to it, that I just started to call “the ree-tard thing” after awhile, that none of those other words do.  Like… the impression I got, as a child, was that stupid is something you temporarily are, but retard is something that makes you a specially hateable category of person, something that’s so disgusting and deserving of hate it can’t even be described in words, something that doesn’t even deserve to exist.  Before I even knew what the word meant.

And if a kid can get that impression without even knowing what a word means, there’s definitely some kind of prejudice underlying it that goes beyond just random insults.  I got to the point where, whenever I was in a new place and heard someone yell “REE-TARD” for the first time, I got this cold chill shooting down my spine and would either start running like hell or flip out at the person who said it (which everyone found hilarious).  I never had that kind of reaction to being called stupid, an idiot, etc.  None of those are nice things to call people, but they don’t have that whole… mythology of a “type of person” behind them. (A type of person I don’t think actually exists or has ever existed anywhere, as I’ve mentioned in just about all my previous attempts to write about this issue.)

And all of this created a shitload of actual internalised ableism in me, once I knew what the word meant- that being really intellectually disabled was like the worst thing you could possibly be, and that I was really lucky to not be that thing, and that whenever anyone called me a retard, I had to fight to prove that I wasn’t one, because if I was, it would make me deserving of all the ways “retards” were treated.  I clung to the label of gifted for years and years after I’d stopped being able to perform academically in the ways most people associate with that label, pretended I could read and understand things I couldn’t read and understand, because that shadow of “must prove you’re not A Retard” was constantly chasing me.  I felt like if I wasn’t “gifted” any more, I would have no worth at all.  

Although, I never really put it into words, but I’ve also made a distinction between people who use the terms retard or retarded because they just genuinely didn’t know those words are considered slurs by a lot of people nowadays, and people doing the ree-tard thing.  Like… I know someone who was born in the 50s and has talked about “a retarded friend” sie had while growing up.  It obviously wasn’t to make fun of the person since they were friends, it was just that that was what the adults around them called it at the time.  Likewise, I’ve also tolerated people using the word “autistic” to mean things like self-centered if they grew up in a time and place when it was widely believed that autism was just an extreme form of being internally focused, and “schizophrenic” to mean plural/multiple, and other terms like “wheelchair-bound” if that was the term everyone around them had always used.  If someone asks what the preferred terms in various communities are and I know, I’ll tell them, but I don’t generally do Time Out Lectures if someone just drops a word in like that, when it seems pretty obvious to me from context that they’re calling it this thing because that’s what everyone else around them has alwas called it, not out of malice.

Actually, one thing I remember that made me think I couldn’t deal with doing self-advocacy by constant word callouts, was reading a book with a character who misused the terms autistic and schizophrenic, that I otherwise enjoyed.  I mean, the book was published decades ago and it was pretty obvious that the author thought when he wrote it that those were the correct meanings.  And the meanings of a lot of psychology-related words, especially schizophrenia, have changed a lot over time in ways most people have no idea about.  But it felt like there was this group of imagined people in my head yelling at me that I should throw the book across the room, that the author using the words this way meant the book was a horrible ableist piece of trash that everyone should boycott, that I had to “police” all my reading to make sure I only read things that passed muster by some incredibly stringent imagined standard.  And that I’d be a bad activist otherwise by letting these misused words float around. 

And… the reality is that I have a lot more problems with non-disabled people who write books with disabled characters when they claim to have done huge amounts of research, that they’ve gone to extremes to try to be “sensitive,” and the books actually promote a lot of horrible stereotypes and people read them and think they’re experts because the book was “so well researched."  Like the ones I mentioned a few posts back, that have gotten a lot of non-autistic people thinking they can decide whether a real person is autistic by comparing them to a fictional autistic character’s behavior and qualities.

(…oh yeah, and I’m also one of the kinds of people who uses words like crazy and insane and mad to describe some of my own past experiences.  And I don’t mind if other people use them, either, unless it’s to insult me or to mean "because you had this experience, your perceptions are completely untrustworthy."  But you can do that by using all sorts of clinical terms, and most of the people I’ve seen who do it, are using "correct” clinical language.)

Oh geez. That voice. I remember hearing my voice on tape and hearing that tone in my voice – varying in amount, but always there, even if just a little – and just freaking out. I also remember my dad imitating something I said, in that voice. I screamed at him and he was genuinely confused, he said “it’s just how you said it”. I learned to keep that tone out of my voice but it required a constant painful tension in my throat. I remember my amazement at hearing the same (variable, of course) level of that tone in feliscorvus’s voice that exists in my own. 

And yes. It was so very different than any other insult that had to do with thinking. It was describing you as a thing, not a person. A thing that could only be hated and stepped on and wasn’t really a person at all. It was awful. Now every time I hear that word shouted at someone I freak out. Even if it isn’t shouted at me. It cuts to the bone and doesn’t stop cutting.  It tries to turn me into a thing too. In people’s heads. 

I went to a conference recently where the theme was getting rid of that word. And it was amazing, also disturbing, to know that every single disabled person there knew exactly how that word cuts you inside. Whether they had an ID technically or not. (Because the word isn’t a diagnostic term. It’s a slur thrown at everyone with a real or presumed cognitive impairment of certain kinds. Usually people with intellectual disabilities, autism, cerebral palsy, or brain damage, but also other things.) 

It always hits me when I’m in the company of other DD people, that everyone inside the room sees each other as just people, and most people outside sees us as things. And you’re right. That’s contained in ree-tard in a way that it’s not contained in most other “thinking based” insults.  I still wish I could describe the “thing” such people see us as, because the way I perceive it is very specific. But I can’t. Maybe my own limitation, maybe a limitation of language. 

People see people with dementia in a very similar way, too. And there’s an equivalent dehumanizing idea people have for “crazy” people, but that idea isn’t forcefully contained in any of the words for crazy that I’ve ever been called (and I think I’ve been called all of them, that was people’s other favorite category of insults for awhile), in the same way that it is for ree-tard. That’s odd. But it’s these extremely not-real-person perceptions people have, that lead to the shitty ways these groups of people are treated.

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