2:26pm July 12, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: About avoiding slurs

There are a lot of slurs that are so ingrained into English-speaking culture that people who say them don’t always realize that they are slurs.

People say them without meaning them as slurs, but they still hurt peopleBecause people also say them as intentional slursAnd it’s not usually…

I see retard as a definite slur. And it’s one constantly used against me. So I’m comfortable saying it in the context of discussing slurs.

And then there are words that can be… something CLOSE to slurs, but still don’t strike me as slurs, and I’m not comfortable seeing them treated as slurs in the way retard is a slur.

Like crazy is one of those words. And while I think crazy can be close-to-slur in some usages, I don’t think other usages are anywhere near a slur and shouldn’t be treated that way. For instance “that drives me crazy” or “that was crazy intense”.

The difference for me is that retard always always always, when pronounced REE-tard (and not ’re-TARD’, which is a totally different word)… that always makes reference to developmentally disabled people as a subhuman, not even really quite a person, not real, not valuable. No matter how the word is used, it’s always used making reference to our subhuman qualities. And that’s what makes it a true honest to god slur with no redeeming qualities.

Crazy isn’t like that. Crazy people are also seen as subhuman, but the word crazy doesn’t always reference our subhuman qualities the way retard does. In fact I would say most of the time it doesn’t.

Crazy as a word, does have some amount of quality of dehumanization. But only sometimes. And never quite as intensely as retard does.

Like if there were a one to ten scale of dehumanization. Retard would be ten at worst, nine at best. Crazy would be maybe six and a half at worst, two at best.

And I’ve had both words used against me in a negative way, and belong to groups of people both words are used against regularly and intensely. But they just are not equal at all to me in terms of that feeling like you’ve been punched in the gut and have had all the wind knocked out of you.

It’s kind of strange. There’s definitely a concept referenced by crazy, that is just as dehumanizing as retard. But I have yet to think of an actual word that references that concept on a level ten type of intensity the way retard does.

I run through them all. Crazy, mad, insane, lunatic, loon, psycho, psychotic. All of them have slur-like possibilities. But they don’t have the definite quality retard has. Where is dehumanizing and only dehumanizing and only severely dehumanizing. And none of them point straight at the middle of that dehumanizing idea of a crazy person. They don’t hit the target right in the center. They miss, and sometimes they don’t even hit the target at all, anywhere.

And it’s certainly not that I haven’t been exposed to being considered crazy, to being thoroughly dehumanized in that way none of the words touch. It’s that the woods don’t touch it, don’t even consistently go near it, and therefore, to me, aren’t true slurs.

And also, they have redeeming usages that aren’t offensive to me in the way that every use of retard is.

And then there’s words. Like stupid, or lame. That I can’t consider slurs at all.

Lame just rates one to two on that scale no matter how I try to look at it.

Scab rates zero no matter what FWD thought of it.

Stupid is complicated. It is not a slur because it’s not truly connected to disabilities. It has a meaning totally unconnected to disability, which is about refusing to think when you should’ve been thinking about something you were perfectly capable of thinking about. That meaning is important. But it’s also used as an insult towards both disabled and nondisabled people. And when it’s used against disabled people, it’s not because stupid MEANS cognitively disabled. It’s because people act like the two are the same thing, which is itself an insult against anyone cognitively disabled. Many disabled people therefore have really bad feelings about the word due to how it’s been used against us. But it’s not a slur or even ableist. It’s a word for a real thing, or several real things. What’s ableist is equating those things with disability. And no matter what word people come up with for that real thing, as long as there is ableism there will be people who will use that word to insult and degrade disabled people.

I can’t even put it on the same scale as slurs, because it’s not even related to slurs, but it can still be used in really insulting and offensive ways.

And there’s other stuff but this is all I have the energy to discuss at the moment. But one of my big problems is people not making a distinction between slurs, words that mean something bad that have ties to disability, words that are sometimes used as insults against disabled people, and things that sort of resemble slurs but just, to me, don’t have the same specific, severely bad, universally bad, severely dehumanizing quality, that slurs tend to have in my book. And when people don’t make those distinctions, then other people don’t take them seriously when they really are discussing genuine slurs.

And so I can see pretty much no redeeming qualities in retard. But I’m not going to get offended if they use a lot of these other words, depending on how they use them. And I’m not going to consider something a true slur unless I’d never want someone saying it except under extremely limited circumstances.

Unfortunately these discussions get so polarized that there are plenty of other people who have actually specified that people should not listen to me about words like crazy. They don’t specifically say not to listen to me in particular. They just say anyone who is offended should be listened to more than anyone who isn’t. Which neglects that many of us have well thought out reasons for our opinions, not just a knee jerk reaction to the idea of things being slurs.

Also the stuff about language use being truly hard for many disabled people to change, makes me see it as very important to be careful to call only the most severe words as slurs. Not just any negative word that can be remotely connected to disability. This not only makes it easier for those of us with language problems. It makes it more likely that nondisabled people will take us seriously when we define some words as slurs.

To me the worst disability slurs are retard (and tard, fucktard, etc.) and vegetable. And just so nobody takes this to the ridiculous, I’m talking about REE-tard. Not re-TARD. And vegetable when applied to disabled human beings, not when applied to garden plants. (But when people say that retard is okay because when pronounced differently it’s an entirely different word, are being pretty disingenuous anyway, because we all know what’s meant by the slur itself.)

Sorry I can’t write about more words, but this is all I can do right now.

Notes: