as small as a world and as large as alone, Friendly notice that you reblogged something with...

8:18am April 8, 2014

Anonymous asked: Friendly notice that you reblogged something with the word st*pid in it and you may want avoid/tag ableist language, especially when comparing bigotry to intelligence is harmful to many non-nt people, and lets bigots off the hook.

some-of-the-patterns:

allies-person:

littlegoythings:

lellyphant:

littlegoythings:

Thanks for the friendly notice. However, I have heard from the non-nt (and disabled!) folks in my life that the word is not a slur, is not ableist, and avoiding it is counterproductive to the ableism they face. (I remember one friend of mine was very angry, because making a fuss over the word allowed others to “white knight” and seem allies whilst ignoring structural issues and far worse slights. It was a very involved conversation. And this friend was non-nt and had an invisible disability.) However, I am opening up the floor to my non-neurotypical followers to chime in on the matter.

In a separate matter, I am not sure what intellegence or lack thereof has to do with bigotry or non-nerotypicality. Are you saying non-nt folks are less intellegent, even on average? Because that would be awfully ableist. There are many ways to be non-nt, and many result in as equal (if not higher) testable intellegence. I do know that people who consider themselves smart but refuse to logic out of bigotry or convenience certainly aren’t acting as clever as they think themselves, nor as good, and truly I do not understand why pointing that out is ableist.

I again yield the floor to my non-nt followers to chime in, as this concerns them.

hello, developmentally and mentally disabled person here to say “stupid” and the like are ableist, with backup from a fellow disabled person bc they can say it so much better than i can:

http://glitchbunny.tumblr.com/post/77115049432/no-stupid-is-not-an-ableist-slur-like-r-tard

http://glitchbunny.tumblr.com/post/71687463481/hey-just-a-heads-up-to-all-of-you-abled-people-who

http://glitchbunny.tumblr.com/post/80938511977/antfucker98-why-does-glitchbunny-think-that

http://glitchbunny.tumblr.com/post/78918762033/why-the-word-stupid-is-considered-ableist

http://glitchbunny.tumblr.com/post/77454002153/words-change-meaning

basically “stupid” and the like are inherently ableist and also equating bigots to disabled people is pretty gross

plus the construction of intelligence is rooted in ableism (there are newer constructions of ~~ableism~~ INTELLIGENCE that are less ableist but i mean the sort that is defined by IQ tests and such)

thank you for your input

I don’t believe “stupid” is inherently stupid because I don’t believe that words have inherent meanings—only those which people ascribe to them. And we are very far removed from a point in time where “stupid” is understood as a medical term describing PWD, to the point where most people, including many people with ID/DD, are not aware of the words origins.

Basically, colloquial usage of the word “stupid” has nothing to do with IQ tests. Do you believe that the author of the “stupid things goyim say” post was implying that anti-Semites say things like “the Jews control Hollywood” because they have low IQs? I think it’s pretty obvious that the writer was actually saying that the people in question say these things because they are willfully ignorant. That is how the word “stupid” is commonly used.

So, no, that post was not equating disability with bigotry. Because stupidity, as the term is utilized by most every American English speaker today, has nothing to do with disability. (Unless, of course, one is an ableist asshole who makes assumptions about PWD.)

i agree with allies-person about this

So do I. I have more things to say on the matter but I’m tired of having this argument over and over and over again. I’ll say as much as I can right now.

Basically there is no widespread agreement among disabled people about words like stupid. This includes disabled people with below-average IQs or intellectual disabilities. (For reference, at this point in my life I have a below-average IQ but no intellectual disability.) Many people I know with intellectual disabilities are far more invested in showing people that intellectual disability is not the same thing as stupidity, than they are in getting rid of the word stupid altogether. And of those who don’t use the word stupid, it’s often because they know what it’s like to be called stupid in an ableist way and make a personal choice not to use the word, not because “stupid is inherently ableist”.

There is no agreement on this word.

There is a very vocal group of disabled people who have decided that stupid is ableist and that nobody should ever say it and that those of us who continue to say it just don’t care about how much they’ve been hurt by the word stupid (and so on and so forth). But they’re not all disabled people. They sometimes try to make it sound like they’re the only disabled people whose opinions on the subject matter at all, and they sometimes try to make it sound like those of us who don’t object to the word just haven’t been hurt by it as much as they have, but on both counts they’re completely wrong.

And it also isn’t a matter of who does and doesn’t have certain kinds of disabilities. Because I know lots of people (me included) who are neuro-atypical, cognitively disabled, developmentally disabled, and/or intellectually disabled, who do not mind the word stupid. And have good reasons for not minding it. This includes many people with intellectual disabilities and other people with below-average IQs who find it far more offensive that anyone equates low IQ with stupidity (including the people who say “stupid is ableist because it refers to low IQ” – it doesn’t), than that people use stupid at all.

Additionally, an extreme focus on ableism as being about the language we use, puts many people with expressive or receptive language disabilities at a disadvantage. Because we can’t just change our language, it’s not “easy”, and for many of us it isn’t worth it unless the word is a true slur (which stupid is not, has never been, and will never be). And some of us can’t even fully get rid of words that are actual slurs. So… yeah. There’s that part.

So I find most discussions of why stupid is ableist, far more ableist than the word stupid could ever be – both because these discussions always seem to equate stupidity with intellectual disability in some way, and because these discussions make it harder for people with language disabilities to express important concepts. (There is no substitute for ‘stupid’ that means everything 'stupid’ means, even if people could make a substitute. I’ve seen the word lists people put up for words you can supposedly substitute for stupid, and they just convince me, even further than the “stupid is a word for intellectual disability” stuff, that people who object to the word the most strenuously, don’t understand its meaning.)

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