The Language of Disability

Crip, Deaf and Dumb, Deformed, Freak, Gimp, Idiot, Imbecile, Lame, Lunatic, Maniac, Mongoloid, Moron, Mute, Nuts, Pinhead, Psycho, Schizo, Spaz, Sperg, Stupid, Tard, Whacko

These words have long been, and continue to be, offensive and unacceptable in social discourse. They are the “N-words” of disability. They have the power to wound people, diminish them, perpetuate disabling stigma. I remember being called deaf and dumb. Indeed, sometimes someone would make a Freudian slip and say “death and dumb.” Now, who’s dumb?

Language undoubtedly serves to empower some and dis-empower others. That is Disability Studies 101. Critical analysis of language’s power to marginalize and oppress people based on their human condition is warranted, necessary and an ongoing obligation of those committed to social, political and economic justice for people with disabilities.[1] This critique “is right to suggest that vicious, inaccurate representations of certain classes of human beings not only can bring about but may also originate in stigmatizing and unjust social realities.”[2] However, I do admit to a degree of discomfort when I hear calls to suppress “bad” language. While empathetic to the drive to fight stigmatizing language against people with disabilities, where do we draw the line? When does a word or phrase pass from acceptability to offensiveness?

Sez who?

Here I’m trying to give expression to a feeling that’s stuck with me over the years like white on rice. In my youth I rebelled against authority. I flipped the middle finger to powerful people, including my parents, and I bristle when someone tells me what I can or can’t say. I know the above named terms are hurtful and demeaning, but I’m uncomfortable by calls to silence the transgressor. I subscribe to Justice Brandeis’ famous dictum: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”[3]

Those who become educated about language are transformed; those who continue to use slurs are diminished and bankrupt. The answer to these schmucks is more speech not silence.

I wouldn’t shout down someone who said “retard” or “spaz.” I’d engage by pointing out the error of using the offensive term and explaining why it was offensive. We can model by using appropriate language.

Sometimes folks get hung up about language and lose sight of the forest for the trees. Certainly there are equally, if not more, important struggles: health care, employment, education, and justice. Sometimes I wonder if the kerfuffles surrounding language are a distraction stoked by capitalist powers to diffuse the revolutionary energy of disabled people.

That’s my deaf and dumb self talking.

Comments welcome.

[1] See Berube, M. (2015). Representations. In Keywords for Disability Studies (pp. 151-155). New York: NYU Press.

[2] Id. at 153.

[3] Concurring op., Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927).