Do We Really Need Another Article About Ableist Language?
Yes. I’m not going to bury the lede here. As a disabled person, ableist language is so ubiquitous that I could literally spend an entire day replying to tweets that appear in my own Twitter feed, based on who I follow and what they tweet or retweet to do nothing but let people know that they used ableist language and to please not do that again. That’s not even considering what I read on Facebook, Reddit, in articles on outlets like Medium, and the words authors chose to use in the audiobooks I consume, let alone the TV shows and movies we watch.
Today’s inspiration for this lesson comes from this tweet from NBC Lx and the engagements that followed:
I’d been made aware of this because someone I follow quote-tweeted this account to point out how this major media account so blithely used a string of ableist slurs as their featured image.
I jumped in to add my two cents, because major media needs to be inundated with replies saying the same thing before they’ll even think about acknowledging the harm they caused.
And then I started reading some of the other replies, and found a reply to another call-out tweet that read:
ableism is a much more widespread and actually harmful social issue than someone using the word dumb
I’m not embedding the tweet, because the account belongs to a minor, and I don’t want her to get dogpiled for having the ignorance of youth and privilege. But I will embed my replies, so please respect my request not to engage with her further.
I first explained:
To which the girl replied:
as you said just because there are different degrees of severity doesn’t mean lesser ones don’t matter but is the word “dumb” an issue on *any* of those levels
I then provided a link to the Google search results for “is dumb ableist?”
There are about 132,000 results for that specific query alone, and more when substituting different ableist words in the search query, or just searching for “ableist words.”
Pretty much all of the first-page search results are good articles that address this topic. I’ll link to a few of my favorites at the end of this piece. But first, I want to give you the message I want you to take away from this article. I’m not going to bother embedding my series of tweets, just copying the text and tidying it up for this platform:
The current widespread usage of the term doesn’t matter when it is still being used to harm people. If you’re using oppressive language that marginalized people tell you to stop using, you stop using it. That’s as true for disability as it is for race, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. [You’re a minor] so please learn this lesson…
If you can treat something as an academic issue to debate because you are not personally affected by it, and the person you’ve chosen to debate is personally affected by it, you are causing them harm and insisting on free emotional labor instead of educating yourself.
By debating a simple statement like “this word is ableist,” you can take this from a fleeting microaggression to something that engages my fight or flight response, something that will affect my mental and physical health for the rest of the day. Don’t do this to people. Just listen when they give you free education the first time.
If you would like to educate yourself more on the topic of what types of language are considered ableist, I’ll defer to some other disabled writers who have delved deeper into this subject so that people like me don’t have to try to create better resources; they already are the better resources. These resources are listed in no particular order.
- Why You Need to Stop Using These Words and Phrases
- Ableist Language To Avoid And Acceptable Alternatives — “Dumb” Edition
- No Joking Matter: Words and Disability
- “Stupid” Is an Ableist Slur: Breaking Down Our Defenses and Liberating Our Words From Ableist Language
- The Effects of the R-Word
- Ableist Terms to Avoid
- Idiot, Moron, Freak: how to not insult disabled people.
- Say The Word: Disabled
