In this week’s episode, we discuss how the general public can take disability language and abuse it in negative ways.

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Hello, this is Chris Young, and welcome to another episode of “Contemplating Life”.

This week we will conclude our two-part series on the terminology used to describe disability. Last week we talked about how words are dependent upon consensus and context. Over the years most consensus and context about the use of various words related to disability has evolved. In some cases, the consensus has not caught up to the new context.

We focused mostly on the evolution of the words “handicapped” and “disabled”. While I understand many of the reasons for the change, I still think that the word “handicapped” should not be considered offensive and has a useful definition distinct from “disability”.

A brief aside, I’m making a serious attempt to keep these podcasts under 30 minutes. When I have a lot to say on a topic, it’s becoming difficult to find a good place to split the episode into two pieces. We have one more aspect of the word “disability” to discuss before moving on to this week’s primary topic – the way the general public has misused and abused disability terminology in offensive ways.

Having evolved from handicapped to disabled, another debate arose in the community. Should we use the phrase “disabled person” or “person with a disability”? Fortunately, the debate never got very furious. At one point many disabled people concluded the terms were interchangeable because there was no clear consensus. The “person with a disability” phrase is called “person first” terminology. Its advocates claimed that we should “put people first” and that disability was secondary. Okay… Maybe…

Ben Mattlin said in a recent interview that “disabled person” seems to be winning. The argument was that “person first” by its nature puts the disability last as if we are trying to hide it. If we are to have disability pride, then put that word up front and wear it proudly. He also points out the obvious awkwardness of the phrase “person with a disability” in contrast to the simplicity of the phrase “disabled person.”.

My argument is summed up in the words “We are speaking English”. In English, we put the adjective before the noun. The noun is “person”. It is the subject of the sentence or phrase. The word “disabled” is the adjective describing the subject. “Disabled person” is simply proper English.

Now let’s move on to our main topic – offensive words used to describe disability.

Before there were handicapped, the common word in use was “crippled”. Outside its use to describe a disabled person, crippled evokes the connotation of damaged into immobility or uselessness such as, “The damage in the engine room crippled the ship and left it adrift.” People with disabilities were seen as damaged goods who were incapable of functioning. Certain hospitals were described as Crippled Children’s Hospitals. Polio was described as a crippling disease because it would literally cause body parts to become deformed and useless. By its nature, the term is only applied to physical or orthopedic handicaps.

Today the word is simply disused as archaic and for good reason. It evokes such a negative pity-driven image. Note, however, the shortened form “crip” is often used within the disability community humorously as a way to reclaim a negative word and turn it positive. A case in point is the award-winning 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp about a summer camp for disabled teenagers. I have similarly heard the word “gimp” as a word disabled people might use to ironically or jokingly refer to themselves. These words fall into the category, “we can use them about ourselves but you can’t.” This is somewhat in the same vein as the way African-Americans use a form of the n-word ending with the letter “a”.

There are a number of cringe-worthy words and phrases that have been roundly rejected by the disability community. Awkward phrases such as “differently-abled”, or “handi-capable” are ridiculous ways to avoid the word “disability”. Also on the do not fly list is “handicapper” unless you are talking about someone who handicaps a horse race. These kinds of words are considered condescending, and ableist, and have been soundly rejected by the disabled community.

Many parents of disabled children describe their kids as “special needs” children or themselves as parents of a special needs child. The term “special needs” seems to be falling out of favor and I have to admit I’m not exactly sure what the issue is. My experience is that parents who use this terminology typically are in an ongoing struggle against the school system or other agencies to have the needs of their children met.

I’ve heard it argued that disabled children have the same needs as any other child. They need to get to and from school. They need an education. They need to eat lunch. They need to go to the bathroom. While the solutions to these needs are nonstandard, there is nothing inherently special about the needs themselves.

I’m reminded of the funny scene from the 1985 film Mask starring Cher as the mother of a teenager, played by Eric Stoltz, who had a disfiguring medical condition. She was arguing with a junior high school principal trying to get her son enrolled.

The principal says, “This is a public junior high school, Miss Dennis. There are special schools with wonderful facilities that might be more appropriate for his needs.”
Cher replies, “Do you teach algebra and biology and English here?”

“Of course.”

“Those are his needs.”

I can buy that argument to a certain extent. But in fairness, the boy in the story, unlike most children described as special needs children, didn’t require any extra services, adaptations, or accommodations.

Should we describe these kids as “children in need of special solutions to their ordinary needs?” Wow! And you thought “person with a disability” was awkward compared to “disabled person.”
I have no objection to the words “special needs” and I don’t believe that the people who use that phrase, again mostly parents, are in any way shape, or form perpetuating any kind of negative stereotype about their children. As I said earlier, they are mostly preoccupied with getting the services and accommodations that their children need.

Probably the best example of the way in which disability terminology has evolved over the years as both context and consensus has changed is the way in which we describe intellectual disabilities. If there ever was a moving target of political correctness, this is the worst and sadly we may be stuck in a never-ending cycle of evolving terminology.

You are probably unaware that the words “idiot”, “imbecile”, and “moron” were originally the medically correct terminology for people with various degrees of intellectual disability. Unfortunately, the words were co-opted by the general public as insults towards people who were behaving irrationally or in other ways were being just plain stupid not as a result of any disability.

In an attempt to come up with new terminology, the phrase “mental retardation” was coined. Outside of disability circles, the meaning of the verb “to retard” is to slow down or impair the progress of something. One often heard people with intellectual disabilities described as, “There is nothing wrong with them… They are just slow.” Depending on the tone or the context, that’s not altogether a bad characterization. People with intellectual disabilities can be highly functioning self-sufficient people. Mental tasks simply do not come as easily as they do to the average person. People who were described as “slow” in fact probably had some sort of learning disability.

The bottom line is that the words “mentally retarded” were a well-reasoned attempt to create terminology that was accurate, useful, and not offensive. In special education programs, there were three levels: “mildly mentally retarded”, “moderately mentally retarded”, and “‘severely/profoundly mentally retarded”. These categories were typically defined by a range of IQ levels and corresponded directly to the previous words “idiot”, “imbecile”, and “moron” although I’m not certain in what order.

Unfortunately, the insensitive general public once again turned the terminology into a derogatory insult. The word “retarded” and its shortened form “retard” became so derogatory and offensive that now they are often referred to as the “r-word”.

Initially, children with intellectual disabilities were institutionalized and warehoused with no opportunity for personal growth or fulfillment. Eventually, parents rejected medical recommendations of institutionalization and kept their children at home surrounded by a loving and supportive family. They began seeking specialized programs and support systems for the children. Organizations known as ARCs began appearing in the 1950s. The acronym initially stood for “Association for Retarded Children”. As their clients aged and continued to need a variety of services, they changed their name to “Association for Retarded Citizens”.

Like the NAACP, these organizations were now faced with a historical acronym based on archaic and offensive terminology. Local ARCs as well as the national organization still retain the name ARC but it is no longer an acronym. Their web pages explain the history of the term. They explain that they kept the ARC designation as a nostalgic respect to their history.

While researching this history I looked up the local Marion County ARC which served Indianapolis as I was growing up. The first page that came up was Marion County ARC in Osceola Florida. They cleverly say that the letters now stand for “Advocacy Resource Center”. They are affiliated with the National ARC yet the national organization hasn’t picked up on this clever renaming nor has the local Indianapolis ARC organization now known as “Noble ARC” named after the “Noble Center” sheltered workshop.

Today, many people use the designation “developmental disability”. But as I explained earlier, depending on what definition you use for DD, I qualify as developmentally disabled yet I am a college graduate who came just two IQ points short of qualifying for Mensa membership. It is inappropriate to assume that a developmental disability is an intellectual disability yet many fail to make that distinction.

There is a part of me that wishes that the ARCs and other disability advocates had drawn a line in the sand and stood up for the word retarded and insisted that the word in and of itself should not be considered offensive. I wish they had spoken out more emphatically against the misuse of the word rather than allowing the word itself to be canceled. The problem is, there is a serious risk that people will co-opt new terms the same way they have in the past. The insensitive public is very clever and they can turn any terminology into an insult.

Here is a fascinating example. Many years ago I was sitting in the parish office at St. Gabriel Catholic Church working on budgets with my friend Judy who was the parish secretary/bookkeeper. In those days, the parish also operated an elementary school. I overheard a conversation in the hallway as a teacher was yelling at a boy. Apparently, he had been tasked with the job of carrying classroom trash out to the dumpster in the parking lot. It was about 25° outside that day. He was confronted by a teacher as he reentered the building.

“Johnny”, the teacher screamed, “Why aren’t you wearing a coat? We don’t run a special education school here!”

It was one of those rare moments in my life where it was probably fortuitous that I have a disability. I probably would have gone out to the hall and punched the teacher square in the face. Well, perhaps not. I was so stunned by what she said I couldn’t move. To this day I regret not rolling out into the hallway and giving her a piece of my mind.

Essentially, she could not have been more insulting if she had simply called the boy a freaking retard. In fact, her euphemism was even more offensive because it not only disparaged people with intellectual disabilities, it disparaged anyone who was educated in a special education environment including myself. Furthermore, my experience with people with intellectual disabilities such as Down syndrome suggests they would be far less likely to go outside without a coat, once you had told them the rules, than would your average belligerent 10-year-old boy. I was especially disappointed not only that she had said such a thing but that she said it to an impressionable child. He was going to grow up thinking that special education was a euphemism for stupidity.

Here’s another brief example of how you can turn any disability language into an insult. I once heard a standup comedian talking about a guy she knew who wasn’t exactly the brightest person around. In questioning his intellect, she said she asked him “When you went to school, did you take a long ride on a short bus?” I nearly fell out of my wheelchair laughing. Although it was highly offensive, I thought it was phenomenally clever. Then again, I’m such a student of comedy that I can laugh at offensive things routinely. Sorry, it’s a character flaw.

Prior to hearing that joke, I had never heard the phrase “ride the short bus” used as an insult yet a Google search revealed a slang dictionary entry indicating that it was a widely used slang insult to one’s intelligence.

In case you don’t get the reference, undersized school buses are frequently used to transport disabled children to special education programs sometimes long distances between school districts. Each individual school district often can’t support a variety of special education programs so they enter into cooperatives in which special education programs are consolidated and shared between districts. Thus the stereotype of a long ride on a short bus.

Although the school bus I rode every day to a special education school was a full-size bus, it exclusively carried wheelchair passengers. There were only about seven or eight of us on the bus. Had we not been in wheelchairs, a short bus would have been sufficient to take us on a very long ride all over the west side of Indianapolis to collect us and transport us to the special education school on the near east side of the city.

Although I didn’t ride a short bus, I identify as a short bus rider.

The bottom line is that no matter what terminology we use to describe any kind of disability, there is an ongoing risk that the words will be misinterpreted, misused, and abused. This struggle to accurately and sensitively identify ourselves as disabled people is likely to continue for a long time. The problem isn’t with the words themselves. Words are just an abstraction. They are a way to allow us to communicate about disability and contemplate what it means to be disabled.

While I agree that words are powerful and should be used properly, it seems to me these days people have become too sensitive about words. I recall the days when we taught our children the adage, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.” I’d like to see that lesson resurrected.

The meaning of words depends on consensus and context. If we don’t work hard to ensure consensus and understand context, no matter what words we use, our ability to communicate concepts related to disability and to think about disability will be severely… uh… will be severely… Oh hell… Just say it Chris…it’s the right word in this context… Okay, let’s start that sentence over again.

If we don’t work hard to ensure consensus and understand context, no matter what words we use, our ability to communicate concepts related to disability and to think about disability will be severely handicapped.

Sorry, not sorry… I just couldn’t resist.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion… I could be wrong.

As always, I welcome your comments.

In the opening episode of this podcast, I said I would be talking about a variety of topics that included disability, religion, politics, and entertainment. I have lots more to say about disability and my life living with a disability but I think it’s time we move on to a different area. Next week I will discuss my off-again, on-again relationship with God and my journey of faith.

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