there’s something hauntingly poetic about the ebb and flows of human compassion coming together to form language that allows the marginalized to express their need for emancipation, only for the inevitable surge of encultured ableism to quell that spark and steal that language for its own purpose. over and over and over. what will break the cycle? will people with disabilities ever get to have a concrete hold on the words they use to describe themselves, or is this a permanent fixture in the world we are forcing onto the disabled?
In the latest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM-5-TR), intellectual disability is the term that replaces mental retardation meaning mentally slow or delayed. Before mental retardation, it was mental deficiency implying there was something inferior. To me, there’s no real difference between mental deficiency and intellectual disability. They are synonymous. Before the first DSM, a prominent doctor in the field of intelligence created a tiered system of intelligence that applied the labels moron, imbecile, and idiot (ordered higher to lower intelligence). Those words became derogatory too. The issue is not that scientists can’t guess the correct term that wont become an insult.
The issue is that society defines values for people which allows terms to be insults. As long as oppression exists, the vulnerable will fall victim to it. The disabled, by definition, will always be part of the vulnerable group. Additionally, oppression is always justified by arguments on who deserves what, whether it be religion, race, sex, social class, work ethic, or intelligence. As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
Preach! 🗣️🗣️🔥
The deaf seem to own it. They made up their own language and ableism can’t do shit.
But that is the only exception I can think of. (And they are really independent).
Yes, different subsets of the disabled community have emancipated their language to different degrees.
Have you ever heard “special olympics” being used as an insult? What about “acoustic” or “neurodivergent”? “Special needs” or “the ‘tism”? Sadly, I have. That’s why, when I see these terms being abused in day to day life, I tend to call it out. I want those words to belong to the people they represent, not people who just want to verbally abuse.
But yeah, asking “what’s special” is sort of the wrong way to think about it. The fight for disability rights has barely started in the grand scheme of things, and it’s only natural that some disabled identities have obtained more broad acceptance than others. Good question though.
