whetstonefires:
beatrice-otter:
cacodaemonia:
theunitofcaring:
(It took me a while to figure it out; anon was bothered by this post.)
Okay, sure, I’ll try to do that. That said, I want to encourage people engaged in anti-ableism efforts that take the form of asking people not to use certain words to put their energies elsewhere. Firstly, I think they make the disability advocacy community inaccessible to a lot of people, since having to relearn which words are “allowed” is overwhelming and particularly difficult for people who have limited access to words in the first place.
Secondly, every time I’ve seen this implemented it…hasn’t made anyone less ableist? People who scrupulously remove “crazy” from their vocabulary in favor of “irrational” still treat the people they’re talking about like unpersons. Often the recommended replacement words are just as good at suggesting “less valuable person” as the words they replaced. I think there’s some value in asking “does our use of words surrounding disability to mean ‘bad thing’ come from a place of treating disabled people like tragedies?” and often it does, but that doesn’t mean that challenging that mindset is as easy as changing out the words.
Thirdly, I think it emphasizes the wrong concerns. I saw a newspaper headline the other day saying “the president’s plan will be a crippling blow to the economy” and one about the “crippling burden of student debt”. I’d think that the fact the president’s plan includes making it harder to get SSI, or the fact disabled students are way less likely to graduate and likelier to end up in debt, is a much more urgent problem than the turn of phrase used in the headline.
Lastly, it seems like the anti-words advocacy often pretends at a false consensus in disability activism. There are physically disabled people who are bothered by that newspaper headline and those who are not. There are mentally ill people who are bothered by use of crazy and some who couldn’t care less. But no one ever says “hey, that word bothers me personally because people have used it to be mean to me”, they say “it’s ableist towards physically disabled people,” as if all physically disabled people agree on this (or as if the ones who disagree are just obviously confused poor souls and don’t merit a mention). “There are physically disabled people who dislike the phrase ‘crippling anxiety’ and there are physically disabled people who don’t care and there are physically disabled people who have, themselves, described their anxiety as crippling” is much more accurate, but less compelling.
Not to mention how constantly making previously common words or terms into ‘bad’ ones discriminates against older members of all kinds of communities, from queer people to disabled folks. So they suddenly become the enemies of younger community members over the use of words rather than behavior.
But yeah, treating any group like a monolith is a bad idea.
I’m 40 years old. This is relevant because in my lifetime, I have seen multiple renaming/rebranding efforts to find words that are not as hurtful to disabled people.
And each and every one of them failed. Within a very short time of going mainstream, the words that were supposedly neutral and less pejorative became, in practice, every bit as nasty and horrible as the word they replaced.
This is called the euphemism treadmill.
Why? Simple.
If someone thinks a group of people are scum who shouldn’t exist, and you tell that person “please don’t use [old word] for that group, use [new word] instead” you have not actually changed their mind about the group they hate one bit. They still think they’re scum who shouldn’t exist! It’s just now they have two words that mean “scum who shouldn’t exist,” [old word] and [new word]. There is no vocabulary change that will make them think about the group they hate any differently. You can shame them into not publicly discriminating (if you have the social buy-in from other people) and sometimes, sometimes if you have a relationship with someone you can over time influence them to be less hateful*, but just changing the word they use does absolutely nothing.
*If you want to work to change peoples’ perspective, the Hidden Brain podcast has an excellent episode on how to handle conflict that touches on “how can you influence people who disagree with you to move their position closer to yours.” Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling
So while I try not to use words that will hurt people (because knowingly hurting people is a jerk move), I also don’t put that much effort into policing mine or other peoples’ language. Because there are so many other things that are more important to spend my time and energy on.
frankly the harder my disabilities are hitting me the more appreciation i have for the word ‘crippling’
honestly, the ableist word stuff makes me so angry nowadays.
Which. Historical context.
I cannot prove this, but I am about 90% sure that the way we talk about ableist words and ableist language has strong roots in the Ableist Word Profile series run by FWD, a blog by feminists with disabilities that ran 2009-2011. I was hanging around there from the start, guest-posted once, and not only was it the first time I had ever seen anyone call out the ableist underpinnings of some common terms like that, I remember it taking off wildly from there through the social justice sphere even at the time. By now it’s gd everywhere, but hey, things do start somewhere.
At this point I would like to quote the bloggers who contributed to the column:
Here’s what this series is about: Examining word origins, the way in which ableism is unconsciously reinforced, the power that language has.
Here’s what this series is not about: Telling people which words they can use to define their own experiences, rejecting reclamatory word usage, telling people which words they can and cannot use.
You don’t necessarily have to agree that a particular profiled word or phrase is ableist; we ask you to think about the way in which the language that we use is influenced, both historically and currently, by ableist thought.
It was never about saying “these words are bad, don’t use them”. Nor was it ever the main focus of the blog. I’d ballpark estimate that it was less than 5% of the overall posts. And my friends, there was so much cool stuff on there, media criticism, awareness raising, intersectionality guest posts, information on web accessibility, so many incisive thought-provoking posts that stuck with you. The site’s still up, you can check them out.
Even back in 2010, people noticed that there was a… weird imbalance… in exactly which of those incisive thought-provoking posts were getting spread more widely and which stayed consigned to a smaller readership. Anna’s post Why Writing about Language Isn’t Enough is still absolutely worth a read over a decade later:
And yet, when trying to have discussions about ableist language, we’re back to the silo of disability. Instead of talking about ableist language as part of the manifestation of the disdain and abuse of people with disabilities, it’s treated as isolated – the problem, instead of a symptom of the problem.
Ableism is not simply a language problem.
and yet, and yet, of that amazing blog, the thing that seems to have made the absolute most impact in the social justice sphere in the long run is… language.
and not even in the nuanced, let’s examine how ableism influences our language historically and today, way it was intended as. In the incredibly reductive “hey, these are Bad words, use these Good words instead” way that the original bloggers actively wanted to prevent. The way that can make spaces hostile to non-native English speakers, people with specific verbal or cognitive disabilities or some people with OCD. The way that is both incredibly punitive and, at the same time, has ceded such important ground in the fight - oh, it’s a simple replacement, say Y instead of X, it’s just that the etymology is ableist you see, it’s that the word is triggering. It’s not like you need to worry that the concept you are trying to express in and of itself might have ableist underpinnings. no need to think about it that deeply.
ableism is just a language problem, don’t you know.
Even the goddamn web accessibility stuff hasn’t gone big to the same point, and that contained some serious low-hanging fruit for improvement. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone be publicly berated for no image descriptions, no subtitles on video, or non-descriptive link text the way people get over language. and when’s the last time I saw someone talk about whether a website was screen-reader accessible.
But really. Every time I see the “X word is ableist, don’t use it” it’s like I’m seeing the horrible bastardized knock-off version of the beautiful work my friends and community put so much of themselves into back then. And yeah. It makes me angry.
