Dis/Ability: The truth behind "the 'r' word

This was not the column I planned to write. This was not a column I particularly wanted to write. This was a column I struggled to write, and turned in way past the deadline because it's an awfully hard thing to write about. But here's the thing:Words mean things.

And we seem to have forgotten this. Smith is usually great about remembering it; unlike my high school, Smith has expunged most racial and homophobic epithets from our discourse. But one remains:

Retard.

I hear it every day. People toss it off, as if unaware that it will inevitably find someone to hit. Because "retarded" isn't used to mean slow. It isn't used to mean low IQ. It is used to mean inferior. It is used to say that all of us who don't measure up should be written off.

Hey, interesting fact: depending on what IQ test you give me, I score retarded. On others I score genius, which is the way Autistic intelligence tends to work. I don't say "retarded" even though, as someone with a cognitive disability, I "own" it, because it originated as a label for "defectives" and has been used that way ever since. It's exactly like the "n word" -- I can't even use that word in this column, but I've said "retard[ed]" four times so far. It's an incredible double standard. The two words share the same history: a label originates to mark the "defectives" as separate from us, and over time it becomes an easy label, a synonym for stupid and undesirable and laughable. It's a slur.

A slur is a word hurled at you with great force. Sometimes it isn't even thrown at you, but invariably it hits you anyway. "Retarded" is thrown around among all sorts of people, and it inevitably winds up hitting someone like me. I started counting how many times I heard it in a day, and had to give up and go throw up.

Why does it bother me? Why can't I just buck up and not care, treat it like every other vaguely ableist word I hear? Why do I care if I'm not intellectually disabled myself? Isn't the whole point of insults to be, well, insulting?

I can't not care because "retard" isn't just another insult. It's a word that has been used to justify forced sterilizations, forced and abusive institutionalizations and genocide. It's a word that originated to describe people who the doctors decided were inherently defective. I can't not care because when you insult someone for being disabled, you aren't just insulting her - you are insulting disability itself, and that affects every person with a disability. When you use disability as an insult, you are effectively saying that we deserve to be mistreated, because, after all, we're just retards.

"No, I'm not!" you exclaim. "When I call my friend 'retard' I'm just saying that my friend is being stupid! When I say 'Oh, that's just my retardation showing,' I'm just making fun of myself."

Making fun of yourself for what, exactly? Oh, that's right - for being stupid, for being defective, for being like them. Would the insult carry any weight if it didn't bring to mind some laughable, intellectually disabled person in need of an extra dose of mockery? There would be no point in calling someone "retarded" if the word didn't actually mean something.

If we lived in some magical, equitable world where I didn't have to actually argue that people with any and all disabilities, even intellectual disabilities, are people and deserve a measure of respect and dignity and human rights, if we lived in some magical world where ableism didn't run rampant over so many lives and where people didn't think it was funny to laugh at someone with Down Syndrome when they saw them in the street, then yeah, maybe I wouldn't care about the word. Maybe I would be willing to concede that it has just become the new and modern way to say "stupid" or "thoughtless." But you know what? We don't live in that world, not even close.

This column could be construed as a call to "end the 'r' word." It's not. It's a call to end the r-treatment, the way our society treats "defectives," the attitudes and malpractices surrounding the lives of the disabled. I wouldn't care about the word if it weren't a slur, and it wouldn't be a slur if it weren't used to reflect and magnify our prejudices.

Few of us are able or willing to spend our lives fighting prejudices like this. That's fine. But there are a few simple things we all can do. Yesterday, March 3, was Spread The Word To End The Word Day. Hopefully, many signed the pledge at r-word.org and joined thousands of people in simply removing the word from their vocabulary.

You can remember that words mean things, and you can ask yourself what, exactly, you mean when you say "retard." And then you can just say that, instead of insulting an entire population.

Please.