R-word.org - Change the conversation...
Thursday, February 04, 2010
R-word.org - Change the conversation...
First of all, you're going to elicit comparisons of 'retarded' to 'nigger' by using 'r-word', and that's fucking stupid. Let's get that out of the way right up front. People are sort of mean to people with mental disabilities. They enslaved 40 million africans and lynched them up through the 1960s.
Anyway, I read a pretty good discussion of why it's not OK to call things that are lame 'gay'. The idea is, there's not enough separation between the new and old meanings of the word yet. Like, 'gay' still means homosexual, so when I use it to mean 'lame', there's this implication happening because it's totally reasonable to think I might mean 'homosexual'. OK.
Then the author goes on to say that this is also why it's not OK to use 'retarded' to mean 'dumb'. Here, unfortunately, I can't get on board.
For one thing -- and again, I don't want to be mean here, but it is what it is -- mental retardation (as it is referred to less and less frequently) actually does refer to a condition in which IQ is less than 70. So there's no double meaning here -- if I call someone retarded, I mean they're acting like they have an IQ below 70, more or less.
The second problem is that 'less and less frequently' -- neither doctors nor intellectually developmentally disabled individuals are going to refer to an actual ID individual (or themselves) as 'retarded'. The only people calling anyone 'retarded' are people making fun of someone for being dumb -- so again, there's none of the confusion around this word that there is around 'gay'.
So the word isn't a confusing word -- if you hear it in the context of 'fucking retarded', what you're really hearing is 'fucking dumb', and not ' fucking having an intellectual developmental disability'. Not every time, but 99 times out of 100, and as words go, that's pretty good. The word's not the problem.
As to whether we should be making fun of people for saying stupid things, yes. Yes we should. I don't know how much more simply we can put that one. If people say dumb things, you should tell them they're saying dumb things. If you don't have anything true to say, don't say anything at all.
posted by henry |
2/04/2010 02:49:00 PM|
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