Prejudice is Cultural

I was just reflecting on my last post, about how automatically I use disability-related slurs. And an interesting thought hit me.

Prejudice and discrimination are often not personal matters. They're cultural.

If you confront your average person on the street (APOTS), they'll say, "I'm not prejudiced." (It's a well known fact, by the way, that we normies are often kings and queens of denial. We always think we're better than average, so don't believe a word we say when we assess ourselves. Make your own assessment of us.) Yet, chances are, they use words like "gay," "lame," or "retarded" as insults all the time, even if they have never actually done anything to directly harm a homosexual, mobility impaired, or intellectually disabled person.

"I have nothing against mentally retarded, gay, or handicapped people," the APOTS might protest. "I don't mean it to insult anyone or any group; I just say these words because they're what people say. They're just words."

And their protest might very well be valid: the APOTS may, in fact, harbor no personal resentment against disabled people or homosexual people. They may even treat a gay or disabled person kindly if they met one.

The problem is that the popular words reflect a cultural attitude that needs to be changed.

And since the problem is not personal, it might be harder to get people to look at it from a personal perspective and try to make changes on the personal level.

But there may be an advantage to the fact that it's not personal: rather than accuse individuals of being bigots and triggering their need to defend themselves, we might be able to present them with an opportunity to make a difference, to use their good intentions to make change on the cultural level. After all, almost everyone in this culture is raised to want to help the disabled, and to not want to be a bigot (well, at least when it comes to race and sometimes sex). Now, if more of us normies could be exposed to the ways in which traditional forms of help are NOT helpful, and how our colloquialisms and stereotypes simply reinforce an excessively pessimistic view of disability, and how it might be helpful to disabled people to see them and treat them as equals, maybe things could get somewhere.

Disablism is an ancient prejudice, though. It won't be an easy one to overturn. And as with all prejudices that have been accepted by society in the age of science, some folks claim that disablism is scientifically justified, in a way: it is an evolutionary strategy to keep the tribe strong by weeding out the members who cannot adequately contribute. Well...my answer to any scientific argument in favor of prejudice or discrimination is that human beings also have evolved to be able to find creative ways around problems - including the problem of making it so that the disabled can use the abilities they do have to contribute to the tribe. And if they cannot hold jobs or communicate much...well...we can still think of them as contributing via our relationship with them (which may not be reciprocated in the ways we want, but that doesn't make it have to be any less of a relationship), or hope to find untapped abilities they have and a way to bring them out.

More than Words

Any other normies find themselves saying, if only in their heads, "that's retarded" or "that's lame" all the time?

That goes to show just how deep - and acceptable - disablism is in our society.

I just caught myself silently saying these two phrases in response to something I didn't like, and after reading some of the posts from Blogging Against Disablism Day in May, I realized what was going on.

I think I first said to myself "that's retarded" and noticed that it was a disablist slur, so I wanted to use something milder. So I resorted to "that's lame," which I then realized is another disablist slur!

I always make a point these days not to say "that's gay," as I was taught when I was a teenager that homophobic slurs are not acceptable. I had a lesbian, now transgendered, cousin, so the issue was a bit closer to home than, say, questions of physical or cognitive disability. But I probably would have been taught that "gay" as an insult is wrong anyway, just via exposure through the college atmosphere and having gay teachers, classmates, and even a lesbian roommate.

However, nobody has ever taught me the same about "that's retarded," "that's lame," or any other disability-oriented slurs. Well, maybe I had a little bit of awareness that "retarded" was a bit controversial as a pejorative, based on a seventh-grade health class guest speaker talking about mental retardation, but people around me kept using it with less shame or self-awareness than they used "gay." And I never was taught by anyone in the least that "lame" was a prejudiced pejorative that should be avoided.

In fact, I'd practically forgotten that "lame" was a reference to physical disability at all. Its use as a generic negative term is far more common these days...and even as a term for disability it's more often applied to animals. (That's probably because newer and more politically correct words existed to refer to humans with mobility impairments.)

Apparently, prejudice against the disabled is so ancient and acceptable that the insulting meaning of "lame" is not listed in my dictionary (published in 1997) as an offensive or controversial term.

I have mixed feelings about political correctness, given that being overly strict about words has seemed to do little or nothing to change the attitudes that spawned the words in many cases. But I think really reflecting on the words we use and where they come from, if we're so interested, can be part of - but not the exclusive form of - a person's education about the prejudices of self and society. Awareness of words may not help much if you're uninterested in examining and changing attitudes, but if you are interested in examining and changing attitudes, it might be interesting to do.

If "that's lame" and "that's retarded" are ever phased out of our vocabulary, and society's attitudes don't change much, we'll know that the use of softer words was a failure in raising awareness and changing attitudes, when these forbidden insults are replaced by "that's mobility impaired" and "that's intellectually disabled." It would be nice to see a different outcome for once, but that's going to take more than words. It's going to take the total re-humanization of disability. It's going to take seeing disability as normal, as a natural and acceptable part of human diversity. So what if someone needs a wheelchair or help looking after the small things of daily life or both? They can still be people just as much as anyone. (And sometimes we normies aren't particularly good at being people.)