Who can say it?
introducing a new series on slurs
Last month, the Arc of the United States—an organization that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD)—published a blog post about the r-word. Alongside some questionable but well-intentioned editorializing, the post very briefly sketches the evolution of a 60s-era “neutral medical term” into a cruel yet ubiquitous epithet for people with IDD1. This evolution, the blog post acknowledges, encompasses the Arc itself: until 1992, the organization’s name was an acronym for “Association for Retarded Citizens.”
The timing of this blog post is not coincidental. While legally, clinically, and culturally we’ve begun to correcting for the harm caused by the pejoration of the r-word, it “stubbornly lingers in our vocabulary and even in some state laws,” as the Arc writes. With what feels like an “r-word resurgence” memeing its way across social and cultural media, “stubborn” is an understatement. (I have questions about this resurgence framing, but more on that later.) In any case, any reasonable person will agree that the r-word justifies and reinforces the dehumanization of people with IDD, which permits us as a society to physically and sexually abuse, financially exploit, deprive of resources, incarcerate, and kill them at much higher rates than people without IDD2.
Of course it does—that’s what slurs do! Scholar of dehumanization David Livingstone Smith talks about language as a precursor, if not a technology, of dehumanization that can predict more literal kinds of violence. “When you get that kind of rhetoric,” says Smith, referring to the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referring to Hamas/Palestinians3 as “human animals” and “monsters,” “you just know there will be terrible atrocities following from it.”
I won’t make the claim that the use of the r-slur by some random Twitch streamer or your asshole coworker is the same thing as official propaganda issued by the architects of genocide. I do mean to compare them, however, in order to get us thinking about the fungibility of language and physical violence. It’s for this reason, in fact, that I’ve (mostly) given up on lecturing people that I don’t have relationships with about using the r-word. They will stop using it when they see people with IDD as people, and this will not come about through lectures (which isn’t to say that social pressure—and social consequences—don’t have a role in supporting and enforcing social safety). In my experience, a non-disabled person willing to use the r-slur is already willing to do much worse to them, if they can get away with it. Something more robust is needed than a half-baked culture war.
The r-slur topic is what got me thinking about this new series4. I’m curious about the online discourse surrounding a slur that many of the people it describes can’t participate in (!), as well as the collective decision among progressives to refer to r-slur users as “childish,” “immature,” or “trapped in middle school”5. I also intend to write about other points of entry into the topic, from “who can say it?” and reclamation; to the relationship between the slurred subject and the slur respecter; to the unsaid and unsayable simultaneously conjured and repressed by the slur’s signifier, signified, and anyone else in the room. And I think I can do it all without invoking Lord Voldemort.
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As are all slurs, one supposes.
More often than not, people have more than one disability or more than one aspect of their identity serving as a pretext for this kind of dehumanization. This summer, after Mohammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down syndrome and autism, was mauled to death by an Israeli military dog, I did not want to say anything about it to anyone, on social media or real life, because I felt I could not do so without reinforcing the common perception of people with Down syndrome as sweet, childlike angels, a benevolent dehumanization has never been enough to protect them from far crueler kinds. What could I say about Mohammad that could not also be said about any other victim of Israel and its handler, the United States government—but may not be? Would those of us watching (I hesitate to say witnessing) the genocide of Palestinians from a few thousand miles away have accorded another young Muslim Palestinian man without IDD the same pity (I hesitate to say compassion)? Is receiving his horrific suffering with saccharine contempt any better than suspicion, or even apathy? In comparing Mohammad with non-disabled young Palestinian men who are branded as terrorist, we dehumanize all of them. For this I am so sorry. Fuck Israel and fuck America.
I don’t conflate these categories myself, but the IDF definitely does whenever convenient.
It’s one I’ve written about before.
That’s so interesting, isn’t it? It feels like the next closest thing to calling them stupid; that is, to calling them the slur right back, which you can’t do—or can you?