Who can say it? (Part 2)

on the r-slur

Read Part 1.

My mom tells a story about the afternoon my older sister, then in kindergarten, got off the school bus with a piece of paper taped to her back. On the paper was written a single word in a child’s looping scrawl. The paper came right off, but my mom had to put my sister in the shower to wash her long, red hair—the other kids had spat in it all the way home. While my sister could scream for hours at a stretch or go days without sleep while repeating the same meaningless phrase over and over¹, my mom says she seemed untroubled by what had happened. I wasn’t yet old enough to ride the bus, but there would be plenty of future opportunities for me to witness schoolyard humiliations that she didn’t understand, or even appear to notice.

Kids can be so cruel, people say, and it’s true that other children were the primary reason why the r-slur was never neutral for my family. But as my sisters and I learned early on, what children say and do can only be said and done with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of adults. (Why hadn’t the bus driver intervened? Perhaps they hadn’t known what was going on, although experience has taught me to never give the benefit of the doubt in situations like these.) Everyone who’s been bullied knows that while the discovery and exploitation of relative power is a normal part of every child’s development, that power is always on loan from higher up.

I’ve been treating the so-called r-slur resurgence like Whac-A-Mole. Every time someone in my feed uses, shares, or engages with it, I unfollow, mute, or block. Brick by brick, as they say on TikTok: you build the algo you live in and I don’t want that shit in mine. At this point in my life, I can no longer regard its use as a teachable moment, even with acquaintances. Afraid I won’t be able to control my emotions, I do my best to avoid it.

Unfortunately, the desire to avoid hate speech (even the kind not directed at oneself) is an unrealistic one. “They’re saying the r-word again,” says a high school teacher in an episode of FX’s English Teacher², perplexed by the re-normalization of one of the 90s’ favorite epithets. This joke relies on the idea that the resurgence is generational, but it isn’t merely regaining popularity among Gens Z and Alpha. From Millennials like Azealia Banks to Baby Boomers like Donald Trump, the use of the r-slur is all-ages fun, and the general sense is that it appears to be escalating.

In 2024, there was a lot of speculating about the origins of this resurgence. Some of it is pure narrative, in my opinion: a Special Olympics campaign with an online pledge does not an r-slur recession make. But with the rise in anti-woke (that is, reactionary) aesthetics, it does seem that the r-slur is returning from cultural hibernation. Why?

• Social media rewards rage-bait: Writing for Mashable, Christianna Silva makes the dubious claim that the r-slur—which became a pejorative between the 1960s and the 1980s—“all but disappeared from common use by the early 2010s.” They do go on, however, to make the insightful observation that the resurgence reflects “how digital platforms are reshaping cultural norms in a way that seems to prioritize engagement over all else.” And what’s more engaging than outrage? Ann Coulter knew this in 2012, when she called Barack Obama an r-slur on Twitter (now X)³, one year after the White House hosted Lois Curtis, the lead plaintiff in the SCOTUS case that ruled that the unjustified segregation of people with disabilities is discriminatory, and two after the president signed Rosa’s law, legislation replacing federal use of “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability.” The rise of social media was concurrent with the entry of the r-slur into America’s culture wars, a context in which the liberal Obama could pay lip service (and, sure, even make some material concessions) to disabled peoples’ humanity while denying the same to teenagers in Yemen and prisoners in Guantanamo⁴. While Trump, a Twitter genius on par with the likes of Dril, was banned from the platform in 2021, he was reinstated the following year when it was acquired by Elon Musk, who went on to help bankroll his second presidential win and lead a new advisory commission to “increase governmental efficiency” (i.e., strip the fed for parts). The “reshaping,” as Silva puts it, between social media and culture isn’t unidirectional: with the victory of Trump and Musk, in fact, they finally converge. “As social media platforms like X allow offensive language to spread under the guise of free speech,” Silva writes, “the lines between humor and harm blur, revealing how digital spaces have become battlegrounds for societal norms.” The r-slur is much more heavily censored on sites like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Contrast this failure to create and/or enforce TOS that purport to protect users from hate speech with the creation of slurs where there are none, as Musk has done on X with the word “cis.” (Congresswoman Nancy Mace, however, is welcome to use the t-slur about trans activists, some of whom may even be her own constituents.)

• People gotta make a living: This Vox explainer points out that while traditional public figures have reputations to maintain, and thus an incentive to avoid using hate speech unless that’s their niche, influencers do not. When your income relies on engagement farming, “being outrageous,” isn’t a liability, but may in fact be “the whole point.” Unlike the eugenicist millionaires and billionaires they parrot, most people who make an income off their social media followers are doing so without the protections that salaried employees enjoy. As a supplement, if not a replacement for, the formal economy, the attention and gig economies run on rage-bait, generating clicks from moral/sex panics (particularly transphobia), conspiracy theorizing, Zionism, and pretty much any other kind of dehumanization you can think of.

• The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: The disposability of disabled people has only intensified since 2020. It’s not just the capitalists’ “let it rip” and “back to work” approach to what was once called public health. It’s not just the escalation of organized abandonment. It’s not just misinformation about transmission, herd immunity, and vaccines; the devaluing of “vulnerable” populations; the myth of personal responsibility; the lie that the pandemic is “over”; or the abandonment of disabled comrades by progressive and left movements that won’t even prioritize masking. It’s not even just healthcare inequality so severe that the murder of a insurance executive could be received with not just approval, but almost hysterical celebration. It is, in fact, a cultural and political eugenicism so entrenched that even “COVID-conscious” communities reproduce the mainstream’s dehumanization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in their fight for survival.

Since 2020 I, too, have noticed what seems like an increased comfort with the r-slur, especially among people that I assumed would have a stronger sense of solidarity with some of our most marginalized comrades⁵. But I think that the word “resurgence” is a little too simple for the phenomenon we’re trying to describe. Was there indeed a window of time in which was the world was less ableist—or was it just that a certain kind of liberalism found it could get traction co-opting disability rights movements, at least for a while?

There’s no debating that language plays a role in the incitement, normalization, and erasure of violence, to such an extent that I refuse to draw a line between “linguistic” (that is, abstracted or metaphorical) and “literal” violence. But as Obama’s signature of Rosa’s law demonstrates, liberals are satisfied with isolating language as both the source and expression of the oppression of disabled people: eliminate the word, eliminate the problem.

To be sure, removing a slur from legal and clinical documents is not meaningless⁶. But until the oppressive systems underlying hate speech is addressed, reforms like these are little more than bandaids on the the cancer of institutionalized ableism that characterizes racial capitalism as we experience it in this country.

Hypocrisy is permission. When my family was out in public, adults often prevented their children from approaching my sister with honest curiosity. They weren’t being polite—they just didn’t want to be forced to think about her at all. They could chastise their child for staring in the same breath that they would inform my mom that her daughter wasn’t welcome in their school, place of business, or church. Scolding non-disabled children for saying the r-slur is meaningless if you don’t also provide disabled children with unfettered access to the same education and community that other children receive⁷. In the same way, not being called a slur at the doctor is meaningless if you can’t go to the doctor (or can’t control what happens at the doctor, as is the case of the many disabled people who don’t have the final say in their own healthcare).

At almost 40, my sister still regards young children as her peers. For my whole life, I’ve watched six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds suddenly recognize—often with frustration, occasionally with fascinated scorn—that the person they were until very recently content to watch cartoons with is neither a child like they are nor a grown-up that they must obey. Upon realizing this, some of them respond with cruelty. Not because they’ve outgrown her, but because they want to find out if anyone will stop them.

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1. Meaningless to my parents. It clearly meant something to her.

2. Yes, I read the Vulture article about the allegations against Brian Jordan Alvarez. All I can say is that I hope all sexual predators get what they deserve.

3. I think Obama is literally evil, but there’s not enough time in the day to list the disgusting slurs the contemptible Coulter used for him during his presidency.

4. I voted for him in 2008 in large part because he promised to close Guantanamo, which of course he didn’t end up doing. Big lesson for me!

5. For our purposes I mean people with IDD, although they’re certainly not the only ones targeted by the r-slur.

6. Nor, by the way, was the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

7. And in this country, not all of them receive it, anyway.