I'm guessing some readers may not be familiar with
the term. It's relatively new to me as well. That's okay, we have a definition
from copyediting.com:
"Ableist language is any word or phrase that
devalues people who have physical or mental disabilities. Its appearance often
stems not from any intentional desire to offend, but from our innate sense of
what it means to be normal."
To give it a real application, using
"lame" and "crazy" as insults is problematic, because there
are people to whom those words have been applied in earnest, and it is
dehumanizing to those people. Some readers may be frustrated with political
correctness run amok. Let me tell you about my own process.
It started through Twitter, of course. As I would
find new thinkers who were smart and knew about things that I didn't, I would
follow them, and then see people that they were tweeting and quoting. Over the
four years I have been on, as the people I follow have increased, they have
opened the world up to me in new ways.
Because there are things that can be very new, it
doesn't always register right away. I tend not to be overly reactionary now (in
my early 20s was a different story), so when I saw the first reference to
ableist language, I didn't have a negative reaction, but I remember it catching
me off guard. I'd had no idea there was such a thing.
I did have some resistance. "Crazy" is
used so flippantly and easily. Even if we only look at songs that I like that
use the word, there's a lot. Did it really matter that much? I started to feel
that it did.
One thing I thought about was how often some
celebrity gets in trouble for getting angry and using "gay" or
"fag" as an insult. It matters. It might not if we were at a point
where people were fully accepted and safe regardless of sexuality, but we're
not there.
We are certainly not at complete acceptance of
disabilities. There is still mockery, aggression, dehumanization, and there is
a very literal danger. Up to half of the people killed by US police are disabled.
This can come from not recognizing deafness, or common spectrum behaviors, or a
seizure, or simply not having a tolerance for someone who doesn't conform.
I also thought about talk of gun restrictions for
the mentally ill. There are many different types of mental illness, so what
does that even mean? (And I'm not getting into guns right now, but that will
happen.)
There is not enough understanding of disabilities,
but one in five Americans has a disability. That's a wide range. That includes
people you know. Shouldn't we care about it?
I found myself reluctant to use the words. If
something was a stupid idea, or illogical, or poorly-planned, any of those
adjectives could be better than crazy. (I never used "lame" much.)
I hope I am more sensitive now, but another result
is better communication. I am saying what I actually mean, instead of taking
the common shortcuts. We feel like we understand each other with the shortcuts,
and we do, but part of that understanding comes from ignoring a huge part of
the human experience. That matters.
I have talked with people before about how so-called
"political correctness" is really just not being a jerk, but there is
another level to it too. Compassion and empathy are important, but beyond that,
choosing how to speak is a decision to be informed. It is a decision to be
smarter and to understand more.
We could use some of that.
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