Tomorrow I meet for the second time with the undergraduate class I\u2019m teaching this semester.\u00a0 The class is called Disability, Power, and Privilege, and it\u2019s about feminist disability studies.<\/p>\n
During our first meeting we talked a bit about the rhetoric we use where disability is concerned.\u00a0 I expect\u2014and I\u2019ve told them so\u2014that we\u2019ll all say things over the course of the semester that others in the class may find troubling or offensive, so it\u2019s everybody\u2019s job to assume that we\u2019re all doing our best, and to call us out when we do wrong.<\/p>\n
While this attention to rhetoric\u2014people first language, for instance\u2014is old news in disability studies and disability activism\u2014indeed, in any of the civil rights movements of the 20th<\/sup> century\u2014it\u2019s important for my students.\u00a0 And not just my students:\u00a0 over the last several months I\u2019ve been reading memoirs written by parents of children with disabilities, and one of the things that\u2019s surprised me has been the frequency with which the term \u201cretarded\u201d appears in these memoirs, even in memoirs as recently published as 2009.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a term that a number<\/a> of disability rights organizations<\/a> have targeted.\u00a0 The Associated Press stopped using the term in 2008, and in 2010 legislation was approved that removed the term from all federal documents, replacing it with \u201cintellectual disability.\u201d\u00a0 And yet it keeps being used, not only in memoirs written by authors who ought to know better, but by professionals I interact with on a daily basis.\u00a0 The most recent occurrence was last week, and the person who referred to a question as \u201cretarded\u201d was someone who deals with diversity on a regular basis.<\/p>\n In his book Life As We Know It<\/em> (1996), Michael B\u00e9rub\u00e9 offers a clear and compelling refutation of this word and its cultural meaning.\u00a0 Because of the word\u2019s familiarity, and the ease with which it continues to permeate conversations in 2011, I\u2019ll offer you\u2014as I\u2019m offering my class tomorrow\u2014an excerpt from B\u00e9rub\u00e9:<\/p>\n But you know, there really is a difference between calling someone a \u201cmongoloid idiot\u201d and calling him or her \u201ca person with Down syndrome.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s even a difference between calling people \u201cretarded\u201d and calling them \u201cdelayed.\u201d\u00a0 These words may appear to mean the same damn thing when you look them up in Webster\u2019s, but I remember full well from my days as an American male adolescent that I never taunted my peers by calling them \u201cdelayed.\u201d\u00a0 Even for those of us who were shocked at the frequency with which \u201chomo\u201d and \u201cnigger\u201d were thrown around at our fancy Catholic high school, \u201cretard\u201d aroused no comment, no protest.\u00a0 In other words, a retarded person is just a retard.\u00a0 But delayed <\/em>persons will get where they\u2019re going eventually, if you\u2019ll only have some patience with them. (26)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tomorrow I meet for the second time with the undergraduate class I\u2019m teaching this semester.\u00a0 The class is called Disability, Power, and Privilege, and it\u2019s about feminist disability studies. During our first meeting we talked a bit about the rhetoric we use where disability is concerned.\u00a0 I expect\u2014and I\u2019ve told them so\u2014that we\u2019ll all say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1919,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21097],"tags":[345,339],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-language","tag-disability","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1919"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}