We already do this with some slurs, right? We can start enforcing these words, too.
Not calling anyone out, I’ve been guilty of it too. And we don’t have to do it all at once. Like, we can start with these:
Ableist words and alternatives.
Stupid, R€tarded, Idiot(ic), Cretin, or Moron(ic): People say this to imply something, or someone isn’t intelligent or worth their time, but the words refer to people with intellectual disabilities. Instead, say that a situation or person is frustrating, ignorant, dense, unpleasant, cheesy, or awful.
Dumb: This word refers to a person who doesn’t speak verbally, but people often use it to mean that something or someone isn’t intelligent or wise. It’s listed separately from stupid and its synonyms because it references a physical disability instead of an intellectual one. Try using any of the non-ableist synonyms like irritating or uncool.
Crazy, Nuts, Mad, Psycho, or Insane: “Wow, that’s crazy!” may not seem like a harmful statement, but if you think about someone with a mental health condition hearing that statement, it’s easy to realize that it is. So instead of using one of those words, try outrageous, bananas, bizarre, amazing, intense, extreme, overwhelming, or wild.
I think there are good alternatives depending on the situations like frustrating, unwise, thoughtless, even evil when it’s capitalism doing something very egregious.
There are alternatives out there. We don’t use them because these ableist words act as a convenient filler, but if there common usage causes some people to feel discomfort, then imo we should look into removing these from our vocabulary.
Convenient filler how though? Because they are short and convey the intent of the user in the shortest way possible.
This is the problem. When I make a mistake and say “I’m dumb” like leaving my phone in the fridge because I was half asleep this morning, I’m not being ableist to myself am I? “I’m half asleep and have sleep walked into a silly action” is the intent. The problem is that the words are ALSO used by ableists in an ableist way, to actually harm the recipients.
We clearly need very short words to communicate these hiccups and mistakes we do. What we need if we’re going to make ground on this front (outside of niche hyper-aware communities) is short words that aren’t also capable of being used by reactionaries to harm people of varying ability, thus tainting them.
I’ve seen someone say that my above example could just be “Doh” and I’ve seen others turn around and ask the question of whether Homer Simpson is an ableist caricature that makes that word ableist. The topic is… Very difficult.
I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t approach this with the aim of fixing it in society. What I’m saying is that we should approach it with tactics that will actually work, and right now I don’t think we’ve figured out how to replace this little communication niche properly. I think we can, and that we should approach doing this when we’ve actually worked out how to replace it linguistically. Without proper replacements people engage in a lot of pushback and even in leftist groups I’ve seen it cause pretty bad splits. I think especially in a dirtbag left setting there’s going to be splitting over it.
Great post comrade.
To give some theoretical oomph, the chain of metonymy is the problem here -any replacement for your example will also be inextricably related to the term it’s replacing. So “doh” is a great example since it’s in theory harmless, but its associations (with both the word replaced and the caricature) mean that we can’t ever imagine a “pure” word completely divorced from its problematic versions.
However, I think that there’s a degree between calling something “dumb” (perhaps the least offensive of all of these? It hasn’t been in the ableist usage for a long time…) and then more problematic ones like specific conditions (for conditions in the DSM now) or other more “charged” terms.
Should we still recognize the history? Yes. But as Fred Jameson says, history is what hurts, and we can never get out of it. I don’t think it’s worth fighting over some of these more benign ones that history has sanded down, at least not when there’s more appealing targets.
Yeah like, don’t get me wrong, I do recognise the problem here that some people are trying to solve…
The issue I see however is that there’s a tactical issue with this specific part of the ableist lexicon that they want to remove. It’s filling a language niche that is genuinely harmless and only ends up ableist by association and misuse. The pushback that occurs, the splitting that occurs over this topic, seems to come from the fact people know they’re intuitively not using these words to be ableist and understand the function that they’re serving in the context so they end up feeling insulted and confused about how to continue filling this niche without a suitable alternative presented.
As communists I feel like we need to be as close to “normal” as possible, especially in the language that we choose to use. My current feeling here is that if we want to solve this problem then we need to find a way around this. The intent people have with this anti-ableist language stuff is good but I think the right tactic isn’t being deployed yet. Far more penetration into the mainstream would occur if we could solve this.
