Even Blogging Against Disablism Day can’t stop the Kate lyrics.

To paraphrase Stina: either words have meaning or they don’t.

Let me flesh that out for you a little bit. I believe that words are impactful, and that our word choices reflect a combination of our backgrounds, our individual lives, and our education on a given topic. Becoming aware of one’s word choices and actively changing them requires acknolwedgement of privilege and a desire to mitigate that privilege.

There has been talk on Jezebel, a website I usually enjoy, about why words matter. We talk about why it’s not okay to use sexist language every day. There have been discussions about feminism vs womanism (especially in the comments section) and tokenism. Discussions are held about racism regularly. Fat shaming is verboten, and lengthy educational discussions are held by the commentariat regularly. It’s a pretty damn nice place to be out as queer on the internet (though it’s not quite as good about trans issues). We also talk about a specific subset of ableist language, namely eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

All of these are good things. Jezebel is a mainstream, very busy website run by paid bloggers. While there are safe-space websites to discuss these issues (Racialicious and Shapely Prose are both good places to start for racism and sizism, respectively), I think having them discussed in a busy, largely privileged place is helpful and important.

In my experience, a lot of people who are otherwise liberal and well educated don’t know a thing about ableism. Words that are ableist are part of many people’s regular vocabulary, and they never give them a second thought. This BADD, I’d like to maybe put the idea into people’s heads that these words aren’t okay.

There’s a thread of ableism in many Jez posts where other language could and should be used instead. I don’t think it would be fair to call out commenters, so I’m going to limit these references to posts which use ableist language, themselves. This is not a comprehensive list in any way–there are many words I omitted because I only returned one “official” (not commenter-written) result, and I didn’t put myself out looking for these words–if they weren’t in the first couple pages of results, I didn’t bother).

Schizophrenic: 1, 2, 3, 4

Retard/ed: 1, 2, 3, 4, (interestingly, Jez commented on the usage on Vh1 before)

Wheelchair bound: 1*, 2

Lame: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Bipolar: 1, 2, 3, (again, to be fair, there’s this, too)

Spaz and derivitives: 1, 2, (this is a very common slur among the commetariat, and I got sick of wading through those results)

Jez (rightfully!) gets upset when words associated with feminism are misused. The editors and commenters won’t stand for the misuse of words like “rape,” or “lesbian,” or “bitch.” It would certainly be nice if they would make this shift as far as ableist language goes, too. Unfortunately, I don’t anticipate that happening any time soon, since responses to noting ableist language, as recently as last week, have been angry and dismissive (to the tune of “Go find someplace else that will let you whine”).

*(A direct quote: “When you think of amputees, dwarves, people with Cerebral palsy, or wheelchair-bound individuals in sexualized situations, it seems wrong, doesn’t it?”)

For further reading:
Bitch Magazine
Feminism 101
FWD/Forward