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Once upon a time, babies, children and adults were diagnosed as mentally retarded. They were thrown into mental institutions. Parents, siblings and spouses were told there was no hope for those they loved who were retarded.
That time really wasn’t all that long ago.
The words “mentally retarded” have been replaced more recently with words like “intellectual disability” and “developmentally delayed”. Those new words are a much more accurate description of what life is like for people who have those diagnoses.
Unfortunately the word “retard” was adopted as a slur, essentially used to insult someone or something by comparing them to someone who is “mentally retarded”.
Confession – I used to say things like “that’s retarded” a lot. In fact one of my earliest roommates used to charge me 25¢ every time I used the word. I’m pretty sure she would have collected $5/week from me if I had ever actually paid her.
At the time, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I didn’t mean it as an insult to people with disabilities, it was simply a word that I grew up associating as a synonym to dumb, or stupid.
But newsflash? It doesn’t matter if I meant it that way or not. That is the origin of that usage of the word.
We wouldn’t accept an argument like that to normalize other slurs. Racial slurs, ethnic slurs, slurs about someone’s sexual orientation or their religion… it doesn’t matter where or how you learned it, but it does matter that it’s insulting to the people that it impacts.
What matters is that it’s hurtful to an entire population of people. People like AJ.
We may have learned some bad behaviors in the past, myself included. Sometimes those things are even so engrained that we don’t always catch them before they’re out of our mouths.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t actively work to stop using it and to educate yourself and others about the why behind the movement to end the usage of the “r word”.
*side note for those who want to argue for using the word to mean slow down – as in a musical sense or a speed sense – technically, that’s still an appropriate use of the word, though it’s a bit of a stretch since most people don’t use those words commonly anymore.*
This post was featured on The Mighty!
