Can we keep our insults?

Short answer: no

Content warning: today I am discussing ableism and history that includes violence against people with disabilities.

Take good care.

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I don’t like Donald Trump.

This is not new information. It can be inferred easily based on nearly everything I write.

Lately, as I’ve watched all the harm this administration has wrought, I have been bumping up against my desire to use certain words to describe him and his cronies. You’ve heard these words before.

Idiot. Stupid. Moron. Dumb. Insane. Fool. Lunatic. Crazy.

They’re common enough, with use by people from all political persuasions and by nearly everyone who has ever been in a traffic jam. But these words, all of the ones I’ve named and many more that I won’t name, are rooted in the evaluation of certain groups of people as intellectually inferior.

Let’s use “idiot” as a case study. Per the OED (I quote from the entry on “idiot” throughout the next two paragraphs), “idiot” was previously used in law and medical settings to describe “a person so profoundly disabled in mental function or intellect as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct” as early as 1325. As one example of this designation at work, in 1893, the Westminster Gazette used the term to describe people with microcephaly, a developmental disability.

In the history of the Western world at large and the United States in particular, folks with disabilities have historically been institutionalized in what an 1735 letter to author Jonathan Swift described as “An Hospital for Lunaticks and Idiots.”

In institutions, people with disabilities and neurodiversity were routinely and severely misdiagnosed, experimented upon, abused, neglected, left for dead, and murdered, especially with the rise of the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States in the mid-1900’s. No surprise, these evaluations and their associated abuses were more likely to harm women, people of color, immigrants, working class people, and people otherwise marginalized by their dominant culture.

Our world remains a less bright place because of how many human beings we lost to institutionalization. Legislation and advocacy that mandated the switch to home and community based living settings, like L’Arche, has allowed countless people to survive and thrive who may have spent their lives in institutions otherwise.

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Please take particular care with the following video, which explores some first-person accounts of the story of an institution run by the government of the District of Columbia from 1925-1991. It closed after repeated advocacy and class-action lawsuits, but HIPAA-protected medical records remain in the dilapidated and accessible buildings.

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I have just offered a very, very narrow account of a very complex history. Spend any length of time researching the treatment of people with disabilities in our culture, and you will come away profoundly changed. I have. But it’s worth noting that these histories are not at all distant from our present moment. The deinstitutionalization movement, led by disabled people, began in the very late 20th century and continues to this day. (Many mental institutions still exist.)

One of my best friends at L’Arche was institutionalized as a young person. She is not alone; I would be willing to bet that she is, in fact, in the majority among folks with disabilities her age.

No matter how you slice it, every way to insult someone’s intelligence assumes a hierarchical differentiation between humans, where some people are smart and some people are not. Where some people have good brains and some people have bad brains. This is an inherently ableist stance, and one that I don’t think those of us who use the words would intend. More to the point: this hierarchy simply doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a good brain or a bad brain, there are only brains that function differently person-to-person. But the stance that devalues disabled people’s bodies is what put people in institutions in the first place. It perpetuates harm today, all the same.

Merriam-Webster says “the clinical application of these words [(idiot, moron, imbecile)] is now a thing of the past” and while I hope they’re right, I also have sat in enough doctor’s offices with my friends with disabilities, and as a disabled person myself, to know how often a provider looks to the accompanier, not to the patient, when asking questions. When evaluating symptoms. When giving medical advice.

This is not news to disabled people. This is ableism at work: not just in one doctor’s office, but also in our schools, in the broader medical field, in research, in employment, in the fabric of our language.

It is helpful, when breaking a habit, to form a new one to replace the old. So, what can we say instead to express our displeasure with the people we don’t like? Well, I’d instead say we have plenty of fodder for calling the humans who actively perpetuate harm against other humans cruel, instead of stupid. We can call out racism, and sexism, and transphobia, and xenophobia, and ableism, and more, when we see it.

I think it’s also worth noting, here, that the current administration holds a specifically incurious, anti-intellectualism ideology that engenders a growing suspicion of the act of learning itself. Then come book bans, cuts to higher ed, vouchers and private school choice programs, and more. There is a clear distinction to be made, here, between rising suspicions about learning and using language that assumes that the way somebody else learns is defective in some way. (There is not a way to learn defectively.)

There’s even an argument to be made that the current white nationalist regime is employing very clever tactics. They appear chaotic, even foolish (to use one of the ableist words), but they are, in fact, working just how a rising fascist movement has planned. Defund Medicaid and there won’t be disabled people to fight for their rights. Take away abortion access and there won’t be people able to defend their bodies from attacks. Run working-class and people of color into the ground with constant labor and you’ll kill them faster, which is what they want, after all. There won’t be people to fight them if we’re not here. All the while, make our schools ineffective at teaching complexity, empathy, and compassion, and then, you find your country with a populace more willing to support intentional harms done to bodies they are taught are “others.”

So call the people who represent you out on their actions, on their harms, not on their brains.

Their actions have much more to say about them than any insult ever could.

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Thanks for reading.

With love,

Liddy