The use of the R-word to describe people, especially those with intellectual disabilities, dropped off, at least in public, a little more than a decade ago, after a coordinated campaign to get people to not use it. But over the last few years, it’s started coming back.
The New York Times reported this month that former President Trump used the word to describe Vice President Kamala Harris at a recent donor dinner, for example.
But the R-word doesn’t just seem to be coming back in certain settings, or out of the mouths of certain people. So, why is that — what led to this slur seemingly becoming acceptable to use again?
Constance Grady, Senior Correspondent at Vox.com, has written about this. Grady joined The Show to talk about what first got her thinking about the use of this word and its history of being used and then going away, and then as she reports, coming back.
Full conversation
CONSTANCE GRADY: The R-word is something that really surprised me over the past few months as I started to see it coming back in these really kind of prominent ways. Shane Gillis is a pretty big comedian, and he was using the R-word in his sets.
I was seeing a lot of people who would have identified as being left wing, who were using the word kind of in this way that seemed to be suggesting, “I’m cool, and I’m edgy, and this is the word that cool, edgy people use.” And it really startled me because it was so recent that it seemed as though so many people stopped using the R-word and kind of decided that it was no longer a word that was OK to use all the time and just throw around as an insult.
BRODIE: Well, is there anything to be gleaned from the way in which it went from being a word that could be used to one that really couldn’t and shouldn’t, to explain why it’s sort of coming back in certain situations now?
GRADY: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, the R-word really was a huge success story in a lot of ways for disability rights activists. The Special Olympics organization launched their campaign, Spread the Word to End the Word in 2007, after the film “Tropic Thunder” became a big hit. And that had a long joke about the R-word.
This sort of galvanized activists to say, “OK, let’s get out there. Let’s tell people that a lot of people in the disabled community feel really terrible when they hear this word.” They are going from school to school for about a decade. And by 2018, they’re basically like, “OK, our campaign is over. It was super effective. We are going to these schools and telling them not to say the R-word. And the kids at the schools are like, ‘Yeah, we already know that.’”
So it was a huge success story for this group. And they really switched their focus and their activism away from that message for a solid five or six years before they started to feel the need to turn back to it again over the past year or so.
And I think that really suggests that people don’t seem that interested in using the word when they’re being reminded that it hurts the feelings of actual human beings. But when they are in a space where it just seems like kind of a fun, edgy thing to say that will maybe offend prudes, it becomes much more attractive and appealing for them.
BRODIE: Why do you think it is that this particular word that relates to this particular group of people has found itself in that place, as opposed to any other word that is derogatory toward any other group of people?
GRADY: What’s really bizarre is this is something that we see happen over and over again, specifically with words that were developed for people with intellectual disabilities. There’s a known cycle in linguistics that describes this process. It’s called the euphemism cycle or sometimes the euphemism treadmill. And what it describes is over and over again, people in psychiatry or medicine will develop medical terminology for people with intellectual disabilities.
So words like idiotic, moron, feeble minded all started off as legitimate medical diagnoses. And over time, laypeople hear these words and transition them into becoming insults. And then doctors have to come up with new terms for people with intellectual disabilities because the old ones have become so hurtful.
This is something that we seem to do over and over again, specifically with people with intellectual disabilities. It’s as though we are so, as a society, bothered by the idea of someone having this intellectual disability that we go out of our way to make the words associated with this condition seem humiliating and hurtful.
BRODIE: I’m curious if in your mind, and maybe in the minds of people with whom you spoke during your research, that this says anything about, for example, ableism as related to racism or sexism or any other kind of discrimination against a particular group of people?
GRADY: Yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with Christopher Hom. He’s a philosopher of language who has done some studies on slurs. He made the really interesting point that a lot of people will think of ableism as being not that bad, definitely not as bad as racism. And it can allow us to kind of hand-wave the idea that ableism is maybe not a real prejudice and it isn’t actually affecting people’s lives.
But as Doctor Humm pointed out to me, if you look at the statistics that describe what people’s lives are like when they have disabilities — you know, describing their quality of life, how long they can expect to live, what their situations will be — the numbers are really, really terrible in a lot of ways. There are all sorts of structural reasons embedded in our society that allow this state of affairs to continue.
And what Dr. Hom said that I thought so, so interesting is that ableism is the thing that is producing these structural inequalities, and it’s also what’s fueling the euphemism treadmill that makes us keep having to replace these medical terminologies as they transition into becoming slurs.
He says, “I take that as evidence that ableism really is pretty significant in our culture.”
BRODIE: So I’m curious what the folks who initially led the campaign to stop people from using the R-word in the first place, what’s their plan now that it seems to be coming back?
GRADY: Yeah, Special Olympics has been talking about bringing the Spread the Word to End the Word campaign back into schools. They had started re-promoting it on their website. One person I spoke to said that when they re-promoted, those sections of their website, they saw a spike in traffic of about 200-300%.
But I think it’s also difficult to show very clearly that the R-word is being used more frequently than it used to be. It’s really, really hard to measure how often people are using curse words or slurs or anything like that. So we’re seeing it in a lot of different places very prominently right now. It’s hard to say for sure that more people are using it more frequently.
BRODIE: How is the increase in this word’s use impacting the people in this community?
GRADY: I think in general, I’m just hearing people say that this is a word that suggests that the person who is speaking doesn’t respect you and doesn’t treat you as a real human or someone who is smart and worth your time and your respect as a human being. And it’s definitely a word that, by and large, they would prefer not be used to describe them.
