Category Archives: language

Guest Post from RMJ: Ableist Word Profile: Crazy

RMJ is a twentysomething with OCD who grew up in Kansas and currently lives in Virginia. She works in education and loves cooking, cats, and television. She blogs about feminism and stuff at Deeply Problematic. RMJ’s previous guest post: Athletes with Disabilities: Arm-Wrestlers as Exceptions and Inspirations.

  • Ableist Word Profile is an ongoing FWD/Forward series in which we explore ableism and the way it manifests in language usage.
  • Here’s what this series is about: Examining word origins, the way in which ableism is unconsciously reinforced, the power that language has.
  • Here’s what this series is not about: Telling people which words they can use to define their own experiences, rejecting reclamatory word usage, telling people which words they can and cannot use.
  • You don’t necessarily have to agree that a particular profiled word or phrase is ableist; we ask you to think about the way in which the language that we use is influenced, both historically and currently, by ableist thought.
  • Please note that this post contains ableist language used for the purpose of discussion and criticism; you can get an idea from the title of the kind of ableist language which is going to be included in the discussion, and if that type of language is upsetting or triggering for you, you may want to skip this post

Like every ism, ableism is absorbed through the culture on a more subconscious level, embedding itself in our language like a guerrilla force. Crazy is one of the most versatile and frequently used slurs, a word used sometimes directly against persons with mental disabilities (PWMD), sometimes indirectly against persons with able privilege, sometimes descriptive and value-neutral, and sometimes in a superficially positive light.

As a direct slur against PWMD:

Crazy as a word is directly and strongly tied to mental disability. It’s used as a slur directly against PWMD both to discredit and to marginalize. If a person with a history of mental illness wants to do something, for good or bad, that challenges something, that person’s thoughts, arguments, and rhetoric are dismissed because that person is “crazy”. If a PWMD is going through pain because of something unrelated to their mental state, culpability for the pain is placed solely on their being crazy. Even if their suffering is related to their disability, it is, in a catch-22, dismissed due to their “craziness”; the PWMD is expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be viewed as a valid human being.

Examples:
“I can’t believe Britney shaved her head. Crazy bitch.”
“Not only is Dworkin cissexist, she’s fucking crazy!”

As a way to discredit neurotypical people:

Crazy is also often used to describe a neurotypical person that the speaker disagrees with. It’s used to discredit able-privileged persons by saying that they are actually mentally disabled – and what could be worse than that?

Examples:
“Tom Cruise is fucking crazy. Seriously, he’s batshit insane about Prozac, yelling at Matt Lauer and shit.”
“Did you hear that Shirley broke up with Jim? She thought he was cheating on her.” “Yeah, she’s crazy, Jim’s a great guy.”

As an all-purpose negative adjective:

Crazy is often used – even, still, by me and other feminists – to negatively describe ideas, writing, or other nouns that the speaker finds disagreeable. Conservatives are “crazy”, acts of oppression are “crazy making” , this winter’s snow is “craziness”. This usage makes a direct connection between mental disability and bad qualities of all stripes, turning disability itself into a negative descriptor. Whether it means “bad” or “evil” or “outlandish” or “illogical” or “unthinkable”, it’s turning the condition of having a disability into an all-purpose negative descriptor. When using crazy as a synonym for violent, disturbing, or wrong, it’s saying that PWMD are violent, disturbing, wrong. It’s using disability as a rhetorical weapon.

Examples:

“They took the public option out of the health care plan? That’s fucking crazy!”
“Yeah, Loretta went crazy on Jeanie last night. Gave her a black eye and everything.”

Crazy as a positive amplifier:

On the flip side, crazy is often used as a positive amplifier. Folks say that they are “crazy” about something or someone they love or like. But just because it’s positive doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Crazy as a positive adjective still mean “overly” or “too much”. It’s meant to admit a slight lack of foresight or sense on the part of the speaker. Furthermore, a slur is a slur is a slur, no matter the context. Crazy is mostly, and overtly, used to mean “bad”, “silly”, “not worth paying attention to”, “too much”. Persons with mental illnesses are none of these things as a group. The positive use is not that positive, and it doesn’t absolve the mountains of bad usage.

Examples:
“I’ve been crazy busy lately, sorry I haven’t been around much.”
“I’m just crazy about ice cream!”

Crazy a destructive word, used to hurt people with mental disabilities. It’s used to discredit, to marginalize, to make sure that we feel shame for our disability and discourage self-care, to make sure that those of us brave enough to publicly identify as having mental disabilities are continually discredited.

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BADD: How can I support Blogging Against Disablism Day?

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2010Today is the “beginning” of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2010. I put beginning in quotes there not just because the day is done in Australia and the West Coast of Canada is still waking up, but because Diary of a Goldfish, who hosts BADD every year, acknowledges that people with disabilities are not necessarily able to post precisely on the date of a blog swarm – that there is inherent disablism in demanding that disabled people write a post on a specific time table.

Every year since I started participating in BADD, I’ve had many people ask me how they – both as currently non-disabled people, and as people with disabilities – can best participate in BADD if they don’t want to, or can’t, write a post, put up a photo, or create a video or podcast. Here is just a short list of suggestions:

Check out the ever-growing list of BADD posts over at Diary of a Goldfish. Even “just” (there’s no just about your time/energy investment!) reading people’s posts and learning about their experiences contributes a lot to BADD. Blogswarms like this are all about raising awareness, and raising your own awareness is just as important. As well, you may find a whole new set of blogs to add to your blog-reading lists. There are so many bloggers with disabilities out there, fighting the good fight against ableism every day.

Comment on some BADD posts. I know that every time I write something and it gets no comments, I feel like I’ve put effort out for nothing. [This is not a demand for more comments for me! I’m just sayin’.] If you have the time/energy to do so, I would really encourage you to leave comments in support of BADD posts. They don’t have to be lengthy: even just “This post was great, thank you for writing it” can make a difference. If you’re up to writing more, go for it! But just leaving words of support can be a big deal.

Tell people about the awesome posts you’ve read. If you have a blog, link your favourite BADD posts so others can check them out – if not today, then over the next few days, or even weeks. Months. They’re not going anywhere, and although we all hope the prejudices against people with disabilities are going to disappear, that’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon, either. There’s nothing saying you have to only link to BADD posts this week. If you’ve got a twitter account, tweet some links to your followers! The hash-tag for BADD seems to be #badd, but I like to also tag my tweets #disability as well. (This is selfish on my part – I follow the #disability tags on twitter.)

Think about dis/ableism in your every-day life. This one is mostly for the non-disabled people, or for people like me – I always need to remind myself to think outside my box of “what disability looks like”. There are huge swaths of my workplace that someone in a wheelchair can’t get in, and I went to a university last week that claimed it was impossible to put floor announcements in their elevators. Many [not all – I’ve heard very good things about some places, like L’Arche] of the group homes in Canada for people with cognitive impairments are more like prisons than the “home-like” environment they claim to be. The websites for each of the major political parties in Canada are inaccessible to many people with disabilities, and events that are held for “all Canadians” have no captioning, no visual description, and no way for Sign users to participate.

I think BADD is a great opportunity to see just how much is out there about disability on the internet. For disabled people who may be feeling isolated, it’s a great time to see just how many people are out there that struggle with similar issues. For the non-disabled, it’s a great way to start educating yourself about disability issues.

The Blogging Against Disablism 2010 Page will update throughout the day. Here’s just a tiny selection of posts that I’ve had the chance to read, and highly recommend.

De’VIA

As I repeatedly told anyone who would listen to me, last weekend I went to a conference in Toronto. While there, I visited Toronto’s Deaf Culture Centre. [1. Little-d deafness is the “medical” condition of not being able to hear, or hearing very little. Big-d Deafness is being a member of a cultural & linguistic minority that uses Sign Language. In English Canada, this is typically American Sign Language, although there are other Sign Languages used here.]

One of the exhibits at the Deaf Culture Centre was about De’VIA – Deaf View Image Art – which “specifically reflects Deaf experience and Deaf Culture.”

I’m still learning about De’VIA, as my particular studies are in nineteenth century d/Deafness. What I like about what I’ve seen is looking at art that is not only explicitly political, but is explicitly about being Deaf. In Toronto, the current exhibit is paintings of Sign Language.

As a Hearing person, I don’t want to talk too much about Deaf artists and De’VIA. Instead, for people not familiar with it, I’d like to show you some very iconic De’VIA images, and then direct you to some websites where Deaf Artists are writing about their work.

This first piece is by Ann Silver, called Deaf Identity Crayons: Then and Now.

A description follows this image
The image is of two crayon boxes. One is done in sepia tones, with “Deaf Identity Crayons” written across in an ‘old-time’ script. The crayons each have a label: Dummy; Lip Reader; Deaf & Dumb; Handicapped; Oralist; Deaf-Mute; Freak. The second box looks like the iconic Crayola-crayon box, with “Deaf Identity Crayons” written across the front. The crayons are CODA; Seeing; Deaf-Blind; Late-Deafened; Deaf American; Hard of Hearing; Signer; Deaf.

(Oralism is the techniques used to teach Deaf people to talk. CODA is Children of Deaf Adults.)

Silver’s biography is available on the Deaf Art website, but I especially love her description of her art:

My language of art has, over the years, metamorphosed from pictorial grammar to creativity and critical thinking. I turn to art (1) as an artistic expression of the Deaf Experience—i.e., culture, language, identity and heritage; (2) as a Zen meditation and an aesthetic recreation of the contemplative state in which it allows my thoughts to drift by without grasping at them; (3) as an emergency back-up whenever the English language gives me semantic anxiety; 94) as an academic study vis-à-vis Deaf Studies; and (5) as a visual weapon to deal with polemical issues and concerns such as stereotyping, inaccessibility, paternalism, inequality and discrimination on the basis of hearing status (a.k.a. audism)

Another very popular piece is this one, by Betty G. Miller, called The ASL Flag:

Description follows
Description: This is a diptych, and the two canvasses come together to show a waving flag much like the United States flag. Instead of stars again the blue square, it shows 28 white hands Signing. Between the red and white stripes of the flat, it has the following:
Oh can’t you seeee…. by dawn’s early light
what proudly…. we Deaf wave at visual beauty
we see in sign language burst in air…
no matter people hearing stare…
show proof that… Deaf and ASL still here…
oh why Deaf people opressed?
over the land of the free…. and the home of the brave…??

Again, I like Betty’s bio, but I will highlight this portion:

When asked to explain the values behind her work, Dr. Miller replied:

“Much of my work depicts the Deaf experience expressed in the most appropriate form of communication: visual art. I present the suppression, and the beauty, of Deaf Culture and American Sign Language as I see it, both in the past, and in the present. Oppression of Deaf people by hearing is actually cultural, educational, and political. Another aspect of my work shows the beauty of Deaf culture. I hope this work, and the understanding that may arise from this visual expression, will help bridge the gap between the Deaf world, and the hearing world.”

You can see images of Betty’s work, and perhaps buy a t-shirt or similar article with images on it, at Betty Gee’s cafe-press store.

I won’t say too much else here, except to link to discussions about De’VIA elsewhere.

Betty Gee’s website
Deaf Art, Deaf Artists
Deaf Culture – Deaf Art on About.Com
Deaf History Through Art – De’VIA revisited after 15 years!
Deaf Art.org

Recommended Reading for April 15, 2010

Hi! As you may have noticed, we’re rotating Recommended Reading between a few contributors now. This is my first one, and it may have a little bit of a different style? I don’t know. Anyway, here it is!

A woman faces the ocean, her back to the camera. An aqua bikini top is tied across her bare back and her arm holds her hair at her neck. A prominent scar runs down her spine.
A woman faces the ocean, her back to the camera. An aqua bikini top is tied across her bare back and her arm holds her hair at her neck. A prominent scar runs down her spine.

History Lessons – Scar

My daughter will inherit my scar.  Obviously I know that you can’t inherit a scar, but she’ll likely end up having the same spinal surgery as me in the future. We both have scoliosis. Pretty bad scoliosis. I was diagnosed at eight; she was diagnosed at five. I wore a back brace and she wore one too. … There is no reason to cover it up.

BBC News – Making Light of Disability

Disability is one of those things that makes people feel awkward – there is perhaps a deep-rooted, psychological fear of contamination by association. So what we often do when something makes us feel uneasy is to laugh about it. It’s still well within living memory that TV comedians would poke fun at people from different ethnic groups – but broadcasting executives soon cottoned on to the fact that they risked alienating growing sections of their audience for the sake of a cheap gag.

Wheelchair Dancer – Disability and Race: Who Will Catch You If You Fall? (not new but still recommended)

In the workshop, I found myself in a conversation about disability and race. One of the participants had worked with some black disabled men; she was confused about why they identified more with being disabled than with being black. Didn’t they experience racism every day? Were they blocking out their blackness, disconnecting from their roots? Were they denying the hatred that black men experience on a daily basis? And then I got thinking. There are many ways to put the pieces of the puzzle together; indeed, for academics, “black disability studies” and other race and disability enquiries have recently become a new edge (yeah, I know… it’s problematic…). I would put some of the many pieces together like this…

Blog of Legal Times – Colorado Lawyer Settles Discrimination Suit Over Dog

A Colorado Springs lawyer who refused to allow a veterinarian and her service dog to enter his law office for a scheduled deposition in a civil action has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a federal discrimination suit. LeHouillier demanded the veterinarian, Joan Murnane, prove her dog, an Australian shepherd, was a certified service dog. According to the suit, LeHouillier was not satisfied after reviewing a letter documenting Murnane’s need for the dog. LeHouillier feared the dog would soil recently installed carpeting, according to the Justice Department complaint.

LA Times – FBI probes LA Housing Department’s actions in apartment project for homeless seniors with disabilities

The FBI is investigating an affordable-housing deal in which Los Angeles officials channeled $26 million to a developer who they knew was under criminal investigation for alleged misuse of public funds, city officials said Thursday. The developer, David Rubin, was indicted last fall in New York for alleged bid-rigging and fraud, charges unconnected to the L.A. project. The $26 million went toward construction of a 92-unit apartment building near downtown L.A. for disabled homeless seniors. It has sat empty since October while its prospective tenants live in shelters or substandard housing.

Figuratively

I’m thinking on metaphors of the body. Here are some examples of what I mean:

On the one hand
Foot in my mouth
Lend a hand
Get back on my feet
Stand up to her
Run with the idea
Wrapped around hir little finger
Get your foot in the door
Dip in a toe
Dangle his feet
Under your thumb

I think these metaphors are interesting evidence as to how much the physical is present in people’s experiences. How much do these phrases assume body parts or functions? What other similar expressions can you think of? What do they mean to you?

I’m thinking on how disability-based metaphors trend to the negative, what Jesse the K would call disabling metaphors. What if we came up with metaphors that centred disabled people’s experiences, of our bodies or otherwise, neutrally or positively? What if disabled people controlled the language, were in charge of determining references to our own experiences? How would that work? What would that even be like?

Idaho Revises State Laws to Remove Ableist Language

Exciting news! On March 29th, Governor C.L. Otter signed a law removing ableist language from Idaho’s state code. From the Idaho Statesman:

The new law replaces outdated language in 73 different laws – including those addressing health and welfare, education and corrections – with more accepted phrases such as “intellectually disabled.”

Disability rights advocates said the revisions send a message to regular Idahoans that their government doesn’t tolerate disrespect, since words like retarded are used, especially among teenagers, to insult others or describe distaste. Officials in several other states, including Washington and Oregon, have enacted similar laws.

Here are a few examples of changes made by the law (from the bill text of Senate Bill 1330, available here)
  • A law giving interpreters to people appearing in court or witnesses in court cases says interpreters will be given to anyone “who does not understand or speak the English language, or who has a physical handicap which prevents him from fully hearing or speaking the English language.” The word “handicap” has been changed to “disability.”
  • A law ordering criminals on probation or parole to pay for the cost of supervision allows exemptions if “the offender has an employment handicap, as determined by a physical, psychological, or psychiatric examination.” The term “an employment handicap” has been changed to “a disability affecting employment.”
  • A law requiring fire safety plans and procedures defines an ‘institution’ as including “facilities for the mentally ill or mentally handicapped.” The description now reads “facilities for people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities.”

On one hand, this isn’t a huge change, and it can be argued that these are cosmetic changes when people with disabilities would be better served by changes to the actual laws, not just their wording. But I believe removing this ableist language from the official law of the state is a meaningful step to take.  Governor Otter made a statement when signing this law:

Otter compared words like retarded to racial slurs Americans used during World War II to describe Japanese people.

“We refer to people as Asians now, as Japanese,” he said. “During the Second World War, we always used the most derogatory terms that were possible at that point. It suggested the anger in our society at Pearl Harbor.”

Guest Post: Storytime

Cara is a feminist writer who blogs at both The Curvature and Feministe. She likes The Beatles, vinyl records, and social justice, though not necessarily in that order.

The first time I saw someone say in a progressive space that it was ableist to use the word “lame” as a pejorative, I thought they were ridiculous. Honestly, I’m telling you right now. I did. I thought all of those things that you most commonly see argued whenever someone is called out on using the word or one like it. It’s not used like that anymore. No one is thinking about disability when they use the word lame. That’s not what it means. It just means bad, and it’s especially useful because it not only means bad, but also bad in a kind of pathetic and sad way … and no, I’m not going to think about what that certain connotation of the word means when it’s a word that also can be used to refer to a disability because it’s not used that way anymore, so it doesn’t matter.

I didn’t make an ass of myself publicly and argue as much. But I thought it. A lot.

And so I didn’t stop using it right away. I didn’t stop, because I used the word a lot, and because I liked using it. And I didn’t want to stop. And I thought that the reasons to stop were silly.

But I couldn’t say it the same way anymore. Every time I said it, every single time, I felt a jolt, a little jab in my spine, a little pain in my heart, a little tightness in my throat. It wasn’t because I thought I was being a “bad progressive,” because frankly the popular opinion among progressives was that using the word was fine and those who disagreed were wrong. It wasn’t because I realized that my brain was connecting pathetically bad things with disability, because I still didn’t feel like it was. It was because I had seen people say that when I used that word, it hurt them. And not only that it hurt them, but that it hurt them systematically, that it harmed them, and that the harm was oppressive.

I didn’t stop saying “lame” or any other word like it because I had a light bulb moment and realized the social connections between the different meanings of the word, and how there really is a reason that “lame” doesn’t just mean bad but uniquely and pathetically bad, when people with disabilities are so commonly portrayed as pathetic. In the end, I’m not entirely sure that it matters when or even if I started believing that. Because it’s not why I stopped.

I stopped because I didn’t want to hurt people. I stopped because I didn’t want to engage in what I claim to advocate against. I stopped because people told me that it was doing them harm when I did it, and because it hurt me to realize that that hadn’t initially been enough. I stopped saying the word because I realized that it was enough.

When it comes to a lot of language that is offensive to marginalized groups — the kind that is exceedingly common and even generally accepted by most progressives, including the types who take pains to correct someone for calling something “gay” or “retarded” — I have to say that I have difficulty getting angry at an average person who uses it. That, of course, comes from a position of privilege, and a position of having been the person who didn’t know any better about 10,000 times. When it comes to most of these words, I am privileged. These words tend to not denigrate me as a person, my humanity, my existence. It is a privilege that I can say “they don’t know any better” and politely inform them otherwise, that I can give them the benefit of the doubt that they will try their best to not do it again. I’m not saying that I expect otherwise of different people, or that anyone else is wrong to get angry at someone who “doesn’t know any better.” At all. That’s just me.

But. When it comes to people who I know know better, who I know have been informed, who I know have been exposed to the harm that certain types of language can do, common though it may be, and then still not only use it, but use it so frequently that it seems like it’s almost on purpose as some kind of gross defiance … I don’t know quite what to think. But I do know it makes me really, really angry to see.

And it makes me wonder about their progressive credentials, not because I can’t believe that they fail to see the exact theoretical reasons and linguistic history as to why the word is one they should stop using. But because they know they’re harming people, people more and differently marginalized than themselves, no less … and just don’t seem to care.

This post originally appeared at Cara’s Tumblr and has been cross-posted with permission.

Words, Language, Context

I had a conversation with Dorian the other day after he posted You Don’t Get It on his personal blog. He said:

My brain doesn’t really work like everyone else’s. So when you say you “know exactly what [I’m] going through”? You don’t, really. You know the same result – a paper not getting written. But you don’t really seem to explain the process that gets me to that point in my brain. It’s frankly kind of agonizing–I want to write that paper pretty badly! You don’t get it.

People didn’t like this comment of Dorian’s. [It also went ’round Tumblr for a bit.] One commenter said:

What exactly do you want people to say when you describe something like this? That you are the only one that goes through it? I can understand the hardship that you may be going through but that doesn’t mean someone else can’t experience too.

When I responded to this, I took the analogy away from struggling to complete tasks and to something that most people will see as a “real” disability [yay, disability hierarchy!!!!].

I do not have a chronic pain condition, nor do I get migraine headaches. When I’m in pain, my joints ache. I feel tired. My muscles are sore. I want to lie down.

I take some over-the-counter drugs, or have a bath, or nap, and usually wake up with little to no pain and go about my day.

When Don talks about his experiences, he talks about being in pain. His joints ache. He’s tired. His muscles are sore. He wants to lie down.

He takes a wide assortment of drugs: two doses a day of 12-hour morphine, a daily dose of oxycodin, the associated drugs to deal with the side-effects of both of those, and a few other things lying around for “breakthrough pain”, one of which we have to sign for before we take it out of the pharmacy, and another of which our regular pharmacy doesn’t carry routinely. He’s a full-time wheelchair user so he can leave the house more than once every few weeks. He spends most of the day lying down.

We use the same words to describe our pain.

Dorian also uses the same words to describe his difficulties in completing tasks that I do. When I’m procrastinating, I’m quite happy to tell anyone who will listen (and several who will not) that I’m procrastinating and having troubles and words won’t come and make my essay/blog spot write itself now please.

But my troubles are not the same as Dorian’s, anymore than my pain is the same as Don’s.

We just use the same words.

My point isn’t that people with disabilities need to use different words or that currently non-disabled people need to use different words. It’s that words come with context. When Don says he’s in pain, he’s typically talking about his chronic pain condition. When I say I’m in pain, I’m typically talking about having sat wrong for a few hours.

Context matters.

Finally, a Dear Prudence column that isn’t rage-inducing!

In the most recent Dear Prudence live chat on Slate, a reader asked the following:

Negativity: I have had a bad couple of years—intermittent employment,
moved twice, lost a sibling. I’m a pretty positive person, but I’m
having trouble keeping my chin up, since that mainly results in me
taking it on the chin.

I have a friend who asked if I was feeling a little down, and when I
admitted it (something that is hard for me), she basically said it was
my fault, and my negative energy was attracting negative events. I
would not find happiness or get my old lucky life back until I could
learn to accept what fate was trying to teach me.

I don’t know what’s worse, her idea of comfort or the idea that she’s
right. She didn’t used to be crazy, but this New Age stuff has been
her reaction to being unemployed and living on credit cards. What
should I have said?

I could do without the mental-illness shaming (“She didn’t used to be crazy…”), but does this sound familiar to anyone who’s had to endure similar “well-meaning” advice from people who think you can — and should — just “buck up?” And oh my god, SCARY NEGATIVE ENERGY! I’ve covered the fallacies of The Secret and related pablum before here on FWD, so let’s take a look at advice columnist Emily Yoffe’s response:

Emily Yoffe: The Secret and other garbage of that ilk suggests people
abandon friends with problems so that they don’t get “infected” by
their negativity. So you could have said you understand her new set of
beliefs mean you two have to keep your distance and that you wish her
all the best.

I actually think the disease metaphor works well in showing just how ridiculous the notion of an “infection” of negative energy really is. To sum up: The flu is something you can get “infected” with, and it’s not fun. As for negative “energy,”  — if “positive thinking” works so well in combatting anything that’s not sunshine and rainbows and unicorns pooping glitter, why do positive thinkers and Secret devotees insist on dumping people who don’t fit their exact super happy worldview? Either the super POSITIVITY!!11 worldview is incredibly fragile and therefore must never be questioned, or there’s some major cognitive dissonance going on — perhaps both?

Stigma Kills: A Concrete Example

Often when bloggers or activists push back against ableist language and stereotypes in the media, especially pop culture, someone will respond with an argument that there are more important disability issues to address and that the topic at hand is mostly irrelevant to disability rights as a whole. This has happened with each of the posts in the Ableist Word Profile series, it’s happened with discussion about ableist tropes in pop culture, it’s happened when critiquing the vast overrepresentation of criminal behavior in news coverage of people with mental illness.

I believe these things matter very much. Perhaps not individually – if I slip and use the word “lame” pejoratively, it does not automatically cause a person with a disability to die instantly. But each individual instance adds up to become a trend, to become a larger understanding and expectation of how things are. And if those understandings and expectations aren’t accurate, it can have dramatically horrific results.

This is because a lot of our ongoing decisionmaking is done automatically, unconsciously. This is because we are constantly presented with such a vast amount of information that if we stopped to consciously evaluate everything, we’d never be able to do anything at all. When I see an object with keys labeled with letters and laid out in the QWERTY design, I recognize it as a keyboard an assume I use it to manually input written data into a computer or typewriter or phone or other device. This saves me the trouble of figuring out each and every time what this object is, what it is for, how I am supposed to interact with it, and what end result I can expect. I do this instantly, even though it is immensely complicated – it has been extraordinarily difficult to program a computer to identify, say, a keyboard from a photo or video, regardless of lighting, angle, and lots of other variables that the brain can process almost instantly.

There are similar examples for evaluating other sensory input. When I touch something, I know instantly and without consciously considering it whether the object is solid or liquid, dry or wet. I have no idea how I make that evaluation and instructing someone else on making that judgment would be immensely difficult for me – but when my foot touches a wet patch of carpet en route to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I pull my foot back lightning fast to avoid what is surely cat puke. If I feel myself losing balance, I put out a hand to catch myself without consciously deciding to, because my classification of my sensations as “losing balance” was done entirely unconsciously.

How does stigma fit into this? Well, a stereotype is an unconscious cognitive shortcut – instead of examining an individual person or situation, we apply a stereotype to make assumptions. While a stereotype is usually seen as a negative thing, they serve an important purpose by allowing us to make educated guesses. For example, when I go into a fast food restaurant, I know to go to the counter and give my order to someone behind the counter, usually wearing a uniform. While this has held true at the places I’ve visited in the past, if I go to an new fast food restaurant that I haven’t visited before, I will assume that I use the same procedure. That’s a useful assumption that saves me the time and energy of approaching each situation as brand new and unrelated.

There are times when stereotypes can be harmful and damaging, as we well know. The stigma against PWDs is an assumption applied to all PWDs simply because they are PWDs, assuming they have a set of presumed characteristics, motivations, and beliefs. It is a stereotype composed of all the understandings and expectations of PWDs conveyed by all the little things – the word choices of the people you talk to, that one character in that on tv show, that story you saw on the news last night. And although the specifics fade away, most people are left with vague, unconscious associations. Again, some of these associations are essentially value-neutral, as how I generally associate red with “stop” and green with “go” from traffic lights and signs. But people can also have unconscious associations around more complex and problematic issues, like race, gender, and disability status.

Social psychologists from Harvard developed a computer-based test to measure the existence of implicit associations and stereotypes – the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT asks users to rapidly categorize words to the left or right of the screen. From the IAT FAQ:

The IAT asks you to pair two concepts (e.g., young and good, or elderly and good). The more closely associated the two concepts are, the easier it is to respond to them as a single unit. So, if young and good are strongly associated, it should be easier to respond faster when you are asked to give the same response (i.e. the ‘E’ or ‘I’ key [to indicate left or right]) to these two. If elderly and good are not so strongly associated, it should be harder to respond fast when they are paired. This gives a measure of how strongly associated the two types of concepts are. The more associated, the more rapidly you should be able to respond. The IAT is one method for measuring implicit or automatic attitudes and is featured on this website. There are other methods, using different procedures, that have been investigated in laboratory studies.

I’ve taken a number of IATs before (because I’m dorky about cognitive science and this kind of stuff) and believe that they have correctly identified in me some negative unconscious associations. For example, I unconsciously associated women with home and family and men with business. Consciously, I strongly disagree with that association! So when I do consciously consider my assumptions about those associations, I override and reject my unconscious associations.

When researching this post, I took the IAT that measures unconscious associations around disability. (I can’t link directly to that test, but it can be found in the IAT demonstrations available here.) Taking the test, I found that I have a slight automatic preference for abled people over PWDs. This doesn’t mean that when I act, speak, or even think about these issues I exhibit that preference. It doesn’t mean that I “really” prefer TABs to PWDs. It means that I have been sufficiently inundated by messages that associate TABs with “good” and PWDs with “bad” that I have a slight unconscious tendency to apply that association, a tendency almost instantaneously overruled by my conscious thought. So it is an association that exists only for the tiniest of moments until it is extinguished by cognition.

How can those tiny moments, almost too small to measure, even matter? Well, as Chally recently posted about, a Los Angeles police officer shot and killed an unarmed man with an unspecific cognitive disability autism [1. ETA since his family disclosed that he had autism in numerous public interviews.]. The officer fired as the man reached towards his waistband after failing to respond to verbal commands from the police. From the LA Times article linked in the post:

[LAPD Officers] Corrales and Diego believed “he [the PWD] was arming himself” and fired, Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said at an afternoon news conference.

The officers made decisions in a fraction of a second,” he added.

In a fraction of a second.

Just long enough for the unconscious association to spark but not long enough for conscious thought to override it.

Just long enough for stigma to kill.