Is using the word “retarded” hate speech?
May 25, 2011, 6:39 PM | Updated: 6:54 pm
Spend any time around school-aged students and you’ll hear some of them say, “That’s retarded.” It’s a phrase they toss around to mean something’s unfair, stupid, silly.
Is using the word retarded hate speech? A new campaign says it is, and aims to rid people’s vocabulary of the word.
The popular teen show “Glee” is leading the effort to explain how the word is hurtful in jokes or any part of speech.
Advocates explain on the website R-Word.org why the word is so hurtful when used in jokes or as part of everyday speech.
“What’s wrong with retarded? I can only tell you what it means to me and people like me when we hear it. It means that the rest of you are excluding us from your group. We are something that is not like you and something that none of you would ever want to be. We are something outside the “in” group. We are someone that is not your kind. I want you to know that it hurts to be left out here, alone,” says Joseph Stephens, a Special Olympics athlete.
Much like the Dan Savage It Gets Better project, the campaign against the R-word is calling on celebrities to upload their own stories of why the R-word is offensive or incorrect to use.
Soeren Palumbo, a student with a sister who has a developmental disability, says using the word is hate speech. “Maybe you don’t realize that you hate. But that’s what it is; your pre-emptive dismissal of them, your dehumanization of them, your mockery of them, it’s nothing but another form of hate.”
He also believes saying someone or something is retarded is “more hateful than racism, more hateful than sexism, more hateful than anything.”
The website asks people to take this pledge: I pledge and support the elimination of the derogatory use of the r-word from everyday speech and promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. In one day, more than 213,000 people have.
Locally, the Seattle Sounders FC are on board with the campaign. Here’s Sounders defender Taylor Graham:
(Photo credit r-word.org, from WSU’s Disability Awareness Week)
