Perry: The return of the r-word

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In the winter of 2009, Special Olympics held a global youth summit that launched a new effort to end the use of the r-word, “retarded,” as a disability slur. Over the following decade, the initiative that grew out of the summit, Spread the Word to End the Word, got to work encouraging both everyday people (especially other young people) and leaders to sign the pledge to not use the word.

It more or less worked. At least in part through the initiative’s efforts, the r-word faded from polite conversation and became sure to generate instant bipartisan backlash anytime a politician used it.

When the campaign launched in 2009, my son was 2, my wife was pregnant with our second child, and I can’t pretend that I noticed. I think I first became aware of the campaign a year later when Rahm Emanuel, at the time President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, was pushed to apologize for using the slur and sign the pledge.

Special Olympics and Best Buddies brought resources, status, connections and media savvy to the campaign, linking to a disability movement that transcended usual political divisions. And since just not using the r-word seemed like a pretty easy ask compared to, for example, access to housing, medicine, education and fair wages, they made a difference. It felt like the slur was dropping out of use and garnered quick universal condemnation whenever it cropped up.

Although I loathe this word and detest the people who knowingly use it, basic issues of language were never my big issue. What I cared about was inclusion, representation, autonomy. Even without explicit use of slurs, an ableist subtext often remained in how people talked about my son, dehumanizing him often enough through kindness (I have a whole rant against the word “cute.” Don’t get me started). So I was pleased when, in 2019, the campaign expanded to focus more generally on inclusion.

These days, the r-word slur has become a staple of the American right wing, uttered with few professional or social consequences. It’s getting worse. And each time it gets worse, the cascade effect leads to more abuse and bigotry, along with policy implications at a moment when inclusion — the “I” in DEI — is under attack across society.

Most recently, as every Minnesotan likely knows, the president of the United States used it against our governor in an unhinged social media rant, filled with false information, aimed chiefly at denigrating Somali Minnesotans. As the Walz family responded, trying to humanize the situation and talk about how language affects people (especially their son Gus, who has a non-verbal learning disability), Republicans gleefully picked up on a comment that people were driving by the governor’s house and shouting the r-word. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, released a mock “Franklin the Turtle” book cover on his Instagram, in which the turtle drives by, uses the r-word and pictures Gov. Tim Walz in handcuffs in front of a Somali man and woman. The ableism and the racism go together.

And it’s not just the Donalds Trump. A study by two faculty at Montclair St. University tracked the use of the r-word on Twitter after Trump’s Truth Social post about Walz. They found that use of the word essentially tripled in the day that followed, with likes and shares especially for the most negative posts (they looked at well over a million posts using the r-word from the period in question).

I honestly don’t care especially if the president insults a governor. It’s unbecoming of what the presidency should be, but that ship’s long since sailed. But by making bigotry explicit, Trump and his closest imitators create a permission structure for people to be their worst selves.

The Montclair authors note, “In the last five years, the term has gone from being nearly unused on Twitter (later X) in 2020 to being prominent in the current context.” I don’t think we know yet how the cruelty online is going to translate into schools and other communities, but I’m not optimistic.

We need to rebuild a society where people who say terrible things experience negative consequences — loss of friends, loss of status, loss of redistricting votes in Indiana (OK, that one is pretty specific). First, we gotta make the text back into subtext again. Then I hope we can erase it completely.