Our friend "Blue Wren" has asked that we post something about disability and language because Connie, in her post about Walgreen’s effort to recruit employees with disabilities mentioned their unfortunate use of the word "handicapped". Wren wonders why the term handicapped might be offensive or in turn, why it is any more offensive than the term disability.
I feel like a man who is poised to enter a mine field but here goes:
Disability emerged as a term during the 19th century and it was first widely used by the German economist Karl Marx to designate workers who had been injured in the factories and who in turn could no longer work. In effect, disablement meant economic disablement in the world of industrial economy.
I don’t like the word "disabled" and I don’t like the glued on article, "the" as in "the disabled" since that term takes the humanity out of our village. In Britain they prefer the term "persons with disabilities" in an effort to solve this problem. Still, one is haunted by the historical negative concerning employment in the term. So the "D" word isn’t all that good.
Handicap means that a person is physically unable to perform an essential life task and there’s nothing wrong with the term except that for many people with disabilities it feels old fashioned: a handicapped person calls to mind someone who is quasi helpless. A friend who is a wheelchair user once put it to me this way: "turn the word around and it means having your cap in your hand".
My friend, the poet and nonfiction writer Nancy Mairs calls herself a cripple. She has written a wonderful essay on that decision called "On Being a Cripple". Many people with disabilities also use the term "crip" in the same way. The idea is that if there’s no good language for disability then why not use the old nasty pejorative lingo to good effect and be up front about it?
The big issue is economic. Capitalist economies don’t generally have enough imagination to employ and include people who have physical differences in the work force. Rather than solve this we tend to spend time fashioning varieties of euphemisms when what we really mean is: "a person who the society doesn’t want to include in the work place or the mainstream". I have often argued that we should substitute for the word "disability" or the term "people with disabilities"a new phrase: "Officially Socially Marginalized People".
As I said above, this feels like walking in a minefield. The accommodations that I need in order to work effectively in a white collar environment cost money. How much money? I’d estimate that I cost about 3,000 additional dollars because I need to read and scan texts using talking computers and peripheral devices. Of course the costs of these gizmos goes down year by year.
It does in fact cost employers a bit more to hire people with disabilities. There are progressive employers in our capitalist economy who believe in this kind of inclusion. There are tens of thousands of corporations and companies that do not believe in this principle and these enterprises look for ways to take their operations overseas where they can employ people without the pesky costs associated with occupational safety and medical benefits.
I told you this was a minefield.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 