41–50 of 1001 posts
Harm is a serious thing: It represents the line where my rights end at yours. If using an inappropriate but common cultural idiom harms someone as opposed to being simply rude, that has a potentially revolutionary significance.
Note that this is a voluntary resource guide of recommendations and suggestions.
Gotta love how the page for "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" has a content warning: "Content Warning: This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace." It's not going well so far.
The content warning is reasonable and it works: because I ain’t reading that crap. I have standards. I prefer to avoid being angry with fools, today.
That is my inclination as well, but truth be told something feels very unsettling and insidious about this document. I can get on board with some word choice changes if they seem reasonable. However just about everything in this list seems unjustifiable and purely driven by some neo-puritanical moralism.
One day I can envision this list being codified into the grammar and spell check programs we use for word processing and email.
If people don’t speak up, this will end up becoming something that gets enforced. Not legally enforced, mind you, but first it will become mandatory in academia, then in journalism, then in the business word, and eventually new generations will speak it natively.
> Instead of "blind review", consider using "anonymous review". Context: Unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture. But.. disability is abnormal and negative? How tortured of a definition of 'normal' must one use to make blindness normal? And I suspect if the author of that sentence were offered, say, $100,000 to undergo a painless but irreversible blin…
I have mixed feelings about the things in this list. E.g. part of my disability experience involves my mental health and, when you’re talking about me, anyway, I don’t mind the term “mentally ill”.
On the other hand, it sort of irritates me when people who are well describe others as “crazy”.
Regarding your comment on disability being “abnormal and negative”, though, I have to disagree. I would not have survived the last few years if I had characterized my impairments as being abnormal and negative.
There’s an approach out there called the “social model” of disability where impairment is regarded as a neutral (neither good nor bad) experience and the good or bad experience is how the impairment changes interaction with society. It’s worth reading at least the introduction on the Wikipedia page, so I’ll link it.
Happy to answer any questions if you have ‘em!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability
Edit: To be clear, I’m just thinking about the list of words, not any sort of policy about what one can and can’t say. That’s a whole other can of worms!
I read though the suggestions. So "trigger warning" is now problematic and the proper alternative is "content note". And "Preferred pronouns" is hate speech, because you imply that pronouns are merely a preference, as if the person can choose their identity. Godspeed.