Hello again!
To address your first point, Emily never said that they intended the sign as an insult. In fact, she made pains to say that this was just one small part of the music video, but that she wanted to address it for future learning - especially since many were celebrating this small moment on social media. And I am sure many of the people spreading the screen shot of the sign across all social media also didn’t intend it to be an insult. But intentions don’t matter much if harm is still inflicted. If there are disabled people out there that say that this is problematic, traumatic, or insulting, then I think it’s in everyone’s better interest to listen. I would make the same argument for any other marginalized group as well.
To your second question, I am including some links below to my favorite writers and scholars on disability as a starting place for you. But I wanted to take a moment to expand on my own thoughts. Using alternate words in place of disability has the potential to cause at least two distinct kinds of harm.
Terms that set disability aside as a category, such as “special needs,” has the potential to cause further marginalization of disabled people through stigmatization. We have seen the impact of this through segregation in schools and ghettoization in housing.
Terms, such as those that you are advocating for, that erase disability by emphasizing “ability,” have the potential to cause harm in erasure of disability. In erasing disability, abled people are no longer responsible for said disability - because it doesn’t exist anymore. Emphasizing my ability to do my job is great, but only if I am physically able to get to my office. Of course, that’s a vast oversimplification of the issues at hand. There is a lot more nuance, microaggressions, and ableism that is baked into this.
I highly recommend this article for in-depth insight into these uses of language: https://medium.com/swlh/whatever-you-do-dont-call-me-differently-abled-d947ac029801
Particularly from the article above, I’d like to highlight this paragraph: “By denying the very term disability we are removing disability from the equation. Society ceases to be the problem. The world doesn’t need to be fixed or challenged around ableism because there is nothing to fix. There is nothing to fix because the individual isn’t disabled — just differently abled.”
Below are a number of articles which I recommend reading. I’ve also been compiling a guide of sorts here, which includes a lot more resources: https://kateringland.medium.com/so-you-want-to-talk-about-disability-5580437dd5d5
https://www.autistichoya.com/2013/08/differently-abled.html
https://www.autistichoya.com/2014/02/violence-linguistic-ableism.html
Regards, Dr. Ringland
