PHOTO: Getty Images (Rahm Emanuel) |
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Term Limits
Honoring his sister, a college student challenges
everyone to eliminate derogatory use of words like 'retard.'
By Katherine Mirani, Lexington, Mass.
Age 17
It started, as so many things do these days, with a viral video.
Soeren Palumbo, now a 21-year-old student at the University of Notre Dame, read a speech inspired by his sister Olivia during his school's Writers Week in 2007. Olivia has both epilepsy and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, which places her on the autism spectrum. Palumbo lambasted his fellow students and teachers for not only using the words "retard" and "retarded" in a derogatory way, but also letting others say it unchallenged in classrooms and hallways.
The speech elicited a huge response at Palumbo's school and on the Internet. After his father posted a video of it on YouTube, Palumbo was bombarded with contact from people he had never met. Two years after that speech, he started the Spread the Word to End the Word campaign with Tim Shriver, son of the Special Olympics chairman. The initiative's goal is to educate people about the consequences of the word "retarded" and its effect on the intellectually disabled.
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| The president's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has made the Spread the Word pledge. |
Proponents of the cause pledge to "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" on the campaign's website, www.r-word.org.
The campaign had a successful first year, with about 40 universities and 300 high schools participating in awareness days, Palumbo said. In 2010, there were more than 500 registered events and many more unregistered, he said.
"It got to the point where we were having trouble keeping track," Palumbo said. "It grew exponentially."
The movement tackled a word that has become a huge part of kids' everyday speech, according to an online survey conducted by the Special Olympics Global Collaborating Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. According to the study, 92 percent of the more than 1,000 youth surveyed have heard someone say the word "retarded." Of these, 86 percent heard it from their peers.
The word has also showed up in the news, with public figures such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh using it as an insult. Emanuel has since made the Spread the Word pledge.
The r-word is "very common," said Kate Needham, an 18-year-old from Lexington, Mass. who has hosted a Spread the Word event at her high school. "It's not as though people are in favor of insulting people who are intellectually disabled. It's that they're not thinking about it beforehand."
Even if they never mean to insult the intellectually disabled, the r-word still hurts, said Katie Smith, another supporter of Spread the Word. The 16-year-old from Florida has had plenty of experience with the effects of the word, growing up with her autistic brother Daniel.
Smith remembered Daniel being called retarded at school, and more recently during his employment at Wal-Mart, she said.
"They were saying, ‘You're so retarded, you can't do that any faster?'" Smith said of her brother's Wal-Mart coworkers. "I can never understand the pain."
Daniel's experiences prompted Smith to organize a Spread the Word event at her high school. She gave a speech, distributed free T-shirts and had people sign a pledge banner.
"He's my inspiration for everything," she said.
Needham had a different experience when she formed a friendship through Best Buddies. The program, among other things, helps develop friendships between high school students and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Unlike Daniel, her Best Buddies friend James has never felt the pain of being insulted, she said in an e-mail, due to his "limited verbal ability." However, she said she feels this is one of the most important reasons to participate in the Spread the Word campaign.
"Fighting for those who can't fight for themselves is one of the more powerful things in life," she said in an e-mail.
Needham hosted a Spread the Word event after hearing Palumbo speak at a Best Buddies leadership conference in the summer of 2009. She set up a white fabric banner for students to sign in the cafeteria and collected about 300 signatures over the course of a day.
From what she has seen at her own school, Needham said she thinks the Spread the Word movement will continue to change people's language.
"Through Soeren's actions to start the discussion, I think it's definitely started to spread," she said. "A couple of years ago people wouldn't even think it was wrong, and now just about all my friends, if they say [the r-word] around me, they'll say, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm sorry I said that. It's just not what I meant.'"
Her school will most likely repeat the Spread the Word event next year, Needham said.
Juhee Park, a senior at Needham's school who signed the banner, said she indentified strongly with the campaign because her brother, Juhun, is intellectually disabled.
Discrimination and misunderstanding toward her brother is common, she said. "It happens all the time. We go anywhere and everybody stares."
Though she said she dislikes the word, she is uncomfortable confronting people about it.
"If it's somebody I don't know that well, I'm kind of scared," she said. "It's not socially conventional. A lot people get upset about it."
Kai Schultz, an 18-year-old from Gilbert, Ariz., agrees that it is not one person's job to confront another.
"When I hear [the r-word] I try not to make too big of a deal about it because it's my place to educate, but it's not my place to change," he said.
He still said he feels strongly about the word's implications, however.
"Working with the special needs community, you become protective of their cause and who they are as people because they're just like you and I and they have so much to offer the world," he said. "When I hear the r-word, it's almost like negating all of that great stuff that they do."
Schultz, who started a Best Buddies club at her school during the 2007-08 school year, held a Spread the Word awareness day there in partnership with the National Honor Society. The campaign, which included an assembly with speeches and videos, a T-shirt sale and a signature rally, reached many more students because of its affiliation with the National Honor Society.
"We have about 3,000 in Gilbert High," he said. "We're a pretty big school and Best Buddies is a new program. The NHS is probably the second-biggest organization on our campus so naturally they have access to a lot more students than Best Buddies would."
The campaign was successful, Schultz said. He said he hopes the new chapter president will do the campaign again next year.
In Palumbo's home state of Illinois, Schaumburg High School executed a weeklong campaign through teacher Jessica Wienke's leadership class.
The students organized a Special Olympics basketball game during halftime at a regional game, made a video about the campaign, decorated the school with posters and streamers and collected more than 1,000 pledges throughout the week.
Even after the campaign, those involved continued their support when they volunteered at a Special Olympics track meet.
"My students were deeply impacted," Wienke said. "Afterwards, a lot of teachers and students commented that the campaign really did affect the way that they use language."
Wienke said the leadership class will tackle a different issue in 2011. Student Council, however, will work on another
Special Olympics basketball game, she said.
"It probably wouldn't be as big of a campaign as last year, but something just to remind people, kind of keep it fresh," she said.
Palumbo said he believes that Spread the Word works so well because it encourages students to be creative in making a difference.
"What we say is, here's our event, we want you to be a part of it, take it and make it effective in your own environment," he said. "We want you to make it your own. I think a lot of young people identified with that."
Dr. Margaret Nygren, CEO of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, has a different take on why language is changing.
"These changes reflect a cultural shift in understanding that people with developmental and intellectual disabilities are entitled to the same dignity and human rights as every other member of society," she said in an e-mail.
Some are not so enthusiastic about the campaign. Professor Christopher M. Fairman of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law said he worries that campaigns to remove the r-word endanger freedom of expression. Government censorship could result from the campaigns, he said, citing a recent proposed broadcast ban in New Zealand as an example.
He also said that, even if the r-word is eliminated, a new word will replace it, just as "retard" replaced earlier terms for the intellectually disabled that have since become insulting. The 1840 census, for example, put the intellectually disabled into an "idiocy/insanity" category, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
"We don't have control over our language the way some advocacy groups think we do," Fairman said. "There will always be words that have resilience."
Palumbo and Fairman agree on the issue of censorship, though.
"If our goal was censorship, or if our goal was banning a word, then I would almost have to disagree with it out of principle myself," Palumbo said. "We're not leading an effort to end the use of fire retardants. Words are very dynamic things. They realign with new definitions all the time, and if we pull out the r-word, you can create a vacuum that a new word jumps right in and it has the same sort of consequences."
To stop this vacuum from happening, society's views of the disabled need to change, Palumbo said. He said he hopes Spread the Word will shrink in importance over time as this transformation takes place.
"Our bigger goal is to encourage people to change how they look at people with disabilities, how they react to people with disabilities, how they interact with people with disabilities," he said. "Language is a huge part of that." |
