Uncle Jim.

It’s World Down Syndrome Day.

My mother’s little brother Jim has been on my mind a lot lately. He was born in 1947, at a time when doctors commonly advised new parents of babies with intellectual disabilities to leave their child at the hospital, that it would be better for everyone to put the baby in an institution before they got attached—which seems monstrous now. We have (had?) advanced so much in the last few decades—in the way we understand disabilities like Down Syndrome, but also in how we regard and treat people with disabilities and what’s possible for them.

Uncle Jim, mid-1950s.

It’s sad and depressing to watch the slurs, “retard” and “retarded,” getting more common again, especially, or maybe only, among the reactionary crowd who are, for the time being, running things. When I was a kid, those words were already strongly frowned on. (I think I got the lecture from my parents about the r-word at the same time as the n-word.) As kids, we heard them, maybe used them, but we knew it was a transgression, and we knew why: because those words hurt people like my Uncle Jim, and they hurt people who loved him.

It’s not unrelated that the Trump/Musk administration is defunding and eliminating federal programs that help people with disabilities—people like my Uncle Jim—live better lives. It’s only three steps from using “retarded” as a casual insult meaning stupid and worthless, which implies that intellectually disabled people are stupid and worthless, to asserting that resources spent to improve their lives are a waste of money.

We don’t just stigmatize certain slurs because they make individual people feel bad (though I think that’s not a terrible reason to avoid a word that has at least 100 benign synonyms), we discourage slurs because the way we talk to each other shapes our thoughts about each other, and shapes our communities’ attitudes, and behavior, and policies.