4

Draw People In

CRYSTAL HANA KIM was in second grade art class. The assignment? Draw a portrait of your partner.¹

“Now let’s do the eyes,” said her art teacher. “See the line over your partner’s eye? That’s called a crease. It’s important to have the crease or your person won’t look real.”

But Kim, who is Korean American, didn’t have a crease over her eyes—she had the ssangapeul, or “monolid,” eyes common in Korea and many other East Asian countries.

Her partner yelled out, “But Crystal doesn’t have any lines!” The teacher’s face turned red. Kim writes, “I understood that this was an awkward situation . . . She had made a mistake, and yet I felt as if I were the one to blame.”

“If I didn’t have a crease,” she wondered, “did I still look real?”

This was the start of Kim realizing that she looked different from her classmates. Later, she would notice how the language of makeup and beauty left her out entirely—assuming that everyone had an eye crease, a “natural line.”

Who gets to have an eye that is just called an eye?

And who has an eye that is highlighted as different and unusual? Given a name that Kim notes “sounds clinical, alien: monolid.”

Who is taken into consideration when we’re talking about faces, art, and beauty?

And who gets left out?

The language used by that long-ago art teacher—and so many other people talking and writing about makeup and beauty—had marginalized and excluded Kim and people with eyes like hers.

It violated my third Principle of Inclusive Language.

DISABILITY

One major category that presents real challenges for inclusive language is disability.

Disability is a word that maps to many kinds of conditions and many kinds of people. More than a billion people around the world can be classified as disabled.²

So many kinds of disabilities show up in so many ways that it’s hard to make broad generalizations. Each disabled person has their own perspective and experiences.

For many of us who don’t live with a disability, it is a category we don’t really think about all that much. But according to the CDC, one in four American adults has a disability of some kind.³ And this doesn’t include those of us who wear glasses or contacts since our vision impairment accommodations are so common that they aren’t even seen as disability accommodations.

Disability is an identity category that people can move into overnight—just one accident or illness can shift a person from not living with a disability to living with one. Although less than 1 percent of Americans under the age of five are disabled, about 35 percent of people sixty-four and older have a disability of some kind.⁴ In addition, as of 2023, long-haul Covid has affected between seven and twenty-three million Americans, including one million people who can no longer work.⁵ One of the long-term results of the pandemic will be a significant increase in the numbers of disabled people.

Here are common ways we categorize disability:

• Mobility: includes issues with walking and standing, such as cerebral palsy, paralysis, amputation, and Parkinson’s

• Physical: such as chronic fatigue, chronic migraines, diabetes

• Hearing: such as deafness and being hard of hearing

• Vision: such as blindness, color-blindness, impaired vision

• Speech: such as muteness and stuttering

• Cognitive: such as Down syndrome, developmental delays

• Neurology: such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s, dyspraxia

• Mental health: such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder

Some disabilities are perceptible, while others are invisible. But they all have something in common: when disability is part of the conversation, problematic language is incredibly frequent. This problematic language shows up both when talking about disabled people and talking with disabled people.

TALKING ABOUT DISABILITY

The Vice President of the financial services firm had a problem.

“I’m trying to get our people to use the correct terms when it comes to disability, but I’m encountering a lot of resistance. People are telling me that there are too many new words coming at them, and that it’s just us being the PC Police. That we’re being ‘too sensitive.’ Or that it’s ‘just semantics.’ Can you help?”

In fact, I could help. Let me share with you what I shared with her.

• • •

There are real linguistic and cultural reasons why language around disability seems to shift more than language involving other topics. At the heart of this is what I call the cycle of pejoration. (You may have heard this concept referred to as the euphemism treadmill.)

Cultural attitudes change the flavor of words that describe disabilities. That’s because disabilities, and by association disabled people, are stigmatized.⁶ In other words, many people hold negative and unfair beliefs about disabled people, who are “disqualified from full social acceptance.”⁷

This broad social stigma means that terms that describe disabilities very frequently start out with a scientific or descriptive flavor, and then, because of how they are used, end up with a negative flavor. Eventually, the term may come to mean something negative or insulting, while the original scientific flavor and meaning is lost to history.

This is called pejoration. Pejoration is the process in which a word’s meaning gets downgraded from positive or neutral to negative (in other words, it can become a pejorative, an insult). For example, the word silly now means “foolish.” But originally it meant “blessed” or “fortunate.” It then had a phase when it meant “pious” or “innocent.” And then it shifted to the mildly insulting meaning it has today.

Once a formerly scientific or neutral word has become an insult, people need to come up with a new word to replace it. Because you don’t want to use a word that’s insulting as a scientific description.

We see pejoration for identities that are less prestigious or have some kind of stigma.

For example, the word hussy once simply meant “housewife,” but through pejoration became a sexualized insult. It was then replaced by housewife, which can now have negative connotations, and so the more “neutral” homemaker is sometimes used.

And the word spinster, which used to refer to an unmarried woman, acquired such a negative flavor that in the 1970s, American game show creators coined a new word—bachelorette. They took the term bachelor, meaning “unmarried man,” and threw a feminine (and diminutive) French-derived suffix on it to create a more positive way to refer to their unmarried female contestants.

When negative cultural attitudes toward a person stay the same, then the new word that replaced the pejorative will start to taste like something unpleasant, negative, shameful. Once the flavor is bad enough and the usage shifts, the new word will become yet another pejorative, a term with an insulting meaning. In other words, if you use a “regular” word in an insulting way long enough, it just becomes an insult.

This is what I call the cycle of pejoration.

As long as the negative attitudes stay in place, the cycle will continue. The issue isn’t with the words—it’s with the culture.

• • •

Because disability is so stigmatized, many originally scientific and technical terms are now just unscientific insults. Here are some words that are used as insults in English today but began as scientific or descriptive terminology:

• Moron: originally meant mental age of eight to twelve.

• Imbecile: originally meant mental age of six to nine.

• Idiot: originally meant mental age of two or less.⁸

• Cripple, crip: originally, a cripple was a person with a physical impairment that prohibited walking or made it difficult.

• Spaz: from spastic, originally used to describe issues of muscle tone, muscle stiffness, or muscle contractions that caused discomfort, pain, and mobility issues.⁹ Spastic is still in use as a scientific term today.

• Lame: originally used to describe people with a body part that was paralyzed or weak and impaired mobility.

• Dumb: originally used for mute people.

Note that the terms moron, imbecile, and idiot, while considered scientific at the time, actually originated with early twentieth-century eugenicists. So these terms were always problematic, given the eugenicist agenda. Also, like the word queer, the word crip has been “reclaimed” by the in-group. Disabled people may use the term to describe themselves and others in the community. This is a different use than the Southern California association of gangs known as the Crips (who originally used canes to signal affiliation with pimps).

A word can move from being a technical term to a slur that renders it no longer viable in just a few decades. For example, my mom worked as a “special education” teacher in New York. And I am pretty sure I remember children in her classroom being classified as retarded. So in the process of writing this chapter, I became curious—how recently did New York state use the term retarded as an official classification?

And I was genuinely surprised by the answer I found. It was only in July 2022 that New York state signed into law a bill removing “mentally retarded” from all state laws.¹⁰ This came a full twelve years after a federal law was enacted that removed all references to “mentally retarded” from federal policy and use.¹¹

When I was young, the word retarded was used as a schoolyard insult, but it also still had enough of a technical flavor to be used by people like school administrators. But by the 2010s, the word retarded had become so strong a slur that I was shocked to learn that it was still being used in any official capacity. In fact, retarded has moved all the way into a taboo word that many people won’t say or spell. Some people call it “the R-word.” (This is parallel to “the N-word.” It’s seen as that insulting.) Others won’t spell it out and use asterisks to replace most of the letters.

Our cultural attitudes toward disability still create real stigma, and that ongoing stigma leads to many disability-related words acquiring a negative flavor. This cycle of pejoration is why you can expect to read and hear new words about disability in the future. Until we change our attitudes, the cycle will keep on going.

So, using new terminology is not being “oversensitive” or “politically correct.” It’s appropriately responding to the semantic shift that comes from problematic language use. It’s recognizing that some words have reached a point where they have become so negative, so insulting, that they can’t be used as technical or descriptive terms anymore and need to be replaced with new words.

• • •

There is a major and ongoing debate on the best way to talk about disability: Is it better to use person-first language and say things like “people with disabilities?” Or is it better to use identity-first language and say things like “disabled people”?

The most inclusive practice is to use the terminology that an individual person prefers. You can listen to or read the terminology they use and mirror it. (But don’t use reclaimed insults if you’re not in-group! For example, if on someone’s blog they refer to themselves both as a crip and as a disabled person, if you yourself are not disabled, then the language you should mirror is only disabled person.)

But then the questions arise: How do you refer to an entire category or group of people if you don’t know all their individual preferences? Or if you know that they have preferences that conflict?

Some groups of people seem to have generally established that they prefer identity-first language—for example, Deaf people and many autistic people. Deaf people have a cultural identity (this is what the capital D means, that a person is part of the Deaf community and culture). And autistic people in favor of identity-first language note that their condition is different from many other disabilities, such as chronic migraines. It feels more accurate to say a person with chronic migraines than a chronic migraine person. But autistic people, who have autistic brains, have always been and will always be autistic. Being autistic shapes both a person’s experiences and interactions with others. It is integral to identity. Even so, some people prefer person with autism or person with ASD, and when they do, then that is the terminology to use with them.

Author Emily Ladau notes that her attitude toward which terminology to use has been influenced by disrespect for her own choices. She used to be very strongly in favor of identity-first language, in part because “ . . . I was tired of mostly nondisabled people telling me that PFL [person-first language] was right and IFL [identity-first language] was wrong. I was tired of calling myself ‘disabled’ and being told ‘oh, you shouldn’t talk about yourself like that,’ or ‘I don’t even think of you as disabled.’”¹²

You can feel that lingering stigma around disability—“you shouldn’t talk about yourself like that” can be translated as “don’t describe yourself using insulting and negative language.” “I don’t even think of you as [identity]” shows the negative flavor of that identity. I’ve had Black friends tell me about parallel experiences with friends or colleagues who said, “I don’t even think of you as Black,” and meant it as a compliment.

In general, my rule of thumb is to use the terminology preferred by in-group activists. Because they have taken the time to think through the language from an inclusive standpoint and also have the benefit of lived experience. The overall impression I get is that American disability activists generally prefer identity-first language for themselves, and that for them, person-first language has the flavor of being language used by the out-group, the flavor of being advocated for mostly by people who aren’t disabled.

So in this book, I have made the choice to use identity-first language when talking about groups and write things like disabled people. But for individuals who prefer otherwise, or for groups for which there seems to be a consensus that person-first language is better, I use that terminology instead.

A final note is that we absolutely want to avoid addressing or referring to people by their disability or mobility device. I’ve heard stories of people addressed as “Hey, Wheelchair,” or who have overheard themselves referred to as Wheelchair. (“Wheelchair is coming to the bar, so I guess we have to make sure there’s a ramp.”) I’ve also heard stories in which people were called Crutches or The Autistic. This is the opposite of drawing people in. It’s dehumanizing and disrespectful. And it’s problematic language to be avoided.

INTERACTING WITH DISABLED PEOPLE

I was in Los Angeles and had just finished giving a legal education workshop on gender bias when one of the lawyers came over to talk. “Me too,” he said. “For all the ways you told us that women are ignored or spoken down to or talked over? Me too.”

I looked at him more closely. He seemed to belong to almost all dominant-group categories, categories that would ordinarily mean he’d be treated with respect. He was white, he was male, and his suit and job suggested he made real money. He was middle-aged, conventionally good looking, and he spoke with a standard American dialect. So there seemed to be just one explanation for his experiences.

“Because of the wheelchair?” I asked.

“Yes, because of the wheelchair,” he replied.

He told me stories of restaurant hosts and waitstaff who ignored him and talked only to his wife. About being ignored and interrupted in meetings. And how he was often presumed incompetent, with people expressing surprise that he did very regular things, like pick up dry cleaning. (Let alone that he worked as a lawyer.)

If this person wasn’t a wheelchair user, none of this would be happening. He was just as competent as if he had been born a person who didn’t use a wheelchair. But his competencies went consistently unrecognized.

Because I had almost no perceptibly disabled family or friends (and my disabled family members weren’t people I spent time with out and about in the world), I hadn’t heard about or witnessed encounters like these. But as I moved further into anti-bias research and education, I learned that experiences like his happened every day. And everywhere.

• • •

Inclusive language draws all kinds of people in and avoids marginalizing them just because they are different in some way.

Some people are able to move through the world with bodies that don’t elicit commentary. Other people, who are visibly different from the dominant group, have bodies that many people seem compelled to comment on. I’ve collected lots of stories involving comments on skin tone, hair texture and style, eye shape, height, weight, and specific body parts.

As human beings, we often feel compelled to comment on difference.

It can be innocuous when you find yourself saying, “Oh, new haircut!” even as you are thinking, “don’t mention the haircut, don’t mention the haircut.” It’s a bit less innocuous when it’s about height—ask anyone very tall or very short how they feel about comments on how tall or how short they are.

My research suggests that disabled people deal with more problematic comments involving difference than anyone else. First, disabled people experience a higher frequency of comments about their bodies or disabilities. Second, those comments are more inappropriate than most comments on difference aimed at other types of people. (Not to mention how intrusive questions related to disabilities can be.)

Here are just a few of the comments and questions addressed to Sassy Wyatt, a disability awareness consultant who is blind:

• Wow, you look/dress really well for a blind person.

• You’re using a phone; you’re faking your blindness!

• Why do you watch TV if you can’t see it?

• Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?

• But you don’t LOOK blind!

• Why do your eyes move/look like that?

• Do you want to feel my face?

• Oh, I didn’t realize people like you could work.¹³

Comments on someone’s disability suggest that they are “the other.” They highlight and reinforce stigma around disability, and present disability as “remarkable.” (As in, people feel compelled to remark on it.)

Another issue is that these kinds of comments tend to focus on individuals and what is seen as individual limitations, rather than on places and systems that refuse to shift and become more inclusive. To quote a tweet from activist Elena Hung, if you say, “She can’t get inside the building because of her wheelchair,” the focus is on the wrong thing.

Instead, Hung suggests that we shift our attention: “She can’t get inside because the building is not accessible. The building has a barrier that does not let her in. The wheelchair is not the problem; the building’s lack of access is the problem.”¹⁴

In a comment on this tweet, Tatiana Prowell, a medical doctor, pointed out we should go one step further: “The building didn’t cause this. People did. Planners who did not think about access for people who use wheelchairs & did not bother to consult any. Able-bodied people who use the bldg & do not demand accessibility. We caused this problem.”¹⁵

The lawyer using the wheelchair had told me about how often he was ignored and interrupted in meetings. Issues like inaccessible buildings, including architecturally significant buildings like the new Hunters Point Library in New York (which met ADA requirements but made popular departments functionally inaccessible), show that again and again disabled people are ignored to the point where they aren’t even in the meetings.¹⁶ Designing spaces, websites, and events that are meant to include everyone and then not speaking with disabled people about accessibility is problematic.

• • •

Lesa Bradshaw, an HR consultant, gave a TEDx talk that included examples of the condescending and patronizing ways people speak to her.

A handy label I use for one type of problematic language I encounter is presumed incompetent. In the stories I collect from the US, I find that women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) are often presumed incompetent in their workplaces. Especially when those workplaces are technical, they are often assumed to not have technical knowledge or skills. (I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve encountered where a woman answers a technical help hotline or steps up to the counter at the electronics or computer store and the male customer says, “No, stop. I want a man to help me.”)

But the presumed incompetent stories I collect that involve disabled people often go a step further—the disabled person is assumed to be not competent in the most basic life skills. In other words, a physically disabled person is assumed to have an intellectual disability. (This seems to be especially true for people who communicate through a device rather than with their vocal tracts or sign language.)

If you’re not disabled, you’ll want to make sure that when you’re speaking with disabled people, you draw them in by talking with them as people. That you’re not unconsciously demoting them and presuming that they’re incompetent, but rather, you’re treating them with the same respect that you treat people without disabilities.

When it comes to drawing people in, inclusive language practices for disability can be applied more generally. Don’t use a term that describes someone’s identity as an insult. Avoid making inappropriate comments that highlight someone’s difference. Avoid unconscious demotions that were triggered because someone doesn’t fit your mental models. And think about shifting your focus from a marginalized individual to the system that isn’t supporting them.

CAN SOMEONE BE “DIVERSE”?

It was the last meeting before they started interviewing job candidates. The hiring manager looked at his engineering team. “Don’t forget, we’re getting pressure from HR. So we have to make sure at least one diverse candidate makes it to the final round,” he said.

The team members nodded and made notes in their files. No one asked him what he meant by a “diverse candidate”—they all knew.

• • •

When someone says, “a diverse candidate,” who do they mean?

If they’re in the US, they usually mean someone who isn’t a white man. Less frequently, they mean someone who isn’t heterosexual or cisgender. And they may sometimes mean someone who isn’t abled.

This use of the word diverse is problematic.

Until very recently, when referring to people, the adjective diverse was only used with nouns or phrases that represent groups. For example:

• A diverse workforce

• A diverse candidate pool

• A diverse employee base

That’s because, when referencing people, the semantic framing of diverse points to a scenario involving difference within a group of people. In this scenario, some people are one way, and other people are another way. Together, the individual differences make up a diverse group.

But in the last few years, I’ve seen the rise of diverse to refer to a single person. Most frequently in the context of hiring. So, what’s going on?

Today, diverse is often being used as a euphemism for

• a person who is white and female, or

• a person of color of any gender.

And, less frequently,

• a person who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, or

• a person who is perceptibly disabled.

Why is this a problem?

It’s a problem because it presents whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and abledness as the default—as if they are the “normal” ways of being, the central core by which everyone else is defined as “other.”

There’s a really useful linguistic concept that helps explain why this happens. It’s called markedness. You can sort a lot of the world into two categories: unmarked and marked.

The unmarked thing is the default, the dominant form, the form that requires less effort.

And the marked thing is seen as nontypical, special, divergent—a form that requires more effort. It is often defined in opposition to or different from the “default” or unmarked form rather than its own thing.

In the US, when it comes to race, the unmarked category is people who are white, and the marked category is people who are not white.

When it comes to gender, the unmarked category is male. And the marked category is people who are not male.

When it comes to sexuality, the unmarked category is heterosexual. And the marked category is people who are not heterosexual.

And when it comes to ability, the unmarked category is abled. And the marked category is disabled.

Linguistic patterns give us insight into the mental models we use to sort out and assign value to the world around us.

For example, in English, most words that point to the male version of something are the default, the bare root. And in order to point to the female version of something, you add an extra word or word part, usually a suffix, to show that you’re talking about something divergent, something marked.

For all of these words, the unmarked form is shorter. The male form is the base form, the default form. And then, the default form is marked with something additional to turn it into the female version. The feminine suffix -ess is added, or the profession is prefaced with female, or a name has an -a added to the end to make a female version.

You’ll find similar markedness with race. For example, in the mid-2000s I used to spend a lot of time reading a website called Overheard in New York. And this markedness would show up all the time in the way overheard people were described.

The reader was led to assume that a “regular” hipster, grandma, or dude was white. People who weren’t white were marked with additional words to describe them.

You can check this out yourself by looking at Wikipedia pages for people. If you go to the Early Life section, you’ll find that white people very frequently do not have their ethnic or racial background mentioned. But people of color (and Jewish people of all skin tones) do.

The same is true for many novels written by white people. In these novels, white characters don’t have their race mentioned, but people of color are marked with ethnic or racial descriptors. Think about the eye descriptions from Crystal Hana Kim’s story at the beginning of this chapter: everyone else in the class had an unmarked eye, but she had a marked monolid eye.

Throughout this book, I use some marked names for the US, like Tomoko, and some unmarked names, like Daniel. How have you been picturing the people with unmarked names? Are they all white? And if you, reader, are not white, have they all been the same race/ethnicity as you?

In the US, when we talk about race, whiteness as a racial category is often erased. For many white people, race is about other people.

For example, what is plain old American history? It is presented from a white point of view. So every February is Black History Month. It’s marked as different.

But, as many people have noted, in the US (and other places colonized by white Europeans), Black history is also white history. To claim, for example, that slavery is specifically Black history erases the role that white people played in the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery.

• • •

When people say “diverse candidate” to mean “a person who isn’t perceived as white,” they’re leaving white people out of the diversity equation.

They’re suggesting that diversity is only about the marked people. That a “diverse” person is someone defined as different from the dominant group. Someone who isn’t white. Someone who isn’t male. Someone who isn’t straight. Someone who isn’t abled.

Someone who is “different.”

But everyone plays a role in diversity. So it’s better to avoid language that suggests that creating diversity is only the responsibility of people who have been traditionally marginalized, overlooked, and kept away from power. Which is ironic, because they are exactly the people with the least power and least access to make systemic and top-down changes.

I recommend only using diverse to reference groups of people and not individuals. If you want to highlight that you’re looking to diversify a group, one handy way to characterize people is underrepresented and overrepresented.

For example, the hiring manager could have said something like this: “Okay, for the open position, we want to make sure we look for candidates from underrepresented groups so we can balance things out on our team.”

Diversity is about everybody. And when you make sure everyone is part of the equation, you can move past the idea that one kind of person is “regular” and everyone else is different, peculiar, divergent. And you can be genuinely inclusive instead.