It’s February 6, 2025, and I’m locking up my bike in CU Boulder’s Visual Arts Complex, a pavilion sporting “Black Lives Matter” stickered on its windows, commemorated as a permanent mural in 2023. I’m on my way to a BIPOC Horror class—a course my instructor is worried won’t be allowed to exist next semester considering new regulations regarding DEI coming out of the White House—when I hear a young man loudly complaining about someone. Without missing a beat, it slips out: “She’s fucking r—”
Growing up, this was a clear cut no-no word. Hearing another student say this word throughout my time in grade school, during the 2010s, was incredibly rare. If it was said, there was swift and thorough discipline. Now, I hear it on social media, at parties, and at school. What changed?
It feels as if I, and many others affected by the landslide election of Trump in 2024, have lost our touch on the pulse of the current American zeitgeist. I was somewhat stunned, but not too surprised, when I began hearing the r-slur in frat houses a year ago. Now, I hear it everywhere. In class, walking in Boulder, at parties, from the tweets and streams of prominent political and entertainment figures. I find myself asking—should I get used to hearing people saying this word off-the-cuff? Is it normalized?
As I was in the process of writing this article, a mutual friend brazenly said the r-word in a close setting. I felt all-too proximal to this topic. I asked myself, if people I’m close to are saying this word, and I see them act in their daily lives towards others with love, compassion, and courtesy, might saying it not simply be the result of an irrevocable moral flaw?
There may be something deeper going on with the use of the r-word at this moment in time. I’m not at all equipped to say what that is. (Though, my speculation is a combination of a misguided conflation of pervasive, mild neurodivergence with severe, stigmatized intellectual disability, and a supposed reclamation of the word within a new, lawless, social-media-guided political era.) What I do know for certain is that it should stop.
The r-word is hate speech. It is a discriminatory term used against a disadvantaged minority group. The word emerged as a medical term that characterized the eugenicist school of thought surrounding intellectual disability in the 1960s. Sterilization and instrumentalization of intellectually disabled people’s bodies was the norm at this time. However, the passing of Rosa’s Law in 2010 marked a shift in the U.S. federal government and medical establishment’s attitudes towards those with intellectual disability—the shift that distinguishes public perception of the r-word when I was growing up, versus now. Rick Hodges speculated on this very cycle in 2015.
If you’ve been using this word or heard loved ones using it, it’s well worth your time to take a moment to consider whether or not it truly reflects your values, or is simply more prevalent and socially acceptable to use now than it has been in the past. Note, this “acceptability” has never been determined by those affected by intellectual disability—it’s those in power, neurotypicals, that turn the tides and impact affected individuals’ lives, one way or another. We have the power to stop the momentum of this word—but we have to call it what it is: A slur. And we have to hold each other accountable. It’s more than an edgy joke; it’s an expression and symbol of hatred.