Political Memes

In my line of work, I have to sit in on a lot of meetings that discuss industrial accidents and incidents. Presenters in these meetings typically have spent weeks or months meticulously dissecting the incident, finding root causes, developing and implementing mitigations, and drafts for proposed changes to policy and process to prevent another occurrence. The meetings are intended to be a high-level review of the materials before sending the entire report to org leadership.

However, there's always at least one person in the meeting that raises their hand/unmutes during the presentation just to point out in an accusatory tone exactly how and why the incident occurred. Whatever thing that person is bringing up is just a slide or two away, and is already included in the analysis, along with mitigations and process changes drafted during the previous weeks' investigation. Some people will just never miss an opportunity to tell others that they've made a mistake; that they would never have made such a crude, easily avoidable mistake, not on their watch.

Rarely, a commenter in these meetings does make an excellent point and adds new insights or suggestions. Regardless if the comments were useful or inane, my responses typically fall along the same line: "Thank you. You are right, and I will address this in coming slides/bring this back to the team for consideration." It leaves the commenter feeling like they have contributed to the discussion, whether that's true or not.

I take the same approach with comments where the only purpose is to tell me how I've made a crude mistake. But rarely, someone does say something that gives me something to take back with me. Specifically, I too was once called out for using the word "retarded." The poster who called me out wasn't exactly rude, and they didn't insult me back, but I still felt taken aback because that word is one that I grew up with, and I know my intent wasn't to insult people with disabilities, so I didn't understand why using it made me seem like a bad person.

I thought about it for a while and realized that the language we use to describe things often does a poor job of conveying what we actually mean. When we use words like “insane,” “psychotic,” or other terms that originated in psychology or mental institutions, we are not just misattributing whatever behavior we are describing. We are also revealing an implicit bias.

We may not be directly insulting people with disabilities, but continuing to use that language still carries a message. It suggests that we either do not know more accurate words, or that we have accepted a habit of speech that quietly devalues disabled people. In that sense, it places them in the same rhetorical position as the people invoked by the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…”; they become the quiet exception, the ones implicitly treated as “one of the good ones.”