Eighteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Twenty-seven years ago the American with Disabilities Act became the law, cementing a foundational promise to people with disabilities nationwide. What occurred however, was quite the opposite. As a unified society, it is generally understood that against traditional ideologies, racism, as a commonly negative signifier would be met with rightful indignation and linguistic disdain for its use of lazy, culturally loaded verbiage rooted in openly discriminatory practice. But in contrast, as a more pervasively subtle idiom, ableism or the idea of overvaluing the material world and circumstances that benefit people without disabilities solely for the perception of normality as a collective, is seen as inherently trivial; a kind of accusatorial leverage held by the pseudo-privileged, and the neoliberal creation of a psychologically sensitive public. However, it is this very rhetoric that lays the foundational discord inherent in the language of disability and the public’s relation to it. Today, as disabled people emerge from the shadows demanding autonomy and independence, an equally assertive demand for linguistic accountability comes with it. My paper confronts modern ableism as it exists within subconscious rhetorical devices, comparing societal views against those of two prominent ideals of disabled rhetoric: person-first language versus identity-first language. By examining both the historical and common views of these ideas, my argument in favor of a demand for the examination of modern ableist rhetoric, comes at a critical moment in American conversations on progress.