Avoiding the pitfalls of minding your language

Recent rows over the use of language on Twitter have prompted Mike Oliver to consider whether what is sometimes not said is of greater importance than what is

The Tzwitterati are beginning to take over the virtual worlds in which we all seem to spend more and more of our time. A good example of this is the recent outrage sparked by John Terry when he called a fellow footballer a black so and so. I don’t know if the England captain is racist or not but I do know that sportsmen and women have always verbally abused each other to gain an advantage.

I do also know that very few black players ever go on to manage professional footballer clubs. In fact of the 92 managers of football league clubs only one is black at present. I haven’t seen the Twitterati calling that racist.

What’s this got to do with disability you might ask? Well, we do seem to have become obsessed with language while ignoring more important issues in the disability world.

For example, a couple of years ago I got a call from a journalist on our local TV news show. An American wheelchair manufacturer had decided to call their new wheelchair “the spazz”. A local supplier had agreed to become an agent for this new wheelchair and the journalist wanted someone to express outrage at this.

I said I would be happy to do this but only if I could also talk about a far more outrageous story; namely the state of our local wheelchair service where many people were waiting for months and even years to get the right kind of wheelchair.

There was a stunned silence and the journalist said he would talk to his editor and call me back. I’m still waiting for the phone call though he did get his story which went out that night with a non-disabled representative of one of the big charities expressing outrage at the use of the term spazz. Our local wheelchair service is still in a terrible state but, as yet, there has still not been any coverage of it.

I’m not against people being sensitive about language and I think using hate speech should be a criminal offence, but if we are only concerned about language we fail to confront bigger and more important issues that we need to deal with.

Many years ago in his pioneering research carried out by the then British Council of Disabled People and the Rowntree Foundation, Colin Barnes suggested that institutional discrimination was the biggest problem facing disabled people and this could only be addressed by changing people’s behaviour and not just their attitudes and the language that underpins it.

When I listen to the Twitterati banging on about disability I sometimes want to scream “you can call me a cripple if you want but don’t you dare deny me a roof over my head, a decent education and a proper job”.