It seems ridiculous to me these are considered slurs, and the replacement words hearing or visually impaired are stupid because they make it sound like you aren’t fully blind or deaf but instead can see or hair but with impairment.
If someone is completely blind or deaf like with 0 ability to see or hear they seem like the correct terms to use to describe it.
Of course that doesn’t make them lose worth as a human being, only an idiot whoops I mean intellectually impaired person would think that.
You tend to come across as being rather dense in your posts. People with those types of disabilites are on a spectrum from almost completely deaf and/or blind to relatively well functioning with only a slight handicap. Also you should note that there are ways to improve their condition e.g hearing aids can and do improve the disability experienced by the hearing impaired. Using deaf or blind to describe them is rather pointless when the disability is only partial.
Actually your point IS exactly what I am saying, if you have 0 ability to see blind is a better term than visually impaired, visually impaired implies partial sight. The same goes for hearing. I’m talking about the idea that the words blind or deaf by themselves, even applied to someone who has zero ability is offensive or something.
I have a friend who is blind, and describes herself as blind. I have a family member who is completely deaf in one ear, and describes herself as unilaterally deaf.
If blind and deaf are offensive terms now, it’s news to me and I would guess news to them, as well.
My nephew is deaf, and all his deaf friends and classmates call themselves deaf. Deaf is not considered derogatory by the deaf.
You’re just wrong when you say that “deaf” is a derogatory term and that deaf people prefer to be called hearing impaired. They don’t. Hearing impaired is a different word that generally doesn’t mean fully deaf. If you can understand spoken words under normal conditions, you’re not deaf.
Note of course that lots of deaf people aren’t stone deaf. Many have some hearing. What makes you deaf is the language barrier. If you can’t use a telephone you’re deaf, even if you can lip-read well enough to understand people if you can see their faces when they’re talking.
I find it interesting that it’s OK to call African Americans “people of color” but not “colored people.”
The polite term for African Americans has changed many times over the years, just during my lifetime. When I was a child, it was perfectly acceptable to call them “colored people” or “Negroes,” and the N-word was seen as rude, but not obscene as it is today. In the 60’s, the proper term became “Blacks,” and suddenly the former designations were considered offensive. Next came “Afro-Americans,” and suddenly “Blacks” was out of fashion. Later, the term was changed to “African Americans,” or “People of Color,” where it remains today, with all the former terms in disrepute.
Basically, this is political correctness run amuck, imho, with a new dash of Newspeak thrown in every few years. And that’s why the terms “blind” and “deaf” are considered derogatory, even if they describe perfectly the condition of their sufferers.
I think that the use of these terms to describe clueless behavior of people with no sight or hearing impairments has tainted them a bit.
“How could you not hear that, are you deaf?” to someone who fails to respond, “what are you, blind?” to someone who has failed to notice a sign, etc. It’s like how calling someone “retarded” for doing something dumb is insulting to people with Down syndrome.
Not sure where you are getting the idea that the phrase is derogatory. My son attended the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind. He is blind, both retinas detached so blind fits him better than visually impaired.
Except that here in the real world, “black”, “blind” and “deaf” are not considered derogatory. You imagined them to be derogatory, but they actually aren’t.
I have retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a catch-all term for a number of degenerative retinal pathologies characterized broadly by loss of night vision and peripheral vision, often, but not necessarily, leading to complete loss of vision.
Because my visual field is less than 20 degrees (probably more like 5 by now–haven’t measured it lately), I am legally blind. I describe myself variously as “blind”, “visually impaired”, or “having low vision”, depending on circumstances and on my mood. I know other people on the low vision spectrum, some of them with no visual perception at all. Don’t know any that consider “blind” to be an insult when applied to them, but context is everything.
Among the people with vision problems I know or have talked to, the thing that irks them is having their blindness called out as their only defining feature. “Carrie, who is blind, does x or y or z” is fine; “she’s the blind girl” is not so okay when it is used as the sole descriptor (there’s nothing about her you need to know except that she’s blind; the sum total of her existence and personality and life is that she can’t see).
I don’t think any of those words are derogatory, nor, for my money, are most of the other terms I mentioned in my post. The OP questioned why “blind” and “deaf” are derogatory and that’s what I was responding to. There was a time when nobody would have asked such a silly question, because everyone knew those words were descriptive and not pejorative. But times change, and the tradition in modern culture is to get offended as often as possible at as many things as possible. So terms that once were accepted as bland descriptors now become controversial.
I don’t think the words per se are derogatory but they tend to pigeonhole people as slash2K says.
“Hi Marcie, I’d like you to meet my friend George. He is a writer, and as a hobby he plays classical piano. He is from Chicago, and now lives in suburban Washington. George, meet Marcie. She’s blind.”
Terms such as *crippled *and mute have met similar fates and are now considered offensive.