# Why did I get an official warning for supposedly insulting Forrest Gump? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [October 5, 2017, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-i-get-an-official-warning-for-supposedly-insulting-forrest-gump/797995 "2017-10-05T02:25:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 47
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2017, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-i-get-an-official-warning-for-supposedly-insulting-forrest-gump/797995/47 "2017-10-05T11:11:55Z")
As the person who first objected to **Shagnasty’s** use of the word, I think it’s important to bring some context into this. **Shagnasty’s** original use of the word was in this context: > [@In Forrest Gump, what disease did Jenny have?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-forrest-gump-what-disease-did-jenny-have/45432/89): > > It really doesn’t matter what the book says because the screenwriters completely rewrote the entire story to be a montage of late 20th century history as seen through a retards eyes. and then doubled down with: > [@In Forrest Gump, what disease did Jenny have?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-forrest-gump-what-disease-did-jenny-have/45432/106): > > I love the movie Forrest Gump but it has no relevance to anything in real life. He is just a retard that just happens to fall into every available opportunity by chance. The reason he was disabled is never given but I assume it was some kind of delivery complication rather than genetic. The whole point of the story isn’t about him. It is just a vehicle to showcase American history. **Shagnasty** didn’t just use the word, he managed to use it in the most offensive way possible, by reducing a human being down to a single trait and using a word that signals the authors disgust at that trait. What’s more, for all of **Shagnasty’s** professed love of the film, he sure doesn’t seem to understand it at all. The entire point of the film was that Forrest would continually be misjudged by the people around him when they first met him because of prejudice against his intellectual disability. But that as people got to know him better, they realized that his intellectual disability was only a part of his character and his kindness, loyalty, moral strength and physical abilities were far more important and what made him into a whole human being. By what I see from **Shagnasty’s** retelling, it seems like he was _never_ able to look past the intellectual disability and, because of that prejudice, ascribed all that happened to Forrest to mere chance rather than active agency on Forrest’s part. The reason why that word is offensive isn’t because some secret cabal got together one day and started marking arbitrary words off a list, it’s because they cause real harm to real people. Imagine if you were someone suffering from an intellectual disability reading that post. You’re reminded once again of just how many people are unwilling to look past your intellectual disability and see you as a mere collection of stereotypes they’ve cobbled together from awful media depictions. And they’re reminded that, even for all Forrest managed to accomplish, there are still some people who continue to label him solely by his intellectual disability so what chance do they possible have of transcending that label? In my original post, I’d simply assumed that **Shagnasty** simply misspoke and would apologize about how his use of the word gave off the wrong impression. His later post has be suspecting that he’s genuinely bigoted against intellectually disabled people and felt the need to threadshit that to the world in a topic that wasn’t even about Forrest in the first place. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-i-get-an-official-warning-for-supposedly-insulting-forrest-gump/797995)._