In a current speechDonald Trump used the language of intelligence or mental disability as a weapon against Kamala Harris. And he used it similar language about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz during a TV appearance.
At a rally on September 29, 2024 in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump told his supporters that “Joe Biden was mentally impaired.” Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And in case you give it some thought, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed something like this to occur to our country.” He made similar comments at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, that very same weekend.
Disability rights advocate have been quick to indicate that Trump's language is “ableist,” meaning he assumes that individuals with disabilities are in some way less priceless than people without disabilities.
Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update host Colin Jost is attempting to hit back joked that “I can’t believe Trump admitted he lost the debate to a mentally disabled person,” repeating the identical ableist premise.
And on a Fox Nation broadcast on September 30, 2024, hosted by Kellyanne Conway, Trump called Walz “a total idiot.”.”
Although that is the most recent round of private attacks centering on an absence of intelligence, it is way from unusual. Derogatory statements about intelligence agencies are a staple of bipartisan political campaigns—and in addition extend to much of American history and contemporary culture.
The value of an individual
Donald Trump has repeatedly called out Kamala Harris – and others: “low IQ” and recently referred to Jewish voters as “Fool” they need to help elect Harris. Harold Myerson of The American Prospect calls Trump a “silly idiot,” And political cartoons Portray Trump as a buffoon.
While people often stop to think and discuss race or gender, comments about intelligence typically don't receive much sustained attention. People either agree with Trump or laugh with Jost without occupied with what it means to be called “low IQ,” “mentally impaired,” or “idiot.”
For me, as a mother of a toddler with Down syndrome, these comments remind me of how she is consistently categorized and labeled as deficient based on various IQ tests in comparison with so-called “normal” children.
And as a mother and a Disability Studies Scholar As I write a book about cognitive disability, I do know that intelligence has all the time been defined otherwise in several societies. You cannot use a number on an IQ test to obviously categorize an individual.
In the West there was no definitive distinction between before the mid-Nineteenth century “Madman,” the “idiot,” and the “idiot.”.” While lots of these individuals were institutionalized or, within the case of, committed The brother of the creator Jane Austento live with one other family, it was more common to maintain them at home and integrate them into the larger community.
Much of this modified within the 1840s, when Adolphe QueteletThe Belgian mathematician, astronomer and statisticianHe sketched the body – complete with measurements – of the “normal” man. While he focused only on the physical body, the concept of the norm, reinforced by the rise of statistics as a discipline, became increasingly essential when it got here to mental function.
As statistics became mainstream and other people began to set norms or imagine what the common person should look and think, statisticians and laypeople increasingly relied on it the bell curvea useful but imprecise technique of measuring all styles of traits, chief amongst them intelligence.
Forced sterilization, institutionalization
In the Eighties, intelligence, now a trait quantified by IQ tests, was used to “prove” the inferiority of people whose behavior, manner of speaking, and even considering threatened the social order. The Characterization was a part of the speculation of eugenicsby which people were classified as inferior prevented from – or actively prevented from – having children and in some cases from living in any respect.
As Historian Douglas Baynton points out in his 2013 essay Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American HistoryMany would-be immigrants were turned away by officials at Ellis Island in the event that they had “some mental abnormality,” be it a cognitive disability, a stammer, and even depression.
The language becomes much more horrific when race comes into play Racial science In the early Nineteenth century, each the “idiot” skull and the “African” skull resembled the orangutan greater than Shakespeare or Napoleon. Africans and other people who were considered “idiots” were seen as animalistic and unreasonable and needed the protection of their wards or owners.
At the start of the twentieth century, the identical ideas about racial and cognitive inferiority emerged Forced sterilization of ladies with mental disabilities in addition to women of color, lots of whom are identified as “unsuitable“to bring the subsequent generation of American children into the world.
In addition to sterilization, those deemed to have low IQs or to be mentally disabled were housed in unsanitary facilities positioned in locations removed from populated urban centers. Invisible and unsuspected, these people were held in places like this Willowbrook State Development Center on Staten Island in New York Bay, where they often had no clothing or sanitation and were mistreated.
Institutions still exist today where individuals with mental disabilities are accommodated. The US doesn't have any Education system where people like my daughter can learn each day neurotypical Children – Children whose brains function in ways which might be considered normal.
North Carolina State Documents Collection/State Library of North Carolina
Special education classrooms are disproportionately stuffed with students of color. Behavioral disorders are mostly diagnosed. These students often find yourself within the School-to-prison pipeline. These classrooms show how something as “simple” as an IQ test – something as innocuous as a label – can find yourself condemning the nation’s children to a lifetime of segregation and social oppression.
Not just Trump's words
Temperatures are high during this presidential election. But Trump's words about Harris, while extraordinarily crude and ugly for a presidential candidate, are sometimes present in derogatory descriptions of each side. These phrases are a part of a culture that uses intelligence as a strategy to measure an individual's price.
Words are powerful: they will either, just like the literature I teach, expand perspectives on the world, or they will serve to bolster limiting ideologies that perpetuate oppression.
Terms like “low IQ,” “idiot,” and “mentally impaired” have a traumatic history that many individuals with cognitive disabilities, lower-class people, and minorities live with to this present day. I imagine politicians and their constituents should understand the destructive history of those terms – and think twice before using words like these as a simple strategy to attack one another.
This story has been updated to incorporate comment from Donald Trump about Tim Walz.
Kathleen Béres Rogers doesn’t work for, advise, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic employment.
image credit : theconversation.com