nick007 wrote:
ToughDiamond wrote:
This article was one of the few I could find that actually questioned person-first - most of the others were by staunch person-first advocates:
https://www.autismparentingmagazine.com ... son-first/I was surprised to see that parents prefer person-first. One reason seems to be their difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that their child is autistic. I suppose defensiveness is often ingrained into language like that. Whenever there's a significant degree of stigma or suspicion towards a group, language seems to get altered as some kind of attempt at a defense. But when I see that, I usually feel suspicious, because it's essentially an attempt to brainwash. I much prefer neutral, objective talking, and I soon get tired of having to remove the propaganda from everything I hear in order to find out what's really going on.
Thanx for finding & posting the link. It explained both sides of this debate as well as the history of person-first language which is quite relevant to this discussion.
It seems to me that getting hung-up on the language phrasing with autism as well as other various disabilities, issues, & problems sometimes detracts from focusing on more important issues & aspects. It's much more important to find ways to offer support & assistance to struggling autistic people & the parents of autistic kids than worrying about how autistic people chose to identify & refer to themselves & what's offensive & not offensive to them. I'm NOT complaining about this thread or any posts in it. It's not uncommon for the media, politicians, medical community, & various support systems to overy focus on language while neglecting & ignoring the struggles various people & groups face in their day to day lives.
I think a certain amount of discussion of this stuff is healthy, but by the same token, the changing of terms for arbitrary reasons is how the US got to the point where people think that it's sensible to refer to African descendants with no connection to the US as being African American. It literally makes no sense, and up until recently, they had gone from some extremely racist language to negro, which was then considered to be too offensive, so civil rights leaders started to push for Black, which eventually got replaced by African American, even though, it's kind of problematic in the sense that you've got people that are referring to people like Idris Elba as being African American, even though he's English. And you see the same sort of thing in other areas, the literal only reason that it is offensive to refer to various Asian people as being Oriental, is that at some point we collectively decided that the term is only for things. That's it.
Personally, I don't have a dog in those particular fights, but the eventual term tends to be the one when the group gained enough power and representation within society that playing word games was no longer any sort of desirable thing to do. In the case of African American, it's kind of interesting to see people starting to push back on it for being kind of silly and racist.
With a few exceptions, most of the time, this is just a distraction. It's not that dissimilar from the bit of The Life of Brian with the myriad names involving different combinations of people's, front and Judea being combined to have different groups that all think the others are splitters.
Today, 7:30 am
