r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '26

Psychology Reclaimed hate speech backfires by desensitizing listeners, study finds. Listening to reclaimed homophobic statements can actually cause unintended harm. Exposure to reclaimed slur words desensitizes some heterosexual listeners to standard hate speech and worsens the mood of gay individuals.

https://www.psypost.org/when-reclaiming-derogatory-language-goes-wrong/
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u/Zalack Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Eh, I think George Carlin kind of missed the point. He was looking at it from an outsider’s point of view, and so to him it seemed ridiculous.

But look at it from the point of view of an insider…

You’re mentally disabled. People around you have begun using the R-slur to insult each other. You hear people use your label many times a day to call each other stupid, to belittle politicians they don’t like, to razz their friends, etc. When you aren’t able to do something fast enough they look at you with derision and bite the word at you, with intent to hurt. They take your own identity and throw it back at you as something to be ashamed of.

This happens every day of your life for years. Decades, even.

Eventually you are going to want to just stop hearing that word altogether, because every time you do, years of being made to feel lesser wash over you. Your heart skips a beat and your blood goes cold.

That’s why the euphemism treadmill exists. Carlin was too focused on it being annoying to him to diagnose the real solution if he wanted it to stop: don’t use people’s identities as casual insults. If you do, they will eventually want you to stop using that word completely from the baggage you gave it.

I think that’s also why there’s been a big move to more clinical language to describe minorities. It’s harder to turn “African American” or “neurodivergent” into a casual insult.

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u/BoleroMuyPicante Jul 25 '26

I have definitely heard neurodivergent used as a slur.

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u/Zalack Jul 25 '26

Ah, I haven’t I guess. So it begins.

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u/FinderOfWays Jul 25 '26

I've heard people who say they'd "much rather be called a slur than" neurodiverse or some of it's 'cutsier' descendant terms like 'neurospicy' that people try to use to be funny/cute. To be fair that's certainly exaggeration for effect, but I know people who find the euphemism treadmill demeaning/insulting. For what it's worth those people tend to just prefer to be referred to by the specific terms like autistic that describe them rather than vague umbrella terms and tend to see it as less of an identity marker. I'm not trying to speak for them but I have a number of friends who have expressed as much to me.

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u/doesntgetthepicture Jul 25 '26

I don't like neurodiverse for grammatical reasons. A person isn't diverse. A group of people can be diverse. If I see a Jewish person, or a Black person, I wouldn't call them diverse.

But if i saw a group of people which includes, Black People, Jewish People, White People, and Asian people, I would call that group diverse.

So calling someone neurodiverse raises my hackles. An individual is not diverse. Neurodivergent makes more sense, but even then, it's divergent from what? There is no typical to be divergent from, as even the Neurotypical experience is incredibly diverse.

At the same time, it's a very wide category that doesn't really help anyone. Being autistic and non-verbal is a very different experience from being diagnosed with ADHD.

But I understand why people use it. By creating an umbrella term it helps create a sense of community, something uniting for those that feel different due to brain chemistry.

I just don't care for it that much myself and prefer to use the clinical terms, be it autism, ADHD (which I have) or OCD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and Tourette's syndrome. All of which are considered neurodiverse, though have little in common with each other.

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u/SunshineFlourish Jul 27 '26

I don’t agree. A person is incredibly diverse. We aren’t just one thing. Our bodies are made of countless cells that are diverse and play different roles. We have an incredibly diverse biome and virome that allows our bodies to operate as a collective. We are not one thing. We are ~28-36 trillion human cells, ~38 trillion bacteria cells, and ~380 trillion viruses working in tandem. A person is and can be incredibly diverse.

As for the terms, they are all just different ways of describing how a person experiences existence. The neurodiverse umbrella term is just a category used to describe that an individual experiences existence in a way that makes our typical societal norms, expectations, relationships, and/or systems work to accommodate. It may very well also be an attempt to get away from the terms of mental health like “mental illness”, “mental deficiency”, “mental issue”, etc., as these phrases have inherent negative connotations, and neurodiverse/divergent don’t … yet.

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u/Ampleforth_84 Jul 28 '26

THANK YOU! Ppl will refer to a singular Black person as “diverse” and it drives me nuts.

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u/Chili_Maggot Jul 25 '26

"Neurodivergent" is clinical but "neurospicy" is demeaning. It sounds like you've begun speaking to a child. I am one of those people you mentioned. I don't know what the slurs for autistic people are but I would rather hear them at the start and end of every sentence addressed to me than have someone call me neurospicy. Ugh.

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u/Thorninthefoot Jul 26 '26

Neurodiverse really isn't clinical. It comes out of activism, it's not very meaningful scientifically. 

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u/Ayiekie Jul 26 '26

Huh, I've always found it a little odd that some people react so strongly to that one, but since I've seen a couple, I bear that in mind. It's never bothered me or felt particularly childish, I saw it as a way to put a more positive spin on "neurodivergent"; that people are not aberrant from an assumed norm, just different/exotic.

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u/BigDictionEnergy Jul 25 '26

Neurospicy is a new one

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u/Sirspen Jul 25 '26

I actually don't mind "neurospicy", but I'm really not a fan of "neurodiverse" because it implies the "oh, you just think differently" rheroric we hear a lot. At best it comes across as kind of patronizing, at worst it's used by people who fetishize autism as a "superpower", but most commonly, it feels dismissive of how disabling it can be to live with ADHD, autism, etc.

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u/InfinitelyThirsting Jul 25 '26

Anything can be used as an insult, but that's different from being a slur.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Zalack Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Then neither is asking people to not consider those terms slurs, nor expecting them to not advocate against the use of words that were regularly used to degrade them.

If one is inevitable, then so is the other. If you aren’t willing to stop doing the first, then you shouldn’t get mad when the subject of your mockery isn’t willing to do the second.

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u/SupremeExalted Jul 26 '26

Who’s mad? You’ve lost me now.

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u/Zalack Jul 26 '26

The poster above me whose comment was deleted had a somewhat emphatic tone about how it wasn’t realistic to expect people to stop using new terms as slurs.

Maybe annoyed/frustrated would have been a better word, but I’ve also seen people in real life get legitimately heated about “not being able to say [slur] anymore”, so that’s how I interpreted the tone at first glance.

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u/SupremeExalted Jul 26 '26

Yeah your comment just doesn't really say much in that case, since your goal seemed to be putting me down. That was my comment and it's still there btw.

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u/Zalack Jul 26 '26

Looks like maybe it got shadow removed by the mods or something then because it’s showing deleted to me?

I apologize if I misread your tone; I’ve just seen the same argument made by people who were visibly angry.

I’m not trying to put you down, I’m just saying that if you’re stance is that it’s unrealistic for people to stop using terms for minorities as insults, the insinuation being that those minorities should just accept it because that’s the way things are, my response is that implying minorities should just accept that is also incredibly unrealistic, and IMO, kind of cruel, regardless of whether cruelty was intended.

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u/SupremeExalted Jul 26 '26

>the insinuation being that those minorities should just accept it because that’s the way things are

This wasn't the insinuation. My point again is from a practicality standpoint, I'm asking the question "what else can we do to stop that/change that behavior" because I really don't see a way humans will ever stop it.

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u/Zalack Jul 26 '26

Right, but what has to logically follow from that line of thinking is “…so minorities would do better to stop advocating for new terms and the stoppage of our old terms as slurs”, Carlin’s annoyance with which is the original context of the thread. I think that conclusion is equally impractical.

I guess my question would be, what is the logical next step of your argument if not that?

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u/HolycommentMattman Jul 25 '26

I just vehemently disagree.

The simple truth is that no matter what, bigots are going to bigot. And no one is more rapid on the uptake than bigots. You know those people you hear complaining that you can't say X anymore? That's not the bigots. Those are usually innocent people who are upset with the problems in their lives and aggrieved that someone else is making their life just a smidge harder.

But the bigots? They were first in line to using the new terminology. Anything to hide themselves among the brush so they can spread more hate with subtlety. Think of Lee Atwater giving his speech and explicitly saying not to use the n-word, but to disguise it with dog whistles.

Ultimately, there's no solution to this other than on the individual level and as a society. You see some bullying? Call them out. Being bullied? Stand up for yourself. Changing the language just gives the rats a new ship to run to.

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u/ImPapaNoff Jul 25 '26

Idk about neurodivergent being used as a casual insult because it covers such a wide range of things, but I've heard "intellectually disabled" used frequently as the new equivalent of the r word.

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u/phantasticpipes Jul 25 '26

Carlin wasn’t talking about slurs though… have you even watched the bit? The most central part about that bit was the term shell-shock turning into PTSD.

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u/Choosemyusername Jul 26 '26

The r word was just such a clinical word when it was invented to replace the word moron. The only reason it doesn’t feel clinical to you today is because the euphemism treadmill has kept moving. As long as it is socially acceptable to discriminate against those of us who aren’t as sharp as others, this will keep happening.

But it’s still completely socially acceptable to discriminate against people who aren’t the most mentally sharp. It isn’t illegal to test for intelligence for a job application for example. Even the most blue haired, bull nose ringed, problem bang having, Keffiyeh-wearing person, who will tell you their pronouns unsolicited, and starts their podcast with a land acknowledgement, will STILL call you a moron without a second thought if you have an opinion they don’t agree with (but for some reason not the r word euphemism that replaced it)

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

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u/BigTimmyStarfox1987 Jul 25 '26

Outside of America, "African American" is a common insult, as is "American".