It started when I read “And Yet” to the class. Several stanzas read:

North on Baldwin Road, I walk my everyday walk.
Bottom of the hill, a dog barks, boy yells, “Hey mister.
Hey mister. Hey mister.” We’ve traded names a dozen times.

Then “Hey retard. Retard. Retard.”
Schoolyard to street corner: words
slung by the pocketful.

Crip skin marked,
white skin not.

And then towards the end of the poem:

Crip skin,
white skin:
which stories
do I tell the best,
and which
rarely begin—
turn, flutter,
settle?

Several students read “crip” to mean “Crips and Bloods,” which lead to a branching conversation about multiple meanings, rather than working toward a single “correct” meaning. And someone asked about issues of appropriation, since many of the disabled people using the word crip are white. Are white disabled people misusing or stealing the word from a particular African American context? I left campus that night high on ideas, connections, what it means to listen to readers listening and using my work.

Out of this mix, I wrote the following post to the Queer Poetics class blog:

Notes on the word crip

I left the Queer Poetics class and Mills full of the poetry and politics of crip etymologies, appropriation, and simultaneity. I asked Rebekah [the teacher] if I could write a blog post to both thank all of you for our plentiful conversation and extend it.

I know where crip comes from in disability communities—the long histories of folks who have had cripple used against us. We have taken the word into our own mouths, rolled it around, shortened it, spoken it with fondness, humor, irony, recognition. And yet I can’t remember the first moment I heard the shortened, reclaimed version (nor, for that matter, the longer pain-infused original), when I adopted it as my own, started calling myself a queer crip. What are the specifics to this history and etymology? Who said it first in which spaces; how did it catch on; when was it first written down as a way of inscribing pride and resistance; how did it come to be passed from person to person over the years so that now I find myself thinking, “But didn’t crip just arise organically from disability communities, movements, cultures?” These are the questions to map out personal and communal etymologies that have very little to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, often thought of as the final authority on the history and etymology of English words.

At the same time I know close to nothing about the etymologies of Crips in gang culture and African American communities of Los Angeles. And so I went to Google, which of course can be the beginning of inquiry but rarely the end. I read several historical accounts of the founding and early years of the club, the organization, the social and activist network that became the Crips. There is a good handful of stories about where the name comes from. One story tells that it’s an acronym for “Continuous Revolution in Progress.” Another that it comes from an associative trail of names rich enough for a poem of its own—the Baby Avenues morphing to the Crib Avenues morphing to the Crips. A third that it comes from an old Asian-American woman reporting to the police that she had been mugged by young Black men who were carrying walking sticks and whom she called cripples or, in accented English, maybe crips. And there are additional versions beyond these three. Because I read these stories on the Web rather than learning them in community, I have no idea how each of them may be embedded (or not) in communal and personal etymologies rooted in specific neighborhoods, historical moments, and experiences of racist violence.

But what is clear to me is that both uses of the word crip have long community histories of their own. Neither have been appropriated, borrowed, stolen, misused. Disabled people, particularly white disabled people, who call ourselves crips aren’t twisting an African American history for our gain or pleasure. Black boys and men inside the Crips aren’t referencing a word loaded with ableism. The two uses, histories, and etymologies aren’t akin to white people wearing our hair in dreadlocks; trans people claiming their transness as a disability or birth defect in order to explain and create empathy for their embodiment; or non-Native peoples romanticizing, simplifying, practicing, and assuming ownership of Native spiritual traditions. Instead crip and Crips trace simultaneous etymologies.

What do we learn when we lay them side-by-side? What do they share in common, and where do they diverge? Who has bodily, community, political connections to both traces/words? How does gun violence and injury link the two? And finally inside a poem, what do we as readers and/or writers gain or lose by bringing all the histories and etymologies to bear on a single word or by making choices among them?

Thank you for a plentiful conversation that embraced my poems and spun off from them, leaving me with unanswered questions that demand my writerly attention.

One of the points Petra makes, and rightly so, is that I misquote the passage that I’m analyzing. I want to correct that. So here’s the whole passage from Neil (pulled from a longer prose poem called “The Question of Cripple”):

“Neil writes:

when you call us crips
I can’t see or feel your ‘wink’
when you refer to me as a vegetable

or im vegetative
i feel more at ease

is there any humor in crip

maybe wry crips

is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public
as african americans is known

not yet

then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use
of oppressive term for ownership of power

this is my poorly developed opening discussion
even tho im nitwit –not without wit–”

So that’s the whole quote with line breaks. And now I want to go for the nuanced reading. (For a poet, I’m quite a literalist; I miss metaphors and puns and layered nuance all the time. It’s one of my weaknesses as a reader.) I’m struck this time by:

Neil’s playfulness in “wry crips,” which was also the name of a disabled women’s (I think?) theater/storytelling group in the 1980s in the Bay Area, and “nitwit.” This wide ranging exploration of cripple includes this playing with language.

“Our” and “ourselves” can be tricky, elusive words. Who is referred to in the line, “is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public”? I know why I assumed that “our history” means disability history and that disability history is being conceived of as white. My assumptions came partly from the juxtaposition of the very next line, “as afrrican americans is known,” making a simile between “our” history and African-American history. And my assumptions came partly from observing myself and other white activists/cultural workers all too often use “our” to mean white and to make similes with the experiences/histories of people of color. But still in Neil’s line, which singular history is “our history”?

The line “not yet” sits all by itself. Is it meaning to say that “our history” isn’t yet known in the ways African- American history is already known? Clearly that was my earlier reading, and part of my contention was that I don’t believe African-American history is known in such a definitive way. But could “not yet” also be questioning how well both histories are known and undercutting the simile that precedes it? Possibly.

Could I read “not yet” forward, and have it mean that we (who is this we?) haven’t yet borrowed cripple as “a nigger equivalent”? Possibly.

And finally the question, “is it?,” is the most ambiguous two words in a passage characterized by Neil’s spare and dense use of words. I want to explore that question, want to know how different kinds of hate language are connected or not or both. I need the word equivalent to be interrogated. Right here, right now, as a reader, I want/need more from Neil and Petra to entirely trust those two ambiguous words, “is it.” Neil writes in his response to my earlier post, “In the real world sense, would it be too much to suggest that the word “crip” comes from “nigger” a kind of ‘shorthand’ a reference no matter how thoughtless used commonly. Is it thoughtless? or is it a powerful statement? This is what im asking.” If crip does come from nigger, how do I read the word equivalent? How do I tie the very different histories of the two words together? And in this formulation, what happens to people who have been bruised by both words? Inside the book/poem, I have to strain to read/hear all this nuance.

In the end, I am a greedy, literal reader: I know that about myself. I can also be a grateful reader. And I hope my gratitude for Cripple Poetics and for Neil and Petra’s work is also clear and present.

–Crip Chick is so right on about intersectionality, there’s nothing left for me to say.

–What I think about the construction of the phrase “R-word” is completely influenced by Emily Bernard’s incredible essay, “Teaching the N-Word.” I’m wildly ambivalent about the turning of hate language into euphemisms–n-word, b-word, f-word, and now r-word–that somehow are to protect marginalized communities from the pain of hearing those words yet again and privileged peoples from having to repeat the violence. There are two pieces to my ambivalence.

1) The violence has already been done. The damage won’t be rectified by a refusal to say the words. In our activism and analysis around hate language, we need to be vigilant and conscious about triggers and re-creating the power dynamics put in motion by hate language, but I’m not sure that euphemistic substitutions for hate language is a good stand-in for vigilance and consciousness. At the bottom of this part of my ambivalence is a sense that the “r-word” construction is designed largely to protect those of of us who have been battered by the word retard and by the institutional, material, and attitudinal realities that come with it. As one of those people bruised by the dismissiveness, hatred, and physical violence of retard, I don’t need protection; rather I need compassion, rage, allies, and an end to ableism.

2) The “r-word” construction mirrors the “n-word” construction, which precedes it. I don’t know from where the “n-word” construction originates nor what mix of opinions/feelings/thoughts Black people have about it. But whatever the origins, the mirroring of the two constructions communicates that retard and nigger function in the same ways as hate language and carry the same violence and that all the repulsion and outrage white people supposedly feel upon hearing the word nigger should also be felt in the same measure by non-disabled people upon hearing retard. Here again is analogy failing to do the deeper work of intersectionality. Certainly racist hate language and ableist hate language share much in common. (The ways the word monkey has been used against disabled people (both poc and white) and people of color (both disabled and non-disabled) highlight these commonalities.) But there is so much historical and present-day difference between the usage of retard and the usage of nigger and such a lack of real anti-racist work among white disability activists that the analogy reads to me like white people appropriating the political work of Black activists yet again. The analogy sidelines Black disabled people’s experience, and assumes that disabled people are white and Black people are non-disabled. And the question isn’t asked: how does the snarl of hate sound in the lives of disabled people of color?

–Call me a crank but the Special Olympics “Stop the R- Word Campaign” makes me pause. Don’t get me wrong, organizing around retard as hate speech and even protesting Tropic Thunder as a specific cultural example of the use of ableist, as well as racist, hate speech is important work. But since when is the Special Olympics about justice for cognitively disabled people? For many years that organization has been one of the biggest creators of super crip images–that is “heroic” disabled people “inspiring” audiences with their “bravery”–and and have often fanned the flames of pity with its charity-model fundraising. Even the name Special Olympics sets up a charity-model context, rather than a social-justice-model context. I believe that an organization that frames disabled people as inspirational and/or objects of pity is also setting the stage for the unquestioned use of retard. If the Special Olympics is serious about its r-word campaign, it has a lot of internal work to do.

–The image below coupled with text from the Special Olympics website that says, “Historically, we have seen the elimination of other negative stigmatizing words through awareness and education campaigns and societal pressure. We no longer tolerate calling blacks, Jews, Chinese, physically handicapped, homosexuals, or Hispanics by the words nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic, respectively,” frankly pisses me off. I want to say, “Oh, really.” What presumption to try to persuade people to take action regarding ableist hate speech by claiming that the the struggle against other kinds of hate speech has already been won. Presumptuous, naive, and privileged, I say. And to suggest that the Black, presumably disabled women in this image don’t hear the word nigger, at least occasionally, while using their images in the struggle against retard is so suspect on so many levels.

Two dark skinned young women stand next to each other dressed in shorts and tank tops with medals hanging around their necks and smiles on their faces. The headline next to them reads, 'R-word is hate speech.' Protest poster found at http://www.selfadvocacy.org/pdf/SpecialOlympics_ProtestSigns2.pdf

That said, I have been so caught by Neil and Petra’s conversation about the word cripple in Cripple Poetics. The book starts with these wonderful lines from Neil:

“How can I speak of cripple and not mention the wind.
How can I speak of crippled and not mention the heart.
Heart, wind, song, flower, space, time, love. To leave
these absent is to leave cripple in stark terms.
As if we were made of medical parts and not flesh and bone.

There is always wind in my cripple….

Cripple is not extraordinary or ordinary.
Cripple is a full plate….”

Cripple is such an an ambivalent word, ugly word, a bully’s word, an insider’s word, a word that’s used as metaphor all the time. (For instance, after 9/11 we heard repeatedly how the attacks were meant to cripple the U.S. The examples of this kind of metaphoric usage abound.) Neil and Petra take all of this up.

The poet who writes, “There is always wind in my cripple,” later says “I don’t use the word crip to describe myself. I don’t wish to take on its painful history.”

Petra’s poem “Crip Language” addresses the stark violence of that word:

“Kruppel Cripple Fickle Tickle
playground ground go round again
last out on the line
Cripple Fucking Kruppel Madchen
tickle fickle root…
Cripple Ripple Cripple Ripple
stick that stick across your feet
fall on down
fall on down
that stick is harder than your bone”

Yet–and because–Petra also says, “In terms of word sound, I personally do not like crip–I like cripple, rippling across my tongue, little explosions, waves in my mouth. Liquid, and reminding me of Kruppel, my German word…. I am not sure the English crip has the same richness, at least not for me: it’s too short, too hip.”

I adore this tangle, dipping down into association, emotion, history, metaphor, not arriving at any one question or answer. At the same time Neil uses an analogy to explain some of what he’s thinking/feeling about cripple that makes me stop and and need to expand a dialogue that’s fairly single issue and narrowly focused. Neil writes, “is our [disability] history similarly known to ourselves or to the public as african americans [history] is known. not yet. then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use of oppressive term for ownership of power.”

Leslie wrote to me in her e-mail: “What that question [about African-American history] assumes: that African Americans’ histories of oppression and resistance are known, acknowledged, and, to some degree, understood. It also implies that crip history is not, in part, African American history; it erases the stories of African Americans with dis/abilities. The inclusion of both of these questions–the broad assumptive question [about history] and the delicate truth-seeking question [about the relationship between cripple and nigger]–could be read as documenting a specific moment in both Neil’s internal dialog and discussions happening across Disability Studies. Or, it could be read as an irresponsible choice to reinforce the perception that intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and dis/ability is merely tangential to dis/ability culture, and to crip-culture building.”

I so want it to be the former–a moment in a bigger dialogue that’s moving toward deep intersectionality. But for it to cleanly and clearly be that moment, I would need the book to be more intentionally multi-issued; for issues of race to be woven into who the “our” of “our [disability] history” is (white disabled people?) and who the “we” of “why do we borrow a nigger equivalent” is (white disabled people?); for acknowledgment of white privilege to be part of the finding of connection between different kinds of ugly words that arise from different histories and systems of oppression. I need Petra and Neil and white disability culture (myself included) to really explore Neil’s two word question: why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?. And analogy and metaphor doesn’t in any way function in this context as deep exploration.

I want to pause here and reflect upon how miserably often white activists make analogy to African-American community, culture, and activist struggle as if the Black Civil Rights movement was entirely successful and is essentially finished and is now simply the measure of other social justice movements. This dynamic serves both deflect attention away from present-day racism and mask the actual role the Black Civil Rights movement had in giving rise to and feeding other liberation movements in the U.S. Of course this reflection isn’t directed specifically at Cripple Poetics, even as it is one of the perspectives through which I’m reading the dialogue about cripple.

I mean these criticisms in the best possible way. As Leslie wrote near the end of her e-mail: “Oh there’s so much to love in this book! Space travel. Disabled food, disabled clothes. ‘Bad crips’ making out under the guise of dance performance…. But isn’t it also a gesture of love for the community and culture that Neil and Petra co-create to keep pushing, asking questions, calling one another on our shit?”

In the end, I can easily say Cripple Poetics provokes me, and that’s a good thing

Early in the book in the form of a personal ad, Neil describes himself as a “handsome romantic 53 yr old spastic revolutionary with vision.” The pairing of the words spastic and revolutionary has made me catch my breath and hold it, letting it out ever so slowly, as I roll those words around. Spastic is one of those one word metaphors: the phrases “spazing out” or “he’s such a spaz”–meaning uncoordinated, incompetent, foolish, to be discounted–have currency because of cultural and institutional assumptions about bodies that are spastic, bodies that move in uncontrolled, jerky ways, muscles tense, constricted, spasming. If those bodies were appreciated as sexy, beautiful, desirable, then “she’s so spastic” would be a compliment rather than a put down.

The words lame, black, crazy, gay, retarded, fag function in the same way. They have become generalized put downs or associations with badness/negativity precisely because the bodies they describe are pitied, marginalized, and/or hated. Of course many of these words are also used as slurs in primary ways: fag used to bully/harass gay and bi men/boys specifically, crazy used specifically to shame people who have psych disabilities.

A slogan like “Lame is sexy” or “Black is beautiful” takes much of its power from not only an affirmation of identity but also from reversing the metaphor. This is the context and function of “handsome spastic revolutionary” and has struck me so because it strikes so close. Even with all my politics about using the ugly words as insider language (LGBT peoples using queer, disabled people using crip, Black people using nigga, however ambivalently with a lot of community disagreement in all these examples), I have always ducked spastic. I’ve tried not to pay attention to it; I’ve not challenged its metaphoric use; I’ve always felt raw in its presence. And so the identity affirmation and the metaphor reversal feel particularly potent to me who lives in a body full of tremors, tics, spasms, tension: spastic revolutionary.

For next time, more about Cripple Poetics and the word cripple itself and what it means for a white person to think about race and ugly language (I certainly paused long and hard before I wrote the n-word).