A couple months ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the first black president of the United States. Regardless of your feelings about Obama, I think we can all recognize that this indicates a positive change in America's racial situation.

But I started getting kind of frustrated with the talk about him being our first black president. Because, as long as you have to qualify it like that, "first BLACK president" . . . you're just drawing attention to the fact. When we can start talking about Obama as just "the president" (which I expect will happen soon), THAT'S when the real progress is made.

My point here is that language matters. We use labels to make sense of the world. We might call a person a Christian, an extrovert, a freshman, a musician, an author--whatever word we apply, it's our way of placing ourselves and others into a framework that we understand.

Most of the time, we do that in a positive or a neutral way, but sometimes it's negative. Nigger. Fag. Retard. When we're faced with differences, we often feel threatened, or frightened. And sometimes, language is a barrier to overcoming that feeling. We apply a label to someone, and then we can dismiss them and file them away, instead of attempting to understand their difference and accept it.

The reason I'm talking about all this is that the people who run the Special Olympics have started a campaign to end derogatory use of the word 'retard'. And I want to encourage all of you to sign their pledge and spread the word.



Signing an online pledge might not seem like much. But in order to effect change, we have to spread the word, and this is one way to do that. Most of the people who are reading this post are people who will be raising the next generation; if we change the way WE speak, we'll change the way that generation speaks.

Because language matters, and we need to keep building a world where differences are accepted and embraced.