Yes, calling someone ‘mentally disabled’ causes real harm

Donald Trump at an Erie, Pa., rally on Sept. 29, 2024, at which he said Democratic rival Kamala Harris was ‘mentally impaired.’ Dustin Franz/AFP/Getty Images

In a recent speech, Donald Trump used the language of intelligence, or intellectual impairment, as a weapon against Kamala Harris.

In a rally on Sept. 29, 2024, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump told supporters that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.” He made similar comments at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, over the same weekend.

Disability rights advocates were quick to point out that Trump’s language is what is called “ableist,” meaning that it assumes people with disabilities are somehow less valuable than those without.

And in an attempt to fire back, “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update host Colin Jost quipped that “I cannot believe Trump admitted he lost the debate to a mentally disabled person,” repeating the same ableist premise.

While this is the most recent round of personal attacks focusing on a lack of intelligence, it is far from unusual. Demeaning language about intelligence is a bipartisan political campaign staple – and extends further into much of American history and contemporary culture.

The worth of a person

Donald Trump has repeatedly called Kamala Harris – and others – “low IQ” and recently referred to Jewish voters as “fools” were they to help elect Harris. Harold Myerson of The American Prospect refers to Trump as a “blithering idiot,” and political cartoons paint Trump as akin to a buffoon.

While people often stop to think about and discuss race or gender, comments about intelligence do not typically get much sustained attention. People either agree with Trump or laugh along with Jost, not thinking about what it means to be called “low IQ,” “mentally impaired” or an “idiot.”

For me, as a mother of a child with Down Syndrome, these comments remind me of the ways in which she is consistently categorized, compared with so-called “normal” children, and found lacking based on variations of IQ tests.

And as a mother and a disability studies scholar writing a book about cognitive disability, I know that intelligence has always been defined in different ways by different societies. You cannot take a number on an IQ test and use it to definitively categorize any person.

In the West, before the mid-19th century, there was no definitive distinction between the “insane,” the “idiot” and the “imbecile.” While many of these individuals were sent to asylums or, in the case of author Jane Austen’s brother, to live with another family, it was more common to keep them at home and integrate them into the larger community.

Much of this changed in the 1840s when Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian mathematician, astronomer and statistician, sketched the body – complete with measurements – of the “normal” man. While he focused only on the physical body, the idea of the norm, reinforced by the rise of statistics as a discipline, grew more and more important when it came to intellectual function.

Once statistics took off and people started the process of norming, or coming up with what the average human should look and think like, statisticians and laypeople grew to rely heavily on the bell curve, a useful but inaccurate means of measuring all sorts of characteristics, chief among them being intelligence.

Forced sterilization, institutionalization

By the 1880s, intelligence, now a characteristic quantified by IQ testing, was used to “prove” the inferiority of anyone whose behaviors, ways of talking and even ways of thinking threatened the social order. That characterization was part of the theory of eugenics, in which people labeled inferior were discouraged – or actively prevented – from having children and, in some cases, from living at all.

As historian Douglas Baynton points out in his 2013 essay Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History, many would-be immigrants were turned away by officials at Ellis Island if they had “any mental abnormality whatever,” be it a cognitive disability, a stutter or even depression.

The language becomes even more horrific when race is brought in. In the racial science of the early 1800s, both the “idiot” skull and the “African” skull resembled the orangutan more than they resembled Shakespeare or Napoleon. Africans and people considered “idiots” were seen to be animalistic and unreasonable, in need of protection by their wards or owners.

In the early 20th century, these same ideas about racial and cognitive inferiority resulted in forced sterilization of women with intellectual disabilities as well as women of color, many of whom were considered “unfit” to birth the next generation of American children.

In addition to sterilization, those considered to have low IQs or to be mentally disabled were placed into unhygienic institutions located in places far from populated urban centers. Unseen and unthought of, these people were kept at places such as the Willowbrook State Developmental Center on Staten Island in New York Bay, where they often had no clothing, no means of sanitation, and were subject to abuse.

Institutions still exist today where people with intellectual disabilities are housed. The U.S. does not have an educational system in which people like my daughter can learn every day with neurotypical kids – kids whose brains work in a way deemed normal.

A pamphlet extolling the benefit of selective sterilization published by the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1950.
North Carolina State Documents Collection/State Library of North Carolina

Special education classrooms are disproportionately filled with students of color, most often diagnosed with behavioral disabilities. These students often end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. These classrooms show how something as “simple” as an IQ test – something as innocuous as a label – can end up sentencing the country’s children to lives of segregation and social oppression.

Not just Trump’s words

Temperatures are running high during this presidential election. Yet Trump’s words about Harris, while extraordinarily coarse and ugly for a presidential candidate, are often found among disparaging descriptions used by both sides. These phrases are part of a culture that uses measures of intelligence as a way to measure the worth of a human being.

Words are powerful: They can either, like the literature I teach, broaden perspectives of the world, or they can serve to reinforce limiting ideologies that perpetuate oppression.

Terms such as “low IQ,” “idiot” and “mentally impaired” have a traumatic history, one that many cognitively disabled, lower-class and minority people continue to live with today. I believe politicians and their constituents should understand the destructive history of these terms – and think twice before using words like these as an easy means to attack one another.

Kathleen Béres Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.