We also enrolled him in Karate class so he would learn that violence was a last resort. I had made a classic mistake. I had confused the word midget with the way it was used by people who intended to make me feel bad. Ironically, midget is the newest term for people like us.
It was coined by PT Barnum in the mid 's to describe members of the dwarf community who were the most socially acceptable, i. The rest of the dwarf community, those of us whose bodies are shaped differently enough to look more than just "really short," were relegated to the back stage or freak shows.
In fact, even into the 's, it was still considered more socially acceptable to be a midget than to be any other kind of dwarf! I remember hearing parents say "if my child has to be small, then thank god she's a midget, and not a dwarf.
So what happened? First, LPA happened. Originally to be called "Midgets of America," the folks who could afford to attend the early meetings were as likely to be non-midgets as midgets.
So a compromise was made to call the group Midgets and Dwarfs of America notice who came first. It didn't take long, however, for the fledgling members to notice that the non-midgets by Barnum's standards were greatly out-numbering the midgets.
So a second compromise was struck to call the group "Little People of America. Second, PT Barnum was so good at showmanship that the term midget became common vernacular, and used for almost anything smaller than usual.
As a result, It became the word that most people learned and used. Which meant that when people wanted to call attention to short stature and body differentness, midget was the first word to come to mind. Those of us raised in this country from the fifties and after came to associate "midget" only as a bad and hurtful word.
In the 's, perhaps as a parallel with the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement, some of the younger members of LPA began using the term "dwarf" and "dwarf power" as a symbol of self and group pride. At first, the older little people and their average sized families and friends were horrified! To them, "dwarf" was as negative as "midget" seems to be today.
However, the intent of the people using the term was empowerment. The message was strength and unity. When the Dwarf Athletic Association of America was formed in the mid 's, there was still quite a stir about the use of "that" word.
But again, the intent was empowerment and pride; the opportunity for people like us to excel in athletic competition, to be America's best at something. It was pretty hard to resist that kind of positive appeal.
As a result, I can refer to us as the dwarf community today without raising too many eyebrows. I can also refer to us as the LPA community with a similar reaction. Why can't I write about us as the midget community? I imagine just about everyone reading this just had a visceral reaction that wasn't positive, even though in much of the rest of the world it is the preferred terminology. But I admit it wasn't all that easy for me to write it!
I have let myself be a victim of my times, and maybe that's why I wrote it. Because it is time to take some of the power away from the word midget. We can't afford to let ourselves and our children be victimized by that word any longer.
And the word will not go away. People like me, who have a disproportionate body size, were seen as undesirable, as we were not as aesthetically pleasing as those who were just short. It seems that whilst freak shows began to fade away at the turn of the 20th century, much of their problematic legacy lives on.
The use of the term on many branded items allows its presence to be maintained within society. It is not hard to imagine that had these sweets been given another name associated with a derogatory term which refers to another minority group that they would have been either removed or renamed. The constant use of the word in the media and on products allows its popularity to flourish, which has implications for people with dwarfism in society.
As a person with dwarfism I have had to endure this word being shouted at me in the street. These experiences tell me that I do not belong and that whilst the freak shows may have disappeared the attitudes that popularised them still remain prominent within society. They will continue to remain the same unless we start to challenge them. Hate speech includes words that humiliate and degrade different groups of people.
To use a term that is from a form of entertainment that paraded people with dwarfism in order to provoke stares and laughter from the audience serves to humiliate and degrade people with dwarfism in modern society. Recognising the word as a form of hate speech will help to remove its use within the media and slowly help to diminish its use within society. Download and subscribe to the Street News app today, for unlimited access to stories that raise the voices of marginalised communities around the world.
Vendor stories Our news Events. By Erin Pritchard. Why don't we just… answer our mental health crisis with free money? I'm in my 70s, and the current dictionary. Soon, little people became the preferred term. It's understandable why the newly empowered dwarf community settled on little people : it's safe, benign, euphemistic, coined at a time when people liked euphemisms. What's not entirely clear, though, is why dwarf eventually made a comeback, whereas "midget" slid into unacceptability.
Certainly a lot of it has to do with the idea of being displayed in public. Dwarf is harsh, guttural, but its origins are less emotionally charged. Still, it took a younger, more politically active, in-your-face generation to popularize its use.
Len Sawisch, who was involved in the creation of the Dwarf Athletic Association of America in the s, says that the use of the D-word was initially quite controversial. But dwarf slowly grew in acceptance to the point at which, today, it's probably more popular with people under, say, fifty, than little person is.
In the s some younger activists even took a stab at changing the name of LPA to reflect this new consciousness, with the American Association of People with Dwarfism being a typical suggestion. The matter was dropped because too many older members were still uncomfortable with dwarf. But the little person legacy remains something of a sore spot.
Just instinctively, people think little person would be a demeaning term. If I had anything to say about it, I would get rid of the term little people before I'd get rid of the term "midget". My compromise as a young man was to grab ahold of the term dwarf. Certainly one reason that dwarf has grown in acceptance is that it is rarely used in a truly derogatory context. By contrast, "midget" is often used as an epithet, a derisive description.
I think it's significant that when the intent is to put down a little person who also happens to be disproportionate, the M-word is what gets invoked, even though it supposedly pertains only to proportionate dwarfs. Think of "midget wrestling," a term that stuck even though most of the performers were achondroplasia dwarfs.
In Massachusetts in the s, a judge whose budget was getting squeezed over a political hiring dispute angrily referred to the then-president of the state senate, who was unusually short, as a "corrupt midget" -- a nickname that stuck thanks to the gleeful efforts of a tabloid columnist.
Now the dwarf community may be slowly coming full circle, embracing "midget" as a way of lessening its sting. But despite the criticism that Black engenders, his best indeed, practically his only customers are dwarfs. Black says he's trying to reclaim "midget" the way more politicized parts of the gay community have reclaimed queer and the way some parts of the African-American community have made the N-word acceptable, at least among themselves.
A term meaning 'childlike',' a term meaning 'not as great as something big.
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