“Gavin Newsom is a mongoloid who barely registers half a brain cell…”
That’s what Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in response* to a taunt by California Governor Gavin Newsom. In case you aren’t familiar with the term “mongoloid,” it’s an outdated and insulting way to refer to people with Down syndrome, based on another insulting and outdated idea that people from Mongolia are less intelligent than Europeans.
As Newsom himself did when he suggested that President Trump might have dementia, these men are volleying insults to each other’s intelligence. I’m sure they aren’t doing it with actual people with dementia or actual people with Down syndrome in mind, and yet their careless rhetoric nevertheless harms those actual, vulnerable people by setting up a hierarchy of human worth with intellectually disabled people at the bottom of the heap.
Our daughter Penny is 19, and she has Down syndrome. I have never heard her utter an insult in her entire life. She’s never been jealous of another person’s success. She celebrates with the people she loves. She wants their good, even if it means she will lose out. She has never wished harm on anyone else, even if they have ignored or insulted her.
I don’t want to portray her as some sort of angel. She often insists on her own way. She rolls her eyes at me regularly. And her obsession with The Summer I Turned Pretty and My Life with the Walter Boys leaves something to be desired.
I also don’t want to pretend that Penny should be Governor or President or that cognitive ability is irrelevant in leadership positions.
I just want to say that our leaders need the type of intelligence that equips them to lift up the vulnerable, not insult them. We need leaders who are intelligent when it comes to policy making and also when it comes to people, who can draw out the best in others rather than the worst. We need leaders who celebrate others, not ones who insult others in a vain attempt to prove themselves.
* I’ve shared a gift link to the Washington Post essay that includes this quote. Just a heads-up—the Washington Post does ask you to create a free account before you can read it.
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