The Original “Off-Color” Insult

Posted by Andrew Leibs Nov 25, 2008

Dale Carnegie said it’s easier to make a million dollars than to put a new word into our language. I don’t know if he ever priced having one removed, but I'd pay any price to never again hear the dehumanizing word “albino.”

It might seem strange how this word, infusing our culture from Moby Dick to Mad TV, could evoke such a reaction. But as a person with albinism (the preferred idiom), I can tell you it takes enormous energy to maintain self-esteem with this word still lurking in our language, still used with impunity by any writer seeking to amuse or appall.

This was driven home recently while I was watching a sitcom, when, at the height of an ugly marital conflict, the pale husband is blasted with “albino” as the ultimate insult, cruel and comic, for the fair skinned. Later, on a different show, “albino” was paired with dwarfism to form some writer’s comic tableau of perversion.

I’m reasonably confident and accomplished and have spent years confronting albinism through writing. Yet when I hear the word “albino,” I’m jolted: I feel anxious, exposed, and angry, realizing how this word, most often used derisively, remains impervious to political correctness at a time when broadcasting one ill-chosen word, regardless of intent, can end a career.

It amazes me how once-common words that fuse condition or ethnicity with one’s humanity (e.g. Jap, Mongoloid, Negro) are embarrassing memories in our age of hair-trigger humanism, while “albino,” coined in the 17th century by a slave-trolling Portuguese explorer, warrants a spell-check entry in the AP Stylebook, while it’s ultimate value, to my ear, is to make its users feel pithy, precise, or powerful.

Eating the shadow of this word has consumed much of my adulthood.

I grew up in a village in upstate New York in the 1970s. My school was small and teachers then (most adults really) exerted far greater influence over rude behavior. I was rarely taunted.

“Albino,” however, had a secret life. I cringed to hear it across a field, or from a window or passing car. It matured with me, like some half-brother banished at birth forever plotting his return. I kept driving it out. It kept coming back.

By my twenties, this struggle fenced the boundaries of my confidence. It depressed me that my condition could be ripped into with this one word, which described nothing about me accept my appearance. The need to suppress that label kept me close to home, from asking tough questions as a reporter, and from standing up in situations, whether at home or in the office.

I knew I had to confront my condition, but accepting that word was impossible. Saying it, even writing it on paper felt unsafe, like living in a house to which strangers held keys.

A breakthrough came once I stopped thinking about my life and began to write down memories of encountering albinism in culture—i.e. how the world sees albinism.

I remember when I was 14; The Eiger Sanction aired on my family’s TV. When he is told, “Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting,” Clint Eastwood quips, “Oh, the impatient albino.” I can still feel the shock and shame of that sudden unkind naming of my condition, which we never spoken of.

When I found references to “albinos” in nearly 200 books and movies, my family’s silence was easier to understand. Albinism is vilified like few human conditions. In film, especially, it’s used to embody everything we fear most in people: the stalker, the soulless assassin, hideous, relentless, impervious to pain. I could laugh off absurd characterizations, but the word still stung.

Even innocuous comedies such as Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation has a frustrated Jimmy Stewart, who, on seeing his daughter dancing with a blond boy, angrily barks, “He looks like an albino!”

It’s impossible to watch such scenes and not feel the contempt infused into that word. I saw that it was really that word, and not albinism that was difficult to face. That realization sparked a more purposeful creativity that enabled me to explore my condition.

Albinism is etched in our imagination, yet the condition is rare enough in daily life that it has no human face. We carry the condition; the world carries its weight and meaning. Such deep-set words are hard to extract.

Still, it’s hard sometimes not to resent albinism’s role as one of the last unmitigated means to marginalize and ridicule, especially as we are so swift to parse out people from their condition. It’s no longer “Idiot Savant,” it’s Savant Syndrome, not “Siamese twins,” but conjoined. Not “albino,” therefore, but person with albinism.

In the beginning was the word. It’s still here. One day, education will dispel ignorance and decency drive it out altogether. Until then, please, refer to my condition, and use my name.