Is the “Be Like Me!” Campaign Using Derogatory Language?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last week or so, you’ve probably seen that a new campaign is taking over Facebook newsfeeds. The ‘Be Like Me!’ campaign is pretty simple, really. You visit the Blobla website, enter your name and gender, click a button and you get a little stick figure image and write-up like the one below.

All harmless fun, right? Well, maybe not so much. As I was rolling through my Facebook newsfeed this morning, I noticed this one had been posted from an old high school friend of mine:

Some of you may be asking yourselves what’s wrong with it. I’ll tell you. The second-to-last line says, “Todd is not a retard.” As someone who spent more than two years working for Special Olympics Minnesota, I have helped raise awareness of the hurtful nature of this word and the need to end its use. And having a niece with special needs and watching the challenges she and her family face on a daily basis, this word holds a dire place in my vocabulary. The Special Olympics movement has spent the last several years working on the ‘R Word’ campaign, to end the use of this word, with its derogatory connotation of people with special needs.

Now, could it really be showing up in newsfeeds through this “fun, harmless” campaign? Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is just a one-off thing and not indicative of the ‘Be Like Me!’ campaign. On the other hand, maybe even one misuse of a word that the special needs community has been fighting against for a long time is one too many.

Have you noticed other ‘Be Like Me!’ posts in your newsfeed that use the word ‘retard’ in them? Or is this just some one-time happening?