Key Points
- Days after Beyonce removed an ableist term from one of her songs, Eminem released an album featuring the same slur.
- Australian disability advocate Hannah Diviney says she's "frustrated" she has to keep calling musicians out for it.
When for using an ableist lyric on her new album Renaissance, she was hoping it would be the last time.
The Australian writer and disability advocate had just a few weeks earlier helped to get Lizzo to re-release her song Grrrls, which featured the same slur.
But on the weekend, Ms Diviney was "frustrated" to find out that a third high-profile musician - this time rapper Eminem - had used the derogatory term on his new album.
"I couldn't really believe that it hadn't even been a week since the last time," the 22-year-old from Sydney told SBS News.
"I figured once you make progress with Beyoncé and get her to demonstrate her allyship by changing a lyric, kind of the whole music industry gets the memo. But apparently not."
The slur - "spaz" - featured in all three artists' lyrics and is a derogatory term derived from the name of the disability Ms Diviney lives with, spastic diplegic cerebral palsy.
"We know that Eminem has a history of not necessarily having the most politically-correct lyrics in the world, so I would be surprised if he even really considered it an issue," she said.
"It just frustrates me that the music industry at large isn't getting the kind of memo that we've sent them three times in quick succession that this needs to change."
Ms Diviney said while Lizzo and Beyoncé now clearly understand that using the slur "isn't okay", she's not expecting the same response from Eminem.
"I'm well aware that it's something of an exercise in futility, and that the likelihood of him changing it is the same as that of a cow ending up on the moon," she said.
Godzilla - Eminem's song that contains the slur "spaz" - was originally released in 2020, but the album it features on only came out on Friday, just days after Beyoncé's lyric change. Source: Getty / Cooper Neill
Godzilla - Eminem's song that contains the slur - was originally released in 2020, but the album it features on only came out on Friday, just days after Beyoncé's lyric change.
"I can't speak to whether disability advocates called out Eminem at the time. I'm assuming they did, because anyone who thinks that ableist language has only just started to hurt the disabled community doesn't know our history," Ms Diviney said.
"But clearly anyone who did raise that point wasn't listened to."
Since calling out Lizzo's use of the slur, Ms Diviney said she's experienced a lot of trolling.
Some people have claimed she's only doing it for clout, while others have accused her of racism given that "spaz" means "go crazy" in African American Vernacular English and isn't considered offensive in cultural contexts.
"I kind of take it as a twisted compliment that I'm getting trolled because it means that I'm doing work that is making noise, and that I'm actually making a difference," she said.
While she's received a lot of praise from within the disability community for holding the music industry to account, Ms Diviney said some others appear to be "increasingly frustrated" that she's not using her platform to push for changes to more significant issues.
"This is a very easy issue to fix, like it doesn't take much effort. We've seen Lizzo and Beyoncé, how quickly they have recorded things and kind of course-corrected," she said.
"And I feel like if you change the language around disability you give people a way into talking about the much bigger, kind of structural issues.
"I'm very much a believer in the phrase from little things big things grow, so I'm hoping that now that people are kind of paying more attention to disability advocates in general that we can start to turn some of that energy to our structural problems."
Ms Diviney said although she's challenged the use of slurs three times "out of necessity", she doesn't want to keep having to do it.
"I know that there will be people who now every single time an artist uses a word that could be perceived as ableist, will expect me to step up to the mic and hold them to account, and I just want to say that that's not going to work for me," she said.
"That's not going to be the way that I choose to spend my energy, because that has been exhausting. I have no interest in this being the only arena in which my voice counts for something."
Ms Diviney said she hopes the "noise" that she and other people with disabilities have created through their advocacy will lead others to take up the cause.
"Maybe people within the music industry and people who are closer to it, people who are able-bodied and in positions of power, kind of take some of that heavy-lifting away from the disabled community so that we don't have to keep yelling about it."
