Kid Rock has been facing public backlash after using an ableist slur on Fox News — including from the Special Olympics, which condemned the MAGA rapper’s remark before asking him to stand with intellectually disabled people.
During his Oct. 24 appearance on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” the “Bawitdaba” singer put on a surgical face mask while asking Watters to guess what he was going to be for Halloween. When the host suggested Dr. Anthony Fauci — an immunologist who became a right-wing target as he guided the U.S. out of the COVID-19 pandemic — Kid Rock laughed and replied: “A retard, a retard. … Greatest costume ever.”
In an open letter to Kid Rock published on Monday, Loretta Claiborne, a former gold medalist and the Special Olympics’ chief inspiration officer, said that using words that have historically belittled and dehumanized disabled people can reopen “wounds that so many of us have worked so hard to heal.”
“People with intellectual disabilities, one of the largest groups of people with disabilities in the world, have suffered generations of discrimination and humiliation,” Claiborne wrote. “In the 21st century, we’re still continuing to fight for the simplest form of justice: the recognition of our full humanity, a recognition you undermine when you use the word retarded.”
