Little People Ask FCC for Ban on the Word 'Midget'

Group spurred to action by Celebrity Apprentice episode
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 6, 2009 7:07 AM CDT
Little People Ask FCC for Ban on the Word 'Midget'
Zoli & Rolly, two dwarf clowns with the Wonder Circus, backstage before a performance at London's Olympia.   (Getty Images)

The Little People of America have filed a complaint with the FCC in an attempt to get the word “midget”—which people of exceptionally small stature see as demeaning—banned from broadcast television, Newsday reports. The LPA was moved to action by a segment on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice in which contestants created a scheme for a detergent advertisement named “Jesse James and the Midgets”—featuring little people who were bathed in the soap and hung to dry like laundry on a clothesline.

"The word 'midget' objectifies you," Clinton Brown, 27, told the LPA conference in Brooklyn. "Growing up as a little person, because you're different, you experience the ups and downs of some cruelties and prejudices. How many times have people I don't know come up to me and wanted to pick me up?"
(More FCC stories.)

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