as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: fierceawakening: ...

7:52pm July 21, 2015

fierceawakening:

madeofpatterns:
ozymandias271:

I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with “ableism” as a term.
Most people don’t read neurodivergent people as ND. They read us as “weird”, or “crazy”, or “eccentric geniuses”, or “lazy”, or “cute”, or “stupid”, or “r*tards”.
And the thing is… some neurotypical people are read as every single one of those terms. And I don’t think it’s “misdirected ableism”, in the same way that a straight man being read as gay is misdirected homophobia. A neurotypical who is consistently read as weird, in the same way I’m consistently read as weird, has essentially the same experience as mine IMO.
But on the other hand putting, oh, anti-pagan or anti-otherkin sentiment in the same category that you put anti-ADHD sentiment– much less the same category you put discrimination against wheelchair users– is stretching the term ‘ableism’ to the breaking point. And I worry that framing it as “ableism” gets you to the place of “well, it’s bad to be mean to people who are weird, because they might be autistic or psychotic.” And, no. It’s bad to be mean to people who are weird. Full stop. End of sentence.
On the third hand, it definitely seems to me that physically disabled and neurodivergent people share a lot of common experiences on a structural level: the health care system; institutionalization; lack of accessibility. And I like that “ableism” highlights the similarity between those things. But I don’t think it’s a useful tool to analyze a lot of the interpersonal problems neurodivergent people face.

Ableism isn’t primarily about how people externally relate to me, though? It’s about how they react to me being disabled and needing accommodations.
I don’t get why you’d object to thinking of cognitive ableism as a thing?
I think there’s a difference between mobility impairment and cognitive impairment. I think there’s a difference between different kinds of cognitive impairment. And I think there’s a difference between being autistic and being blind.
But like, I have a blind classmate. And there are materials that neither of us can read, for physical reasons. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the reaction we both often get to that access need is meaningfully similar and that the right word for it is ableism.

Yeah.
I can’t speak to whether another word would be more useful for certain types of neurodivergent people, but…
When people told me things like “I can’t help you, you’re a cripple,” they were being ableist.
When they forced me to move my body in certain ways, and shamed me when I couldn’t, they were being ableist.
When they told me I’d never be as good as people who were born without disabilities, they were being ableist.
When they said maybe if it had been possible to know the fetus that became me would be born with a disability it should’ve been aborted, they were being ableist.
When they demanded I push my body until I got hurt and then told me publicly it still wasn’t good enough, they were being ableist.
The thing they were doing needs to have a word.

Yes. That thing.
I’ve been in a lot of situations in which people expected me to do physically impossible things, and insisted that I try over and over again.
There are ways in which my physical and social experience is different from people who have CP or whatever, but there are also a lot of ways in which it’s the same.

I’m in just about every major disability category (psych, DD, cognitive, physical, chronic illness, chronic pain, born, acquired, stable, unstable, etc.) and ableism is a thing and acting like it’s super super different for every category of disabled people is just hair-splitting at best. Like ableism is generally worse for some kinds of disabled people than others, but not always in an overall sense, more in terms of specific things (but there really is a disability hierarchy, too, although it’s complex and shifts around a lot by situation). I don’t feel like it’s meaningful to say that ableism only applies to physically disabled people. In fact I think that idea itself is incredibly ableist.

Also, I’m not sure if anyone involved in this conversation thinks ableism is a recently invented word. But just in case anyone does think so, it’s not. It’s been around since at least the eighties. And it’s been used on every kind of disabled person for a very long time.

Also some disability law acknowledges that ableism happens to nondisabled people sometimes. That’s why at least in theory the ADA applies not just to disabled people but to anyone presumed to be disabled. Just like homophobia can happen to people presumed to be gay. There are lots of people who refuse to acknowledge this happens, but it does happen all the time and it’s still ableism (or homophobia or whatever else).

Also ableism is a component part of every other kind of oppression, so it’s not just another form of oppression but a very key form of oppression. This isn’t me trying to say it’s the worst form of oppression or set up a hierarchy of oppressions, nor am I claiming that it’s the only thing at the root of other oppressions. But it is tangled in the roots of every single one, deeply, in a way that other ones or not. It’s that you can’t get rid of any single kind of oppression for real, without getting rid of ableism, and that’s not true of most other kinds of oppression. So it strikes me as particularly weird that people attack the very idea that this kind of oppression exists, when it’s one of the more key oppressions to understand if you want to be able to fight any kind of oppression at all.

(What do I mean? Sexism says women are biologically inferior in ways that have to do with abilities and that this inferiority means that they should be treated in certain ways. Racism says people of color are biologically inferior in ways that have to do with abilities and that this inferiority means that they should be treated in certain ways. Homosexuality was until recently actually officially considered a disability (and still is in some places), being trans still is – and LGB people got away from being considered disabled not by fighting ableism but by distancing themselves from disabled people – something that most anti-oppression movements end up doing rather than addressing the ableism itself, or understanding how ableism shapes even who gets considered disabled within a culture. The eugenics movement wove together racism, classism, and ableism, with ableism being the tie that bound the three together. And this is the short version. You could literally write an entire book analyzing the ways that ableism plays into every major form of oppression out there, in ways that are bound up in the cores of those kind of oppression, such that you can’t get rid of the oppression without getting rid of the ableism. And I’m not talking about ‘intersectionality’, which is also a thing but a very different thing that I’m not addressing here at all because it’s not my point. My point is that every oppression involves ranking people by ability and finding the oppressed group inferior, and that requires an ableist value system in order to do that. So there’s like… at least one core idea to each oppression that is pure unadulterated ableism. You can’t say the same of, say, sexism, which is also bound up with other kinds of oppression but on a side-to-side level not a down-in-the-core level if that makes any sense.)

I always get a lot of crap for saying the above, mostly because people think I mean just about everything except what I meant. They think I’m saying something they’ve seen before, something where a member of an oppressed group will decide their oppression is the most important kind, and that’s just not the case. I’m a member of most of the commonly-named oppressed groups, and ableism really is different in that respect. If I were doing this on the basis of being disabled then surely I’d do it on the basis of every other oppression I experience too, which I don’t, because when I dig to the bottom of oppressive ideas I don’t see every other kind of oppression located down there as consistently as I see ableism located down there. And not because I don’t know how to spot things or something.

I remember talking to someone who told me she had a disability, and I asked what it was, and she said it was that she was black. She understood more about ableism with that statement than most people I’ve met. Although I’m sure she’s gotten a lot of shit for saying it, it’s true that there is ableism against black people, because ableism is one of the component parts of racism. I wouldn’t go around calling people of color disabled (that’s not even close to my place as a white person), but I totally understand individual people of color who understand ableism on that level calling themselves disabled. I also know disabled people who would be furious at that, but there’s people who would be furious at a lot of things..

It’s even more complicated than this but I’m tired and can’t explain more than I already have. I do find it highly disturbing that ableism is simultaneously all-pervasive in the core of different oppressions, and routinely dismissed by members of just about every oppressed group as an idea that has gone too far or doesn’t make sense or shouldn’t exist. That basically ensures they’ll never reach their stated goal of ending those oppressions, they’ll just at best pass them on to people who can’t get away from the ableism as well as these people can.

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