7:19pm May 13, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: Product Review: Greeper Laces for Children with Disabilities

youneedacat:

livingwithdisability:

Greepers top the list of no stigma inclusive products and make wearing shoes with laces possible for children who may have had sensory or physical problems with them before. Greepers are award winning patented shoe laces which simply do not come undone yet can be…

Idk. But I don’t understand what they mean when they kept saying “inclusive”. Except that “inclusive” seems to be the new word for “disability”. At which point it’s not “inclusive” anymore.

Argh, yes, this.

When I first started seeing the word (early-mid 2000s?), it seemed to mean “activity that lots of non-disabled people participate in that welcomes disabled people as equal participants.” And that was used by people trying to build communities in line with the Dan Wilkins quote “A community that excludes even one of its members is no community at all.”

I don’t know how well this meaning was followed then. But now it’s heavily used by people whose idea of inclusion is making us invisible. And who think that achieving some measure of passing is necessary before we deserve a place in the community.

There’s a local group called Include Autism. They claim that their “Community Coaching” ABA program “provides natural, hands-on opportunities for … participants to develop adaptive, functional skills needed to become included in their community.” Their Peer Pals program, also intended to prepare autistic teenagers for community inclusion, entirely fails to be about relationships on equal ground. It’s about the ways neurotypical teenagers engage with the world being treated as inherently better than the ways autistic teenagers engage with the world. The overwhelming message of their website is that autistic people aren’t ready for real community until they’ve been saved by neurotypicals.

I’m minimizing my involvement with the campus autism awareness group because what they took away from “you need to include autistic perspectives” is “we’ll drag autistic kids to campus and do crafts with them and call it inclusion.” Even though no non-autistic children were involved. And no autistic people had any say in designing the event, or leading the activities. And what I saw of the event descriptions made me realize that the event would be flat out inaccessible to me as an *adult.*

So basically, my impression of variations on “inclusive” now is that I need to look closer. Maybe the thing is good. But more often it’s a way of saying “We’re doing good things for those people, isn’t that enough for you?”

A quote I liked regarding so called inclusion at school was, “If you can tell which students are the regular students and which students are the ‘inclusion students’ then you’re doing it wrong.” Cal Montgomery told it to me but I think she was quoting someone else.

Of course I don’t think school can work for virtually anyone without massive differences to the point it might not even look like school anymore, but that’s a completely different topic and I’m exhausted. Really exhausted. Too little sleep last night, too many mishaps today, too much pain. I was kicking the crap out of my air conditioner earlier just because I was having a bit of a really bad moment.

Notes: