12:10am August 5, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: Stupidity

josiahd:

Stupidity is a real thing. But if you’re hanging your identity on thinking that almost everyone is way stupider than you and your elite cohort, you’re doing it wrong.

THIS!

I’ve had a number of friends who talk and act — even if in a jokey-sounding…

There were these people in our building who were generally upper middle class before becoming elderly or disabled. They were more likely to have completed college, one of them had a fancy Hollywood job before becoming deafblind, etc.

And they never quite figured out they’re just as poor as anyone else here. You could see it how they interact with the world. They live in this bubble where they’re the only people that exist. They think they’re in the sky floating above the rest of us. They can’t see that whatever lives they lived in the past, whatever privilege they carry over from that, they’re right down in here with the rest of us now.

They took over the tenant organisation. I was around sometimes after meetings so I could hear how they talked about the other residents.

I remember them laughing their asses off at the frustrated guy who said “Who’s Robert and why do we hat to follow his rules?” and another guy who said “I make a motion to get rid of Roberts riles of order!" This was after a meeting which had turned into a shouting match, and these guys had decided to force Robert’s Rules of Order on everyone. Since they didn’t explain it, and only people with a certain background had ever heard of it, this had the effect of silencing everyone they didn’t like.

And the laughter later was not laughter at the situation. It was laughter at the people. It was mocking. It made me shrink down and hope they didn’t notice I’d never heard of Robert’s Rules of Order until that very night.

They were constantly laughing at people. Not just then. They called people idiots, stupid, and sheeple.

And I’m sure they laughed a whole lot when they got a working-class cognitively disabled woman to do their work for them in an area where they didn’t want to get their hands dirty, then when things heated up they claimed to have no connection to her and that she was acting on her own, telling her "someone had to be the fall guy”.

I honestly don’t know why they wanted to be involved in that group if they had such contempt for everybody in it. But they did.

That was back when I could still go to meetings. My friend and me sort of ended up splitting our understanding of what was going on there. I can usually either do nonverbal information or verbal but not both. And she’s way better at receptive language than me.

So she’d listen to the words, and I’d sort of subconsciously map out the shape of the interactions in the room. And we would both end up coming to the conclusion that they were being cruel and manipulative to everyone.

Their basic idea was this: We were all idiots who didn’t know what was good for us. We needed them to make all the decisions for us. If we proceeded to remain stupid enough not to do as we were told… well then, it was only necessity that led them to try to manipulate us into doing what they believed was in our own best interests.

It reminds me of something Dave Hingsburger pointed out happened to some people with developmental disabilities he knew.

A lot of nondisabled advocates in the DD world had been saying that the sheltered workshops in the area needed to be closed.

The actual DD people were saying no. Don’t close the workshops. Please.

The nondisabled advocates came up with all kinds of reasons for this. DD people just didn’t know what was good for them. DD people lacked “vision" DD people didn’t understand they were being exploited.

They overrode what the DD self advocates wanted. The workshops closed. And suddenly they had a crisis on their hands.

DD people were more and more living in more and more isolated settings. The workshops had been the one remaining place they could get together with other DD people and hang out. In the name of inclusion, they had been completely isolated from each other.

That frequently happens. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be institutions and mini institutions where disabled people were forced to live. Disabled people would, like everyone else, be fully included in our societies and cultures. But we would have the option, like everyone else, of living alone, living with nondisabled people, living with other disabled people, whatever. If we lived with other disabled people, it would not be called a group home, it would be called having roommates. Whether or not we shared caregivers or had other arrangements.

But too often, what inclusion means to nondisabled people is to isolate us from other disabled people because we are bad influences on each other. Especially in the DD world, there’s a strong impulse nondisabled people have to freak out when two out more of us get together. They call it "self-segregation” and consider it an inappropriate behavior they just train us out of. It gets really ugly. When we are moved out of group homes and other institutions, nobody ever gives any thought as to whether they are separating us from our friends or lovers, abruptly, never to meet again for the rest of our lives.

They say they do all this for humanitarian reasons. Sometimes it’s clueless good intentions. But sometimes it’s outright hatred for disabled people. It’s because they don’t want us to spread out awful disabled people behavior to each other. It’s because they think we won’t develop properly unless we are surrounded by exclusively nondisabled people, who will serve as our role models. If disabled people were our role models, we would regress.

Right now there are generations of disabled kids growing up who have never seen a child or adult who looks like themselves. Not because nobody has diagnosed them, but because they are forcibly kept away from others. Some of them conclude that their disability is fatal by adulthood. Others conclude they will grow up to be nondisabled.

The worst situation I ever heard of was a woman with Williams syndrome that Dave wrote about. She never met other kids who looked like her. She concluded that her face was horrible and a symbol of everything that made her different. By the time her parents realized what she needed was others like herself, the damage had been done.

If she saw anyone with a face like hers, she tried to bludgeon her face and tear it to shreds. She injured her face until it was unrecognizable. If she see herself in any reflective surface the same thing would happen.

When she died, she died screaming and inconsolable. She said she was about to meet God, and she was terrified of meeting the person who had made her look like this.

That’s not a natural response to being disabled. But it’s an extreme version of a common response to never bring able to spend time with people who look like you in any positive situation. People who understand you. People who know what it’s like to walk in your shoes.Pretty much all children forcibly isolated from everyone like us, whether it’s disability, gender, ethnicity, or any major trait a kid can have, will develop serious emotional problems, even if it never reaches the point of physically tearing our faces off. I know where that women was coming from.

So nondisabled people have gone from forcibly segregating disabled people, to forcibly integrating us. They call this integration “inclusion”, but they are wrong. Dead wrong. When you’re truly included in your society, nobody forces you to interact with one kind of person and stop interacting with another kind of person. They’re destroying the meaning of the word inclusion.

DD people know this. Not all of us know all of the words for all of the concepts. But at minimum we know what it feels like to be forcibly separated from people like ourselves. At worst we’ve been ripped away from friends and lovers in the name of our rights.

And when nondisabled people wanted to close the workshops, they had good reasons. The same reasons many disabled people want to close the workshops in general.

But they thought they were better then DD people. The moment they disagreed with them, they decided they were just too stupid to understand the issues. And they acted without finding out why DD people thought as they did. And the DD communities in these areas were devastated.

Because they were communities.

And because nondisabled people broke up the one place that DD people had left where they could all meet and BE a community.

And they didn’t listen because we are, as a group, considered too stupid to listen to. Not just stupid like the “brainwashed sheeple” are stupid. But extra stupid. Totally without possibility of being listened to.

My local DD community has no sheltered workshops and few group homes. Which is good. Forced segregation is not the best way for a community to have to stick together.

But we have a community center. There are activities there all the time. Art. Dances. We get together because we want to be together. Because we’re a community. I don’t talk to people at art because my hands are too busy. But they find ways to include me.

I’ve met people online who tell me they can’t communicate with anyone with an IQ lower than 130. They don’t realize mine has been lower than that since I was 15, and most recently tested as 85. The only time it tested over 130 I was 5 years old.

Nobody in the DD community has ever asked my IQ. Because most people there understand it’s just a number. More than a lot of high IQ folks understand. In some DD communities I’ve been stereotyped as low functioning, but in my local one people just take you as you are and treat you like people. And it’s not because we are too innocent to understand. (Intellectually elitist DD people exist.) It’s because we understand it only too well, and reject it.

Notes: