10:27pm September 10, 2013

“What may seem like ‘productive discussion’ or ‘lively debate’ feels like an attack on your identity and validity as a human being when it comes from a person in a position of power who is telling you how to react to something that upset you. When a disabled woman, for example, expresses anger about something that is going on in the news and nondisabled people tell her there’s nothing to get upset about, or she doesn’t know the whole story, or she doesn’t know how hard caregivers have it, what she’s hearing is that disabled people aren’t human beings. That not only does she not have the right to be angry about, say, a case of horrific abuse of a disabled person by a ‘caregiver,’ but that she’s so unimportant that her voice, her opinions, and her experiences don’t matter.”

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