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11:08am December 5, 2013

madeofpatterns:

Privilege and power dynamics are *so* complicated when it’s a disabled person who is privileged over their staff on every other axis.

YES THIS.

This is why these things are never simple.

And it also varies a lot by what kind of disabled person it is.

Because things are a lot different based on whether you’re under the broad categories (any or all) of physical disability, or cognitive disability, or chronic illness, or developmental disability, or psychiatric.  And various subcategories of each.  And with some of them, such as intellectual and certain psychiatric disabilities, even being seen as having them means you’re dealing with oppression, even if you still may have some privilege that a person who actually has them doesn’t (maybe, it really depends on situation, because in some situations a person who doesn’t have them is still unable to prove they don’t and everything around them functions exactly as if they have them). 

I’ve seen a huge difference in the dynamics between me and a friend of mine.  We both have a combination of developmental and physical disabilities and chronic illnesses.  However, she gets her services through the physical disability system and I get mine through the developmental disability system.  That difference alone makes a huge difference in how we get treated by staff and agencies that help us.

I think this becomes especially thorny with class and racial privilege.  Because people of color and poor and working-class people both deal with really specific power dynamics when they’re being made to do a job for someone else.  And that isn’t gone just because the person happens to be disabled and the disabled person may not actually be their boss. 

I’ve also been in situations where the staff were disabled and they thought that made them equal to me power-wise.  Nearly always, they had either a very mild physical disability or a chronic illness, and little to no cognitive disability, no developmental disabilities of any kind.  But even if they had the exact same disability I had, their position as staff would give them power over me that can’t be erased by whatever disability they might have.

Lots of disabled people who work as staff completely miss that and think their disability magically makes them good at their job.  I’ve never seen that go so badly wrong as i’ve seen it among “consumer-run” psychiatric situations.  I can’t even describe how wrong that goes.  That also goes wrong a lot with autistic people who become staff for other autistic people, thinking they’ll magically have the ability to do things right.

(I remember reading a horrible description by an autistic woman who clearly believed that she totally understood this other autistic person and what was good for her.  And she described, in detail, how she manipulated the autistic girl into doing something “to free herself of her fears” or something.. except she had no evidence at all that this is what the girl would have wanted, and doing this required ignoring all of the girl’s communication because of the belief that it was in her best interest.  It was scary to read because people have done similar things to me.  Not that what someone wants is always the best thing to do for them, but you don’t just leap into doing that kind of thing when you barely know a person, and you only do things like that with incredible incredible caution and care.  And lots of autistic people and “psychiatric consumers” who “work in the field in order to make things better” end up doing things to their clients that are totally messed up like this.)

And… yeah, it’s very tangled.

Especially when it’s people of color working for a white person, or poor and working-class people working for a middle-class or rich person, or cognitively or psychiatrically disabled people working for someone who solely has a physical disability.  AND when all those things are true but the staff also have various forms of privilege ver the disabled person.  

Nothing about things like that are simple, and too many people try to make them that way.

(Hell, even the concept of privilege the way most people describe it is grossly oversimplified compared to the reality.)