8:06pm May 22, 2014

➸ Harry Potter and The Allure Of Separatism

Even within the disability community, even within the communities that work on disability rights, various subgroups adopt a strategy of tinkering with meritocracy so that the “right” abilities are rewarded and others treated as irrelevant.

A wheelchair user tells me that public transit does not need to be accessible to autistic people. She says that people should not be denied opportunity on the basis of physical ability, but that those with cognitive impairments should be under 24-hour-a-day supervision and control in special institutions built for us. An autistic tells me that public buildings do not need to be accessible to wheelchair users. She says that people should not be denied opportunity on the basis of cognitive ability, but that those with physical impairments should be under 24-hour-a-day medical care in special institutions built for us. And while we’re fighting this one out in the disability communities and in the larger society, known barriers remain in place, barrier removal is treated as a handout and an unfair advantage rather than a just response to entrenched disadvantage, and I indulge in the guilty pleasure of imagining finding a group of like-minded, like-bodied people and seceding from disability rights. Wouldn’t be too many of us: we’d be leaving a whole lot of people out. But we’d be the insiders for once, not the outsiders; and wouldn’t it be great?

[…]

Similarly, when I imagine what it would be like if my like-minded, like-bodied friends and I created a separatist haven, I tend not to be thinking about what it would be like to be a personal care attendant or support worker there. Those workers are just in the background somewhere, doing their bit to make my life easier without calling much attention to whether I’m doing my bit for them.

I tend not to be thinking about people whose minds and bodies are just enough unlike mine that we’d need to plan carefully to avoid access conflicts.

I tend not to be thinking about the people, of whom there are a number approximately equal to the population of the world, who have a different idea of what a perfect society would be like. Since I would need some of them to live in my dreamland with me, though, there would have to be some way to either win them to my way of thinking or simply to ensure that they wield no real power. Egalitarianism gets hard when your equals perversely refuse to go along with whatever you want; and if you have the power to suppress dissent it can be tempting to use it.

Those people illuminate the dark underbelly of my fantasy: I don’t think about them, and that makes it easier for me to imagine arranging things to their disadvantage.

I’m not a real separatist. I’m not really trying to call up this fantasy and make it real. So it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure, the nice simple world in which everything goes well for me, it’s not a shameful pleasure. I note my tendency to gloss over the unpleasant details, but in my off-hours I don’t exactly fight it.