10:31pm June 19, 2014

“
A few years ago, I was at a conference on language and evolution when an audience member questioned a prominent child language researcher’s thesis by raising a counterexample: One aspect of the development of children with Williams syndrome didn’t quite fit the researcher’s theory. The prominent child language researcher quickly retorted, “Oh, I’ve seen children with Williams syndrome. They don’t count. They’re not even human. They must belong to some other species entirely.”

With the wave of a hand, an entire group of people was erased from the human race. Without a contesting word, members of the human species were sacrificed — but a theory was saved. And what was the distinctly nonhuman behavior demonstrated by some children with William syndrome? It was their ability to develop a prodigious vocabulary, prior to developing the ability to extend an index finger to point.

Admittedly, this psychological scientist’s dehumanizing pronouncement occurred during a relatively free-flowing discussion at a relatively small, invitation-only conference. The outrageous comment wasn’t even illuminated on a PowerPoint slide. But similar pronouncements have been typeset on the pages of other psychological scientists’ bestselling books and bound into our field’s most prestigious scholarly journals.
”

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Morton Ann Gernsbacher — On Not Being Human (via youneedacat)

So, so tired of the way that people with disabilities are so often so profoundly dehumanized.

And the disabilities I have are not as commonly targeted for the worst and most profound kinds of dehumanization, the kinds that other people use as an excuse to treat you as an “unperson”. So if this is how I feel, sometimes I wonder how people who have experienced being made into an unperson on a much more regular basis can find the strength to even think about it much less talk about it without breaking.

(via andreashettle)

It gets completely bone-shatteringly exhausting, is what it gets. Like sometimes it feels like the darkness seeps so far into you that you can’t do anything about it. And you don’t know what to do about it. And you know what the answer is, but you don’t know how the answer can possibly work, because everything looks so bleak. That’s what it feels like sometimes.

Notes: