9:56pm July 30, 2014

“Q: Why is disability history important to all Americans, but Americans with disabilities in particular?

A: History gives us the tools to think about us—whoever that us is—as being part of something bigger; we have a past, which means that we have a present and a future. Because disability has been ignored for so long, it’s important for the general public and people with disabilities to learn that it played an important part, not just because of a few important people who defined a movement, but also for how we think about things like productive labor, our healthcare system, the impact of war and how our nation establishes various hierarchies. By understanding how disabled people are defined by these experiences and often helped define them is tremendously empowering both individually and collectively.”

—

from Why Disability History Matters, an interview of Cathy Kudlick by Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project (via longmoreinstituteondisability)

Why I think history matters:

1. People are always reinventing the wheel in various disability communities, when it doesn’t have to be that way. Lots of people just do things without regard to their history, not knowing there is a history of doing those things, and of understanding how to do those things, and understanding what works and what doesn’t, that they could draw on if they asked the right people.

2. Because when searching for clues to a disability identity, disabled kids often end up making their own disability history through their own research, which often misses this stuff when they can’t find books on it at the library, etc. Kids need that history of people like themselves, and when they can’t find one, they make one.

Those are two of the biggest reasons I see for having a disability history, and history of specific disability movements like autistic history, developmental disability self-advocacy history (which is largely oral at present, and could be turned into both visual and transcribed interviews), Deaf history, etc. And the history of these things in various countries other than English-speaking ones would be vital. A global history of disability movements would be beautiful to have. Absolutely beautiful.

Notes: