3:10pm August 1, 2014

“An African-American welfare-dependent mother of three told me this story about the birth of her son with Down syndrome. She had been planning to put the newborn up for adoption, a decision she had reached shortly before his birth, due to the domestic stress and violence with which she was living. When the baby was born and diagnosed, a white social worker came to see her about placing the child. The mother asked what would become of her baby and was told, ‘We’ll probably find a rural farm family to take him.’ ‘Then what?’ she queried. ‘He’ll grow up outside, knowing about crops and animals,’ was the reply. ‘Then what,’ the mother repeated. ‘Maybe he’ll even grow up to work on that farm,’ the social worker replied. ‘Sounds like slavery to me,’ answered the mother, who decided to take her baby home. This imagery and its legacy contrast strongly with the stories many white mothers tell, in which they fantasize a peaceful, rural life ‘in nature’ as the perfect placement for their children with Down syndrome.”

—

in Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America by Rayna Rapp, p. 271.

This paragraph like, knocked the wind out of me.

(via this-reading-by-lightning)

I am so glad that this woman had the necessary cultural slant to see right through the BS that is pseudo-utopian farm community institutions. Because most white mothers can’t see through it at all, and they put their developmentally disabled children there, whether as children or as adults, and they don’t see the awfulness at all. And even those of us with developmental disabilities… we feel the awfulness, we feel its effects in our soul, but we don’t necessarily register that something is going horribly wrong, and we can’t necessarily say anything about it, we may even fight to stay in such places. So anyone who can see through it, for any reason at all, that is a really important thing. And it’s also really important that the white people who usually make these communities have overlooked how such an institution looks to someone with a family history of slavery.