[humanser] {Spam?} On Disability

[JD Townsend]

What do you think of this article from the New York Times?


DISABILITY.  Becoming Disabled.
By ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON  
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson teaches English and bioethics at Emory University, where she is a 
founding director of the Disability Studies Initiative.  

Not long ago, a good friend of mine sa    id something revealing to me: 
'I don't think of you as disabled,' she confessed.
I knew exactly what she meant; I didn't think of myself as 
disabled until a few decades ago, either, even though my two arms 
have been pretty significantly asymmetrical and different from 
most everybody else's my whole life..
My friend's comment was meant as a compliment, but followed a 
familiar logic -- one that African-Americans have noted when 
their well-meaning white friends have tried to erase the 
complications of racial identity by saying, 'I don't think of you 
as black,' or when a man compliments a woman by saying that he 
thinks of her as 'just one of the guys.
This impulse to rescue people with disabilities from a 
discredited identity, while usually well meaning, is decidedly at 
odds with the various pride movements we've come to know in 
recent decades.  Slogans like 'Black Is Beautiful' and 'We're 
Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It! became transformative taunts 
for generations of people schooled in the self-loathing of 
racism, sexism and heterosexism.  Pride movements were the 
psycho-emotional equivalents of the anti-discrimination and 
desegregation laws that asserted the rights of full citizenship 
to women, gay people, racial minorities and other groups.  More 
recently, the Black Lives Matter and the L.G.B.T.  rights 
movement have also taken hold.
Yet pride movements for people with disabilities -- like Crip 
Power or Mad Pride -- have not gained the same sort of traction 
in the American consciousness.  Why? One answer is that we have a 
much clearer collective notion of what it means to be a woman or 
an African-American, gay or transgender person than we do of what 
it means to be disabled.
A person without a disability may recognize someone using a 
wheelchair, a guide dog or a prosthetic limb, or someone with 
Down syndrome, but most don't conceptualize these people as 
having a shared social identity and a political status.  'They' 
merely seem to be people to whom something unfortunate has 
happened, for whom something has gone terribly wrong.  The one 
thing most people do know about being disabled is that they don't 
want to be that.
Yet disability is everywhere once you start noticing it.  A 
simple awareness of who we are sharing our public spaces with can 
be revelatory.  Wheelchair users or people with walkers, hearing 
aids, canes, service animals, prosthetic limbs or breathing 
devices may seem to appear out of nowhere, when they were in fact 
there all the time.
A mother of a 2-year-old boy with dwarfism who had begun 
attending Little People of America events summed this up when she 
said to me with stunned wonder, 'There are a lot of them! Until 
this beloved child unexpectedly entered her family, she had no 
idea that achondroplasia is the most common form of short stature 
or that most people with the condition have average-size parents.  
More important, she probably did not know how to request the 
accommodations, access the services, enter the communities or use 
the laws that he needs to make his way through life.  But because 
he is hers and she loves him, she will learn a lot about 
disability.
The fact is, most of us will move in and out of disability in our 
lifetimes, whether we do so through illness, an injury or merely 
the process of aging.
The World Health Organization defines disability as an umbrella 
term that encompasses impairments, activity limitations and 
participation restrictions that reflect the complex interaction 
between 'features of a person's body and features of the society 
in which he or she lives.  The Americans With Disabilities Act 
tells us that disability is 'a physical or mental impairment that 
substantially limits one or more major life activities.
Obviously, this category is broad and constantly shifting, so 
exact statistics are hard to come by, but the data from our most 
reliable sources is surprising.  The Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention estimates that one in five adults in the United 
States is living with a disability.  The National Organization on 
Disability says there are 56 million disabled people.  Indeed, 
people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the 
United States, and as new disability categories such as 
neurodiversity, psychiatric disabilities, disabilities of aging 
and learning disabilities emerge and grow, so does that 
percentage.
Disability growth areas -- if you will -- include diagnostic 
categories such as depression, anxiety disorders, anorexia, 
cancers, traumatic brain injuries, attention-deficit disorder, 
autoimmune disease, spinal cord injuries, autistic spectrum 
disabilities and dementia.  Meanwhile, whole categories of 
disability and populations of people with certain disabilities 
have vanished or diminished significantly in the 20th century 
with improved public health measures, disease prevention and 
increased public safety.
Because almost all of us will experience disability sometime in 
our lives, having to navigate one early in life can be a great 
advantage.  Because I was born with six fingers altogether and 
one quite short arm, I learned to get through the world with the 
body I had from the beginning.  Such a misfit between body and 
world can be an occasion for resourcefulness.  Although I 
certainly recognized that the world was built for what I call the 
fully fingered, not for my body, I never experienced a sense of 
losing capacity, and adapted quite readily, engaging with the 
world in my preferred way and developing practical workarounds 
for the life demands my body did not meet.  (I used talk-to-text 
technology to write this essay, for example.  (continuation 
indicator) 
Still, most Americans don't know how to be disabled.  Few of us 
can imagine living with a disability or using the technologies 
that disabled people often need.  Since most of us are not born 
into disability but enter into it as we travel through life, we 
don't get acculturated the way most of us do in our race or 
gender.  Yet disability, like any challenge or limitation, is 
fundamental to being human -- a part of every life.  Clearly, the 
border between 'us' and 'them' is fragile.  We just might be 
better off preparing for disability than fleeing from it.
Yet even talking about disability can be a fraught experience.  
The vocabulary of this status is highly charged, and for even the 
most well-meaning person, a conversation can feel like stepping 
into a maze of courtesy, correctness and possible offense.  When 
I lecture about disability, someone always wants to know -- 
either defensively, earnestly or cluelessly -- the 'correct' way 
to refer to this new politicized identity.
What we call ourselves can also be controversial.  Different 
constituencies have vibrant debates about the politics of 
self-naming.  'People first' language asserts that if we call 
ourselves 'people with disabilities,' we put our humanity first 
and consider our impairment a modification.  Others claim 
disability pride by getting our identity right up front, making 
us 'disabled people.  Others, like many sign language users, 
reject the term 'disability.
The old way of talking about disability as a curse, tragedy, 
misfortune or individual failing is no longer appropriate, but we 
are unsure about what more progressive, more polite, language to 
use.  'Crippled,' 'handicapped' and 'feebleminded' are outdated 
and derogatory.  Many pre-Holocaust eugenic categories that were 
indicators for state-sponsored sterilization or extermination 
policies -- 'idiot,' 'moron,' 'imbecile' and even 'mentally 
retarded' -- have been discarded in favor of terms such as 
'developmentally delayed' or 'intellectually disabled.  In 2010, 
President Obama signed Rosa's Law, which replaced references to 
'mental retardation' with 'intellectual disability' in federal 
statutes.
The author and scholar Simi Linton writes about learning to be 
disabled in a hospital after a spinal cord injury -- not by way 
of her rehabilitation but rather by bonding with other young 
people new to disability.  She calls this entering into community 
'claiming disability.  In 'Sight Unseen,' an elegant explication 
of blindness and sight as cultural metaphors, Georgina Kleege 
wryly suggests the difference between medical low vision and 
blindness as a cultural identity by observing that, 'Writing this 
book made me blind,' a process she calls gaining blindness rather 
than losing sight.
Like them, I had no idea until the 1980s what it meant to be 
disabled, that there was a history, culture and politics of 
disability.  Without a disability consciousness, I was in the 
closet.
Since that time, other people with disabilities have entered the 
worlds in which I live and work, and I have found community and 
developed a sturdy disability identity.  I have changed the way I 
see and treat myself and others.  I have taken up the job of 
teaching disability studies and bioethics as part of my work.  I 
have learned to be disabled.
What has been transformed is not my body, but my consciousness.
As we manage our bodies in environments not built for them, the 
social barriers can sometimes be more awkward than the physical 
ones.  Confused responses to racial or gender categories can 
provoke the question 'What are you? Whereas disability 
interrogations are 'What's wrong with you? Before I learned about 
disability rights and disability pride, which I came to by way of 
the women's movement, I always squirmed out a shame-filled, 'I 
was born this way.  Now I'm likely to begin one of these 
uncomfortable encounters with, 'I have a disability,' and to 
complete it with, 'And these are the accommodations I need.  This 
is a claim to inclusion and right to access resources.
This coming out has made possible what a young graduate student 
with a disability said to me after I gave a lecture at her 
university.  She said that she understood now that she had a 
right to be in the world.
We owe much of this progress to the Americans With Disabilities 
Act of 1990 and the laws that led up to it.  Starting in the 
1960s, a broad disability rights movement encouraged legislation 
and policy that gradually desegregated the institutions and 
spaces that had kept disabled people out and barred them from 
exercising the privileges and obligations of full citizenship.  
Education, transportation, public spaces and work spaces steadily 
transformed so that people with disabilities came out of 
hospitals, asylums, private homes and special schools into an 
increasingly rebuilt and reorganized world.
That changed landscape is being reflected politically, too, so 
much so that when Donald Trump mocked the movement of a disabled 
reporter, most of the country reacted with shock and outrage at 
his blatant discrimination, and that by the time the Democratic 
National Convention rolled round, it seemed natural to find the 
rights and dignity of people with disabilities placed front and 
center.  Hillary Clinton's efforts early in her career to secure 
the right to an education for all disabled children was 
celebrated; Tom Harkin, the former Iowa senator and an author of 
the Americans With Disabilities Act, marked the law's 26th 
anniversary and called for improvements to it.  People with 
disabilities were featured speakers, including Anastasia Somoza, 
who received an ovation for her powerful speech.  President 
Obama, in his address, referred to 'black, white, Latino, Asian, 
Native American; young, old; gay, straight; men, women, folks 
with disabilities, all pledging allegiance, under the same proud 
flag.
Becoming disabled demands learning how to live effectively as a 
person with disabilities, not just living as a disabled person 
trying to become nondisabled.  It also demands the awareness and 
cooperation of others who don't experience these challenges.  
Becoming disabled means moving from isolation to community, from 
ignorance to knowledge about who we are, from exclusion to 
access, and from shame to pride.
This is the first essay in a weekly series by and about people 
living with disabilities.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter 
(@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. .  



JD TOWNSEND
Helping the Light Dependent to See
Daytona Beach Earth Sol System
JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: JDTownsend.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 83 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/humanser_nfbnet.org/attachments/20160829/3987c30a/attachment.vcf>