https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2020.0014
Nobody wants to be the racist uncle in a discussion. The thing is, many racist uncles (or aunts, or grandmas/grandpas) don't honestly feel they're being racist. They simply don't know better or don't care to learn better.
Hopefully no one reading this blog is the latter sort of person. For the rest of us, it can be really simple to accidentally slip into racist uncle territory without realizing it. That's why it's so important to listen to black and brown people, and to educate yourself using the resources they've provided over the years.
By the same token, it's important to listen to disabled and autistic people. Essentially, ableism is racism, except instead of dehumanizing people with a certain amount of melanin in their skin, it dehumanizes people in wheel chairs, people who score low on IQ tests, and/or people with developmental disabilities.
I've seen a reasonable amount of discussion of various types of ableism. Perhaps the most widespread debate I've seen is between person first (person with autism) and identity first (autistic person) language.
The person first vs. identity first debate in a nutshell
Person first: Meant to stress the person's personhood before their conditions. An alternative to using medical-terms-turned-derogatory-terms, such as "retard." Preferred by the community of people with intellectual disorders and the occasional person with autism.
Identity first: Meant to stress how a condition can be experienced as inseparable from the person. Autism is a whole-life-affecting condition. If you could somehow remove the autism from me, I would not be the same person. I would not, in fact, be even recognizable as me. Preferred by me and most autistic people I've seen weigh in on the subject.
There are a number of others, including whether autism should be cured, how a person's support needs are described, the ever-dehumanizing "high-functioning" and "low-functioning" labels, and how things like meltdowns, self-injurious behaviors, and stimming are described.
The point of this article is to summarize what's been said and overall agreed upon in the course of a couple decades. The audience here is mainly autism researchers, but to be honest, this was a good read for me, too.
Like racism, ableism is systemic to the US. A person in a wheelchair is, on average, assumed to be less capable on all fronts than someone who isn't... even if the criteria have literally nothing to do with physical capabilities. The same mentality (in a less quantifiable form) goes for autistic people, even though we can be incredibly skilled and knowledgeable in our areas of interest.
This mentality is fed to us in popular media, in how healthcare professionals treat us and the diagnosis, and how friends and family treat us, among other things. I did a series a while back on types of stigma, which is rather relevant to this issue.
All this to say I've swallowed my fair share of poisonous ideas in regards to what people with disabilities are capable of. Myself, frustratingly enough, included. There's a handy swap table of ableism to acceptable phrases and words in the article, which I think I'll try to keep handy. I can safely say my own writing includes some of these "should be avoided" words.
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