As I read over the material “Disability as Inequality”, I couldn’t help but be reminded of an experience I saw a few years ago. “Individuals with disabilities experience lower education levels…”. I can at least corroborate in my experience that this is true. I have 3 young cousins who are on the spectrum. I’ve had to babysit them a lot when they were really young, because their parents were always working. I can’t say that I always did everything right, but I know I tried my best. All 3 of them are non-verbal, and for those who don’t know how to communicate with them, it’s really disheartening to hear and see how others treat them when they think others can’t hear. I’ve heard people call them unintelligent, bratty, weird or the worse ones I’ve usually heard, the r-word. As a society, we like to claim that we are becoming better at accepting others’ differences, but it seems we are always lacking when it comes to people who are disabled.
I remember going to pick up my cousins from the daycare they were enrolled in at the time and being horrified watching a little snippet of how they were most likely treated before I came. All the other kids were playing with toys, reading books, or generally screwing around as children do. Other than my cousins. My cousins had to sit in the corner facing the wall, because they were being too “disruptive” and had been causing a fuss for the past 30 minutes. It’s something that I probably won’t really forget when I look at them. What kinda teacher in our current era makes children sit in the corner like it’s the 1940s? Rather, simply because she didn’t want to have to “handle” my cousins, she’d rather leave them to their own devices, isolating them from the rest of their classmates, just for the convenience for herself. She didn’t care, and she sure as hell didn’t try. I don’t know where she got off trying to rationalize it to me or anyone else. She was fired, and their parents pulled them out of that daycare.
I understand for some people who don’t have people in their family who are disabled, it may be hard to relate to those who are disabled. But that is absolutely no excuse to treat people like they are subhuman or less than you because of that. As I said before, we always like to say we are moving forward, but it seems we consistently lack when it comes to those who are physically or mentally disabled.
Why is it more “acceptable” to overlook the struggles of disabled people? We seem to take a lot of care and effort into things such as racism, sexism or homophobia (not successfully at all, lol) but when it comes to ableism, it’s like we have a collective blind spot in society. Where do you think it may originate from?
