“A Supercrip Story”

Yesterday, we participated in a workshop on ableism and discussed this excerpt from Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation by Eli Clare (1999, South End Press). Check out Eli Clare’s website for more about him and his work.

I am a gimp. A crip, disabled with cerebral palsy. The story of me lurching up the mountain begins not on the mountain, but with one of the dominant images of disabled people, the supercrip. A boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team. A blind man hikes the Appalachian Trail from end to end. An adolescent girl with Down syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada. The nondisabled world is saturated with these stories: stories about gimps who engage in activities as grand as walking 2,500 miles or as mundane as learning to drive. They focus on disabled people “overcoming” our disabilities. They reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind. They turn individual disabled people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration.

Supercrip stories never focus on the conditions that make it so difficult for people with Downs to have romantic partners, for blind people to have adventures. For disabled kids to play sports. I don’t mean medical conditions. I mean material, social, legal conditions. I mean lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services. I mean stereotypes and attitudes. I mean oppression. The dominant story about disability should be about ableism, not the inspirational supercrip crap, the believe-it-or-not disability story …

On language and internalized ableism

I only found out the official medical term for my disability at the age of 18. I remember growing up as a child and not having language to describe who I was, what my body was or how I was different. The knowledge and use of inclusive and appropriate language may have facilitated the affirmation and centering of my body and my experience as normal within my context and lived reality. I could not speak of any other young girl my age living with a disability, nor was I offered any other context besides living without a disability. This placed me in a precarious mental and often physical environment of feeling and living like a fish out of water, out of context, out of centre.

In turn, I fully internalized the unspoken expectations alongside my absent context of performing as one who in fact was not living with a disability. I often acted and understood myself as living without a disability.

Living with a denied disability and out of centre, my life was repeatedly reinforced and centered without a disability (as normal and central) until it was completely internalized. Thus erasing my difference and disability, leaving me no room to be who I am or to understand who that is and what it might mean for me. And as a result, there was no chance for me to begin to identify with, speak to, or speak from and understand this reality of living with a disability.

This is the struggle I find myself in. I am a woman living with a disability in an able-bodied head, with able-bodied thoughts, language and values. I suffer from persistent internalized ableism. Even though I so obviously have a disability I have judged myself and adopted values reflective of people living without disabilities

I remember that when I was about 10 or 13 years old, there was a game, joke, song and dance about a cranky old man who had suffered from polio and as a result had a different walk, different from the other elders of the village. Him and his walk became standing comical caricatures. When he became aware that he was being mimicked, he reacted with outbursts of, “Is it because I don’t have legs?” as he walked by children providing lyrics for the song. Now, he had legs mind you, but because of the polio they were different and he understood them as now no longer legs.

So in my kitchen with loved ones, family, and friends, I joined the song and dance and made sure I could laugh as loud, dance as low and cajole as much as the next person as I understood that I must not, could not, was not expected to be that old man with his obviously funny legs and crabby attitude. At 13, I was not self-identifying as living with disability, I was not acknowledging who I am, I was not even willing to honour and sit powerfully as who I was. My basic understanding was that there was not and could not be anything powerful about disability.

I understood living with a disability as angry, pitiful, comical, uncool, unsexy, powerless, and downright unattractive. That was not me, could not be me, and most definitely was not who I wanted to be or even ally, sympathize, and identify with.

In naming my experience, allowing myself space and time to see who I am, speak to who I am as not outside of the norm and as centre, I find strength, endless possibilities and joy at the prospect of holding, sitting in and loving powerfully the prospect of living my life from and in every realm, layer, and sphere as centre and simply different. This means a life redefined, a life found, a life reborn.

Adapted and Excerpted  from “Inclusive Language and disability” – Special Needs Opportunity Windows (SNOW) E-Journal” originally published on perspectivesoninclusion.blogspot.com.

Disability does not mean lack of ability

I once had a summer job years ago at a retail clothing store. I always made my best effort to keep the larger change room reserved for people with disabilities, well, reserved for anyone who actually needed it! I once had a “difficult” customer who helped herself to this room. While in it, a customer in a wheelchair came. The lady in the room refused to switch to accomodate this other customer. This situation was an early realization for me of some people’s non-existent ettiquette towards those with disabilities. The realization amplified for me over the years through watching my mother’s own health conditions degrade her ability to walk. My temptation to park in spots resevered for those with disabilities, even if only for a couple minutes, has definately been eliminated.

People with disabilities are … PEOPLE! I am near-sighted, I need glasses. Someone has impaired mobility, he or she needs a wheelchair. I am not saying that my sight condition and someone’s impaired motion are “1 for 1″; I just want to lead to a larger point that access to resources is important to support the contributions people with disabilities. Those without disabilities must recognize this, eliminate use of these resources for self-interest, abolish disability discrimination in general, and promote equal opportunity. Our differences do not make us superior or inferior; they make us unique.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s and President Barack Obama’s speeches in July 2009, on the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, send these messages powerfully. These speeches were delivered before the President signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities  (the first new U.N. convention of the 21st century) Proclomation, a bill with 143 signatories as of December 2009 (Canada included). Check out the video here. Within their speeches they speak to the fact that people with disabilities make up 10% of the world’s population, and like everyone, have a right to dignity and respect. The President also gave an eye-opening example: 75 years ago, a ramp was added during a renovation at the White House. This was done for President Roosevelt, who had a disability (caused by polio). At that time, “…most Americans didn’t even know that President Roosevelt had a disability.” He said it means that most Americans didn’t know that President Roosevelt’s disability did not reduce his ability to “renew our confidence, or rescue our economy, and mobilize our greatest generation to save our way of life”.

In short, in my own words, disability does not mean lack of ability.

Scratching the complicated surface of genocide

I checked out the Wikipedia article on genocide. (I know it’s fool hearty to trust “the pedia”. My apologies right up front.) Apparently “the neutrality of the article is being disputed”; I clicked to the talk page where various Wikipedians are hashing it out.

Fascinating. Probably more than the article itself. (On an only partially related note, a psychologist found Wikipedians to be grumpy. I could’ve told you that.)

There are several arguments going on – what is the “true definition” and what is “real genocide”? What has to happen and how many people have to die? Was this conflict or that happening really a genocide? And it quickly gets ugly. Aren’t you exaggerating? Who are you to say that this didn’t happen? What if you were the target? Would you type so glibly as you are doing right now? What about this event, how come no one calls that genocide?

I’m not about to try to disentangle it. It’s just interesting how genocide evokes such varied reactions; it’s really not as simple as the first line of the Wikipedia article suggests, “Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” The very idea of genocide is political, couched in our investment in the idea of nation-states. What terrible events are deemed worthy of the term is wrapped in power – in those who define things, write history, respond or not respond to murder and destruction. What’s also fascinating is how violence against women and girls is contextualized within genocide. Many people have addressed how rape is a common tool of war, a mechanism to systematically destroy and devastate entire communities. Yet rape is oddly invisible in many discussions of genocide. Maybe not so oddly, given who are the most common targets of rape.

And finally, we always do have to consider who benefits from the devastation – Onyii’s article on economic genocide this week is an excellent discussion of how genocide may be much broader, much more insidious than what mainstream journalism discusses. And as easy as it is to decry the idea of genocide, it’s a very uncomfortable exercise to think about who benefits and why.

War and its amplification of inequality

I recently started re-reading George Orwell’s 1984. I read it for the first time in high school, but now feel I have a greater maturity to appreciate the messages from this classic book. If you have not read it, I recommend it (you can even find it online for free, e.g. here and here). Written in 1948, amongst many things, it speaks to the impacts of human-initiated destruction (such as war) on society – an indirect reflection of historic events. Well, it is said that “history repeats itself”, thus, I feel it is also a reflection of current day happenings. On this week’s topic of “holocausts” (i.e. acts of mass destruction and loss of life), I wanted to share my thoughts on the messages from this book.

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 “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily on human lives, but of the products of human labour.”

We constantly hear about the current “economic crisis”. What does this mean? Economics is defined as the distribution of scarce resources. So, if there is “x” amount of “stuff”, “x” is distributed in one of two ways – equally or unequally. In our world, things are obviously unequal. And I feel war amplifies this inequality. By destroying “stuff”, there is less to distribute; by destroying people, there are less to distribute to. War in itself stimulates the production of goods (e.g. arms), in turn generating wealth. In the material sense, wealth is the possession of goods and money. Thus in war, the relatively few in control are the ones who control production and the ones who attain wealth which is not distributed.

“…if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.”

How can the hierarchal societies we inhabit remain that way unless they are kept that way? They can’t. Look at the housing crisis in the US – many lost their homes, while others received million dollar bonuses! Those in control want to stay in control.

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 What do you think?