Is It Ableism? Part 2: Obvious Definitions of Ableism

In last week's post, I introduced the concept of ableism via a personal anecdote. Then, I acknowledged that it's not easily defined, and defining it requires a lot of nuance. According to Wikipedia, ableism is defined as "discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities and/or people who are perceived to be disabled." This is the definition at its simplest, but there's still a lot to unpack. So let's start with a very simple example that damn near everybody would agree is ableism:

In Nazi Germany and its eugenics program, people with physical and cognitive disabilities were deemed inferior and executed. However, it is pretty naïve to think that ableism is limited to such extreme and obvious examples. Just as society is becoming increasingly aware of racism being a structural issue-- as opposed to something simple and obvious like "He's a racist because he's a KKK member"-- it's important to realize that structural ableism is a problem. Often, structural ableism is the result of lack of awareness and understanding rather than intentional maliciousness. A simple example is not providing a ramp for a wheelchair user to enter a building. Or, in the case of an invisible disability, such as dyslexia, not giving a student extra help or some other accommodation. While not as insidious as Nazi eugenics, failing to make accommodations for disabled people is a genuine problem.

Structural ableism is difficult to address, but part of addressing the issue involves being aware of cultural ableism. Wikipedia defines cultural ableism as "behavioural, cultural, attitudinal and social patterns that may discriminate against dignity of disability symptoms, deny, invisibilise, dismiss special needs or may make disability rights and accessibility unattainable." This is definitely a major issue for all forms of disabilities, and I would wager probably more so for invisible disabilities.

When I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, the only invisible disabilities that were well understood-- to my knowledge, anyway-- were dyslexia and intellectual disability (people with the latter, of course, used to be slapped with the cringe-worthy label "retarded"). Special education classes and accommodations were increasingly available for people with these disabilities. But as for the invisible disabilities that have been a part of my life like autism, prosopagnosia, and auditory processing disorder? Forget it. Sink or swim. Missed that social cue and made a faux pas? "You refuse to take advice and you refuse to learn from your mistakes. You're not trying." Can't differentiate between two teachers with similar mustaches? "You weren't paying attention." Didn't hear the directions because there was too much background noise? Tough shit. "These other kids all heard the directions, so why didn't you? I don't want to hear any excuses." When parents and teachers said things like this to me, they were denying and dismissing my disabilities. There was just one problem that prevents me from automatically slapping on the "ableist" judgment: practically nobody was aware of autism, prosopagnosia, and auditory processing disorder back then. Of the three, auditory processing disorder was the only condition that I was diagnosed with as a kid.

While the above scenarios are definitely ableist, I strongly believe that applying this label is contingent upon whether the person passing these judgments is aware of the existence of these invisible disabilities. A teacher today would most certainly be educated on them, and if they still displayed the same attitude, it would be appropriate to call their attitudes ableist. Teachers in the '80s and '90s? Ignorant perhaps (in a "I don't know anything about astrophysics" kind of way, not in a Donald Trump kind of way). And in some cases, assholes, because on what planet is it okay to tell a child that they aren't trying?

I let my parents and teachers off the hook somewhat because the issue was largely that my disabilities were unknown and unidentified. As I noted, auditory processing disorder was the exception to this. I was diagnosed at age eight, and every year before school started, my mother told all my teachers that I needed to sit in front of the room so that I could more easily process the directions. Usually my teachers cooperated, but practically every year there was a teacher who failed to let me do that; whether because they "just forgot" or because they dismissed it as "special treatment", who the hell knows? If it was the latter, that is definitely an ableist attitude. And invariably I would get in trouble with said teacher for "not listening," which possibly reflected an ableist attitude.

Now what about less obvious cases of ableism? Well, part of that involves acknowledging that even a disability isn't always easy to define. We'll unpack that next week. Stay tuned.

Progress in the 21st Century

I often tell people that I was born in the wrong decade.

I look at autistic kids who were born in 2000 or later-- a good 20+ years after me-- and I envy them. They were born into a world in which unprecedented progress in the understanding of the human mind-- professionally and publicly-- has increased exponentially since I was a kid. They get individualized education plans (IEPs) based on their needs. Does the kid have auditory processing disorder (a condition often comorbid with autism)? They'll will be seated at the front of the classroom where they will be less likely to be bombarded with extraneous noise that would otherwise make it difficult for them to process the teacher's instructions. Does the kid miss social cues? No problem-- there will be time set aside to work with the kid on social skills, and the teacher will forgive the child for missing something that most of the world takes for granted. Does the kid have esoteric interests? Well, then the teacher had better at least try to understand them instead of dismissing them. Does the autistic kid do better working alone than in groups? Then the kid will be allowed to work alone even when the rest of the class is working in groups. And if there is a project where groups are mandatory, the teacher will handpick students that they know will get along best with this kid. Is there bullying? If the teacher tells the student to "just ignore" it, then a lot of people will think the teacher is ignorant.

If only "autism" had been a word in the '90s, at least outside the context of Rainman, then my life would have been much different,  my childhood less of the nightmare that it was. Between the kids that bullied me emotionally and physically, the sometimes-callous teachers who told me to "just ignore" it, and my well-meaning-but-tragically-misguided parents who thought they needed to change me, my life was often a living hell. My parents get it now and realize that they made some serious, non-trivial mistakes. But even today I wake up screaming from nightmares about being a kid and arguing with my mother about certain things about me-- such as my androgynous sense of gender and concurrent gender expression-- that I knew were never going to change. My parents thought they were helping me, but the reality was I often did not feel completely comfortable in my own house. As a teenager, the only place I felt comfortable was my progressive overnight camp. Today, I compare it to the way Harry Potter felt going to Hogwarts.

I was born in 1980. As much as I complain about growing up in the '90s-- what I refer to as the final decade of the dark ages-- I realize how much worse it would have been had I been born in 1930, 1950, or even 1970. I look back at the way autistic people (or people who in hindsight probably were autistic) were treated in decades and centuries past and find myself getting infuriated. I think about how often people were institutionalized, sometimes just for having unpopular opinions. An autistic person having a meltdown? Forget it. Whereas today we better understand that a meltdown is the result of extreme frustration that most other people don't experience-- and NOT the same thing as a temper tantrum, which is something a child does to protest not getting their way-- what did people think it was 100 years ago? Or 50 years ago? Probably insanity, grounds for institutionalization. Hell, even in the '90s, people dismissed my meltdowns-- which I tried VERY hard to control-- as temper tantrums. I didn't have the words for them, but I knew that's not what they were, and I felt insulted as a teenager when people dismissed my genuine hurt and frustration about a certain situation (usually a social issue) as a temper tantrum.

I think about the ways people with other disabilities were treated. Deaf? No sign language for you! You'd better learn to read lips! Gesturing, let alone a gesture-based language- isn't normal! This was as recent as THE GODDAMNED 1960s, as illustrated in the film Mr. Holland's Opus. 

These poor old souls, what they must have gone through in a world that didn't want to even try to understand them, let alone accept them.

But, to quote Dr. Jack Kevorkian, "That's the way the world runs. It advances slow, and somebody gets burned-- badly."

But it advances, and that's what's important. I'm immediately suspicious of the mindset of someone who laments about "the good old days" and rhetorically asks, "What's the world coming to?" The good old days when autistic people were locked up? When deaf people were not allowed to learn sign language? When black people were legally segregated?

What the world is coming to is progress. Change seems scary to some people, but change is going to happen. Does some change worry me? Yes. We are making significant leaps in artificial intelligence technology. I can think of a million things that can go wrong. I think of all the sci-fi stories about intelligent robots killing humans. But I also see AI as being something that can do a lot of good. For one thing, it's probably easier to teach a computer than a human to be unbiased when interviewing an intelligent but socially awkward autistic person. It will be difficult to teach the computer, because computers are made by humans after all, but I'm confident that we'll get there. One time, my grandmother was talking to me about how the idea of AI scares her. I asked her what she thought about how we have a device that can fit in our pockets and that has access to an unbelievable amount of information. She said she thought it was interesting. I asked her what she would have thought had someone told her in the 1950s that this device would eventually be invented. She said it would have scared her.

Well, there you go. Despite all the problems that exist in the world (the asshole in the White House, climate change), we are overall living in the best of times. As we prepare to enter the '20s, let's make them the Roaring '20s... Roaring with progress, that is.