Andrew Pulrang
Forbes Magazine, Oct. 25, 2020
If you read more than one or two articles on disability issues, or talk to just about any disability rights activist, you will run across the word “ableism.” The word does a lot of work for disability culture. It carries the weight of the worst of what plagues disabled people the most, but can be so hard to express.
But for that reason, “ableism” can also seem like an overworked term. It often adds as much confusion and dissension to disability discourse as it does clarity and purpose. While it gives voice and substance to very real beliefs and experiences, the word “ableism” can also feel like a rhetorical weapon meant to discredit people at a stroke for an offensiveness that many people simply don’t see or agree exists.
But as any disabled person will tell you, ableism, or something like it absolutely exists. Having a word to talk about it is essential to understanding it and fighting it.
What, exactly is “ableism,” or what is it supposed to be? We may as well start with “textbook” definitions of “ableism” …
Urban Dictionary: “Ableism is the discrimination or prejudice against people who have disabilities. Ableism can take the form of ideas and assumptions, stereotypes, attitudes and practices, physical barriers in the environment, or larger scale oppression. It is oftentimes unintentional and most people are completely unaware of the impact of their words or actions.”
These definitions are fine as far as they go. But it’s always useful to try coming up with our own definitions, based on real-life experiences of disability. For example, ableism is:
Any statement or behavior directed at a disabled person that denigrates or assumes a lesser status for the person because of their disability.
Or …
Social habits, practices, regulations, laws, and institutions that operate under the assumption that disabled people are inherently less capable overall, less valuable in society, and / or should have less personal autonomy than is ordinarily granted to people of the same age.
These two definitions point towards an important dual nature for ableism. In one sense it is about individual behavior, but it is also about social structures and institutions. It’s important to explore the essential components both.
1. Feeling instinctively uncomfortable around disabled people, or anyone who seems “strange” in ways that might be connected to a disability of some kind. This manifests in hundreds of ways, and can include:
2. Holding stereotypical views about disabled people in general, or about certain sub-groups of disabled people. For example:
3. Resenting disabled people for advantages or privileges you think they have as a group. This is one of the main flip sides of condescension and sentimentality towards disabled people. It’s driven by a combination of petty everyday resentments and false, dark, and quasi-political convictions, such as:
It’s interesting to note that there seem to be two main schools of ableist belief. One is that disabled people are unfortunate but innocent victims of circumstance who should be loved, cared for, and shielded from harm. The other is that disabled people are naturally inferior, disagreeable, and at the same time beneficiaries of unfair and unjustified generosity and social protection. Neither belief is true, and both beliefs are limiting and poison relationships between disabled and non-disabled people, and sometimes between disabled people themselves.
At the same time, we can’t lay all of this on individual beliefs and behaviors. Those beliefs are heavily influenced by longstanding social practices and institutions. And those practices and institutions take much longer to change than individual attitudes. Long after people’s beliefs about disability improve, laws, regulations, and institutions keep ableism alive and do enormous harm to disabled people.
Any time we talk about “systemic” forces, we run the risk of wandering off into so much abstraction that we lose connection with everyday reality. But institutional ableism really isn’t that mysterious. The components of it are easy to see, once we know what we are looking for.
2. Social policy that seeks to “care for” disabled people through intensive supervision, protection, and isolation from everyday society.
3. Policies and practices that seek to reduce or eliminate disability from society, not just as a benefit to any individual disabled person, but as a perceived benefit to society as a whole.
Some even argue that entire economic systems, like capitalism, other prejudices, like racism, and conventional values like paternalism and conformity both generate and depend on deep-seeded and often unconscious ableism. Far from being a new or niche social phenomenon, ableism may be a key component of oppression and injustice themselves.
So what does all of this suggest about how we should understand ableism? Here are a few suggestions:
Ableism is bad. It hurts people. But it shouldn’t shock us. We should be able to identify it and work against it with urgency, but without undue shame or anguish. The word “ableism” itself may sound artificial to some, but what it represents is as old as human civilization, and as immediate as every awkward encounter disabled people face every day.
Original at https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewpulrang/2020/10/25/words-matter-and-its-time-to-explore-the-meaning-of-ableism/#38d5dd147162
