Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
A guide from the developmental disabilities center at Kennedy Krieger Institute opens with a blunt claim: ableism is so deeply woven into daily life that people treat it as normal, yet it is this unfair system that has to be addressed, not disability. Through a lens that counters ableism, disability becomes a form of diversity and a marginalized identity. The guide's Six P's framework, which runs from the person all the way to policy, points faith communities toward becoming places where People with Disabilities belong, along with their families. The harm is clearest in health care. Clinicians often assume a disabled life is a life of low quality, while patients report otherwise, and that bias widens gaps in preventive care. Ableism also keeps People with Disabilities out of education, employment, and housing. Real inclusion means a place in every program and activity, structural barriers removed, communication People with Disabilities can use, friendships, and a say in community decisions.
Ableism takes several forms, and the guide sorts them into covert and overt. Implicit ableism is unintentional, such as assuming a disabled person must accept a hand or talking around the person instead of to them. Explicit ableism is hostile and meant to injure, and the guide names hate crimes, mockery in gestures, and shunning. Internalized ableism grows inside People with Disabilities who absorb the oppression around them and come to see themselves and one another in a poor light. Two models of disability explain the divide. The medical model attaches stigma by insisting on erasure and cures, and its record includes institutionalization and silencing. The disability justice model defines wellness broadly, puts the voices of People with Disabilities first, and weighs intersecting identities, since a Black person who has a disability meets oppression doubled by racism and ableism. Disability humility completes the picture: people without disabilities accept that People with Disabilities hold the expertise on disability, so they can learn from them and amplify their voices.
The cost lands on People with Disabilities in layers. At the personal level, stigma casts disability as inherently negative and disabled people as incompetent, and the violence of eugenics echoes whenever health care favors nondisabled bodies. Praising someone as a source of motivation for simply living in their body turns that person into an object. At the systemic level, high medical bills and missing insurance put care out of reach, unemployment and underemployment create financial inequity, public health surveys leave disabled people out so solutions never form, public transit stays physically unusable, and disabled students of color are disciplined at uneven rates, feeding the pipeline from school to prison. Communities add their own barriers, from missing ramps and narrow doorways for wheelchair users to a lack of trained staff and of partners from the disability community. Guardianship policies go further and take away autonomy, reinforcing the false story that People with Disabilities cannot make decisions.
A community that calls a difference a defect has the flaw, not the person. The guide's fourth point is a plan, and it asks a lot of the rest of us. It wants disability history and culture taught in training, training that builds disability consciousness by digging into structural inequity instead of stopping at cultural competence, close collaboration with People with Disabilities, representation in positions of power, and policies that reach past inclusion, including supported decision making in place of guardianship. It also asks each of us to look inward, to redefine what counts as normal, and to weigh who holds power in the room. We hold that the people who meet a barrier know it best, so we should defer to them and use our own seats in the room to carry their voices into decisions, never to speak for them. That is where the friction sits: the guide wants People with Disabilities in positions of power, and a plan drawn up first and shown to them afterward does not give them that.
What we know of disability from the outside falls short of what People with Disabilities know from the inside, so we should first look back at how people around us talked about disability and what mass media showed us. We should retire our own idea of what counts as normal, and we should use whatever privilege we hold as nondisabled people to lift up what People with Disabilities tell us before any plan takes shape. A community that counts disability among its many kinds of diversity would keep us building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.
Naming the flaw in our own view first moves the blame off the person and onto the system, where it belongs.
Read the Full Article: Becoming Anti-Ableist: A Disability Justice-Informed Approach to Supporting the Disability Community.
By: Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute
Also See:
- What is ableism, and what is its impact?
- Horror movies have an ableism problem. Isn’t it time we found new ‘monsters’?
- Ableism 101: What it is, what it looks like, and what we can do to to fix it
- Intersections Between Racism and Ableism
- How to talk about disability sensitively and avoid ableist tropes
- I was nine when I learned what ableism is
- Anti-Ableism Fast Facts - Ways to Combat Ableism:
- 8 Ways Ableism Shows Up In Religious Spaces
- Inclusion Is Not Something You Earn
