The Invisible Ism

Of all the vocabulary I’ve gathered and ability I’ve acquired to discuss systemic oppression, there are a couple of forms of oppression or discrimination that I’ve noticed receive less or almost no attention. By referring to them as invisible, I don’t mean that we can’t tell that they exist or that their effects are minor or inconsequential, but that they are easily overlooked or erased in discussions about combating injustice and in purportedly progressive spaces. Society collectively disregards the validity and experiences of people who are victimized by these isms, one of which I want to explore in this post: ableism.  

The definition of ableism that I’m working with is as follows: a form of structural oppression--the intertwining of prejudice and systems of power--that produces an entire system of thinking and acting that harms and discriminates against disabled people (as well as people presumed to have disabilities).  

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            Rereading old writing of mine is always a treacherously cringeworthy experience. Invariably, interspersed with the occasional nugget of surprising astute middle-school observations will be sentences, descriptions, or words that I wish I had had the sense not to use.

            I am conscious that my writing as it is now still probably doesn’t avoid ableist language, but it is particularly striking to me that as an eighth-grader, I was both aware and completely ignorant of the issues I was trying to discuss. I wrote a story that touched on characters with autism, mental illness, and other chronic illnesses in fairly heavy-handed or inconsiderate ways. I was not trying to be ableist--I didn’t even know what that meant--and would have said I was trying to be positive or respectful about people with disabilities, which clearly didn’t work out. Part of the problem was my ignorance of issues around disability, which led me to try to constantly “justify” my character’s depression and suicidality by making her an increasingly tragic figure experiencing every misfortune I could think of. And part of it was internalized societal ideas about disability that I had no idea I’d adopted.

It was especially unnerving because I wrote a character quite like myself into my story, and there’s a scene when she’s explaining her medical problems to another character, and the thing she emphasizes most emphatically is that she is not “handicapped,” and seems terrified of being perceived as such. This disavowal isn’t something I can recall ever doing myself--at least not so vociferously. I do have to wonder, though, just how much anti-disability sentiment percolated into my subconscious before I became aware of it.

To identify as a person with disabilities (mainly chronic autoimmune disorders) is something I struggle with--how to do it, whether to do it at all, whether my chronic illnesses “qualify” me as disabled enough. As a kid, I was shy and loathed attention, and tried my hardest to fit in with the people around me. I hated that the school nurse had to come to my classroom twice a day to check in with me, that I was often late to lunch or class and attracted attention by coming in late. I hated that I couldn’t eat what I wanted and sometimes couldn’t participate in activities or had to miss school. I understood that the media did not reflect or represent people like me, and clung to the few books that did, even in flawed or unrealistic ways. I tried to include characters with my experiences in the stories I wrote (and managed to problematically represent myself even so, apparently). I had some encounters with ableism--doctors convinced I would not be able to manage my medical conditions alone in middle school, other kids’ rude interrogations, adults’ deliberate misunderstanding, TSA officials at airport security harassing me over whether my medical devices were actually explosives. But internalized and other less obvious manifestations of ableism were whole different matters, ones that it took me a long time to grasp.

I began to think about ableism around the same time I started to think more deeply about the whole web of intertwined oppressions (racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, cissexism, etc.), but at first it was only another term in a list of Bad Things. It was when I attended a class on disability rights activism taught by Lydia Brown that a whole other dynamic of societal oppression came unhidden for me--the way “normally”-functioning bodies/minds are taken as the default, relegating all those who deviate from that quietly assumed normal to some sort of defective status. The simultaneous erasure and exploitation of disabled people--as sources of “inspiration,” as symbols of divine punishment or tribulation, as medical problems that can be fixed--came clear to me, like something that had always been all around me but which I’d never really examined.

The disability activism class was one of the most valuable two hours I have ever spent. I probably signed up out of a sense of activist duty--this was an area of oppression that I didn’t know too much about and should probably learn. I was thinking vaguely of myself as disabled at the time, but I shied away from the label still--afraid, perhaps, that it would seem like I was asking for pity or special treatment, afraid that I didn’t “count” as disabled, etc. Perhaps, shamefully, afraid of associating myself with the people our culture deems worthy of rejection, subjugation, erasure, and/or violence.

This concept of internalized as well as societal ableism is one that has stuck with me most strikingly. To want to distance myself from the “disabled” label, to want to prove I was no different than non-disabled peers--this is part of what Brown described to us as disability disavowal: even within the category of people with disabilities, there is an artificial hierarchy. In order to reclaim some of the power disabled people are not apportioned or allowed, we may console or raise up ourselves by thinking along the lines of, “Well, I may be ____, but at least I’m not ____.  I don’t want to be ____. At least I’m more normal than that.” This is what my  book character from middle school was doing--insisting that she’s not handicapped, god forbid anyone see her that way. God forbid she fit into any category but some throttling concept of normal. In order for her to “win,” to be accepted, to be normal, someone else has to lose--has to be lesser, “more disabled,” less valid as a real person, less respected, lower on the totem pole of people already cast into society’s reject pile.

The takeaway from that class was the conviction that what we need now is to move from rights to justice. Beyond changing whatever laws we’ve managed to change or institute, we must have a shift in mindset and cultural values and paradigms so that progressive laws have a chance of being enforced, and better ones made, so that our lives can be something not just legally protected, but culturally understood and appreciated.

In my town, which tends to fancy itself progressive and liberal, there were attempts in elementary school to teach kids about disabilities. On the day when they taught about a condition I have, I skipped school, dreading being talked about, being regarded as irrevocably Different. I was very shy and touchy about discussing any of my medical problems, but at least the school was making an effort to increase kids’ awareness of the experiences of people around them. But I would have preferred it if disabilities could be more “normalized,” so to speak, rather than singled out for a day. Not to say that programs aimed at understanding should be replaced with erasure or avoidance of the subject, but discussions of ableism and such would be a good addition, rather than just spotlighting some sad differences that Other People have. Additionally, we have to build a general culture where disability isn’t something that’s stowed away in a corner, with disabled people at risk of erasure or far worse mistreatment.

A less harmful society is still far off, despite some efforts that have been made--awareness posters, attempts at inclusive language, attempts at accessibility accommodations. Backlash against “political correctness” and “oversensitivity” is also unfortunate and harmful, especially when it creates unsafe environments through mockery. Just the other day, one of my teachers went off on a bizarre, ableist-neurotypical rant about the fact that we have a therapy dog that visits the school once in a while. His diatribe went something along the lines of, “When Russia and China come to invade us, we’re not even going to fight, we’re going to be big squishy marshmallows with our therapy dogs, where everyone gets a trophy…” He went on, adopting a mock-baby voice. “Aw, your lives are so hard here, aren’t they? It’s just like a war zone here, isn’t it? Don’t you all have PTSD? Aw, I feel so bad for you!”

Yes, the town I live in is largely privileged and coddled, but disabilities do not discriminate by class or situation. Implying that any mental health issues we might have are trivial because our lives aren’t “hard” enough is an ableist effort to delegitimize those issues. Bringing in a puppy for students to spend time with, to give them a moment to decompress, to soothe stress--this is not an effort that warrants derision or scorn. What does deserve reproach is not that students in a privileged town may, apparently inconceivably, have hard lives or suffer from mental health problems, but that our schools are not safe places and may well contribute to anxiety, depression, and the like. Suffocation in the pressure-cooker of a privilege-sodden high school is not the equivalent of a war zone, but that doesn’t make our problems insignificant or worthy of scorn. Ironically, the stress of this teacher’s high-level class combined with the mocking of his students are exactly what can produce the problems that therapy dogs may help assuage.

In a way, this incident was born of the same misconception I had back in middle school, when I kept trying to “justify” my character’s suicide by making her life harder and harder, thinking that she couldn’t believably be struggling unless she was in the very worst situation possible--except this is worse, because here the ableism was coming from a teacher, in whom authority is vested, and whose job description is not supposed to include taking aim at his students or belittling them if they are struggling or really do benefit from therapy. Additionally, if our priorities truly were supporting mental health rather than fear-mongering around the Threat of China and Russia, why exactly would that be worthy of mockery? And just the fact that teachers can openly ridicule efforts to build support networks and healthier school atmospheres is demonstrative of the reality that we do not live in a society where everyone gets a trophy--in other words, an equal one. We live in one where there is still a clear lack of justice, understanding, and compassion.

As well as in schools, with their mixed records, there’s a dearth of consideration of this silent ism, ableism, in the domains of activism in general. At a screening of a documentary on climate change, a man asked me if there would be audio narration for the whole movie, since he was nearly blind and would not be able to see it. I had to tell him that I didn’t think there would be, and cringed during the times in the film when the narrative was carried only by pictures or words on the screen. At the same event, incidentally, a friend of mine worried that there would not be subtitles--and there weren’t--without which she had a hard time hearing the words, especially if she couldn’t lip-read the people speaking them. This was a screening hosted by an activist organization that strives for awareness and inclusiveness, and it dawned on me slowly how much ableism still pervades spaces that try to be intersectional and enlightened. At recent marches and rallies, I applauded the diversity in race, gender, and class of the speakers, and was impressed by the readily available Spanish translation, but noticed that disability was not at all taken into account. I have seen an ASL interpreter at a Jackson Browne concert, but not a political rally or conference. Many events involve stairs or walking long distances without accessibility options. And mental illness may be given even less consideration even in spaces that are supposed to be progressive or radical.

Ableism is often a quiet oppression, but it is not an absent one. It is not separate from other issues that we try to combat, and may both appear and be ignored in our well-intentioned activism. To treat mental illness as the root of gun violence has a flavor of ableism, for example. There are situations in which the phrase “man up” can be seen as both sexist and ableist. Classism affects the ability of people to get aid for health problems, including those stemming from disabilities. The fallout of catastrophic climate change will pose particular challenges for people like me who will not be able to survive without access to medical supplies. Gender identities and sexual orientations that break with the cisgender-and-straight pattern have been sometimes regarded as mental illnesses (and sometimes in declaring that they’re not, the LGBTQ community partakes in disability disavowal--“we’re queer but that doesn’t mean we’re disabled, at least,” without including or affirming the experiences of people who are both). Whatever our sphere of social justice activism, ableism is there playing a role, waiting to be brought to light, held accountable, and rejected.

Ableism creates artificial divisions and strata of society to hold differently-abled and “normal” people, and unless activists begin to address and rectify this oppression in our work, they reinforce those barriers, exactly as our discriminatory society would prefer.

The road to a better world, as always, is long. To change our mindsets, to change our actions, to alter how we think of normal and problematic, to destigmatize differences in ability, to shift our own language and thoughts as well as working to change others’, to engage with struggles against ableist incarceration or education or legal policies--none of this is easy. But no facet of activism is easy. Fighting to dismantle systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etcetera has never been easy, but we work for it, and it is necessary.

We should not settle for any less with ableism.