Daily Archives: 28 January, 2010

Open Letter to the Mainstream News Media

media and pop culture, social attitudes, , ,

Dear Reporter,

Hi, how are you? I am fine.

Okay, that’s a lie. I am not fine.

There’s a certain type of “news” article that drives me up the wall. The “feel good” story about how the poor pathetic cripple, whose life was horrible and bad, has now been SAVED! by something miraculous, by which we mean “something that would be common place if we lived in a world that wasn’t full of disability fail and discrimination” and also “something done by non-disabled people so we can all talk about how Good and Kind they are to the pathetic disabled person”.

Here’s an example: Legally Blind Man Gets First Job

Debbie and Russell Ward spent a whole evening crying in silence when they were told their four-year-old son would never see again.

Fifteen years later, their tears were ones of joy when they saw the look on Bobby’s face as he was told he had landed his first job.

The shy but proud 19-year-old worked his first shift at the new Supa IGA yesterday morning, where he will work in the produce section.

The article [do read the whole thing] describes how Bobby has multiple certifications that would make him qualified for a variety of jobs, but everyone should be Very! Happy! because look! The poor blind boy has a job. Isn’t it so awesome of the “new Supa IGA which opened yesterday morning” get this free publicity – I mean, give this nice young man a job?

The whole article is structured in such a condescending way, too. I mean, all due respect to Bobby’s parents – I still get teary whenever it hits me again that Don may never get his voice back [1. Side effect of the OMG! Cancer surgery. They removed his thyroid, and hurt his vocal cords. They may come back, but every day it seems less likely.], so I totally get the grieving period and how it can be a total blow to find out your life has been drastically changed – the article focuses a lot of attention on their grief, how their life was affected, and what they thought about everything.

Notice, please, that there’s not a single quote from Bobby himself. Just the Nice Sighted People who work so hard for him.

Look, Reporters: I get it. You want to tell a story that makes everyone feel good, and really digging into why Bobby couldn’t get a job he had qualifications for because of his disability wouldn’t really make anyone feel good at all. Prejudice rarely does.

But these sorts of stories fuel people’s pity. “Oh, how sad it must be to be blind! A world of darkness, of dependency, of not being able to drive a car! WOE. I’m so glad I’m not one of THEM. And I don’t know how I’d cope if my child were one of them. Oh, Bobby’s parents are so brave! And that nice man who gave him a job! So Nice!”

You can do better than this, really. I’ve seen you do better than this.

Do better, okay?

Hugs & Kisses,

Anna

Recommended Reading for January 28th

recommended reading

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post. I attempt to provide extra warnings for certain material present in articles, but your triggers/issues may vary.

two sled hockey playersThe Big Picture: Fire and Ice

Image caption: “Sled hockey player Nikko Landeros, of Berthoud, Colorado (right), takes part in a scrimmage with Tyler Carron in the Boulder Valley YMCA in Lafayette Colorado on January 2nd, 2010. Three years ago, high school wrestlers Landeros and Carron lost their legs when they were hit by a car while changing a flat tire. It didn’t take long for Landeros to pick up sled hockey, and he’ll be competing in Vancouver in the Paralympics. Carron is on the junior national team.”

Image description: “Two sled hockey players on the ice on low, metal, skateboard-sized sleds. Their gloved hands hold metal poles used to steer and to strike the puck. Both wear helmets. Landeros wears a Colorado Avalanche jersey and Carron a white USA jersey. Both men intently look at and seem to move toward the puck in the ice between them.”

Cat in a Dog’s World: Book Review Series: The Ethics of Autism

But I have to say that I find these kinds of questions incredibly irritating and dehumanizing. Autistic people do not need non-autistic people (using simplistic schematics of autism devised by other non-autistic people) to theorize in order to recognize our humanity or membership to “the moral community” […] Why is our personhood and right to autonomy up for debate?

Even if Barnbaum does have some (peculiar) kind of pro-neurodiversity sentiment, her project seems to be entirely misconceived. She starts with presumptions which treat autistic people and non-autistic people as beings from separate planets, are overly simplistic, and are silencing of autistic voices.

Prof Susurro: Want Ad For Feminist Revolution Pt. I

During that meeting, she disclosed that, like me, she has a hidden disability that in no way impacts her ability to do the job for which she was hired. […]

By the time she reached home, her offer of hire had been rescinded on the basis that she might “put youth in danger” and “serious concerns about her ability to come to work on time.” My friend was dumb-founded and has been silently weighing her options all the while feeling completely dehumanized by an all white, all female, “feminist”, “social justice”, agency who didn’t skip a beat in hiring a white able-bodied female to replace her.

LWN.net: LCA: HackAbility

Bright purple hair seems certain to make Liz Henry distinct from the crowd, but it’s another attribute that she came to linux.conf.au 2010 to talk about: her wheelchair. […]

Disability-friendly software, too, is not an easy hack; accessibility tends to be treated as a last-minute add-on. Web site accessibility, too, is often an afterthought, and tends to be user-focused. This approach tends to lead to sub-standard solutions, but it also fails to lead to a free, do-it-yourself culture. We need good accessibility for developers too. […]

As an example of good and bad ways of doing things, Liz contrasted the Free Wheelchair Mission and Whirlwind Wheelchair International. The former makes dirt-cheap wheelchairs out of lawn chairs and bicycle wheels, then ships them by the container load to poor countries. It seems like a good idea, but dumping all those cheap chairs devastates any local market that may have developed. When the chairs break (which tends to happen soon), there’s nobody left to help keep them going. Whirlwind, instead, is focused on partnering with local industry and sharing information, creating a more hackable solution with more people to hack on it.

Patricia E Bauer: Shriver to Emanuel: Let’s work together to end ‘R-word’

In the wake of a news report that the White House chief of staff used the words “f–g retarded” in a strategy session, Special Olympics chairman Timothy Shriver called on Rahm Emanuel to join his campaign to stamp out the “R-word.”

Shriver’s letter to Emanuel [PDF], released today, said the terms “retard” and “retarded” perpetuate stereotypes and stigma against people with intellectual disabilities, and are “just as painful as any number of racial or ethnic slurs, jokes or taunts that society has committed to eradicating from our lexicon.”

The Irish Times: Half of all adults with a disability have trouble coping with daily tasks – study

More than half of all adults living with a disability say they have experienced difficulties going shopping, getting away for a holiday, taking part in community life and socialising in public venues, according to a new study. […]

While some adults with a disability said they had made improvements to their home to help assist them carry out tasks on their own, 52 per cent of adults in private households said a lack of money meant they were unable to adapt their homes.

The Opposite of “Disabled” is Not “Employable”

accessibility, blaming, language, Uncategorized,

According to the United State government, disability is “the inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment(s) which can be expected to result in death or which has lasted or can be expected to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months.” Or, in non-regulatory terms, disability is when a physical or mental impairment will last at least a year and will make someone unable to work. The ability to work is right there in the definition. A person who cannot work is disabled. If that person can work, they are not disabled. Disability and employability are mutually exclusive states of being.

That definition comes from the Social Security Administration and is applied to people applying for disability benefits, basically a wage replacement program to compensate for the salary the person cannot earn – so the focus on employability makes some sense. But more and more, I see this framework for defining and evaluating disability applied outside the benefits context, in deciding if someone is “‘really’ disabled.” It’s also notable that these wage replacement programs are the most commonly known and discussed form of disability-based benefits – while I’m used to seeing articles about how to handle the Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) program, I rarely see coverage of programs from the Department of Rehabilitations, which provides vocational training and support to PWDs. And the false equivalence of disability and unemployability is problematic for a lot of reasons.

  • There are a whole lot of people with disabilities who are not employed due to problems with the economy and with employers who discriminate against PWDs when hiring or fail to sufficient accommodate PWDs while employed. Assuming that unemployment is due solely to a person’s disability status, rather than systemic stigma and discrimination, places the responsibility for finding and keeping a job solely on the shoulders of the PWD. This shifts focus entirely away from the employers who have ultimate power over whether an individual is going to have a job. Take a look at employment statistics for the federal government itself, where “the severely disabled represent 0.94 percent of the government’s workforce.” And despite those low numbers, the government has no problem telling people that unemployment is a disability issue.
  • When disability is defined as an inability to work, that overlooks an enormous segment of people with disabilities. About 37% of PWDs in the United States are employed – 8,581,869 people. But their ability to work does not negate or erase their disabilities. Those disabilities continue to exist and implying they do not lets employers off the hook for acknowledging and accommodating those disabilities in the workplace. It is already easy for an employer to overlook an informal request for accommodation or demand overbroad access to private medical files to “prove” whether or not the requesting employee “actually” has a disability in response to an accommodation request. It’s impossible to say how many employed PWDs have successfully requested and received needed accommodations relative to those who have been too intimidated to ask or had employers unwilling to fulfill their legal obligation to provide accommodations. But I would venture to guess that it’s quite difficult and involves risk for the individual employee. The stereotype that people who can work are not disabled and do not “really” need or deserve accommodation only encourages this behavior.
  • In our society, employability is often equated with worth and value on a fundamental level. In the current bad economy, lots of people have been losing their jobs, and half of them feel that being unemployed has changed their lives for the worse. Being unemployed is seen as shameful, humiliating, a sort of failure to grow up and develop into a “real person.” Obviously, having “disabled” be seen as a synonym for something with those negative connotations does a disservice to people in both groups.