Daily Archives: 6 April, 2010

Dear Carolyn Hax: Thank You

Dear Imprudence

I was so pleased when s.e. brought Carolyn Hax’s advice to a grandparent of an autistic girl to my attention.

Here’s a clip of the letter Carolyn is responding to:

The mother of my grandgirls is making life a problem. The middle girl is extremely autistic and has not been taught the social rules we all need. That means it is extremely hard to take her anywhere. She is manageable in the car, taken out to a fast food restaurant and back home. But she is not social enough to take to a store or overnight. The parents think we should be able to take her overnight and anywhere we take the other girls.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Appearing Normal, children are not unaware of these sorts of situations, and they do have long-term consequences. Carolyn doesn’t pull any punches:

If it already hasn’t screamed its way off the page, here’s where I’m going with these questions: There are ways you can show an interest in including Jane, and if you haven’t tried them, then you’re the one who is making life a problem. You can ask your daughter to teach you her strategies for bringing Jane on successful outings, or, if you’ve learned those already, then you can admit that Jane overwhelms you and ask for outing ideas that are a notch above McDonald’s that can build your confidence with her. Then you can take Jane with you, one-on-one, for as many of these outings as you take the other girls.

Basically: Stop treating your grandchild like a problem to be solved. The problem here is not “Jane”.

In my experience, situations like this one are pretty common, and not just in family members. It’s easier to just… not invite or plan for the wheelchair-user than it is to be limited to the small number of places they can go. It’s easier not to include things that can be helpful to people who are disabled than it is to contact people with disabilities and find out what their needs are.

I’m really glad to read Carolyn Hax calling that shit out for what it is.

I really recommend reading the whole thing.

Recommended Reading for April 6, 2010

recommended reading

Assistive tech keyboards - three of them, all with large print and brightly contrasted colours

I’m sorry this is short today – something came up in my personal life.

Assumptions: Unfair & Not Unfair

This is an ethics professor discussing the ethics of caring for patients whose injuries were, in our view as physicians, “brought upon themselves”, or for patients whom we don’t necessarily like.

Racist, Sexist, and Homophobic

I posted Monday about the “Writing the Other” panel at Millennicon. Today I wanted to address one of the comments. Jim Van Pelt … described an academic panel in which the moderator opened by saying, “If you are white, male and straight in America, you are also, automatically racist, sexist and homophobic.” Comment link here.

This next part is scary to write. To be clear, I’m not talking about you. I’m not talking about Van Pelt. I’m not talking about anyone except myself, ‘kay?

That moderator is correct. I am a straight white male raised in the U.S. I am also racist. I am sexist. I am homophobic.

How the left enables the right’s racism: The Obama rape comic TRIGGER WARNING

But what really got my side-eye going was AlterNet’s accompanying article to the cartoon, where I originally saw the cartoon. Once again, it’s another progressive dismissal of racism and racists as “something” thought/said/done by “them” over “there.” Of course, the post’s intent (sigh) is calling out the blatantly viciously anti-Black bigotry while offering some sort of “compassion” to those “afflicted” with the “racist condition.” Well, sort of.

…

However, calling out racism as a “mental illness” both enables the racism and is ableist to those with differing mental and physical capabilities than the “able-bodied.”

Fighting Ableism Fights Sexual Assault TRIGGER WARNING

Women with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be victims of rape or sexual assault than women without disabilities. More than twice as likely than what is already a terrifyingly high probability of being a victim of rape or sexual assault. I myself am a woman with a mental health disability who is also a victim of sexual assault, and seeing this statistic always makes my stomach drop and my muscles tense. But when I think about it, what influences that statistic, it makes perfect sense. Rape and sexual assault are crimes of power and control. Women with disabilities are subject to sets of interlocking, intersecting oppressions on the basis of their gender and their disability status. Both gender-based oppression and disability-based oppression separately accept and even encourage abuse and denigration of people in those groups. So of course it makes sense that sexism and ableism would add to each other, reinforce each other’s power, resulting in the heightened vulnerability to assault reflected in the statistics.