I’m sharing some out of the ordinary pieces today. One is several years old, the second is about a distinctly local matter, and the third is an extremely short part of an advice column. You never know where you’ll find some worthwhile disability content.
Here are your three disability-related links for Monday, April 22, 2024.
1. AUTISM IS NOT A SHELL SURROUNDING A “NORMAL” CHILD
Maxfield Sparrow, Thinking Person’s Guide To Autism - January 12, 2017
Source: X (Twitter)
“I’m going to take you on a little journey through autism, to try to help you understand why hoping for your child to recover, or go into remission, or be cured is both a waste of the precious time you could spend learning how to better understand your autistic child, and also harmful to your child-parent relationship — not to mention damaging to your child’s self-esteem and mental health.”
This article, written by an autistic person, and addressed to parents of autistic children, should be on any Autism Acceptance Month reading list. It clearly, specifically, patiently and compassionately explains pretty much the whole idea of autism being a way of being, rather than a disease to be fought or cured. More importantly, it vividly describes the negative consequences for autistic people of the most common efforts to cure or mask autism. Seven years later, the ideas of this 2017 piece do feel quite a bit more widely understood and accepted. But it’s still relevant an necessary.
2. Rockwood school board member who mocked disabilities, Pride flags and ‘libtards’ to resign
Monica Obradovic, St. Louis Post-Dispatch - April 12, 2024
“‘They come to the school board meetings with their gay flags and their masks,’ Clark said to laughs at a town hall hosted by conservative Real Talk Radio Network. ‘I use the word libtard, they said I was an ableist … They come in with the kids in the wheelchairs and everything … whatever, you are a libtard, and I mean it, and I stand on it.’”
It’s sometimes tempting to distance disability rights and the struggle against ableism from other social justice issues — from the “woke agenda” to use the popular but deeply unfortunate term. We might think that going it alone in the culture wars will win us some kind of respect from our more conservative neighbors and lawmakers. But aside from the arguable cowardice of refusing solidarity with other oppressed people, we keep being reminded by actual people’s words and behaviors that they already see disabled people as part of that despised group they call “woke,” or “libtards.” People who are prejudiced against others based on race, immigration or citizen status, gender, sexual orientation, or even just their ideas about education, history, and social policy, usually won’t have any difficulty tossing disabled people into the same wastebasket when it suits their rhetorical strategy. So we may as well pick sides. Lots of others have already picked our side for us.
3. Miss Manners: If you don’t have a disability, is it ever okay to use a wheelchair-accessible stall?
Miss Manners, NJ.com - April 16, 2024
“GENTLE READER: Will you be prepared to vacate the stall instantly if someone who needs it enters the bathroom? Miss Manners doubts it.”
Broadly speaking, non-disabled “allies” still have the dominant voice in disability matters. We need more authentic disabled voices to be heard and respected. But I it’s still uniquely valuable when a widely-read, thoroughly mainstream, non-disabled commentator weighs in well on something to do with disability. Even if it’s only a sentence or two, when a byline as familiar as “Miss Manners” answers a question about accessible restroom stalls with a truly unique and fundamentally “right” answer, it’s something to celebrate. It’s also pretty satisfying.
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So much good stuff in this post. Thanks for sharing