image of a person in a wheelchair. The photograph shows the feet, legs and arms of a Black-skinned person wearing gray pants and blue sneakers. The face does not appear. Credits: Adobe Stock
I have been thinking for days about how we (ableist society) place a weight on disability, when in fact it is part of human diversity.
Disability is not a weight!
I will not romanticize it, but if we stop and think carefully, we know that: disability is not a burden.
The weight exists and comes from a structurally ableist society: when it wants to normalize, contain or reduce autistic people’s “stims” through medication; when scientists focus on miracle cures instead of finding ways to make society more inclusive and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities; when doctors subject our people (especially Black disabled people) to invasive and degrading treatments contrary to human dignity. When the State provides neither adequate care nor treatment according to their difficulties; when the mother (overwhelmingly Black) of a child with a disability spends months and even years on the waiting list for a specialist or has to deal alone with all the demands of the person with a disability because the father can vanish. And beyond that, both the caregiver and the person with a disability have to deal with ableist and offensive comments.
That is, we are crossed by all of this and, at the end of this crazy race to guarantee the minimum, we hear this phrase: “you are a warrior, God does not give a burden greater than you can carry”. Look, all the crossings I mentioned above were not created by and do not come with disability; they are the result of a racist, sexist, LGBTQphobic society and of oppressions structured and rooted in society.
I say again: this does not come with disability. We must have class consciousness and political consciousness and treat as a weight what is in fact the problem: the sexist, racist, ableist and LGBTQphobic structure. That is what we need to fight and “seek the cure” for.
Disability belongs to the diversity of human beings, to the many ways of thinking, acting, feeling and perceiving the world. Neurotypical people must respect it. And the collective struggle is everyone’s duty!
Only the struggle saves!
