4/2/2019 0 Comments What Happens when we're hiddenI had a conversation with my husband the other day that really showed me what the rest of the world sees. He had come to visit me at my internship and bring me lunch, and there was a video playing nearby of an event the organization held recently. Obviously, just about everyone in the video was a client of the organization, most of whom have intellectual or developmental disabilities. My husband turned to me after watching for a minute, and then he said something interesting: "Is it bad that I sometimes feel uncomfortable around people with certain disabilities?" What he meant was that sometimes the physical features of some people are jarring to him and make him a little uncomfortable. He knew he could ask me this question because I make a point to have these hard discussions and talk about these kinds of things. I wasn’t mad or offended--I really thought his question was interesting.
We discussed how he only knows a couple people with physical "deformities," mostly missing fingers or a hand that didn't develop typically, things like that. And he acknowledged that he's not bothered by these specific people because he's known them for so long that it's just become normal. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there is a really good reason for why he feels this way, and why many more people do as well. If we look at our schools, our jobs, even our everyday shopping, most of us rarely run into other people with disabilities. Maybe an elderly person with a cane or in a mobility scooter, maybe a fellow wheelchair-user, maybe someone with a hearing aid or a child with a developmental disability with their parents. But rarely do we see the people who are employed by my organization. Rarely do we see folks with service dogs, or white canes (for the blind and visually impaired), using sign language, or with more "severe" intellectual and developmental disabilities--and especially not adults. Our schools are organized so most of these students are off in their own hallway, tucked in a corner somewhere no one else ever goes. I've seen this in a dozen different schools, always the same. Most general education students only see the students from the self-contained (i.e., segregated) class every now and then, and they rarely get the chance to interact. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the continuum of services is vital to students achieving their potential and being able to find a middle ground between full inclusion and full segregation; some students just cannot tolerate the environment of the gen ed classroom, and that's fine! My concern is not with these students being in a class by themselves, as I think it's pretty important to get to interact with other people like yourself as well, but rather that they are practically never given a chance to interact with their non-disabled peers in a healthy way. Most interaction is almost forced, or derived from pity and a "do-gooder" attitude, which benefits no one. In general, the non-disabled students just see the disabled students from afar and never get to know them as people. I could say the same of employment. You never see people with visible disabilities (including the use of mobility aids as "visible") working most jobs. Especially where intellectual and developmental disabilities are concerned, people with those types of disabilities tend to be in "sheltered" work environments, segregated from the rest of the workforce. Even in integrated workplaces, I am the only wheelchair user in the entire office, aside from the clients. I've been mistaken for a client too! I only see a couple of other people with visible disabilities on my college campus. In searching for jobs, I never see people with mobility aids in company/staff pictures, never anyone with a physical marker of disability, nothing like that. Essentially, we don't exist to the general public. Yes, people with disabilities only make up about 10% of the US population, BUT--ignoring 10% of the population is like ignoring the entire state of California, which also represents about 10% of US citizens. It's kind of an apt description of the US perception of disability too: If you're not from California, you can't fully understand what their day-to-day life is like. We get snapshots from social media and celebrities, but that's all very heavily doctored and filtered to only show the good stuff (the way people see only the bad in having disabilities or only the good in inspiration porn). In some places (like where I live in the south), people joke that Californians are from another planet, and anything that happens there doesn't apply to the rest of us "normal people." Yet, when confronted with someone who grew up there or currently lives there, people may find that this person is nothing like the Beverly Hills, vegan, vapid, extreme-liberal they expected. People from California are, in fact, normal people! But because we don't see them every day, we don't see them in their normal context, we don't interact with them on a personal level, we create this false identity in our heads about what they're supposed to be like. Is this metaphor still tracking? What I mean is this: when my husband asked if he's a bad person for being uncomfortable with some people's physical differences, I wanted him to know that he really wasn't. Of course it's not nice to make fun of people, and he would never, but it's natural to be uncomfortable with things that are different from the norm and that you haven't been exposed to in a positive light before. For most people, their only experience with physical differences are from horror movie monsters, which leaves an imprint on their mind that anything outside of the physical "norm" is inherently scary and possibly dangerous. Consciously, we know this isn't a good way to think, and most people don't act on those feelings. But the subconscious can do weird things, and it's not any individual's fault for never having been exposed to the wide variety of the human species prior to meeting a person with physical differences. But those of us with disabilities are taught to be quiet about it, not make a fuss, and stay out of the way of the "normal" people. We keep most people with I/DD in segregated classrooms, workplaces, and housing for practically their entire lives. Accessibility in many rural and suburban areas is garbage as well, which keeps many physically disabled people stuck at home and out of public sight. When we want to protest and raise legitimate issues, we either physically cannot rally like other oppressed groups, or we get a pat on the head and are told to be grateful things aren't worse. We have to be visible to ever breach this gap between those of us living with disabilities and those without. If the general public can pretend when don't exist because we're out of their direct sight, it gets easier and easier to boil us down to stereotypes and inaccurate assumptions. These are the assumptions that dictate what laws are passed, how policy is implemented, how society views us, and whether we are "allowed" to participate fully in our communities. People fear the unknown, and they fear deviations from the norm. We have to expand the definition of normal human variety, and a huge part of that is just making people acknowledge we exist. We're right here, trying to come in. Open the door.
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