Ableism sustains norms of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ that creates Otherization which justifies genocide, identity erasure, and forces disabled folk to adapt or be silenced.

The one societal need in our society that is often unacknowledged, silenced, and left unexamined is that humans have, as Michalko quoted Cornel West, the “deep, visceral need to belong” (Michalko, 2002, p. 81) — all of us struggle with full acceptance of ourselves and our desire to be seen as acceptable or welcome in a society that loves to label people. The media creates walls between its ideals and the people it views as Others, such as when the media views people with autism as “abnormal mysteries”. We are being taught that differences occurring from autism are wrong, and sadly too many families depicted in the media perpetuate this negative view of their own children. When thinking of “normal” henceforth, let‘s consider what Michalko wrote about society and his blindness. He explained that, although society might have found ways technologically for him to participate (he is a professor), he is still seen as “strange” because he is blind. He said the difference in his blindness must be grappled with inside his being in “a space between nature and culture” and “normal and abnormal” (2002, p. 83), and it is within this confusing, unmarked space where he has had to build his own identity. By moving through the world with his “body of blindness,” Michalko has projected himself into the “social space,” just as my son must project his own self, by moving through the social space with his ‘mind of difference‘; thus, society reacts to people who have disabilities who cannot live up to the mythical norms with “help,” “pity,” “ridicule,” “unease,” and “curiosity” (2002, p. 88), and it results in an unequal power structure that creates treacherous terrain for all of us who have been Othered. Michalko (2002) noted that mainstream Western society views all disabilities as abnormal, and it thus approaches people with disability as tragic people who live lives “not worth living”; they are seen as the Other, as objects of pity, both “vulnerable and fragile” (p.68). The complexity, diversity, and range of differences of all human beings in this world are erased, denied, and ignored under a banner of ‘sameness’ or ‘normalcy’ and those who cannot or will not conform are silenced and lumped into the category of Other, and dealt with suspicion for not conforming to social construction of what is acceptable in appearance, behavior, and experience. Eugenics, the academic Phil Smith (2008) has concluded, is still very much present in societal attitudes toward disability. Eugenics formalized “the Normal, a cultural landscape outlined in order to support the hegemony of its inhabitants, a liberalist bourgeois class of white, able-bodied men” (P. Smith, p. 419). By silencing those with perceived disabilities (or those with a particular perceived race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, etc.) and deeming them as lesser than ‘normal‘ humans—society is able to continue to deny that ‘being normal‘ is actually a socially constructed myth (Michalko, 2002, p. 69). Phil Smith further pointed out that not so long ago those who committed the war crimes by killing or sterilizing people they had deemed of inferior intelligence in the Nazis T-4 project were consistently given less severe convictions and higher acquittal rates (P. Smith, 2008, p. 421)—revealing, indeed, that as a society we devalue the lost lives of those considered too different from the mythical norm, which we will demonstrate later is a devaluation of human life very much alive in media depiction of autism. Society rarely has ears for the voices or rooms reserved for those with differences who think otherwise, and it rarely realizes that indeed people with differences also have value and critical roles to play in society. The media maintains this gaping silence as well. Society, Michalko has argued, either expects those deemed “abnormal” will “get through” their differences by adapting to the dominant rules, so as to be less noticed, or it expects them to “get out” by removing themselves from view, by being silent and isolated (Michalko, 2002, p. 75); and some experts, doctors, educators, and therapists make a sizable income from attempting to enforce these societal expectations on families.