Ableism is White Supremacy p2

Privilege expresses itself as ableism, the same privilege that finds those in positions of power fearing and denigrating folks who live on the margins; the people who society would rather forget.

What this does mean, or at least one thing it may mean, is that what is wrong here is not something that is inherently wrong with me or up to me alone to fix. I live with illness and impairments regardless of what society does, but that does not preclude us from asking: How might we design a world that addresses those impairments and educates nondisabled people about how meaningful a life with a disability can be, particularly if one is supported in the best ways to maximize their potential as fellow folks with dreams, goals, interests, senses of humor, favorite foods, relationships and desires for self-determination? The problem that I am diagnosing here is that attitudes couched in dominant norms about my life do not meet me where I am. A failure to bring attitudes about a population into closer alignment with the attitudes shared by that population is a stubborn privilege that would rather pity the “other” than learn from them.

Privilege expresses itself as ableism, the same privilege that finds those in positions of power fearing and denigrating folks who live on the margins; the people who society would rather forget — poor people, people experiencing homelessness, people requiring low-income housing.

These communities on the margins of society are viewed as something less than, inferior, even blameworthy for their station, and so a form of circular reasoning develops where folks in power dehumanize those on the margins to justify their inhumane treatment, and for marginal communities who experience poverty, crime, joblessness and comorbidities, those features of these communities are trotted out to prove the point of their inferior status. It is a cycle that erects straw characterizations to justify injustice, then uses the outcomes of systemic injustice to bolster the straw characterization.

The truth is, ableism and privilege are, in part, expressions of white supremacy. Both speak and act from positions of power to look down on the other: to pity or to fear. Folks on the margins are not equal in worth to the dominant class, according to those who establish value, and few traits are viewed as more detrimental to individual worth than the inability to contribute meaningfully to the economy. This was the real harm of serious illness, according to Talcott Parsons, a mid-20th century sociologist whose “sick role” theory was at first attractive to me because it codified the social deviance of chronic illness. I enjoyed the claim to deviance. It was a nice foil to conformity. But by “deviant,” Parsons did not mean a laudable resistance; rather, for Parsons, the worst part about illness was its disqualification from economic productivity. The ill person’s deviance, their necessitated exemption from certain defined social roles, must be policed. A sanctioned deviance where dismissal is permitted only through gritted teeth, not extended as compassionate allowance.

I am not, by far, the first to mention a connection between ableism and white supremacy. “The notion that some people produce more (or less) for the economy and are, therefore, more (or less) valuable — is ableism,” write Kristin Garrity Sekerci and Azza Altiraifi in a 2008 article for Al Jazeera. Sekerci and Altiraifi connect ableism to immigration policies, linking economic productivity as the highest good of personal worth. “To be sure, then, ableism is part and parcel of white supremacy,” they write.

Disability justice activists Patty Berne and Stacey Milbern discuss the need for a politicized understanding of ableism:

Ableism tells us some bodies are valuable and some are disposable. In the U.S. context, ableism has been forged with and through white supremacy, colonial conquest, capitalist domination, and heteropatriarchy so that bodies are valued for their ability to produce profit or have it extracted from them, or are otherwise excluded or eliminated through isolation, institutionalization, incarceration, and/or death.

You may wonder whether disability needs to be politicized in these ways, but the short answer is a resounding, “Yes!” Amelia Blackwater writes, “Disability is political when disabled BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] and LGBTQ+ people are being ignored, mistreated and dying because of the color of their skin and sexual orientation.” Blackwater cautions readers that ignoring the political dimensions of disability threatens to erase disabled people of color. While it’s true that my diagnosis places me at the bottom of the triage list when rationing health care, during, say, a pandemic, it is just as true that for disabled people of color, their intersecting identities render their lived experiences more fraught than my own as a white man who possesses markers of privilege.