Disability rights are your (yes, you!) rights
Pandemics, eugenics, and why you (yes, you!) should care, ForRealThisTimev.2finalfinal
I used to make this joke about how the things that always garner me the most unhinged levels of hatred are when I write about baseball (how dare!) and when I assert that disabled people are people (HOW DARE!!)
But I’ve kind of forgotten how the joke went, and now this is actually just a statement of fact. For whatever reason, Internet Dudes really don’t like my analysis on, say, the the fielding positions of the 2014 Mets. But what they hate even more is when I, or other disabled people, mention our humanity or will to live. A lot of it, I suspect, is rooted in fear. Some of it is that ableism is still widely a socially-accepted brand of mean. And some of it—I have to keep hoping this is true—is that people simply do not know what they are talking about when it comes to disability history and rights.
So if that’s the case, here’s what I’ve got: a crash-course on disability rights, history, and why it matters (to you! to all of us!) right this second.
If you’re a disabled person or someone familiar with this line of activism, hi! Hopefully having these links in one place will be useful to hurl at your own reply guys. If you’re new to all this, I hope it is as fascinating and frightening as I find it to be, and that we all come out with a little more solidarity on the other side.
1. Ableism is bad (for you*), actually
Would it be better if ableism was just understood to be bad by the nature of its inherent badness, and not because I can demonstrate how it’s bad for you, personally? Sure would! However, due to a variety of factors, ableism is a brand of bigotry that carries fewer consequences in the American mainstream (and in lots of places), so much so that it is often not an argument of how bad or dangerous ableism is, but whether it exists at all.
Anyway. Yes—ableism is bad for you, specifically, even if you are not currently disabled, because as with all things socially constructed these lines are constantly in flux, and upholding oppressive ideas of “normalcy” eventually backfires on everybody.
Consider an adjacent bigotry in TERFdom: JK Rowling’s fanatical transphobia (🚨which was still inherently bad when it was wielded solely against trans folks!🚨) has now morphed into a deeply whack crusade against any woman with muscles. These targeted (cis) women are harassed, humiliated and even harmed by transphobes, and that further emboldens other jerks to attack more people they suspect to be gender nonconforming. A broader fear of being queer in public in a bigoted society takes root, ultimately forcing everybody to perform their own genders in really narrow, constricting ways.
Similarly, the view of who is considered an acceptable productive, able-bodied member of society can, and does, change at the whim of powerful asshats, and supporting ableist hierarchies requires everyone to perform able-bodiedness, wellness, and neurotypicality in really narrow, constricting ways, even if it’s actually unproductive or harmful to them. See: remote work crackdowns, productivity worship, grind/hustle culture, ageism, medically-sanctioned fatphobia, fear-of-autism-fueled antivax palooza, mental healthcare-as-weakness worldview, and more!
The other thing is, unlike other marginalized statuses, disability is very easy to acquire. All humans will be disabled, either temporarily or permanently, in their lifetime. This becomes increasingly true in the context of the ongoing pandemic, against the backdrop of global climate change, and more. And, as medicine and technology find ways to keep us alive longer, our bodies find new ways to break down—we are no doubt also seeing an increase in chronic illness in part because more humans live long enough to be ill.
So, if you or your loved one might, at any moment, become us—then what? If, following an accident you began to need a wheelchair, would you be satisfied with the fact that (33 years after the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act) only 23% of New York City subway stations are accessible to you. That the majority of inaccessible stations have no plans or funds earmarked to make them compliant to a decades-old law?
Or from my deaf soapbox—the World Health Organization recently stated that due to factors like noise pollution, earbud use, and COVID-19, 1 in 4 people will have hearing loss by 2050. Got a few grand stashed away to drop on hearing aids, which are usually not covered by insurance? Would society’s everyday treatment of deaf people in healthcare, the justice system, education, or employment be acceptable if it suddenly applied to you?
*Again, I don’t much use this argument when talking about disability rights because most nondisabled folks fear disability so much, and disassociate themselves from us so hard, that they cannot rationally comprehend these hypothetical situations. On the other hand, the inevitable fact of eventually having to experience disability remains, so if nothing else, maybe this thought exercise will be the first drop in a big old coming to terms bucket.
2. An Historical Canary in the Coal Mine Sitch
The reason I started writing this was because history has demonstrated that the way a government treats disabled people is often an early indicator of that government’s broader intentions on social policy. And historically, in situations where pandemics and authoritarian-flavored regimes cross paths, the results are particularly deadly:
In 1918, as WWI drew to a close, the Spanish flu pandemic swept the globe, killing at least 1% of the population, though some historians estimate as high as 5%. Both the war and the pandemic caused economic strife, including the rationing of food and medicine. Both were also mass disabling events—in Europe in particular, asylums and institutions were converted into convalescent homes or hospitals for returning soldiers. There was just slight problem: what to do with the people who had previously been living in those asylums or institutions before.
In Germany, the answer was a series of government programs to further dehumanize, segregate and eventually murder them, beginning with efforts to normalize this plan within public opinion. When times were tight, arguing that disabled people were a drain on society, swallowing up resources meant for the fit working people, was quickly effective.
The rise of eugenics in this period was not unique to Nazism, nor was it used exclusively against disabled people. Eugenic pseudoscience was popular globally, including in the United States, as scientists in societies under economic duress found a way to extract the essence of Darwinism and apply it to humans, specifically as a way to scapegoat the vulnerable and justify their own preexisting hatreds.
Through Germany, though, we see eugenic thought reach its inevitable conclusions. A 1933 law called for compulsory sterilization of those with “hereditary diseases” including deafness, blindness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, chronic alcoholism and a host of other conditions, and a 1935 expansion requiring mandatory abortions on the fetus of a parent with one of the listed conditions. Approximately 400,000 disabled people were sterilized in Germany and annexed territories during this period.
While sterilization was in place to protect Germany’s future fitness, Hitler and others soon saw the current state would require something more drastic. More extensive propaganda campaigns, declaring disabled people as “useless eaters” were launched through various advertising media, while the arts, particularly narrative film, posed a solution: euthanasia.
As a result widespread support for euthanasia among Germans began to grow, and the first disabled people were euthanized at the behest of their families, who’d bought the party line that killing their loved ones would be an act of mercy. Eventually, after a pair of high profile murder cases were justified by the victim’s disability and met with no public resistance, Hitler created an advisory committee to oversee the state’s first official program for the killing of disabled children, whose murders began en masse in 1939.
The program quickly expanded to encompass multiple killing sites, and disabled adults, across German territories, under the program Aktion T4. Under T4, officials first created the cover story that “patients” were being sent to take a shower, where they were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas and sent to crematoriums. Over the course of the program, the methodology for gassing via Zyklon B was tested and perfected on disabled victims.
Protests from Catholic bishops stopped T4’s public programming in 1941, but by then the gassing of prisoners at Chelmo, and the Wannsee Conference to establish official policy of mass extermination against Jewish people were only months away, and the T4 mandate, too, continued more quietly until 1945. The program is estimated to have killed about 250,000 disabled people.
We can’t know what might have been. And this isn’t an attempt to instill fear about what might be coming, either. What it is is an admission that I often think about T4 and wonder if disabled people had been deemed worthy of life, might more government-sanctioned murder have been stopped in its tracks?
Maybe not. But the other thing about T4 is most people don’t know it ever happened. I hope more people learn about it, and at the very least internalize its ultimate lesson: is if they’re willing to test it on us, they’ll eventually be willing to do it to you, too.
3. It Can Happen Here
It did! It does!
Maybe you already know that the first eugenics-based law in the world was passed in the good old US of A? (Indiana, 1907) That the 1927 SCOTUS decision to uphold that law was never overturned? That the Nazis were impressed by the breadth of America’s body of eugenic, anti-miscegenation, and segregationist legislation, and praised it in their 1934 handbook?
While rightful outrage over reproductive rights in our post-Roe world abounds, it is still legal in at least 31 states and Washington DC to forcibly sterilize a disabled person today.
While nondisabled labor organizers fight for $15, disabled people in “sheltered workshops” are paid subminimum wage through a Department of Labor loophole, earning far less than the legal minimum, at an average of $3.34 an hour (This week, the Biden administration proposed a regulation to phase out sheltered workshop certification over the next three years—we’ll see.)
While folks express super valid fears that today’s conservative SCOTUS will overturn Obergefell, many disabled people today don’t have meaningful marriage equality, as essential benefits are revoked from them upon marriage at income thresholds far below other populations, despite the astronomical rise in healthcare costs.
While President-Elect Trump’s promises to abolish the Department of Education would be REALLY BAD for everybody, it would be catastrophic for disabled students. Removing the overseeing body for IDEA law, which protects disabled students’ right to even attend and access a public education for free. Any child with an IEP depends on this law for that document’s enforcement. There is already currently a bill on the House floor that would abolish the DoE, so please consider contacting your reps. More information and letter templates are available here.
4. I don’t know how to convince you to care about other people
Whether or not it affects us directly, or tangentially, or not at all, I think part of our humanity rests on the ability to be galvanized by rampant injustice, even when tired, and in this case both without or with the knowledge that disability also intersects with and further marginalizes those you may already actively know and care for.
To me, the frustrating thing about the state of disability rights today is not only that things are pretty grim, but also that most folks are completely ignorant to, and often inert when presented with evidence thereof. The vibe reads a little like disabled people are meant to wait until other social causes are served first, as if they could ever be parsed out, as if there are no disabled people of color, or disabled queer or trans people, or disabled immigrants, or infinite permutations thereof.
This is not meant to disparage anyone doing their best at antiopression work of any kind, nor a play at the oppression olympics, but a pleading reminder that our liberation is tied up in one big f*cking knot, and we can’t do it without you. Nor you without us.
5. On the plus side
Disabled people are extremely skilled activists. We are good at big-tent coalition building because disability itself is Big Ol’ Tent™ We strike a good balance between symbolic action and nonviolent resistance, if I do say so myself.
(If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the documentary Crip Camp, which is in part about the sit-ins required for the passage of section 504, which requires government own buildings to be accessible. It’s on YouTube for free, as well as Netflix.)
We can be persistent, creative, and are practiced problem-solvers in a world designed without us in mind (or sometimes, with us in mind specifically for exclusionary purposes).
It’s no secret that I think a good amount of nonviolent resistance is going to be required over the next four years (at least) if we are going to maintain even a semblance of democracy. And while I can’t speak for all disabled people, I can say for sure that a lot of us are fucking ready, as ever, to do this thing. Let’s go—together this time.
Biz
This month’s paid subscription will feature book recommendations that I hope could be a fun gift-guidey situation for the book lover in your life, so if you’ve been thinking about subscribing and want to test it out for a month or so, this could be a good time. Fees from new subscribers will be donated to the deaf-lead NGO Off The Grid Missions.
Officially wiped my twitter, but find me on BlueSky, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Wrote a cranky article for The Baffler, about the appropriation and monetization of signed languages, including a case study of the particularly egregious manipulations of the sign system Makaton, which started in the UK and is headed to North America.