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Ableism Awareness Month
Introduction to Ableism and Disability Rights Issues
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Ableism Awareness Wrapup Post
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Monthly Archives: March 2018
Ableism Therapies
Ableism Therapies
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The only evidence backed treatment for ableism is listening to disabled people and learning from us.
Organizations
- Autism Women’s Network
autismwomensnetwork.org - Autistic Families International
autisticfamilies.org - Autistic Self Advocacy Network
autisticadvocacy.org - Disability Visibility Project
disabilityvisibilityproject.com - National Association of the Deaf
nad.org - National Federation of the Blind
nfb.org
Twitter Hashtags
- #CripTheVote
- #ActuallyAutistic
- #FilmDis
- #AutisticWhileBlack
- #TheFutureIsDisabled
- #TheFutureIsAccessible
Awareness Campaigns
- Tone It Down Taupe
facebook/toneitdowntaupe - Boycott Autism Speaks
facebook/boycottautismspeaksnow - Walk In Red
walkinred.weebly.com - ADAPT direct actions
adapt.org - facebook/NationalAdapt
Intro: Ableism Awareness Month
Part 1: What is ableism?
Part 2: How many people are affected by ableism?
Is there a cure for ableism?
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Is there a cure for ableism?
Effective treatments for ableism include:
Education
Everyone must make an effort to learn about disability issues and to examine and confront ableist bias ourselves and our communities. We all have a duty to understand and combat ableism.
Accessibility
Inclusion and accessibility are civil rights, not special privileges. It is everyone’s obligation to find out how to make our communities and spaces more accessible, and endeavor to include disabled people.
Intersectionality
The rights of disabled people are intertwined with non disabled people’s civil rights; our political activism, our votes, and our policy making should always be inclusive and intersectional.
Center Disabled People
Disabled people must be centered in our own lives and in disability advocacy; this means we have autonomy in our personal lives and we take the lead in disability rights organizations…
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What causes ableism?
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What causes ableism?
* There is no single cause of ableism; rather, it is a complex and interrelated set of attitudes, assumptions, and prejudicial biases. Ableism develops from a combination of individual prejudice and environmental factors, such as widespread normalization of ableism, misinformation by ableist institutions, and societal lack of inclusion for disabled people.
* Some important risk factors for ableism are unfamiliarity with disabled people and ignorance about disability issues and disability rights. Tragically, an ableist culture that fails to provide access and true inclusion for disabled people has a high risk of worsening the ableism epidemic.
* Vaccines do NOT cause ableism; on the contrary, a large scale program of inoculation against ableism, through the inclusion of disabled people and education for non-disabled people, may protect individual people and major societal institutions from falling victim to…
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How many people are affected by ableism?
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How many people are affected by ableism?
Everyone is affected by ableism.
* At any given time, about 1 in 5 people worldwide has a disability.
* People who were not born disabled, or aren’t currently disabled, may become disabled later in life.
* Some people who do not identify as disabled or recognize themselves as disabled are in fact disabled and directly affected by ableism; for example, people with psychiatric disabilities such as depression and anxiety.
* Disability Rights are highly intersectional; civil rights issues for women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people are intertwined with disability issues. Disability rights also overlap with issues such as healthcare, education, poverty, and more.
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CAUTION
Descriptions of ableism as a disorder is this series are satirical and not…
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What is Ableism?
[The following text is also a transcript for the featured image description]
What is ableism?
Ableism is a cultural disorder that can affect people’s language and communication skills, social relationships, and other interpersonal behaviors.
Symptoms may include:
* Deficits in respectful, disability-inclusive communicate skills; may include the repetitive use of language that discriminated against or excludes disabled people, and a failure to provide communication access to disabled people.
* Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity with disabled people, ranging (for example) from lack of empathy toward disabled people to failure to include disabled people in social activities; in severe forms, may include abuse, homicide/filicide, and/or total apathy toward the abuse of disabled people.
* Restricted patterns of discriminatory behavior, for example: insistence on segregating, mocking, and/or abusing disabled people; unusual interest in “inspiration pornography” that objectifies and demeans disabled people, etc.
Ableism is any form of discrimination or negative bias toward disabled…
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April is Ableism Awareness Month
For several years, autism organizations led by non-autistic parents and professionals have focused on Autism Awareness in the month of April.
Autistic people have pushed back on the Awareness campaigns (and their usual pathologizing, othering frameworks) by asking for less talk of awareness and more acceptance for autistic people of all ages.
This year I was inspired to flip the old script with a new kind of Awareness campaign:
This April is Ableism Awareness Month
Join me in the coming weeks as I roll out some basic information and awareness of this epidemic of ableism, including examples and symptoms, treatments and alternatives, and more.
Part 2: How many people are affected by ableism?
MY IDENTITY IS NOT YOUR ENEMY – STOP COMBATING ME
From 2014…a must read!!
Nattily from Notes on Crazy
http://notesoncrazy.com/2014/03/my-identity-is-not-your-enemy-stop-combating-me/
My identity is not your enemy. #StopCombatingMe
When I was seven or eight, a friend told me that some people have “photographic memories” and explained what that meant. She dove into the pond. I sat on the dock and thought to myself, “That’s what I have. I have a photographic memory.”
When I was in high school I read a webcomic mentioning “super-tasters.” I looked it up, thought about it for a while, and thought to myself, “That’s what I am. I’m a super-taster.”
When I was in thirteen, people in my middle school started calling each other “gay” as an insult. I still hadn’t had the sex talk, and I spent most of my free time thinking about what exactly sex was, since I knew I was supposed to know about it and it wasn’t ok to ask. I didn’t know what gay…
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The Teacher’s Kid – It’s not what you think…
I had the opportunity this evening to enter into a discussion with a colleague: a fellow teacher who is also the parent of a five-year-old Autistic son.
So as we talked this man commented, “It is great that you are a teacher – I’ll bet you’ve been able to be a great advocate for your son within the school system. Our kids are fortunate.”
And I suppose this is true in many respects: my understanding of the system has supported us in navigating it in varying degrees and I recognize that it has been an advantage.
But… the thing is… that is not actually how I responded.
I might have caught him off-guard when I said, “No… my son has benefitted much more from my being a Social Justice Activist. Teacher-smeacher! It is ACTIVISM that has made the difference. Our Autistic, Neurodivergent, and otherwise disabled children need us to show…
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I Just Don’t Do Well…
All of this!! I need to know i have freedom of choice. Just because we are disabled, does not mean we don’t have the same rights to autonomy as able-bodied people do.
The weird thing was it wasn’t throughout my whole house. On a Saturday morning a few months ago, I noticed something strange soon after I woke up. There was no electricity in my bedroom or my office, but the rest of the house was fine. At first, I thought it would be a simple fix. Fuses have certainly blown before. The problem is, the box is in my storage shed outside and it is too high for me to reach. Complicating the issue was that I didn’t have any caregivers scheduled for the day and that a caregiver had inadvertently broken my phone a few days beforehand, losing my contact list in the process. The phone numbers of my handyman and friends who might have been able to come over quickly were not etched in my memory. I had a new phone on that day, but not really any way…
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Melissa Fields, Autist 