In our last class and in my past two blog posts, we've talked about how academic thinking and stances towards disabled individuals such as the thoughts of Peter Singer can come across or are in fact violent and oppressive towards those disabled people in question. Whether you agree with Singer's theory or not, it can I think be agreed on by both sides or anywhere in between that the tone assumed by Singer in his writing on the subject is cold and disconnected, most likely because that is what we are taught academic writing has to be; some theory removed from reality that tries to exsist in a practical non-messy bubble.

My favorite article this week was the one on cognitively accessible language and why it's important in academia. Accessible language is not just important for neurodivergent folks, but also for people who aren't familiar with the field or those who simply don't identify as an academic. Especially when those people are the ones who the literature discussses, it's unfair to make them "wade through walls of jargon in order to read about themselves". As Elizabeth Grace says, for those trying to change the norm around academic literature, it can be extremely difficult to get published when marked as not being a legitimate member of the field. This makes me think about how college students are trained in the way of "expertise", thereby perpetuating the issue.

We've been talking a lot in class about how disability was (and continues to be) synonymized with an inability to be self-sufficient and by extension, an inability to be productive. With that in mind, I found it interesting that the whole productivity narrative was often used as a catch-all for people who were deemed to be morally lacking, even if they didn't have a physical or neurological disability that could be seen as a hindrance to manual or intellectual labor. For example, the Jewish man who was turned away at Ellis Island using the LPC clause even though his extended family explicitly stated they would employ him was particularly disheartening. I had a really interesting discussion with some classmates about this problem of moralizing other people in a modern context.

Something I found interesting in chapter 5 was finding out a big reason African Americans with disabilities in the Invalid Corps did not file for disability pensions was because of a lack of access to resources to file. Many times they could not afford travel costs, assistance to fill out paperwork, and/or obtain the proper documentation (83). It angers me that even though members of the Invalid Corps put more work back into society after returning from war, they were still not given extra help to obtain the resources they needed to file for disability pension. Additionally, this is scarily similar to the struggles of poor and/or government reliant citizens today when applying for any sort of government assistance.

Hi everyone! Here's a cool Hidden Brain podcast episode about Buck v. Bell and forced sterilization. It's 41 minutes.

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/23/604926914/emma-carrie-vivian-how-a-family-became-a-test-case-for-forced-sterilizations

Relating to the reading on "A Disability History of the United States", in both this class and my other one we've talked about protests of disabled folk throughout history. Specifically I've been thinking about the sledgehammer protests in the 80's in Denver where wheelchair users took to the streets and hammered their own curb cuts since the city wasn't helping them. On my own campus I've been thinking about forms of protest that would bring issues of disability into the light for everyone. I thought of the idea of having some sort of displays on campus that point out inaccessibility to people who wouldn't normally think about it walking around like myself.

We talked a bit last class about how the ability to be productive is somewhat synonymous with a person's level of disability. To explain, even if a person is in a wheelchair for example, if they are able to be "productive" in a capitalist society, they may be considered by others "less disabled" than someone who has a harder time functioning or producing in the same society. On the flip side of this, thinking of mental health as a disability is still not common. Yes, we have come a long way in terms of overall acceptance of mental health as an issue that isn't just "nerves" but a lot of times people with crippling anxiety or depression are not able to contribute "productively" in a society that demands so much work and constant labor. Does this mean they are disabled too?

We talked a bit last class about how the ability to be productive is somewhat synonymous with a person's level of disability. To explain, even if a person is in a wheelchair for example, if they are able to be "productive" in a capitalist society, they may be considered by others "less disabled" than someone who has a harder time functioning or producing in the same society. On the flip side of this, thinking of mental health as a disability is still not common. Yes, we have come a long way in terms of overall acceptance of mental health as an issue that isn't just "nerves" but a lot of times people with crippling anxiety or depression are not able to contribute "productively" in a society that demands so much work and constant labor. Does this mean they are disabled too?

The flagrant disregard for truth and cruel embrace of hypocrisy that enabled the treatment of disabled folks through US history felt particularly difficult for me to read this week. As I learned about the immigrants who were deported due to a proclaimed inability to economically support themselves, even when they had explicit job offers, and the countless other individuals and communities who were the victims of pseudoscience and bigotry, I struggled with how to react. The type of cruelty described in these chapters felt so unfathomable, yet these were real events and people. Reading, I wished for a time machine, so that I could travel backwards and ask the "leaders" and "scientists" of those days "what could you possibly be basing that conclusion on?