Jim and all:
My point was that Disabled person seems less pejorative than PWD, at least
from a point of self-determinism and self-naming in the same way that
Chinese person or Asian American is less pejorative than Person of Asian
Descent, which was a term created for the census (and not really, as far as
I can tell, a wholly embraced community term). And I do hope that
essentially the public catches on with this change. More people are aware,
I'd say, of Deaf person v. Person with a hearing loss, (and the differences
therein) for example. And certainly, if I want folks to recognize my claim
to disability as identity, Disabled Person does that for me in a way that
Person with XXX doesn't. In the same way that I never believe fully anyone
who says about my ethnicity, "Oh, I never think of you like *that*," I
never really believe people (and I don't mean inner circle people in my
life, I mean say folks at readings and conferences) who say things like
"gee, I didn't even notice you were in a chair" (rolling my eyes now) or
"You know, I never think of you folks as disabled. I just think of you as
people." (Well, gee thanks,you know, you've just erased a large portion of
what I've devoted my life to, and the poetry or writing you've just been
listening to). Those folks have just, though they mean well, foisted all
their angst and negativity about disability on to me in those kinds of
statements (like I'm burdened; it's something to be ashamed of). In these
instances (because invariably someone will ask what the "correct" term is)
I think Disabled person is important, because PWD can be construed
negatively. Like it's something I have, and I'd get rid of if I could.
Johnson
At 10:44 PM 7/21/02 -0400, you wrote:
>Thoughts on labels, labels by whom?, ostentatious sensitivity, and
>business as usual ignoring us altogether in the liberal establishment
>
>. . . . .
>
>Someone writes that the term 'people with disabilites" may have come
>from AB people wanting to cute-ify or feel comfortable. News to me.
>
>The term that fits THAT historic description to my knowledge, is
>"differently abled". Which seems to be an indication that the
>politically correct in the 1970's (back when that label itself impled a
>sense of humor & perspective, not what it was twisted into by the
>Right).... this term showes that PC folks DID notice PWDs and then
>quickly dropped the political ball. "Differently abled" seems to be the
>pinnacle of what I call "ostentatious sensivity" (meaning -- more
>posturing surface, than applied subtance),
>
>Whenver "progressive" (formerly "radical", formerly "new left",
>formerly.....) people use the excuse that they or their movement never
>thought about things like having their public meetings and events in
>accessible locations....(the schtick goes like this: "So what do you
>want? We've just been given notice that this is important, one minute
>ago; and this is not the cheapest way to set up a meeting, so forget it;
>it's up to you to find us a free accessible meeting hall").... I find it
>useful to remember the term "differetly abled", as proof that it ain't
>so. AB progressives will have to come up with a new excuse. You can't
>claim to have never been notified of something that you even made up a
>PC name for.
>
>"Differently abled" I heard several times in the 70's (mostly in print),
>and very few times after that. I have never heard it come out of the
>mouth of a PWD.
>
>As for "disabled person" vs. people with disabilites".... I think we
>have to remember that what "label' gets picked and established, isn't
>all a matter of facts, logic, "Does it work in all grammatical forms?",
>etc. Granted scholars like to be careful and precise with language, but
>whren you're studying a phenonomon that is more fluid, one can "clarify"
>things more than they really are, in the real world. (i.e.: it seems
>improbable that while "Colored" went out generations ago, "people of
>color" is now di rigeur here. The African American civil rights
>movement spent decades trying ot teach people not to call black males
>over 18 a "boy", and then the term "B-Boy" emerges in hip hop culture.
>Word analysis alone couldn't have predicted these things.) There is a
>subjective thing of "sounds OK to me" that has to do with what speads in
>culture more and what spreads less.
>
>To my ear, "people with disabilites" respectfully imples that the
>disability isn't 100% of what the person is all about, whereas "disabled
>person" does, making PWD the clear winner.
>
>Also let's not forget that terminology is situational. We bring up and
>adjective or label when there is a reason in that communication. When I
>lecture on universal design, I use PWD adn people with iumpairments, or
>people with mobilitiy disabilities or people with certain impairments,
>etc., depending on what best and most accurately fits the context of
>what I have to say. Usually I am saying something rather focussed, so
>the question isn't "What label is best in gerneral?" Similarly, in
>personal conversation disabilty probaby comes up for a specific
>reason... so the term if one comes up at all..... may be selected for
>that context.
>
>
>--
>
>(JC:) I haven't noticed able-bodied masses trying to get anyone to call
>themselves "person with a disability".
>
>As far As I know, AB people typicaly want the whole idea of disabled
>rights to just go away. (And they'd want the notion of emerging
>disability culture to go away too, if they had ever heard of it.) That
>is, unless thay can make money off us. As far as I know, they don't
>want us to call ourselves anything, because doing so with any term at
>all, implies that we have some self-respect and might assert some pesky
>rights.
>
>While this board is debating how many label-angels can dance on the head
>of a pin, the AB world even in it's more liberal or "progressive"
>mileaus, from what I can see in my community involvements -- seem to
>continue dissing us to the point of trying to forget that we exist, at
>all.
>
>--
>
>In the U.S. there is a "progressive" non-profit radio network with 5
>stations, Pacifica Radio Foundation. ( www.pacificaradio.org ) It
>unrelentingly defines rights, sensitivity and diversity in only terms of
>race, ethnicity, sometimes gender, and then 99 times out of a hundred
>the list closes.... both in casual conversation, or even when policy is
>being made. It is as if they haven't learned one new thing about
>diversity or rights since the year 1968. Getting sexual orientation or
>PWDs onto that "short list", to make it a reality-based "long list"....
>is like Sisypheus pushing a boulder up the hill.
>
>If a LGBT person isn't in the room or "at the table", they always
>"forget" or treat in a grossly unequal manner, that segment of something
>like 15% of the local population and listeners when it comes to
>discussing programming, internal rights policies, balanced membership on
>decision-making boards, balanced employment policies, etc. Similarly,
>if no PWD (or more precisely "out PWD" or... one for whom being "out"
>is not applicable because it's obvious) is in the room or "at the
>table", they inevitably just happen to 'forget" the biggest stigmatized
>minority in the country, which is (I just did the census-based research)
>about 18% of the listeners to their New York City area station, WBAI
>99.5 FM.
>
>Both PWDs and our rights, and LGBT people and our rights, seem to be
>topics that often give AB and/or heterosexual people faux-amnesia. In
>one ear and out the other. Every time they hear about it becomes the
>"first". So why have't they made any progress over the years? Because
>(they say this standard lie with a "straight face): "You're the first
>person to meniton this."
>
>In New York City, there is a huge institutionally-organised public input
>process on the city planning for reconstruction of the World Trade
>Center area being organsised by a "good government" group / planning
>lobby the Regional Planning Assn., with three universities (NYU, New
>School U. and Pratt Institute, my alma mater), which has organised a
>coalition of over 80 community based orgs. I have joined this as a
>representative of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York. In
>February they held a public input session of 650 people, and did polling
>to determine the diversity of those in the room (you enter replies into
>wireless keypad, and it's put up on screens, and then compared with the
>stats of the region to see if they met their goal of a representative
>crowd). In the firrst 10 minutes of this all-day meeting, they
>determined the mix of the crowd in terms of gender, racial
>identification, age, income, place of residence, if you were an
>emergency services worker on that attack site, or if you were impacted
>by the attack of 9-11 in terms of lost a family member or a job,
>
>What's missing from this picture?
>
>They didn't bother to also determine the diversity and balance in the
>crowd to see if it met their goals of being "representative", in terms
>of also... LGBT people or PWDs. ----- In the earlier attack on the same
>building in 1993 in the early morning, it took until after 10 pm to get
>the last PWD evacuated. On 9-11-01 the smoke and dust tsunami blasted
>throught the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and Access-A-Ride drivers with
>busses full of people with severe disabilites abandoned their busses in
>the tunnel and ran away... leaving those people to sit there for hours
>choking and wondering when or if they'd be rescued. In spite of the
>fact that PWD's sometimes take much longer to evacuate, this time the
>landlord of the twin towers actually was telling people over the
>loudspeakers in the south tower not to evacuate, after the north tower
>was hit by the plane. The official evacuation of the south tower only
>began after it was hit by the second plane. As a result, not only did
>may more die in the south tower, but people who can't run down the
>stairs fast were obviously disproportionately among the dead. A
>disproportionate impact made worse by every minute in the delay in
>notifying the south tower occupants to evacuate. Showing that the
>impact of an event like this on PWDs (see my friend Edwina Julliet's
>article in the December 1993 'Fire Engineering' magazine; their on-line
>archive doesn't go back that far; you have to buy a back-issue) didn't
>succeed in teaching the building's management how to do things any
>better, esp. in terms of protecting PWDs.
>
>LGBT lovers / family members with no legal status allowed.... found
>themselves being discriminated against by various programs to help the
>survivors' next of kin. And found themselves having to fight for any
>3rd class rights at all. But why bother to determine if there were any
>of THEM in the room?
>
>Both of these minorities were very definitely disprportionaterly
>impacted. WhIch is usually liberal's reason for specific actions to
>cinclude, listen, etc.
>
>At the February 2002 event, they said they increase outreach to fix any
>discovered shortfall in getting representative percentages into the
>room. I suggested to the leader of one of the convening groups that
>they should do outreach to disabled orgs and ask that as one of the
>questions next time. He seemed to agree. Yesterday at the second
>high-tech public input event for 5,000 people held at the Javits
>Convention Center, neither happened. I didn't have time to survey the
>whole room (I had answered a last minute call for more facilitators for
>the tables of 11 which are the building block of these events; so I was
>working) The only other people with (perceivable) disabilites in the
>room I saw were 3 DIA people I had invited. Plus I know of a 4th. 4
>out of 5,000. Less than one percent isn't good, for the largest
>minority in the country.
>
>So while DS scholars debate labels, we're being pretty well ignored, no
>matterw what the label. Maybe we should call ourselves: "the group who
>you can never remember"?
>
>In terms of the input itself, our attempts to get it into the report on
>the first meeting's input failed. I then did several months of work
>through one of the 6 standing committees of the Civic Aliance and got
>about 10 words into the report which will come out soon (see
>www.renewNYC.org for the report, not on the July 20 meeting but the long
>version of the report from the first half of the year), otherwise just
>got the tepid phrase 'accessible for PWDs" into the design criteria,
>which implies per the (weak) building code, which is smaller what what I
>was advocating. At yesterday's giant meeting, again PWDs got that
>input in, but it got whittled down by intent or by accident of AB's who
>don't understant, just to "accessibilty".
>
>I think my next project will be to educate the event's producers (a
>non-profit called America Speaks which the Civic Alliance hired) to get
>their staff who crunch the input and summmarize it, to undersatnd the
>vocabulary of access, universal design, versus merely code compliant
>design.
>
>Also if I have time I'll volunteer this week to help collate the input
>data, and get a glimpse of what the reality is, there. That may be
>where training needs to improved? It seems like 95% of the labor in
>these events is volunteer... like they drew volunteer professional
>facilitators from all 50 states and 6 countries.... for yesterday's
>event. Who the info collators and rephrasers are (about 20 at the
>meeting itself, summing up input sentances entered from any of the
>wirelessly linked laptops on each of the 500 tables of participants) I
>don't know. I suspect college student volunteers.
>
>--
>
>How PWDs fare in public input gathering proccesses, is an interesting
>topic that I'm planning to write on sometime this year. I've organised
>proceses specifically for us, and now I've experienced a ore
>professionally run process both as a person giving input, and later as a
>person working as a facilitator. Having seen it from those three
>sides.... I think I can now begin to look at the literature wherever it
>is (I haven't even started to search... no doubt in the "meeting
>facilitor / conflict resolution" profession?) and read it with some
>grounding in the reality of what these meetings can be like.
>
>If anyone out there can reccomend writings either scholarly or "mere
>journalism" on how PWDs fare in public-input gathering efforts...
>.....please write to me at the above address. Thanks.
>
>Alternate E-Mail address [log in to unmask] (As my printer is now
>broken and awaiting replacement, I'll list my snail-mail address, too.)
>
>Jim Davis
>
>POB 9452, Elmora Station
>Elizabeth, NJ 07202-0452
>USA
>
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