Shortsightness? AV
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Davis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 4:30 PM
Subject: Vocabulary question: Is there a word for this?
> Is there an established term for the phenomenon of people with more
> severe (or more visible) disabilities perceiving themselves as the sole
> possessors of validity as people with disabilities? And perceiving
> people with less visible / non-severe / not-yet-severe disabilites - as
> impostors or diluters of the concepts of disabled rights or people with
> disabilies?
>
> The word "ableism" clearly doesn't fit. Something like "disability
> degree-ism" would be more like it For lack of a single term, I once
> referred to this in a lecture as "... for lack of knowing any
> established term for it, what might be called an 'authenticity test'".
>
> Examples -- people who say that the scope of people with disabilities
> covered in a law like the Americans with Disabilities Act should be cut
> in half, or saying that only people using wheelchairs should be allowed
> to use "handicapped parking spots" (ignoring other disabilities for
> which such accommodations would be appropriate), or people who in
> disabled social or movement orgs do not want to associate with or accept
> as equal coworkers people who they see as insufficiently disabled?
>
> Another example that comes to mind in a social org which I won't name
> here, that had as it's one project, monthly Sunday brunches in
> restaurants. In which I am told by a friend with severe mental
> disability due to severe brain injury (barely able to work out ways to
> live independantly), that a social pattern in this org. soon emerged in
> which the crowd was big enough to use two big restaurant tables, and a
> binary split happened -- people using wheelchairs refused to sit at the
> same table with people not using them. Not in response to any untoward
> occurances, but based on some underlying attitudes. This was the
> opposite of the "paper bag party" phenomenon (of the light skinned
> African American students refusing to allow into a party anyone darker
> than a paper bag). In the example described by my friend, the less
> disabled / less visibly disabled were socially ostracised by the more
> disabled / more visibly disabled; the bias was clearly a one-way street,
> not a two-way street (which division I hear, eventually led to the
> dissolving of the brunch group).
>
> So I'm just looking for the single word to indicate this phenomenon.
>
> Is there a noun or adjective for this?
>
> Jim
>
> --
>
> PS - It would be interesting to see someone analyze in research this
> phenomenon in terms of the concept of "piss on pity", since the
> "disability = only severe / visible disability" - notion (or the even
> more restrictive - "disability = only wheelchair use" - notion) would
> seem to not be a rejection of pity as a disability defining concept --
> but would actually be an indication of an indirect and unconscious
> embrace of the bad old pity concept.... which perhaps may not have
> vanished as much as certain oversimplified theoretical writings are
> saying?
>
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