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"We have a trick, we do, those of us who work with or otherwise support people with disabilities. We believe in their competence when they are compliant - when they agree with us, when they submit to our authority, when they bow to the hierarchy of the natural order of things. We determine incompetence when they have the temerity to dismiss our opinions as interesting but irrelevant. Yep, we use competence as the reward for compliance and submissiveness."
Excerpted from Dave Hingsburger's blog post, Jenny and Eve and the Statistics of Freedom
And some of the comments were just as insightful, so I'm quoting them too.
It's the difference between presumed competence versus presumed incompetence. One makes for a pretty straight road. The other for an uphill battle.
One of the defining aspects of oppression is that oppressed people have to fight to occupy space with the same freedom and safety as privileged people. There are always excuses for stripping people of this right: the idea of Trayvon being killed because he wore a hoodie is just as ludicrous as the idea that Jenny needs guardianship because she had a bike accident. Lots of white people wear hoodies and aren't killed. Lots of nondisabled people have bike accidents and don't lose their civil rights. I think that rather than make each of these kinds of oppression look unique, we need to start showing how they are all of a piece -- that people routinely lose their rights to live in freedom and sometimes, to live at all, based on what their bodies look like and how they work. Only by showing the similarities are we going to convince the general public that disability is a civil rights issue. Every time we put it in a special category, we run the risk of enabling other people to make us a special case.
I am cautious about the idea about PWD being seen as the only people not seeming to deserve freedom. I suspect that you are right to a degree. I certainly don't see other minority groups fighting in court to live on their own. BUT I do see that they are often restricted in freedom in ways that are less obvious. And I think it is about their competence...just perhaps not intellectual competence.
Jisun, blacks have been victimized by the suggestion of innate incompetence for centuries. It's one of the bases of racism. Black women were sterilized for being "feeble-minded" only because they were black. Black kids were considered innately less intelligent because they scored low on culturally biased IQ tests. Young black men are considered less than competent in their ability to be nonviolent and law-abiding; it's what gets them killed. Slavery was based on the assumption that black people were lesser beings, intellectually and morally. It's the identification of oppressed groups with disability that deepens their oppression so in that sense, disability bigotry is at the heart of many other oppressions. But I don't think that it's entirely different in kind.
Dave, I totally get what you're saying. You're not saying that others aren't discriminated against. You're saying that the discrimination is completely different. This is where I disagree. I think that discrimination is all about competence. Gay men aren't considered competent enough in love to be married. Black men aren't considered competent to walk down the street without attacking someone. Trans people aren't considered competent to describe their own experiences. Competence is one of the things by which our culture measures humanity, and it's a horror story for people in a number of different groups.
It's not that discrimination doesn't play out differently; it does. But a lot of people have to prove their basic right to be free, and that means that a lot of people live their lives in the same fear that disabled people do.
Emphasis mine.