ableism and anti-blackness

There is a lack of intersectional understanding between disability and race. Disability research that does not interrogate race creates scholarship that promotes ignorance of the intersection between disability and race. The best remedy for this problem would be an interrogation of mental deficiency. Ferri’10 (Beth Ferri Beth A. Ferri, Ph.D. is a Professor in Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at Syracuse University. She is also Associate Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies and coordinates the Doctoral program in Special Education. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in adapting instruction for diverse learners and critical issues in dis/ability and inclusion, as well as several doctoral seminars in Disability Studies. Her research interests include inclusive education, disability studies in education, and narrative inquiry. Professor Ferri has published widely on the intersection of race and disability, including articles in Teachers College Record, the International Journal of Inclusive Education, Remedial & Special Education, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Gender & Education, Disability Studies Quarterly, Disability & Society, and the Journal of African American History. This article can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/343849/A_Dialogue_weve_Yet_to_Have_Race_and_ Disability_Studies)

A quick, yet disheartening review of dissertation abstracts does not bode well for the field. Of the ninety nine dissertations published in the past five years that include “disability studies” in the title, abstract, or as a key term, only twenty four include analyses of race or ethnicity, and of those only five are in the field of education. It seems clear that unless we intervene quickly we will likely produce another generation of disability studies scholars willfully ignorant of issues of race. A similar lack of engagement with disability studies is evident in scholarship focused on racial inequity. It is into this absence that I write—hopeful that this chapter serves as an invitation for more sustained and meaningful dialogues among my colleagues in disability studies and race studies. There are many difficult dialogues that remain to be explored between critical race theorists and scholars in disability

studies in education. Working margin to margin, I examine one potential starting point for building a coalitional politic that accounts for and works to eradicate multiple ways that students are “othered” in schools. Specifically, I focus on the entangled

histories of racism and ableism embedded in the construction of mental deficiency (and normalcy), as well as the legacies of this history

Medical authority is deadly for blacks. The medical system has given blacks diseases and let it fester. Giving power to doctors over the lives of blacks is tantamount to giving them complete control over black life again.

King and Wolf’98 (A.B., Stanford University, 1988 J.D., Harvard Law School, 1991 M.P.H. Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 1997 Biography Leslie E. Wolf, professor of law, conducts research in a variety of areas in health and public health law and ethics, with a particular focus on research ethics. She has conducted empirical research on conflicts of interest, research with stored biological materials, Certificates of Confidentiality, IRB web guidance, and HIV-related laws and policies. Prior to joining the law school, Wolf taught medical ethics and research ethics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she also served on the UCSF institutional review board and advisory committee regarding stem cell research. She also previously was selected as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy and as a Greenwall Faculty Scholar. Wolf teaches courses on human subjects research, public health law and HIV and the law.)

There is evidence that members of those groups regarded as vulnerable have different attitudes about end-of-life treatment than do the majority

of Americans who support assisting the terminally ill to die. Disparities are greatest, however, in attitudes, values, and beliefs about end-of-life decisionmaking with racial and ethnic minorities. Studies show that blacks are substantially less likely than whites to support legalization of PAS. n18 Although the support for legalization has increased over time in both groups, the gap in support between blacks and whites persists. n19 There is also evidence that these differences [*1023] arise in attitudes towards other end-of-life issues, such as use of life-prolonging treatment, advance directives, and living wills. n20 Why these substantial gaps in attitudes about end-of-life decisionmaking exists is not clear and warrants additional study. The available evidence indicates that these differences persist even when controlling for education, age, and socioeconomic status. n21 Possible reasons for this difference in attitude include religious preferences, n22 blacks' distrust of physicians, medical institutions, and the health care system generally, n23 and cultural characteristics like trusting families more than physicians. n24 Specifically, these differences in attitude towards PAS may reflect differences in black expression of health and illness as well as concerns about death. Not only have African-Americans experienced disrespect for their autonomy, they have suffered injustice in medicine as well as in the broader society. As a group, blacks have been abused, neglected, and exploited. They have reason to believe that their lives are not valued in the same way as whites, and in their encounters with the health care system they frequently perceive that they are treated differently solely because of their race. n25 African-Americans have reason to be suspicious of physicians and rightly worry about giving them too much authority. In the [*1024] medical context, physician paternalism builds on and reenforces race differentials in power and authority that occur in the broader society. In short, historical and current experiences with American medicine have made African-Americans acutely aware of the difficulty of looking after their own interests. Ordinary practices, norms, and habits of well-intentioned institutions and professions can result in unjust practices vis-a-vis some groups. n26 Those with power in the society are able to impose their norms, values, and beliefs on those who lack power. The dominant group's ideas, beliefs, and judgments serve to stigmatize and mark other groups as different and deficient. Behaviors and practices

of the stigmatized group are often considered unworthy of study or respect. The myth of white superiority persists and has profoundly affected both whites and blacks. As Professor Charles Lawrence notes, "We do not recognize the ways in which our [shared] cultural experience has influenced our beliefs about race or the occasions on which those beliefs affect our actions." n27 Stereotypes that capture and reflect negative attitudes towards AfricanAmericans flourish and become embedded in the culture to the point where they may not be consciously noticed. Thus, injury frequently is inflicted on blacks without the actor being consciously aware of racial motivation. n28 It is not only the dominant group, however, that is affected. The negative messages are also absorbed by blacks. Feelings of inferiority and unworthiness are among the psychic injuries inflicted on blacks. As a result, in addition to all the disadvantages that blacks suffer, they carry the additional burden of not always appreciating their own worth as human beings. As Herbert Nickens points out, "such stigma is never far from consciousness for minorities and is one of the lenses through which life is perceived." n29 [*1025] Although other racial and ethnic groups have separate and distinct experiences with American medicine, an additional reason for examining the African-American experience is that in some real sense African-Americans are the paradigmatic minority group in this country. They constitute approximately twelve percent of the population. Although they were not willing immigrants and endured slavery and its aftermath of rigid segregation, as people of color they have not been easily assimilated and do not share the western European heritage and culture of some immigrants. Features of black health experience such as persistent poverty, limited access to health care, different health status, and low numbers of health care professionals are common to other minorities as well.

Thus the altReject the AFF as a form of disability education that centers around the white and excludes the black. Instead center our discussion on the primordial nexus of disability and racism the notions of mental deficiency and mental normalcy. Ferri’10 (Beth Ferri Beth A. Ferri, Ph.D. is a Professor in Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at Syracuse University. She is also Associate Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies and coordinates the Doctoral program in Special Education. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in adapting instruction for diverse learners and critical issues in dis/ability and inclusion, as well as several doctoral seminars in Disability Studies. Her research interests include inclusive education, disability studies in education, and narrative inquiry. Professor Ferri has published widely on the intersection of race and disability, including articles in Teachers College Record, the International Journal of Inclusive Education, Remedial & Special Education, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Gender & Education, Disability Studies Quarterly, Disability & Society, and the Journal of African American History. This article can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/343849/A_Dialogue_weve_Yet_to_Have_Race_and_ Disability_Studies)

Historically, disability (and particularly mental or cognitive disability), according to Baynton (2001), proved to be an effective tool in justifying discrimination and inequality not just of people with disabilities, but also women and racial minorities as well. Mental retardation and all of its related terms is a construction whose “changing meaning is shaped both by individuals…and by the social context to which these individuals are responding” (Trent, 1994, p. 2). At their core, however, cultural meanings of mental deficiency are saturated with eugenic- based racism , which gave the concept the traction it needed in order to be seen as a social and political cause for concern (Danforth, 2009). This explains why mental deficiency only became a crisis once it was associated with a host of “social ills such as crime, unemployment, prostitution, and alcohol abuse ” (Danforth,

2009, p. 20). Conveniently, these and other social problems

were blamed on the inherited defectiveness of individuals, who were variously characterized as mentally defective, feebleminded, and subnormal. But when did the idea of feeblemindedness get entangled with race, in particular, and why, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, does this supposed relationship between race and ability remain so ingrained? How can retracing this history help us to locate where and when notions of race figured into ideas about dis/ability? And, finally, how does challenging

the legacy of this shared history of ableism and racism necessitate a coalitional politic? The concept of mental deficiency arose as a “response…to serious disruptions and dislocations that resulted from the nation’s transformation into an urban, industrial society” (Franklin, 1987, p. 190). The historical context would most likely include two World Wars, the Great Depression, the largest wave of immigration into the U.S., and the vast migration of African Americans from the rural south to the burgeoning urban centers of the north. To say these were tumultuous times would be an understatement. It is against this historical backdrop that we see the earliest facilities designed for individuals who were considered feebleminded which, despite efforts to the contrary, were more custodial than educational, as well as the first college textbook focusing on special education (Franklin, 1987), and the first teacher training programs (Osgood, 1999).She Continues if we pay close attention to the history

of special education, what we see is a series of attempts to deal with diversity by creating ever more specific categories of otherness, categories which have always been (and continue to be) associated with race, class, and culture/ethnicity. We

should not be surprised that today’s special education classrooms continue to be over populated with students of color, particular in those categories that are more subjective (and less obvious, like the “high grade” mentally defective category), that patterns of school disciplinary referrals and placements are disproportionately applied to students of color, or that the achievement gap continues to mirror racial inequalities. What we should be surprised at is the lack of real engagement with these inequities. Does our collective

silence, as disability studies scholars, reveal a complicity in this history—are we not surprised because we expect to see these differences? If we link the history of categories, such as mental retardation, and special education more broadly with

racist ideologies, do we stop at critiquing only the overrepresentation of students of color or do we insist on dismantling the whole enterprise? If we, as critical race scholars, take “our” kids out, who do we think still belongs “in there”? What then justifies our current state of affairs and how do we collectively dismantle it

Ableism and race are intermingled modes of oppression. It is important to start any truly liberatory analysis from the nexus of these two forms of oppression. For the Negative that conversation begins with a rejection of the notions of normalcy and mental defiency. Ferri’10 (Beth Ferri Beth A. Ferri, Ph.D. is a Professor in Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at Syracuse University. She is also Associate Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies and coordinates the Doctoral program in Special Education. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in adapting instruction for diverse learners and critical issues in dis/ability and inclusion, as well as several doctoral seminars in Disability Studies. Her research interests include inclusive education, disability studies in education, and narrative inquiry. Professor Ferri has published widely on the intersection of race and disability, including articles in Teachers College Record, the International Journal of Inclusive Education, Remedial & Special Education, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Gender & Education, Disability Studies Quarterly, Disability & Society, and the Journal of African American History. This article can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/343849/A_Dialogue_weve_Yet_to_Have_Race_and_ Disability_Studies) Thus, what is needed is not simply a cursory attending to

race or ethnicity, but a sustained and careful analysis of the ways racism and ableism are interdependent. Unfortunately, too often, when scholars or activists do attempt to combine analyses of race and disability or gender and disability, they do so by analogizing between the two or placing these systems of oppression in a hierarchy (May & Ferri, 2005). This amounts to placing one type

of oppression as overarching or as foundational to all others. A common claim is that disability cuts across all the other forms of oppression. Moreover, because anyone can acquire disability it is therefore thought to be more universal, as opposed to the particular interests of race or gender, I suppose. I admit to being puzzled by these assumptions. Don’t race, gender, and sexuality, for example, cut across social class? Moreover, what is universal about disability experience—Is there really one disability experience or isn’t it mediated by the particular social, historical, and political context? A slightly different approach attempts

to garner attention to one type of oppression by linking it to another, usually through analogy. Consider a bumper sticker that reads something like, “Black people had to fight for the right to ride in the front of the bus, but we can’t even get on the bus.” Other examples use terms like being “shackled” by ableism or “crippled” by racism. These

analyses ignore the ways that racism and ableism are dissimilar—ways that they cannot or should not be seen as interchangeable or analogous. Moreover, they all but erase those who experience racism and ableism simultaneously —a point cogently raised in the germinal collection of essays, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982).