(Image from the 1977 504 sit-in.)
Welcome to the first weekly disabled community discussion thread for the week of 10/28/2024 — 11/3/2024.
This community is brand new! Everyone is welcome to post new topics and comments. However, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
"Disability" is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Disabled people in the U.S. today experience a poverty rate of approximately 30 percent; comprise 40 percent of the total homeless population; have an active labor market participation rate of less than 20 percent, despite self-reporting a preference to do so at a rate well over 60 percent. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people remain today living in institutional or carceral environments, such as nursing homes or prisons, where conditions tend towards the cruel or barbaric.
Thus, when we ask the question, what is disability, we are not really providing a full answer if we only talk about physiology, biology, or even identity reduced to a cataloging of manifest limitations or functional deficits. In fact, disability – or, to put it perhaps more accurately, disablement – is a dialectical phenomenon arising from existing political, economic, and social relations in society.
While variations in human bodies, minds, and behaviors – up to and including those traits which might be termed ‘impairments’ – have always been an indelible and essential aspect of the human species, disability as we have come to understand it in the modern era is neither eternal nor transhistorical.
The notion that a group of people – with a vast array of completely different traits, capacities, morphologies, and phenotypes – could be lumped together and labeled according to their relative lack of generalized “ability,” in the abstract, is in fact endemic to the particular period of more recent human history signaled by the emergence and dominance of the capitalist mode.
Specifically, what is the relationship between disabled people and the working class, as such?
... we should hold an expansive conception of disability, which understands it both in terms of class location, but also more generally as a phenomenon less immediately relevant to the positions of the classes than to the processes intrinsic to the relations of the classes. In other words, centering the analysis of disability on the processes of labor commodification, exploitation of labor, market competition, and class division.
Put differently, the conditions that reproduce the division of society into separate classes, and in particular, reproduce that class of people whose lives are wholly determined by the commodified value that their labor power can purchase on the capitalist market, are the same conditions that reproduce a subclass of people whose very existence is diminished and devalued according to the relatively diminished and devalued worth of their labor power as measured by the logic of commodified market competition.
Insofar as the value of commodity labor power under capitalism is both a creation and a measure of the rate of exploitation obtaining in the market – that is, the rate at which capitalists can competitively extract surplus value from the productive labors of the working class – then the simple realities of human physiology, let alone the complex realities of biopolitics, mean that there will always be and must necessarily be a constant proportion of the working class whose commodified labor power manifests as a “disability,” with the attendant forms of oppression concomitant thereto.
The struggle against disability oppression should be seen as innately allied with all other struggles born of – and against – capitalist oppression. Specifically, disablement is a form of oppression arising from the system of exploitation of labor, and therefore the historical struggle of the working class against exploitation.
from Keith Rosenthal of Tempest Collective
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD. My kid presents very similar to me. When they got diagnosed by a neuropsych, their case was described as “severe”. I have no idea if that’s a clinical distinction, but seeing the school refer to their ADHD as “a legally recognized disability” gave me pause because I’d never considered myself disabled.
Learning about the social model of disability and listening to disability advocates has helped me be easier on myself and give myself the rest I needed (I also have some sort of sleep disorder that’s currently being diagnosed). Basically, I’m glad this community is here. Just dumping, I guess.
Another one here, but likely audhd. For me it was my kid that made me see it.
I've been wrestling with going from "adhd is just a quirky thing and you need to focus" to recognizing adhd as a serious, heavily impairing disabiity. Something that recently hammered it home to me is apparently the general public, if they start college, about 50% of people will graduate.
For people with adhd it's 5%. Five percent! That's an enormous concrete example of how much adhd causes severe problems for people!
I'm still adjusting to the idea in many ways, but looking at adhd as a serious disability has helped me make sense of so many difficult and upsetting and traumatic things in my life. Just realizing that i was never lazy or procrastinating, but rather struggling alone against a hugely disruptive illness, has made me feel so much better about some of the worst times in my life.
That college statistic is wild. I knew school wasn’t designed for me. I didn’t realize it was that bad. I actually considered going back to college to finish a proper degree (I have an independent studies associates basically on a technicality). But I’d have to go to one of those schools where you take one class at a time on just a matter of a couple weeks. I’m good at speed running a course but it always puts me ahead and then I get bored. The material has never been the problem. It’s always been the class structure.
I definitely relate to the what you’re saying about taking it seriously as a disability. I’m also very fortunate to have a partner who I practice a mutual radical acceptance with. There are days where I just feel like a lazy pos and they always pick up the slack and are understanding and I do the same for them on their days.
Wait, ADHD is legally recognised as a disability where you're at? This is the first time I've heard of it as such, which is... interesting. I have AuDHD and out of the two, I have struggled with accepting the autism part because while many of the symptoms of ADHD can be managed with the right meds for most people, there isn't really a "quick fix" for autism. Up until then, I never considered myself disabled either.
I'll have to read up on the social model of disability because I've got a lot of ableist brain worms wriggling around. Do you have any recommendations? Also, I'm glad (and rather hopeful) that it has helped you be easier on yourself because that's where I struggle with the most.
In the US, having ADHD entitles you to accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, yeah. I don’t have any reading recommendations, unfortunately. The social model is pretty easy to explain the basics of, though. The medical model of disability says that the human body has normative functions and that disability is a deviation from those normative functions. The social model is more relative. It says that, while some people have impairments like difficulty walking, disability itself comes from society’s inability or lack of desire to accommodate those impairments and that some disabilities are just the result of differences, not impairments at all. So if focuses on your desired ways of functioning and then looks at the way society makes them difficult or impossible for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty succinct and helps to reframe a lot of internalized ableism for me.
Colorblindness is a great example of social model disability. It's a disability in any context but when traffic lights use red and green lights to signal stop and go a red/green colorblind person suddenly faces a serious and dangerous problem that only exists because of a decision made by society.