Whats your opinion on Meryl Streeps speech? I saw some article on FB where allegedly disabled activists said they think her speech was ableist. What's your take on this?
Crying at the thought of someone making fun of us… It’s not that it’s not a good sentiment but disabled people were watching it in a very different and specific context.
Everyone is complaining about Trump, giving impassioned speeches about his racism and homophobia. Everyone is furious. But when they talk about some of things he’s done two disabled people it’s always sadness.
It’s pity. We don’t want pity, but not in the way most able-bodied people think.
We want able-bodied people to empathize with us, sympathize with us, to considers an equal part of the community. The current pity is none of this. The pity we are currently getting is of defeated indignants.
Everyone’s reaction was “how could a human being do that?” In the way that people respond to child abuse. They speak for us and then sleep peacefully because they believe someone else will actually help us. No one talked about the disabled community in the way they talk about other communities. No one even knew the disabled reporter’s name.
Remember I said this was about context. Months earlier one of the largest instance of genocide happened. There was a mass killing of disabled residents in a segregated living facility in Japan by a man who used to work there and had released his manifesto calling for disabled people the world over to be put down.
Well, people who knew about it.
No one besides the disabled community was talking about it and it wasn’t being reported on TV. Families of the victims were so ashamed over having disabled relatives that they refused to release the names of the victims. Some Japanese citizens wanted to pay their respect but the facility, despite the fact it was still running and people were living there, was locked down and a picnic table was put outside the gates for people to put their flowers. All offerings of respect had to be on the table and any overflow was thrown away. There was a risk that letting people pay their respects normally and so close to the facility might out the families of the dead.
This was after the Pulse massacre in Florida but after the media had exhausted what it could report. All of the victims names were released.
The names were released because they were human beings. They were adults. Individuals who matter. They could no longer speak for themselves but their names were released and no one was concerned about their families being “outed” for having any relation to them.
You could argue that it’s cultural differences but it was primarily Japanese citizens who demanded that the names of the victims of our latest genocide be released. Compare that to the fluff pieces in the West about families putting down their disabled children, sometimes adult children, and note how often the victim is given a name. Note how everyone finds it disgusting but sympathizes with what our families must go through because we exist.
I appreciate what Meryl Streep did but it’s just a nice gesture. It will not inspire people to be allies. We have been thrown bones by well-intentioned people since the 70s when it finally became legal for disabled people to be in public spaces(x). We have been through this before. We had been through it just months ago and have not yet recovered from a genocide.
Imagine what some disabled people felt to see the overwhelming praise of Meryl Streep all over social media from all of the same outlets and people who have been completely silent about genocide.
We live in a global society where it’s worse to make fun of a disabled person than to kill them.
Everyone is talking about the resurgence of Nazis and no one has ever talked about the fact that disabled people were the first exterminated. No one talks about the gas chambers being originally built for us before they got an upgrade by people who trained by medically torturing us as guinea pigs. No one knows what a T4 patient is. Despite the fact that at least three channels at any given time is showing a documentary about World War III.
But everyone was sad that Trump did something that happens to us every time we leave our homes.
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