is something that might someday appear in all its parts and might not. Right now I'm primarily interested in writing about staff infection. Spoiler alert though: the answer to "how did indistinguishability get its groove back?" is exactly that.
Or like I said before: it never really lost it.
I think there are two reasons "staff"--very broadly defined as doctors, teachers, therapists, aides, and a million other people--end up trying to control people with disabilities.
1. They believe people with disabilities inherently need to be controlled.
2. They get in a position of power because of people with disabilities' support needs and/or youth, and have the opportunity to make people with disabilities more convenient to deal with.
Whichever reason is not your reason can be used as a straw reason to support the real reason. I could give examples but basically you know it when you see it. Doing this relates to the Harder Fallacy and Shocking Behavior and things like that.
The way indistinguishability got its groove back is that a person with power looked at a person diagnosed with autism and decided they didn't like the way person's body looked or the way the person felt about things. Or (I say when I get angry) the way the person said no.
The person with power started trying to change the person with autism's body (or whatever). The person with autism couldn't defend themselves because they couldn't talk. Or, if they could, other people felt their beliefs, opinions, and arguments were inherently weaker than those of people without disabilities.
The person with power told their coworkers or their employees or the other people in their field to do the same thing. They by and large did.
Occasionally someone was bothered by it but afraid of losing their job, being seen as a pushover by their coworkers, or not being respected by other autism scientists. But most people weren't bothered. Maybe the original person with power was very charismatic and converted them. Maybe they already didn't like how the person with autism's body looked. Maybe they just didn't think about it, accepted it as part of their job, and eventually came to be a little passionate about its rightness. After all, no one was trying to change their bodies.
When I say this happened once I mean that people in power make this decision about people with autism on a regular basis. Probably as you are reading this a person is deciding to be this way, and their decision will spread because it doesn't occur to many people to question it.
To some extent this is true about any decision within that dynamic. Let's say someone decided that all kids with a certain disability have to play soccer, or read Tarot cards. I think this would actually catch on to a greater degree than you would expect. But indistinguishability is such a historically popular thing for people in power to choose to force on disabled people that it has a kind of momentum. You just think about it and it's already there.
Every person in power who unthinkingly chooses or supports indistinguishability is adding to its mass. It's an army of laziness, an army (usually) of feeling safe in your body. Of being able to talk about how much you love The Office in between sessions of training a kid with autism not to make jokes that don't have an obvious punchline. It's easy to do pretty much anything to people with disabilities but indistinguishability has an army.
The pressure of the army makes room for more soldiers. Obviously. This has all been an excuse for a pun. The way indistinguishability got its groove back is that indistinguishability actually is a groove being worn into the fabric of society by sheer constance and bullheadedness. Have a nice day.
Showing posts with label double standards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label double standards. Show all posts
25 June, 2012
16 July, 2011
I can't wait till I have a chance to synthesize my two email addresses so I don't have to go to as much effort to post here. I can never really dash off posts here, and just end up posting things on tumblr that are too long for tumblr and that I don't really edit the way I would if I was posting them here. Posting here has started to feel like a Big Deal where I have to write something well-organized.
This may be selfishness as a staff person, in fact it totally is, but I think the level of intense surveillance I'm required to keep up working at this camp is a little bit ridiculous. Someone I know recently got threatened with being fired because she forgot two of the campers she was supposed to bring to the pool--obviously forgetting to bring someone to an activity is bad, but I doubt she would have gotten in much trouble if she'd been with the campers and just lost track of time or forgot they were supposed to go somewhere. I think the really bad thing about what she did is supposed to be that she left them unsupervised, but they're two teenage girls with intellectual disabilities, not convicted felons. I'm sure their parents leave them home alone just as the parents of most teenagers do, but when they're here, suddenly we're supposed to be treating them like very young children.
And I mean very young--I volunteered in a mainstream first-grade class this spring, and I was surprised every time the teacher allowed a 6- or 7-year-old to go walk to the bathroom alone, because I'm so used to the idea that IF YOU'RE RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE, YOU HAVE TO ESCORT THEM EVERYWHERE. Even adults with disabilities who live pretty independently and definitely walk to the bathroom by themselves when they're not at camp.
It kind of reminds me of the way Danny's teachers usually acted like there was something dangerous about special interests, but for his birthday they let him have a party totally focused on his special interest, and allowed him to talk to them about it. It was like they could hold two contradicting beliefs at once; there was a part of them that thought his special interests were cute and perfectly acceptable, but when they were doing their job, they thought the opposite. The rules about how to treat campers seem to contain a similar paradox, at least in their application. We know lots of them can do this stuff on their own. Most of us would say, if asked, that disabled people deserve to be treated "just like anyone else." But we don't treat them like anyone else at all, and if another counselor doesn't stand in the bathroom while their camper is taking a shower, we all cluck about it. We don't act like it's just a deviation from policy, but like it's actually dangerous.
I want to come back to camp next year because so many of the campers are really special to me and given location, taboo, and different writing/Internet abilities, we can't really be good friends outside of camp; but it's hard for me to imagine I will come back, because it's such a time-intensive job that I rarely get the chance to even read books or write posts or letters.
I keep daydreaming about trying to get a job at one of the two camps I enjoyed going to when I was a teenager. One of them is CTY, which is supposedly an academic camp for kids with high test scores, but is functionally a social space for kids who are different from their classmates. In my group of friends there, almost none of us had any friends at home. The other camp is a farm camp where the campers work on the farm and do group therapy together; when I went there, there were a fair amount of kids who had learning/developmental/psychiatric disabilities and had come to camp because someone decided it would be good for them, but there were also a lot of kids who had no disabilities and just enjoyed the environment. And, importantly I think, you didn't always know which was which. I've written some snarky things about this camp but I really admire what they do, ultimately.
I keep getting excited about the thought of applying to work at CTY or farm camp, not just because they're places I like, but because, oh my gosh, the freedom of being allowed to let campers go to the bathroom by themselves and only closely monitoring them if they actually need close monitoring and support! But then in the same breath I can't not just be staff, I can't help thinking how ridiculous it is that once you put people under a certain label all these new potential dangers emerge, like, THE DANGER OF WALKING BACK TO A CABIN ALONE, and, THE DANGER OF PUTTING YOUR HAND ON THE KNEE OF THE BOY YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON, that you must be protected from by your staff!
(On a totally different note, I've been meaning to link this since I read it, their parents are fantastic.)
This may be selfishness as a staff person, in fact it totally is, but I think the level of intense surveillance I'm required to keep up working at this camp is a little bit ridiculous. Someone I know recently got threatened with being fired because she forgot two of the campers she was supposed to bring to the pool--obviously forgetting to bring someone to an activity is bad, but I doubt she would have gotten in much trouble if she'd been with the campers and just lost track of time or forgot they were supposed to go somewhere. I think the really bad thing about what she did is supposed to be that she left them unsupervised, but they're two teenage girls with intellectual disabilities, not convicted felons. I'm sure their parents leave them home alone just as the parents of most teenagers do, but when they're here, suddenly we're supposed to be treating them like very young children.
And I mean very young--I volunteered in a mainstream first-grade class this spring, and I was surprised every time the teacher allowed a 6- or 7-year-old to go walk to the bathroom alone, because I'm so used to the idea that IF YOU'RE RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE, YOU HAVE TO ESCORT THEM EVERYWHERE. Even adults with disabilities who live pretty independently and definitely walk to the bathroom by themselves when they're not at camp.
It kind of reminds me of the way Danny's teachers usually acted like there was something dangerous about special interests, but for his birthday they let him have a party totally focused on his special interest, and allowed him to talk to them about it. It was like they could hold two contradicting beliefs at once; there was a part of them that thought his special interests were cute and perfectly acceptable, but when they were doing their job, they thought the opposite. The rules about how to treat campers seem to contain a similar paradox, at least in their application. We know lots of them can do this stuff on their own. Most of us would say, if asked, that disabled people deserve to be treated "just like anyone else." But we don't treat them like anyone else at all, and if another counselor doesn't stand in the bathroom while their camper is taking a shower, we all cluck about it. We don't act like it's just a deviation from policy, but like it's actually dangerous.
I want to come back to camp next year because so many of the campers are really special to me and given location, taboo, and different writing/Internet abilities, we can't really be good friends outside of camp; but it's hard for me to imagine I will come back, because it's such a time-intensive job that I rarely get the chance to even read books or write posts or letters.
I keep daydreaming about trying to get a job at one of the two camps I enjoyed going to when I was a teenager. One of them is CTY, which is supposedly an academic camp for kids with high test scores, but is functionally a social space for kids who are different from their classmates. In my group of friends there, almost none of us had any friends at home. The other camp is a farm camp where the campers work on the farm and do group therapy together; when I went there, there were a fair amount of kids who had learning/developmental/psychiatric disabilities and had come to camp because someone decided it would be good for them, but there were also a lot of kids who had no disabilities and just enjoyed the environment. And, importantly I think, you didn't always know which was which. I've written some snarky things about this camp but I really admire what they do, ultimately.
I keep getting excited about the thought of applying to work at CTY or farm camp, not just because they're places I like, but because, oh my gosh, the freedom of being allowed to let campers go to the bathroom by themselves and only closely monitoring them if they actually need close monitoring and support! But then in the same breath I can't not just be staff, I can't help thinking how ridiculous it is that once you put people under a certain label all these new potential dangers emerge, like, THE DANGER OF WALKING BACK TO A CABIN ALONE, and, THE DANGER OF PUTTING YOUR HAND ON THE KNEE OF THE BOY YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON, that you must be protected from by your staff!
(On a totally different note, I've been meaning to link this since I read it, their parents are fantastic.)
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