Abelistic Utopia

         In the United States, one cannot refute that the passing of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990 was not a turning point for people with disabilities. However, almost thirty-years later we still see gross inequities within the dis/abled community. While reading Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/abilty by Annamma, Conor and Ferri brought up a range of emotions and memories. I have witness first-hand what it is like to live with a disability. My cousin Richard who was born in 1929 he had no formal schooling and was sixty years later diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum Disorder, which in the reading these "notions of dis/ability continually shift over time according to social context." Had it not been for my grandmother's family, my cousin Richard would've ended up at the Howard Complex in Cranston, Rhode Island where the disabled were lumped in with the mentally ill. My grandparents used to talk about how people used to take Sunday rides out to Howard in the 1960's to watch those placed there pace back and forth in adult sized cages. Today, much of that area has become commercial real-estate known as Chapel View in Cranston, RI. 

    The article further discuss the intersectionality with Critical Race Theory (CRT) in its examinations and connections between interdependent constructions of race and dis/ability in education in society in the United States. It began by talking about post-mortem physiological examinations, particularly of the cranium to determine that having more Caucasoid features was desirable and determined racial superiority through intelligence. It is the same eugenics studies that were promoted by Adolf Hitler in WWII. Here, "black and brown bodies were viewed as less developed than white bodies, more "primitive," and even considered subspecies of human (Trent 1998).  This type of "white superior thought" it still evident in historical curriculums taught in schools today. It is no coincidence that Civilizations of the Africas is one of the most under taught parts of the curriculum in history classes today. You would call this teaching the "master-narrative." I do agree in the reading that there are a number of disproportionate number of non-dominant racial, ethnic, and linguistic continue to be referred, labeled, and placed in special education particularly in the categories of Learning Disability, Intellectual Disability (formerly called Mental Retardation), and Emotional Disturbance or Behavior Disorders. I have witnessed this first-hand, particularly among our Multi-Language Learner (MLL's) in Providence School District when I referred a student to the Right To Intervention (RTI) process, I had to ask if the formal evaluation would be conducted by an evaluator in the students L1 or native language. Many times this answer was no due to the lack of bilingual evaluators. This was addressed by a former professor I had who was called to do evaluations for students of Portuguese descent and Creole/Portuguese speakers. She herself indicated that the evaluations were skewed because students of color are evaluated by very discriminatory metrics. It is fact that minority students are overrepresented in Special Education. However, we need more non-white Special Education evaluators. According to the article, African American students continue to be three times as likely to be labeled mentally retarded, two times as likely to be labeled emotionally disturbed, and one and half times as likely to be labeled learning disabled, compared to their white peers (Parish 2002). 

    It is not uncommon to determine that there is deeply entrenched racism embedded within educational and societal structures. However, as a MLL educator this makes things exceedingly difficult when referring non-native speakers to Special Education. I actually had to move schools because of my advocacy in trying to get a potential MLL/SPED student service because his administrator felt that I was pushing too many MLL parents and students through the RTI process. However, I always play my own Devil's Advocate when referring a student. It takes me weeks to look through all the language and testing data subjectively. I know what it means when a student is labeled. It sets off a course of events that could affect their entire emotional, professional and social careers. More research and PD needs to be accessible for educators, especially DisCrit, which addresses the social constructions of race and ability and recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labeled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of western cultural norms. We need to look at students who are labeled dis/abled by looking at differences among certain individuals as strengths and not deficits. 

    In the video Examined Life by Judith Butler, it addressed this idea that we are indeed all different from one another. The article and video examined this notion that "a person who is perceived as having a dis/ability is no more or less different from someone who is considered nondisabled than that nondisabled person is different from him/her. The video talked about the investment that certain cities like San Francisco, where the gay pride movement began, especially with the first openly gay elected official in California was Harvey Milk. The city has slowly begun to "normalize standards." This idea of going for "a walk" for a person confined to a wheel chair as abnormal. By going for "a walk," the person represented in the video was challenging this stigma associated with their disability. Going for a walk was not something that was foreign, but was very familiar, just like getting a cup of coffee. It is our perception and it challenging of norms when we see something that is unifamiliar to us. The video did reference people who are disabled and this type of embedded racism, especially the person who was diagnosed with arthrogryposis and how when she walked people said it looked like a monkey. I think about the Italian movie Malena starring Monica Belluci and how her "beauty" made her a social outcast. In the film people in the town would just stare as she walked. 

However, when looking at things from a social Darwinism perspective this is biological normally, however, certain social constructs have made walking non-bipedal as racist. This term "monkey" is often totted to represent people of color. This term came to light when a person I know who worked at the prestigious Dunes Club down in Narragansett, which at one time employed colored staff referred to the summer staff's lodging quarters as the "Monkey Houses." I was disgusted and shocked that the term was still used even till this day. 

This is very reminiscent of the so-called mestiza consciousness addressed in the Borderlands reading by Gloria Anzaldua in that the "answer to the problem between white race and the colored, males and females, lies in the healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages and thoughts. Until this happens, we will dream of a day, until then society is seen as an abelist utopia...