5/28/25 - Catching up on some reading

Good afternoon!

I'm catching up a bit on articles I had in my queue from earlier in the month. Here are three of them for this midweek ...

What RFK Jr. Doesn’t Understand About Disability

Ivan Plis, The Bulwark - May 5, 2025

"Luck is unfashionable in bootstrap America, with its disavowal of things like structural racism or generational wealth as factors that can influence life outcomes. Many in power today reject the idea that being born in another family, or in another place, would dramatically change how a person turns out. The randomness of disability, then, is an affront to the hardline meritocratic worldview: Even if a lifelong disability wasn’t the result of an accident, there must be some immediate cause for it—something that could, in theory, be prevented or fixed."

The main reason I'm sharing this piece is because it's from The Bulwark, a podcast and newsletter outlet that's made up mainly of moderate Democrats, "Never Trump" Republicans, and neoconservatives. Their political orientations alone make them intriguing, often exasperating, and sometimes tantalizing. When one of them decides to connect on of the hot current issues by digging into the social meaning and politics of disability – well, I can't resist. It's mostly standard "social model" of disability stuff, well presented for novices. But the quote above was a bit of insight into many Americans' attitude towards disabilities I hadn't thought of before. And I do think it helps a lot to explain how anti-vax views dovetail with ableism. I hope a lot of Bulwark followers read the piece.

We need to talk about hate

Lucy Webster, The View From Down Here - May 13, 2025

"Sometimes I’ll be telling a story about something that’s happened to me or talking about a political problem (cough, assisted dying, cough), and someone will ask me how these things can possibly be happening. More and more these days, I can’t be bothered to sugar-coat the answer, which is that a not insubstantial part of the population hates disabled people. People, let me tell you, really, really do not like this answer. I think it forces them to confront their own prejudices, or to wonder if people they love harbour them. They are quick to accuse me of hyperbole, or to excuse hatred as misinterpreted ignorance. But I don’t mean it as an accusation; I am simply offering up the truth. It’s a shame, in a way, that we turned off the comments on that post. If nothing else, they were proof of what I’ve been saying all along."

This blog post highlights a specific kind of frustration disabled people have – not with ableism itself, but with naïveté about ableism. Sometimes, the intensity of people's outrage and disbelief at real-life examples of ableism get to be too much for me, too. I can't help thinking, "Why does this still shock you?" And when they question whether the thing really happened, or a disabled person's interpretation of the situation, it really can cut deeper than the original wound itself. The question is, what do we do with this frustration? How do we work productively with people who basically mean well for us, but who see, hopelessly naïve about disabled people's actual place in society?

All hands together

Peter Torres Fremlin, Disability Debrief - May 15, 2025

"The Debrief is a home for disability stories told in new and authentic ways, in our own words. We take an independent view and publish exclusive reporting on the key challenges in international disability work. And this newsletter is relied on by leaders in disability activism, policy and research."

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