Is Anybody Listening to Disability Advocates?

Disabled writers pour their hearts and souls out every day – blogs, Tweets, Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts, and on and on. It seems our presence online is at once vast and infinite while also contained to the smallest of planets in cyberspace. We take threads spun from every one of our lived experiences and weave them into a rich tapestry of our insights and stories. We share instances of discrimination that have left us feeling hollow and empty. We share triumphs over stigma, our small victories in the ever-present fight for social justice within the global community.

Every word we put down for others to read…who’s reading them? Each time I come across a blog post or article expressing sentiments I’ve long searched for the right words to explain, spelling out ideas and perspectives in ways I’ve never considered, or conveying ideas crucial to the progress of the disability rights movement, I wonder: are the people who truly need to be reading our words the ones actually reading them?

There’s a beauty in the fact that the writing of disabled people is out there for us to relate to one another. However, what about the millions of non-disabled people around the world who don’t know about the daily lives of disabled people from the inside? The ones whose views of disability are colored by a range of misunderstandings and misconceptions? The ones who harbor deep-set prejudices against disability? These are the people we must connect with in our advocacy efforts in order to spark true change. Are we reaching them, or are we just talking to ourselves?

I fear, at times, that we might be, and the reasons for this are twofold. First, activism is based largely in the formation of community. Our social circles and social media platforms are places for us to collaborate and develop our thoughts on issues affecting us personally, and affecting disabled people at large. This is crucial for personal and professional growth, but it also means that much of the most important work being done by advocates tends to make the rounds among the same core groups. Second – and what I believe to be the main source of limitations in the spread of activism – is the use of in-speak and jargon.

All issues of diversity and discrimination come with their own set of vocabulary. Consider this at the most basic level: disability rights advocates often talk about ableism. “Ableism” isn’t even recognized as a real word by Microsoft Word. The little red squiggly line appears underneath each time I type it. Of course, this is indicative of the fact that disability issues are not ingrained in society’s collective conscience, which is deeply problematic. But if you look at it another way, it also means that talking about the concept of ableism right from the start may not resonate with the very non-disabled people whose attention we seek to gain with our messages of change.

An even better example of the way jargon can alienate people is when you put a whole bunch of it in one big old sentence. For instance, there’s this gem that my friend Kyle threw together with highly academic activist buzzwords (and stick with me here, because the confusion will be over quickly): “The intricacies of ableism in this so called ‘post-racial’ society of ours really is a disservice to how colonialism and capitalism influence the very notion of ableist ideals in the first place, which are inherently governed by the heteronormativity of the patriarchy.”

Say what? That sentence could be utter nonsense or pure genius (it was fully intended to be nonsense), but really, I have no clue because I fell asleep in the middle of it. And for what it’s worth, Microsoft Word put a red squiggly error line under the word “heteronormativity,” too, which is most definitely a real thing, albeit another activism buzzword. My point is that jargon works just fine in a dissertation, but using it to advocate in ways that could be much more simply put leads down the direct path to ensuring no one but other members of our own activism community pay attention to us.

Eliminating this problem all comes down to one major rule that I’ve developed as my advocacy motto, and that I try extremely hard to apply to all of my work: We cannot expect non-disabled people to make the world accessible to us if we do not make the messages of disability rights advocacy accessible to the world.

I believe in my heart that most people aren’t bad people, and that they want to understand how they can make the world a better, more accessible place for disabled people. I believe that most people don’t intentionally pose obstacles or discriminate against the disability community. Plus, disability is something that anyone can become intimately acquainted with at any time. So, it just makes sense to make disability more understandable to everyone. And if we want to stop talking amongst ourselves and truly expand the reach of the words we write as advocates, and if we want to light a fire of real change, we must invite all people to understand that the disability experience is not so alien from the human experience as a whole.

Emily Ladau is a writer and disability rights activist whose passion is to harness the powers of language and social media as tools for people to become informed and engaged social justice advocates. She maintains a blog, Words I Wheel By, as a platform to address discrimination and to encourage people to understand the experience of having a disability in more positive, accepting, and supportive ways. You’re welcome to connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.