Ableism

When we watched the clip in class Tuesday about the special needs girl who had suffered abuse from her teacher and her T.A. I was extremely upset. I couldn't understand how someone who went into the special needs field could say such horrible things and how a teacher could say those things as well. I then began to think about it further when I realized that at my school it wasn't that much different. There was an autistic kid that I will call Tyler that went to my high school all four years I was there. Everyday he would hide from kids in the hall or say inappropriate things to girls but instead of trying to help him kids made fun of him. Tyler and I had a special relationship through school because freshman year he had decided I was going to be his "queen." I always was nice to Tyler and had a close relationship with his T.A. because I would report to her if Tyler was being out of hand or being inappropriate at times she was not around. Tyler's T.A. was very accepting of him but other teachers at our school made fun of him behind his back and said snide rude comments that I can never understand. I will never forget the day between my sophomore year and junior year when Tyler messaged me on Facebook saying a girl from our class told him school didn't start until the week after it was supposed to. This girl was trying to make Tyler a week late for school and embarrass him. I was furious at this, I didn't think any 16 year old person would ever think this was okay and immediately reported it back to the T.A. So to bring it back, I've experienced the cutting down of "disabled" by the "abled" and I know I am by no means innocent. But just as society labels people that are gay as "other" or people that are not living up to all society's norms as "other" people label the disabled as well. Tyler was an extremely nice kid and all he wanted was for people to like him, he just didn't know how to go about doing that.
I blogged about David/Brenda way back and talked about how everyone likes to say that they would never have done that to their child and they would have been totally accepting. This is the same concept. Everyone likes to think they would never treat someone badly and never would make jokes about someone that is different, but if this was true we never would have been discussing this issue in the first place. We are society, and we are the ones that can make a change about how Tyler and every other person is treated.