What have we wrought: A thought for Disability History Month
Hello,
It’s currently Disability History Month and given, well, everything, I’ve been thinking about what it means to come from a long line of resistance.
There’s this persistent myth that disability advocacy is new; a myth reinforced by the fact disability isn’t taught in schools, isn’t the subject of many mainstream books or TV shows, and isn’t included in the great narratives of social change we are all familiar with. But just because you can’t see it - or, more accurately, haven’t been shown it - doesn’t mean it’s not there. Disability advocacy has been around for ever.
And, I don’t know, I guess I find that comforting; the idea that people like us, facing worse conditions and with even less support, banded together and changed things. Not only did they make their own lives better, they quite literally made possible the lives my friends and I live now. It feels important to remember that - what they did for us - when politics is bleak and the light of progress dim.
But really, it’s not the success stories I hold on to. At least, not at the moment. It took a few years of educating myself but I now know the stories of Stop Telethon, the 504 sit-ins, the campaign for the DDA as intimately as I can, and I have reached for them many times. But at the moment I am much more interested in tales of the failures, the set backs, the times when long-hoped for change did not materialise. Because it’s those stories that bear the real hallmarks of organising - picking ourselves up, changing tactics, forging new allegiances, and laying the groundwork for advances we cannot yet foresee or imagine.
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These stories also remind me that this work takes time, and that you do not really know what difference you are making when you are doing the work to make it. Yes, it is this that I find comforting. It is also this that I think nondisabled people should learn from disability history - that allyship is not always about making a big flashy change right now but about grabbing a trowel to help sow the seeds. You might never see them grow, but someone else will. And that’s the point, really.
I’ve been leafing through an absolute tome of a book on disability history called What Have We Done. I like the title because it shows how activity is key to activism (the clue is in the name). You have to do things, have to get things done. Resistance is a living, breathing act of putting one marker down and then the next. I sort of hope it doesn’t require blood but it does demand our sweat and tears. The book is full of the names of the people who gave theirs. What have we done, indeed. It’s a good title, but after absorbing the stories of generations of disability activists and after writing a few weeks ago of the importance of anger to anti-ableism, I’ve been thinking that the book ought to be called What Have We Wrought, what have we used all our fight to hammer out of a hostile world, over and over again.
And I’ve been wondering: what world will we hammer out for ourselves next?
With love,
Lucy