Scan barcode
A review by courtneyfalling
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau
hopeful
informative
3.0
I'll start by saying that I was in a disability-specific public speaking training with Emily Ladau about a year and a half ago, and I actually found her insights and tips very helpful as I was beginning my involvement in the wider disability community. And I think the best thing I can say about this book is that it's a well-designed, liberal introduction to current disability rights aims for those who are sympathetic but unaware.
The problem is that I think very few people actually belong to the "well-intentioned but misinformed allies" crowd that liberals like to imagine and preach to. This book constructs disability rights as an etiquette issue, but much bigger injustices are at play, especially for multiply marginalized disabled people. I don't want to "be the bigger person" so I can "change the hearts and minds" of my oppressors, I want to stop suffering the consequences of ableism and saneism every single moment with important, immediate structural changes, and I'm bitter at ableism even when people don't know they're being ableist because there are real and deep consequences, not because I have surface-level hurt feelings.
I wanted, for example, for this book to open with a definition of ableism and some basic history of disability organizing. Without that crucial context, the identity-first vs. person-first language section comes off as nit-picky, without addressing why these issues matter so much. (And I've absolutely seen better examples for this discussion elsewhere.) I also would've loved to see more diverse examples of disability history and community needs, including abolitionist organizing, DDOM and the failures of parent-only groups, and patient advocacy and the Affordable Care Act in particular (in my own opinion; there was a lot missing beyond these). The section on disability justice was also a wild misrepresentation of the actual principles of DJ (alone, DR + intersectionality =/= DJ) and made me frustrated with how much it boiled down and reappropriated DJ.
And fundamentally, this book views disability rights through an always-only-upward view of history, where things used to be really bad, and now they're still kind of bad but a lot better, and if we just wait long enough and make our gradual changes, every single thing will get fixed. But that's not how the complex cycles of history actually work and it ignores so much nuance about how types of oppression and injustice have morphed throughout time.
The problem is that I think very few people actually belong to the "well-intentioned but misinformed allies" crowd that liberals like to imagine and preach to. This book constructs disability rights as an etiquette issue, but much bigger injustices are at play, especially for multiply marginalized disabled people. I don't want to "be the bigger person" so I can "change the hearts and minds" of my oppressors, I want to stop suffering the consequences of ableism and saneism every single moment with important, immediate structural changes, and I'm bitter at ableism even when people don't know they're being ableist because there are real and deep consequences, not because I have surface-level hurt feelings.
I wanted, for example, for this book to open with a definition of ableism and some basic history of disability organizing. Without that crucial context, the identity-first vs. person-first language section comes off as nit-picky, without addressing why these issues matter so much. (And I've absolutely seen better examples for this discussion elsewhere.) I also would've loved to see more diverse examples of disability history and community needs, including abolitionist organizing, DDOM and the failures of parent-only groups, and patient advocacy and the Affordable Care Act in particular (in my own opinion; there was a lot missing beyond these). The section on disability justice was also a wild misrepresentation of the actual principles of DJ (alone, DR + intersectionality =/= DJ) and made me frustrated with how much it boiled down and reappropriated DJ.
And fundamentally, this book views disability rights through an always-only-upward view of history, where things used to be really bad, and now they're still kind of bad but a lot better, and if we just wait long enough and make our gradual changes, every single thing will get fixed. But that's not how the complex cycles of history actually work and it ignores so much nuance about how types of oppression and injustice have morphed throughout time.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism