when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize
you’re either going to build a base of clueless liberals who learn by rote to nitpick their language for anything with the remotest connection to ability, or you’re going to help them develop the alertness and critical eye necessary to recognize eugenics and abuse. i don’t think those things are mutually compatible in an immediate timeframe, because one locates both the root and branch of oppression in a disembodied cloud of language and thought, and the other locates it in the real material structures that we need to confront immediately in order to save actual lives. not saying “crazy” isn’t going to get anyone out of forced institutionalization
this this this.
a long list of bad things and replacements isnt cultivating understanding. this is the issue of the transmission of the idea
This. A primary focus on slurs often seems like something you would only prioritize is you were very privileged in relation to other disabled people to such an extend that slurs were your primary experience of ableism.
It also often comes across as a replication of other movements by inexperienced activists who don’t really know how to do this ‘changing the world’ stuff and thus start with what they’ve seen others doing.
Ableism, like every other oppression is systematic, not individual, and it’s main roots are a capitalist exploitation of labor and a white supremacist ideology of eugenics and a belief that there is such a thing as a ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ human life.
QueerAnarchism 