But who are we Fighting, Really?

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about the systems that enable discrimination against certain groups of people. Of course I experience this discrimination as a disabled person, but disabled people are hardly the only group to find themselves disadvantaged and on the receiving end of unequal treatment.

I started my life as an activist when I was seventeen. I had a pretty bad attitude towards being disabled, I thought I deserved half the discriminatory treatment I received, but there was at least a part of me that could acknowledge that some of it was wrong. I started to fight back, in a clumsy, ineffectual way and somehow from those early days of blogging, I began to build a platform. People started listening to me, a phenomenon that continues to surprise me, and I found that when I spoke about the often awful treatment I received, there were those who would listen.

But ten years later I look at my work and can’t help thinking that I haven’t managed to change a whole lot. Or the ways in which I have made change weren’t the ways that I expected to be successful. I thought that by fighting individuals by pointing out how they were ableist, and how a business excluded me, would yield positive responses. Social media, and the kind of engagement I received on those platforms only fuelled my belief.

It is true that if I write a snarky Twitter post about something ableist that was said to me, or post about how a business has denied me service, it is likely to receive a large volume of responses. People will retweet it; they will direct anger at the person or business, and I can try to convince myself that I am doing good work. Try being the key word.

I am not going to say that we should never draw attention to such instances of cruelty and discrimination, or that we should sit back and quietly tolerate them. But I find myself increasingly convinced that engaging in individual disagreements on social media is not an effective way of making life better for disabled people, or anyone else for that matter. The actions of individuals, of businesses and services, and of educational institutions are enabled by systems that allow them to behave in this way. Systems that value disabled lives, or gay lives, or black lives, or immigrant lives, or so many other lives, less than those they consider to be the “norm”.

It is the systems we have to dismantle. Because for every individual we fight and every business we shame, one more will step forward to take their place. These ideas are hardly new. They come from reading about political protests and rights movements and liberation and the need for community. These are things that we desperately need, but which somehow get lost in the fast-paced fury of Twitter.

Some of the people I admire most deeply engage in quiet work. Work which has a tremendous impact on my own life, and I am sure the lives of many others, but which will never receive thousands of shares on the Internet. They show up day after day to chip away at policies which treat certain people less favourably. They spend time researching and writing articles that I read as a student and find utterly fascinating, their words forcing me to sit back and look at the world from an entirely new perspective. They are dedicated and conscientious, intelligent and curious, and most of all generous in sharing their knowledge with people like me who know very little. Their work cannot be contained within a 280-character comment, because it encompasses so much more than so few words could ever convey.

I don’t write this to disparage the work of those who engage in online activism. There is some extremely important work happening that makes a genuine difference. Projects like Crip the Vote, which was designed to highlight access barriers disabled people face to political participation, and connect voters with accessible information, are incredibly important. I do write this to share my concerns that some forms of online activism, including my own, may feel very real and important in the moment, but may not be helping at all.

I have found my greatest successes to be where I tried to reach people where they were at. Moments when I shared resources, or offered guidance, rather than condemning someone for their lack of knowledge or awkward take on disability. These interactions resulted in something genuine, a connection between two people who otherwise would have never spoken with one another. Many of these moments are fleeting, I will answer a question or point someone towards an existing resource, but some have resulted in genuine friendships.

This isn’t to say we should try and make friends with people who discriminate against us. If someone is actively hostile towards me, their actions feel very different when compared with someone who doesn’t know much about disabled people, but who is willing to learn. But I do think that sometimes those who make clumsy comments or ill-advised remarks can be held up as an example and treated unfairly, used to demonstrate just how forceful the rage of our community can be. I am no longer ok with this. I don’t think the end justifies the means. And I don’t think that we are stronger for behaving in this way.

So where do we go from here? I don’t know. Truly, I wish I had the answers. But more and more I feel that I know nothing, and that we’re all stumbling through our lives trying to do the best we can and rarely making a good job of it. I don’t think I’m going to change the world. I used to think that with the force of my rage at the injustices I faced, somehow I could tear the whole thing down. But I can’t, most of us never will. But perhaps I can do something.

Collective action has to be the answer. It has always been the answer. Whether that is through joining a disabled people’s organisation, or organising protests, or researching, or contributing to policy challenges and campaigns, or by voting, always voting, it can make a difference. I won’t pretend that my anger is gone. It isn’t, and I don’t believe it ever will be. There is so much anger inside of me at a world that treats so many people as though they are less than human. But I can’t keep attacking individuals and pretending it is making a difference just because others from within my community cheer me on and pat me on the back. In the end, I have realised that reaching out to those who are willing to listen, building bridges where before there were chasms, and being lucky enough to have many people around me who share their knowledge with me feels a whole lot better than being unkind in the name of fighting ableism.