I intend to answer a question from the readers of this blog each week (you can read more about this here). This week’s question comes from Karen.
So many otherwise progressive people I encounter, especially in faith spaces, have not really examined their own ableism. You are a rare progressive who is on an anti-ableist journey. I’m curious how that happened to you.
First of all, thank you for the implied compliment. I get this wrong a lot, but I hope I’m better than I used to be. As a friend of mine says about another issue, the bar to clear to be good at this is so low, it’s in hell.
I have sat with this question a few days now, and have struggled with it, because I hate the “Tell us about your journey” questions, because it usually wasn’t any one thing, but a bunch of things, and because it would be easy to write about this in a way that makes me sound heroic, and really, I’m just trying to be a good guy.
So, I think I have to start there. I want to be a good guy. I think that is rarer than we think it is. Note: I didn’t say I want people to think I’m a good guy–I want to be one.
Because of a long string of events, in my late twenties I came face to face with myself and realized I did not like who I had become. While there were other people who did not admire me, what is worse is that I did not admire myself.
Over the next few years, I would spend a lot of time asking myself, “What makes a person a good person?”
This was not completely untrod ground for me. My father was a good man, and he modeled that for me. But I was eager to get out and make my mark on the world, and so I had to distance myself from my father’s teachings. Some truths we only learn on our own.
I would read a lot of books and take classes on ethics, and in the end, I came up with the simplest possible definition I could: a good person works to reduce the amount of harm in the world. Every single definition I could find kept coming back to this.
And so, since then, that has been my primary goal: I want to reduce the amount of harm in the world. And then the question becomes: how does one measure that?
The two principal ways I know of are to ask people who study such things, and the second is to ask the people who are affected. Although it often goes the other way: people first, experts second.
This has informed most of my life at this point. It has informed my garden, the city in which I lived, the food I buy, the recipes I cook, the political fights I enter, the religious tradition I belong to, the way I vote. It might feel like we have moved away from ableism, but I don’t think we have.
Ableism is one of the relatively quiet ways we humans have for harming each other, and it’s wrong, the way all the ways we harm each other are wrong. I confess I came to it late. As someone who is currently able-bodied, I didn’t notice it. Most of my friends were currently able-bodied as well. Like so many systemic injustices, it was just the water I swam in.
It wasn’t until some people I love called me in when they saw it in me that I came around. Now that you know something you are doing causes harm in the world, what now? Now you have to decide if you are okay with not doing anything about it.
There are times you cause harm in the world and the remedy isn’t clear. Perhaps you work in international aid, and you realize the jets you fly on weekly are damaging the environment. There is not much you can do about this and do that work.
But ableism isn’t like that. Working against ableism doesn’t harm anyone and makes the world better for everyone. So, once you know better, you should do better.
Looking back over my life, it is a source of shame to me that many things that didn’t directly affect me rarely struck me as bad until they affected people I care about. I think that’s true for most of us, however. It is a strong case for having a diverse group of relationships.
It excites me to know that I haven’t met all the people who will shape the way I think yet.