Not a laughing matter

This was initially going to be a part of the previous entry, but then I realized it's important enough to me to merit its own rant! So here we go!

One important question kept coming to me over the last few days: Why is it ok to laugh at disability? Throughout the course of this workshop, and though many other days as well, I've been hearing jokes about someone or the other being blind/ deaf. Another that really upset me was when the Pizza Hut team said something about taking care of people with special needs, someone else laughed and said "matlab? agar koi langda-lula aa haya toh?". And everybody laughed.

(Of course, turned out that the team wasn't really talking about disability but about responding to "special needs" like giving a children's menu at a table where there were accompanying children... I didn't hear any talk about special needs in terms of people with disabilities... but that's not the point of this rant).

Of course, anyone from the workshop who reads this will say I'm over-reacting to nothing... what's the big deal about joking that someone is too blind to read the board, right? No, wrong. Ask someone who has been "too blind to read the board" most of her life. Someone who has struggled on a daily basis to navigate through traffic, to walk in the dark, to read and write. There' s nothing funny about the experience. And the more you laugh at it, the further you distance yourself from ever fully engaging with that person or understanding that person's reality.

Think about it for a moment longer. If you are a woman sitting with a group for 4 whole days, during which the only reference to women is to laugh at them or at the experience of womanhood, how would that make you feel? Is it really that hard to relate to?

Megan and I have had these chats often. Why do stereotypes/ prejudices about disability never make it (or hardly ever make it) into talks about inclusion and diversity? Is it because disability shatters that oh-so-flimsy argument people use to explain religious, national, racial, and often even gender equality: "these are just labels, but when you think about it, we are all really the same." When we look at someone with a disability (assuming it's a visible one), we know for a fact that, at least in one important sense, we are not the same. We can't wish that away, and it doesn't fit into our flimsy rhetoric about equality, so we quietly push it under the carpet and pretend that we just don't see it.

Who was it that talked about able-ism along with sexism, racism, and the other isms we commonly talk about in conversations about discrimination? Whoever it was had a very important point. Time to start recognizing that these jokes are no less, and perhaps more offensive, and time to start thinking about inclusion a little more broadly.