I had the privilege of speaking on Friday last at the 40th anniversary celebration of Syracuse University’s Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. The honor stemmed from finding myself in the company of some very principled and accomplished activist-scholars. SU’s commitment to establishing the rights of people with mental illnesses and people with profound disabilities goes back to the late sixties. Faculty at Syracuse like the late Burt Blatt, and the still extant Steve Taylor and Doug Biklen helped to lead the charge that brought the criminal conditions in our nation’s mental hospitals to wide public attention. In recent years they have lead the effort to assure equitable and inclusive public education for children with disabilities. Why should I be grumpy? Because I see how few academics, even in fields like disability studies wake and sleep with the knowledge of institutional and political abuse regarding people with disabilities. The GOP’s basic plan to slash “entitlements” (a term I do not like–as if asking to live was some kind of social privilege) is built on the premiss that our nation’s most vulnerable citizens should be allowed to lose all hope for health and education. There is not a modicum of exaggeration in this claim. Amazing enough. Meanwhile I see calls for papers theorizing the disabled body, as if life in the streets was simply a settled matter. I see in the literary sphere conferences like the redoubtable Associated Writing Programs, the “AWP” where, if you examine the panels of academic creative writing types you would never know that human rights violations against people with disabilities are legion or that the Los Angeles County Jail is the US largest psychiatric hospital. I have the utmost respect for scholars who believe ardently in scholarship that transcends the ingrown and static preoccupations of much that merely passes for progressive teaching and research in our time. I am worried that non-speaking people with autism who are keenly literate may never find jobs. I worry a good deal. I discomfited alright. And I’ll be darned if I’m going to shut up.
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Planet of the Blind 