Barriers and Speaking Up
[CW for a whole lot of ableism, person in crisis, racism, and homophobia]
This is going to a long early post of disparate yet connected (I promise) ideas because everything has been all together too heavy. This post is probably going to make a lot of people uncomfortable because they will see themselves in what I am saying and honestly I hope it's your cue that maybe something needs to be done in your practice.
This week I spent a lot of time witnessing silence and justifying of ableist practices. The week started with me witnessing someone in crisis while I was on a bus, not a city bus where I could get off and see if I could support, but you know a point A to point B bus that does not stop anywhere. And the driver didn't do anything to support this person, this person who was walking with no shoes in the middle of a Toronto street, no they just drove around them. I was not surprised however because I am sure that the driver's contract says don't stop even if someone is bleeding, but also since this person wears tshirts on a regular basis that suggests social support mechanisms are the last thing they care about, it was pretty much par for the course.
I spent a lot of time after that thinking about the complicity of silence, and how the pandemic has allowed the complicity of silence to grow and grow and people in turn feel more isolated and without supports because there is a lot of "not my problem" coupled with I honestly don't have spoons left because the systems I have to negotiate every day to just survive being me mean that I can't support someone else right now. We see this in educational spaces too, where instructors should have resources they can share with students who need support, but I know that not everyone knows what and where those resources are and that's a training and communication failure.
I talked a months ago about the pedagogy of complicity, about how folk go to conferences and are complicit in the inaccessibility of the conference and do not say things to the organizers and don't decrease barriers to others. It becomes a gate keeping space and I am watching a similar thing happen again this week on Twitter. It isn't an in-person conference, but the cost of this conference, along with the lack of clear support by conference organizers to make the social media space accessible means that yet again, it is same privileged folk hearing the same privileged voices and me screaming into the void on Twitter. It also becomes a disciplinary barrier where the subject matter says, hey we love inclusion, this is how we do equity, and the actual practice and conference spaces say nope sorry, you need to be of this very small demographic to participate and we will not make any real movements towards showing we care about accessible communications and knowledge sharing.
I had to go get my health card renewed this week and watched ableism in action there too. I couldn't renew online like many folk in this province without a driver's license, many whom are disabled. I got there 40 mins before it opened, one other person was sitting, I sat two seats after him, a family came (one who was an older lady) and sat two seats after me, and then another older lady. About 25 minutes before the kiosk was to open a white lady showed up and stood in the line, when another person showed and asked where the line started she declared that she was first in line because she was standing, and she should be rewarded for standing. I was the only other white person there besides this standing lady, and the others were looking sad and unsure, is she right? is that how it works? and I said to them no of course not ,said to the standing white lady in fact you are about 5th in line this person was here first, I am second, this family third etc. And said no you are sitting, I am first. So I asked her if she knew was ableism is and that there are disabled folk in the world who need to sit. And she of course in her very privileged way asked screamed at me "ARE YOU DISABLED?" And friends, the others were looking at me, looking to see what I would do, and I rolled my eyes and was going to get into a whole discourse about society's failure of empathy and the problematics of the primacy of disclosure, but instead she told me to stop rolling my eyes . I can go on, it was not cute. The point of this, is to show you how ableism works, to show you how racism works ("I need to be first because my work is more important than their work" pointing to the others), and how someone had to speak up there, and I was happy to be that person, though it changed nothing because she rushed towards the first open wicket when it opened, leaving the others just looking at each other sighing, but someone had to say something there. It happened 2 days ago, I am still very upset at this interaction because so many similar things happen in educational spaces.
I watch on Twitter, I watch in educational spaces where people for the twentieth time use the words crazy and insane to mean a lot or overwhelming in meetings and no one says anything. I am always the one who says things, but after the week I had, I had nothing left to call that in in the conversations I had this week. I am already pretty clearly marked in all the spaces I frequent as the accessibility advocate, but it is not easy work, and it is never ending work, social justice work never is. And this is similar to how disabled students know that they have to rely on themselves to advocate for accessibility in educational spaces, because rarely will they find a community or a space where that constant need to advocate doesn't need to happen.
This is why I support universal design for learning (UDL) framing and accessible pedagogy. Because it helps take some of that constant advocacy work away from the students so they can be in those educational spaces as the selves they are. This is why I get so upset when UDL folk on Twitter dismiss calls to do better as "oh everyone is learning". Yes learning super important, but constantly holding up the barriers tells folk who the UDL community really is, and what they care about. It sadly tells people they cannot bring their whole selves to this space, because part of who you are is not valued or important here.
There are always some who speak out. There are always some who say things but their actions don't match their words. That's performative allyship. There are also contexts where saying something is impossible for safety reasons. That happened to me this week as well, when I was in an Uber and the driver started going on about how pronouns are the devil's work and that queer folk were going to hell, and how you never know who you are talking to and, and, ... as I put my arm over my she/her pronoun pin and my all bodies are good bodies disability pin on my bag, and just sat in silence counting the minutes till I was safely home. Sometimes you can't say anything because it's dangerous. Sometimes you can't say something because part of who you are is scared by what the person saying and suggesting.
But...if someone is telling you look your communications are ableist and you don't do something about it, that says something about your ethics and what you value. If someone is asking you to make spaces more inclusive, and instead you choose to gatekeep with more financial and communication barriers that tells people who you feel that space is for, and it is sadly not them.
When I was talking to Chris Friend a few weeks ago for his podcast, he said something like "I just don't understand why you have to keep telling people to alt text." And honestly I don't know why I have to either, I have said it so often I get mail addressed to me with my middle name being "alt text." But I guess I have to keep saying it again and again, because some choose to keep quiet about it again and again. Some choose to find excuses instead of ways to support. If promoting barriers is what your pedagogy is about because you are firmly entrenched in rigour discourse and "I had to go through this gauntlet so others should too" framing then I am sure this active creation of communication roadblocks pleases you. But if you are not, why, why do you keep making excuses for others, instead of doing the work of speaking up about it, when it is safe to do so (and I can argue that asking for alt text is a low safety risk though as someone who has been really harassed on Twitter for my advocacy of it by certain groups I get that it can still be a danger)? Can you do the work, can you make the change? Can you? I am asking, can you speak up?
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