Ableist Discrimination and The Mission of The Handicapable Podcast: An Episode 1 Companion Piece

On episode 1 of The Handicapable Podcast, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Tye D. Martin Ph.D. We spoke on many topics including relationships, travel, and ableist discrimination, which is the topic of this companion piece. For those of you who don’t know ableism is the unintentional or intentional discrimination against individuals who have disabilities. This is an issue that members of the disability community face every single day, including myself, and is something that needs to be addressed.

Our discussion on this topic began with a grotesque example of ableist discrimination. Shane Burcaw of Squirmy and Grubs recently posted a video about “not qualifying for the Olympics” where he was put underwater in a pool, just as a funny video, but one of the comments stuck out. A commenter said something along the lines of “It’s good to wash your vegetables”, which is something very cruel and mean to say. This sparked a conversation, about generalized discrimination against disabled people, and I want to delve deeper into that topic in this post. We face all kinds of discrimination every day, some of it is more hurtful than others, but what’s the cause of this? Why is the disability community so marginalized?

My conclusion is that the historical view of people with disabilities has been that disabled people are viewed as inferior to someone else and that they do not have the same mental faculties as everyone else. This stereotype has continued into today, and that leads to so much discrimination. This causes issues such as infantilization, or the assumption that members of the disability community perpetually have the same mental faculties as a young child and so people will treat these individuals as such. However, infantilization is not the only result of our society’s superiority complex, this also results in comments such as the one mentioned above. As Dr. Martin put it in our interview, and I’m paraphrasing, “People have the assumption that members of the disability community do not live a life worth living”, and unfortunately, I believe that conclusion is true for members of our society. There is an assumption that disabled people do not have the same desires as everyone else, and that just is not the case. We can talk about issue all day, but simply talking about it does not provide a solution, so what is the solution?

There is unfortunately not a way to fully solve this problem, there will always be people in our society who do not want to learn and will continue in their ignorant ways. One way that I concluded is a way we can solve this is through our education system. What I have found is people who have grown up around disabilities or have the knowledge of the actual behaviors of people with disabilities, do not exhibit these discriminatory behaviors. So, the conclusion is that disabilities need to be talked about from a younger age, so the brain can develop in a way that would almost remove this behavior. Unfortunately, a lot of discrimination we face comes from members of older generations, as I have experienced recently. While this suggestion would not eliminate societal issues individuals with disabilities face, it certainly would allow future generations of the disability community to experience less discrimination. Another solution is simply to raise awareness, which leads me to the mission of The Handicapable Podcast.

The mission of The Handicapable Podcast is simple, to raise awareness and educate the public on our marginalized community. While there are plenty of people and organizations who strive to do this, we have a different approach. Our approach is to raise awareness by simply talking with those in our community through our show, so people can hear from the individuals themselves the issues they face. We can have conversations all day long, but if the marginalized population is not included themselves, it does not make as much of an impact. We also have another goal, to inspire individuals of the disability community to get out there and live life to the fullest! We want members of our community to pursue relationships, pursue careers, and to pursue the human experience. So, through stories of resilience, stories of people getting out there and experiencing the human experience, we hope that we can inspire other people to do the same. While hearing these stories of resilience is at our core, we also want to hear from experts in the disability field. I believe it is important to get insight from professionals in the disability space, so we can look deeper into the work that is done every day to allow everyone to pursue everything mentioned above and more! Without professionals, we can’t pursue everything we want to pursue, so it is important to hear from them too. While much of this will be achieved through our podcast, our blog is also open to members of the disability to share their stories as well.

Join us on our journey to make the world a better place for members of our disability community, we’re going to show life who’s boss!