Near the beginning of Jeannette Wall’s memoir The Glass Castle, she recalls how she was taught to swim. Her family already struggled with money, moving around constantly, and she had grown to be independent. As she learns to swim, her father employs a concerning strategy: letting her sink and nearly drown before saving her for just a moment, then throwing her back into the water. Jeannette eventually catches on, realizing it’s more harmful to let him save her: “And so, rather than reaching for Dad’s hands, I tried to get away from them…and finally, I was able to propel myself beyond his grasp.”
A disability can make someone look at a "disabled" person in a specific way, even though they are just as capable as others of doing things. Some people don't realize the impact someone with a disability can have on the world because they are limited and criticized for their issues. People without disabilities can show what they have, and those with disabilities will never even get past the starting line because of people's biased views on disabilities. After listening to the Ted Talk by Keith Nolan, a private cadet, he established ethos, logos, and pathos through his educational speech on the deaf in the military. In the Ted Talk, Keith Nolan backs up his story with emotion, statistics, credible information, and real-life experience.
In Chapter 2 of No Pity, there was one man that paved the way for independent living. This man's name was Ed Roberts. He demanded residential and educational accommodations that allowed people with disabilities to have the same freedoms as people without disabilities. Obviously, this did not come easily. Just like there are today, there were peaceful protests that Ed and others led.
“Only 50 years ago persons with intellectual disabilities were scorned, isolated and neglected. Today, they are able to attend school, become employed and assimilate into their local community” (Nelson Mandela). Prior to the later part of the 20th century people with intellectual disabilities were often ridiculed, treated unfairly, feared, and locked away in institutions. According to Rhonda Nauhaus and Cindy Smith in their article Disability Rights through the Mid-20th Century, The laws of any nation reflect its societal values. The real life issue of discrimination towards people with intellectual disabilities in the United States and Australia is demonstrated in the novel, Of Mice and Men by showing how this issue affects one of the main characters, Lennie Smalls.
during the civil rights movement there was a lot of chaos going on. People back then were treated differently due to segregation. The african american people tried fighting for their rights to have the same equality as the white people had. any african american tried making history by either going to an all white school or getting their rights to vote.
Image your a person with a mental disability, and all people seem to do is ridicule you day in and day out. The may call you such derogatory terms such as “retard” or “braindead”. You try not to take these words to heart, and attempt to ignore these people and continue living a life that you want. You may work for a living and try to support yourself, or you may live with a relative that understands and cares about you. You try to live on, and go past the overarching question if people with mental disabilities can live normal lives.
As Baynton discusses disability as a justification for inequality, I view it in the sense of a social concept of disability that sets the platform for discrimination and violence against the minority groups. This concept has been implemented in U.S. history to allow discriminatory practices against the minorities to occur. Basically, women, individuals from different races, and ethnic minorities were labeled as disabled as well to interpret inequality as a positive concept. For example, there was justification for slavery in which African Americans did not have the required intelligence which made them incapable of equality with other Americans. This assumption was ascribed to physical causes and differences that were visible in their race.
In “The Social Construction of Disability,” Susan Wendell briefly discusses how the fast pace of American life impacts the social construction of disability through an inability for people with “disabilities” to maintain expectations of a high-performance level. Wendell also claims that the pace of life causes disability in many people’s lives, but quickly moves on to another topic, referencing chapter four of Barbara Hillyer’s Feminism and Disability in the footnotes as a place for more information on this argument. In Hillyer’s chapter “Productivity and Pace,” she writes to the feminist and disability communities, analyzing how the pace of life affects them both in similar ways. Through an analysis of how people with disabilities are forced to set their own daily pace, Hillyer hopes to encourage others to learn about the necessity of slowing down.
In my opinion, the progressive reformers were motivated by their aspiration to do something regarding the discrimination that existed between businesses and the laborers. They sought social justice; they wanted civic engagement. There was an enormous push against corruption and big corporate monopolies that came out of the industrialization movement and then the other side of the progressive movement was the attempt to make government more scientifically sound. All of these activists saw European countries using new economic theories, political science and realized that America was falling behind. They wanted the U.S. to be up to date on the latest medicine, education and science.
Secondly In most cultures, men have historically held most of the worlds resources, until relatively recently women in western cultures could not vote or hold property, making them entirely dependent on the male Gender , A group with a power of wealth advantage maintain their control over resources such as political, economical and industrial power by usually representing the majority. Conflict between the two genders caused such events such as the woman’s suffrage movement and was responsible for a degree of social change. If we look more to the modern Era,
“The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.” -- John Lewis
These ideas of normalization, integration, and rehabilitation were changed by people with disabilities. With the fresh perspective offered by the disabled population, new thought processes and ideas were at the forefront of the disability rights movement. One of the first organizers of the ILM was Ed Roberts (who was a quadriplegic himself) who fought for the acceptance of disabled people in schools. This began when Roberts was in high school, as he could not graduate because he could not complete his requirement for gym due to having an Iron Lung. This started his desire to better the lives of disabled people at schools and as he went to UC Berkeley for college, he decided to sue Berkeley for not having integration or acceptance of disabled people and won his case, yet he was confined to the infirmary and as more and more disabled people decided to join Berkeley they created the Disabled Students’ Program that was very important for people who had disabilities.
We think it’s common sense to say hello to your neighbor, hold the door open for the person behind you, or even sit next to someone in class, but that has not always been the case. At one point in time, civil rights was not for everyone. We all remember the women suffering and the african-americans being segregated, but most forget how hard the disabled community worked to be treated as equals. By utilizing the strategies of previous civil rights movements, the American Disabilities Act (ADA) wanted to extend basic civil rights to the disabled community. It started in 1973 with Section 504 which helped people to recognize that even though there are many different variations, the disabled are a legitimate minority who are subjected to discrimination
By 2011, more than 1 billion people around the world were living with a kind of disability wrapping 15% of the world’s population (WHO, 2011). For so long disability was identified under the “individual model”; as a consequence of an impairment “lack or defectiveness in any part of the body”, that leaves the one suffering from it with long term functional limitations. Recently this conceptual understanding has been questioned shedding the light on the social barriers and norms that label impaired people as disabled and restricts them from their social rights and activities. In fact, the society’s organization is increasing the occurrence of abuse at higher incidence for disabled people compared to the rest of the population and by that are considered as “vulnerable”. The following article written by Hollomotz (2012) “Disability, Oppression and Violence: Towards a Sociological Explanation” will be discussed and analysed throughout this paper to understand better the different social forces that face people with learning difficulties and leave them disabled.
Disabled people are people who have mental or physical limitation so they depend on someone to support them in doing their daily life needs and jobs. Although disabled people are a minority and they are normally ignored, they are still a part of the society. The statistics show that the proportion of disabled people in the world rose from 10 percent in the seventies of the last century to 15 percent so far. The number of handicapped exceeds a billion people all over the world, occupied about 15 percent of the world's population, as a result of an aging population and the increase in chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, blood and psychological diseases that are related with disabilities and impairments. Every five seconds someone
