Quote: Disability, Stereotypes, And Spirituality

From Ballastexistenz:

The disability category I belong to — cognitively disabled people in general, autistic people in particular, non-speaking autistic people in more particular, and autistic people who use FC at least some of the time in even more particular — has a spiritual stereotype about it that is misleading and damaging to our real spirituality. That stereotype parallels, and is sometimes used alongside, the stereotype of the noble savage. The reasoning goes that we are “simple” and therefore closer to God because we lack the sin that the rest of humanity has, that we are purer versions of humanity than non-disabled people, and that we are totally innocent.

This deprives everyone it is applied to of our true complexity, our true relationships to God, our true spirituality.

It’s sometimes hard for people to understand that a stereotype that sounds positive can be negative. People say that it’s not prejudiced to say that American Indians, for instance, are uniformly simple, spiritual, close to the land, and have some kind of monolithic culture that accounts for all this. But it is prejudiced, and it is a prejudice that is hated by most Indians, for good reason. It sounds positive but it deprives people of humanity, complexity, reality. It’s a form of dehumanization. It’s just as dehumanizing when applied to cognitively disabled people.

That’s a small part of a typically excellent and multi-layered Ballastexistenz post – go read the whole thing, as people say.