ableism isn’t a form of ignorance.

it’s a normalized and lethal kind of hate that allows even otherwise marginalized people to feel inherently superior to someone, so it persists.

— cyrée jarelle (@cyreejarelle) April 11, 2021

Ableism isn’t something that results from a lack of education but how disability and disabled people are fundamentally viewed within a society. There is no technological development that can come about that will fix a structure that views you as subhuman.

Capitalism can’t contribute to accessibility because capitalism makes access to products dependent on wealth; so capitalism kills poor people and charges extra on others to stay alive or have our basic needs and comforts met. This is compounded by the effects of generational wealth robbery and poisoning on health (e.g. redlining robs the value of Black homeowners to pass to descendants while also forcing families to live in places affected by industrial waste).

Capitalism makes having non-inherited resources to live be something that’s dependent on your ability to create surplus value for your bosses. This is already happening in a world where workers are expected to fit an existing ableist model for the sake of their boss’s convenience. Capitalism then denies people access to basic goods and comforts due to their lack of wealth, worsening conditions that could be manageable otherwise and making it yet more difficult to continue laboring under ableist conditions, yet more difficult to earn enough in wages to access life-saving and health-restoring care.

Finally, capitalism veers inevitably toward eugenics, as we saw recently when disabled people were expected to die “for the economy” during Covid and of course have consistently been told that if medical resources grow scarce, they’ll be the ones sacrificed to save others (in the name of “triage”). When, had disabled people been listened to from the beginning for their expertise, such scarcity would never have come about.

There are other economic systems where disabled people can be treated as subhuman. Ableism is its own form of hierarchical oppression. But the point is that, under capitalism, it is not that people are ignorant and need to know more; it’s that all this is an inevitable result of power relationships when the vast majority of people only have value as workers whose labor can be exploited as much as possible with as little investment as possible because that’s where profit for bosses comes from.

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Twitter cyrée jarelle @cyreejarelle
ableism isn’t a form of ignorance.

it’s a normalized and lethal kind of hate that allows even otherwise marginalized people to feel inherently superior to someone, so it persists.

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