Beyond Smartness: Disrupting the Hegemony of Smartness Through Disability Studies

I really loved reading this piece, and especially enjoyed the unique formatting, which seemed to really intervene in the linear and conventional paper format so typically associated with "smartness!" I was brought back to a conversation we had recently in my Empowering Learners class, with a woman who was Skyping in on her expertise: adult development. The woman explained that this kind of learning was vertical, while gaining information or skills would be considered horizontal learning. This development happens at different rates for all people, and not everyone (and this means not all neurotypical people, either) reach the most advanced levels of development. The stages had much to do with understanding a world/perspectives outside of oneself, and resultantly, being able to conceptualize what should take priority or what holds significance at all. Natalie raised her hand and asked the woman about people with intellectual disabilities; how did they fit into this framework that seemed so focused around a neurotypical person's development? The woman explained that this was NOT a value-based hierarchy, and that those with the most advanced levels of development were not "better" or "smarter"--in fact, she explained, many of the world's most conventionally "intelligent" people are fairly low in the development hierarchy. People with intellectual disabilities are incredibly valuable to society, she stated--"because we can all learn from them." This reasoning for why neurodivergent lives matter is uninformed and exhausted. I remained unconvinced that she really didn't see this as a value-based hierarchy, as she went on to explain that while people of average intelligence could be at the highest stages of adult development, those with below-average intelligence would not be able to achieve these far reaches of the process. 

I was struck by the feeling that this "perfect" person who was the MOST developed would not even believe in this hierarchy at all--that it seemed to be so based on a privileged and neurotypical experience that for someone to actually have this complete sense of ones place in relation to others and their experience would mean that they wouldn't even consider such a "progression" to be real. I'm intrersted in how this relates to the connections you draw between conceptions of "smartness" and race--historically, those who took it upon themselves to rank races and their intelligence (and through doing so supposedly justify racial oppression) would have considered it impossible for non-white people to be anywhere near as developed as white people. And yet, if this is a hierarchy based on empathy and external understanding, it would seem that white privilege and racial prejudice would render it impossible for most white people to actually reach these far stages of development themselves. How could this further disrupt our conceptions of intelligence, smartness, development, ability, and race?

It was really interesting how this paper talked about the intersections of whiteness and smartness. Usually when I think about smartness I think about Asians (Asiannesss?) and smartness. Many times Asians (especially Chinese, Koreans, Indians, etc.) are expected to be the "smart ones." They are expected to be the ones excelling in maths and sciences, and many times expected to get perfect SAT scores and GPAs. This ties in with your argument that smartness is a socially constructed idea. I think the reason why many Asians excel is they are expected to be smart and put under a lot of pressure.
In Korea many parents get rid of their infants if they know there child is going to have an intellectual disability because they think there child can't succeed. "Smartness" is measured many times with success, and how one is gong to succeed.