December 21, 2017 - 17:32
This class has been partially a new experience and partially a confirmation of ideas I already held to be true. I have certainly learned things about disability culture that are valuable not only in terms of how I will treat people with disabilities but in terms of how I treat all people. Still, the disability specific knowledge I gained will prove to be invaluable, I am sure. But at the same time, some ideas covered in this class were affirmative to the understanding I already had, not specifically of disability, but of the treatment of all people. These ideas helped me to frame this understanding in the context of disability. This can be explained with no better example than supercripping. Using minority figures to inspire the likes of the majority masses has always been rather bothersome for me. In the black community supercrips can be equated to “famous firsts.” This method of inspiration, putting minorities on a pedestal for doing things that are remarkable, but not so remarkable that a member of the majority would be heralded for doing it, has always been contradictory to my personal philosophy. I have always been one to critically assess whether someone is really deserving of praise before doling it out. Supercripping is exactly the opposite of that, so when some of the writers we read this year were opposing it, I was happy to know that they felt the same way I did.
I never wrote about this topic in any of my papers though. In fact, I never wrote about two of the three topics I found most interesting. Besides supercrip, I was constantly thinking about how disability issues intersect with black issues when we would talk about things like supercrip but the one thing that stands out in memory is the connection between the operation of the black community and the deaf community. While the aspect of community in these two groups is not completely parallel, there are certainly aspects that they share. For instance, deaf people often get along because they share something culturally beyond their disability and the culture is what makes the community close, not the disability per se. It is the same in the black community. We are close because we like the same music, we have the same cultural references, we have parts of our culture that are more important to us than to other cultures. Another link between the black community and deaf community is communication. Obviously, deaf people have sign language, and that is a beautifully unique part of their cultural identity. Ebonics is the sign language of the black community. Its importance to the community identity certainly is not what sign langue is to the deaf community, but there are still certain words and phrases, pieces of verbal slang, that allow black people to communicate in way that to many, in my experience anyway, seems like almost a new language.
I did get to write about Peter Singer and Chris Gabbard however. This is still my favorite paper I wrote for this class, and probably one of my favorite papers I have ever written. It really touched something in my that inspired me to have a great deal of passion about the subject. It gave me the greatest lessons I’ve learned from this course. Firstly, it made me realize exactly how important it was to truly engage with someone’s argument and fully understand their stance before passing judgement on it. Secondly, this paper helped me gain a new perspective on the value of life. I never would have thought that I would be one to value life the way I do now, but my attitude has drastically changed, and I have this course to thank for leading me to this conclusion.