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Disability Resources

It’s important to understand ableism when discussing disability.

Ableism: Oppression, prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against disabled people based on actual or presumed disability. The belief is that people are superior or inferior, have a better quality of life, or have lives more valuable or worth living based on actual or perceived disability. (Lydia X.Z. Brown)

Ableism is about individual behavior, our social structures, and institutions. We live in an ableist society; through it, we intrinsically learn ableist behavior. Ableism is perpetuated on personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. It is necessary to understand how it operates on each level to unlearn ableist attitudes and change society.

Everyday examples of ableism include:

  • Choosing an inaccessible venue for a meeting or event, therefore excluding some participants
  • Using someone else’s mobility device as a hand or footrest
  • Framing disability as either tragic or inspirational in news stories, movies, and other popular forms of media
  • Casting a non-disabled actor to play a disabled character in a play, movie, TV show, or commercial
  • Making a movie that does not have an audio description or closed captioning
  • Using the accessible bathroom stall when you are able to use the non-accessible stall without pain or risk of injury
  • Wearing scented products in a scent-free environment
  • Talking to a person with a disability like they are a child, talking about them instead of directly to them, or speaking for them
  • Asking invasive questions about the medical history or personal life of someone with a disability
  • Assuming that people must have a visible disability to be disabled
  • Questioning if someone is ‘actually’ disabled, or ‘how much’ they are disabled
  • Asking someone with a disability, “How did you become disabled?”

Examples of systemic ableism include:

  • Lack of compliance with disability rights laws such as the ADA
  • Segregating students with disabilities into separate schools
  • The use of restraint, or seclusion, as a means of controlling students with disabilities
  • Segregating adults and children with disabilities in institutions
  • Failing to incorporate accessibility into building design plans
  • Buildings that do not include braille on signs, elevator buttons, etc.
  • Building inaccessible websites
  • Assuming that people with disabilities want or need to be ‘fixed.’
  • Using disability as a punchline or mocking people with disabilities
  • Refusing to provide reasonable accommodations when they are requested
  • The eugenics movement of the early 1900s
  • The mass murder of disabled people during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany

Start unlearning ableism by relearning how to refer to disabilities and disabled people. First, remove phrases implying a disability makes a person inferior to someone without a disability. Next, unlearn concepts that suggest that a disability is bad, negative, and a problem to be fixed rather than a normal, inevitable part of the human experience. Although most people do not intend to be insulting, they perpetuate negative associations with disabled people. Some of these phrases include:

  • “That’s so lame.”
  • “You are so retarded.”
  • “That guy is crazy.”
  • “You’re acting so bipolar today.”
  • “Are you off your meds?”
  • “It’s like the blind leading the blind.”
  • “My ideas fell on deaf ears.”
  • “She’s such a psycho.”
  • “I’m super OCD about how I clean my apartment.”
  • “I don’t even think of you as disabled.”

The second way to start unlearning ableism is by relearning how we refer to disabled people. Each disabled person has their own preferences for referring to their disability. Like other identity groups, some argue for person-first language ("person with a disability"), some advocate for identity-first language ("disabled person"), and others don't care one way or the other. For example, this section uses identity-first language.

  • Person-first language: Language that refers to the person first and the identity second. For example: “The writer who has bipolar disorder,” as opposed to “the bipolar writer.”
  • Identity-first language: Language that refers to the person’s identity first. For example, “bipolar people.” Applying “people-first language” affirms members of some identity groups who consider their identity to be inseparable parts of who they are.

The disabled community is diverse. Learn more about the types of disabilities (e.g., physical, visual, hearing, mental health, visible, invisible, intellectual, learning, and more), as each type has a particular language. If it is necessary to refer to a person’s disability, it is best to leave it up to the disabled individual to determine which language they prefer. To learn more about referring to specific types of disabilities, refer to our Inclusive Language Guide.

For sources and more information on ableism and language on disability, please refer to the articles below: