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Kindle Notes & Highlights
To grant animacy to another is to treat her as subject, to regard her as a being in her own right, not just an object or a thing.
Animacy shapes the way we understand our connection to the world.
So many of our assumptions about human superiority are grounded in the choice to privilege specific norms of communication, language, and rationality.
The assumption that a certain degree of intelligence is a threshold requirement for human belonging runs like a terrible, bitter thread throughout modern American history.
Those without intellectual disabilities routinely exercise power and control over the folks we define as cognitively deficient. Sometimes that power rears up with utter brutality. Sometimes it’s wrapped in the mantle of paternalism and benevolence.
Classical Jewish traditions assert that humans are distinguished from other creatures by our capacity for speech, as well as by other distinctive physical attributes that are said to confirm our unique place before God.
The implications for disabled folks are brutal. If it’s speech that justifies our specialness, do nonspeaking people forfeit their status as human? Is a certain kind of sight a prerequisite for being made in God’s image? Does a person have to be able to stand in order to belong?
Representation matters. Theologians of color have written powerfully about why it matters for religious communities to refuse a theology that’s rooted in whiteness, to move beyond Euro-American norms and notions as the only proper way to name and know the sacred.
“The God-language of a religious community is drawn from the qualities and roles the community most values, and exclusively male imagery exalts and upholds maleness as the human standard.”
Even when we only mean it as a metaphor, the embodied language we use for God helps build a conceptual world that lifts up sight and hearing, that honors physical dexterity and strength. It reinforces the rightness of the nondisabled norm.
Some access barriers are the result of deliberate social choices, large-scale city planning and building campaigns that didn’t account for disabled people’s presence. But many of the frustrations in my life on wheels are smaller, more intimate.
Access needs vary profoundly across the disability community, and what ensures welcome for one person doesn’t guarantee access for another. Access isn’t one-size-fits-all.
