Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

by Judith Heumann

When someone ignores you, it’s an intentional display of power. They’re essentially acting like you don’t exist, and they do it because they can. They believe that nothing will happen to them. Ignoring silences people. It intentionally avoids resolution or compromise. It ignites your worst fears of unworthiness because it makes you feel that you deserve to be ignored. Inevitably, being ignored puts you in the position of having to choose between making a fuss or accepting the silent treatment. If you stand up to the ignorer and get in their face, you break the norms of polite behavior and end up feeling worse, diminished, demeaned.

Distance and segregation are breeding grounds for failures of understanding and empathy and ultimately injustice and the denial of others’ rights. If we allow ourselves slowly to become a country where we are simply unable to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, we can’t understand the complexity of how discrimination occurs and how it feels. Lacking respect for those we don’t know or understand makes it easy to blame inequality and poverty on individuals—rather than on the system.