Nothing About Us Without Us Quotes

“LANGUAGE AND THE POWER OF DESCRIPTION We must take language very seriously. The feeling I have is that language is always a reflection of attitude. With the advancement of the disability movement you see a change in language. Michael Masutha, director of socioeconomic rights, Lawyers for Human Rights, Johannesburg, South Africa Language informs attitudes and beliefs because it is a medium of translation of expression and thought.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Paternalism often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities. This is the most salient aspect of paternalism as it concerns disability. Paternalism is experienced as the bystander grabs the arm of a blind person and, without asking, “helps” the person across the street. This happens for wheelchair users as well. It is the experience of the waiter asking a companion of a person with a disability, “What does she want to eat?” It is the institutionalization of people against their wishes. It is the child taught only handicrafts, or the charity pleading for money to help cute crippled kids. It is these and a thousand other examples of everyday life. It is most of all, however, the assumption that people with disabilities are intrinsically inferior and unable to take responsibility for their own lives.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Paternalism lies at the center of the oppression of people with disabilities. Paternalism starts with the notion of superiority: We must and can take control of these “subjects” in spite of themselves, in spite of their individual will, or culture and tradition, or their sovereignty. The savages need to be civilized (for their own good). The cripples need to be cared for (for their own good). The pagans need to be saved (for their own good). Paternalism is often subtle in that it casts the oppressor as benign, as protector. The relation between ideology and power is expressed as natural to justify relations of oppression. In Roll, Jordan Roll, possibly the best-known exposition of paternalism, Eugene Genovese writes, The Old South, black and white, created a historically unique kind of paternalist society. . . . Southern paternalism, like every other kind of paternalism, had little to do with Ole Massa’s ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. . . . For the slaveholders, paternalism represented an attempt to overcome the fundamental contradiction in slavery: the impossibility of the slaves ever becoming the things they were supposed to be. Paternalism defined the involuntary labor of the slaves as a legitimate return to their masters for protection and direction. (1976:4–5)”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“We do have better models and evidence of the superiority of these alternative models to nursing homes and other institutionalized living arrangements. People with severe disabilities who are living at home with personal assistance have demonstrated that living in an environment they control is far superior to institutionalized care. But according to the World Institute on Disability, “9.6 million people with disabilities live in the U.S. who need help with daily activities like washing, dressing and household chores. Less than 2 million receive paid assistance. Most rely on family and friends” (WID 1995). All of the 7.6 million people dependent on family or friends for personal assistance are thus vulnerable to future institutionalization.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Another example, one that touches more people, is the nursing home industry. Numerous studies have shown that living at home, in a house or an apartment, is better psychologically, more fulfilling, and cheaper than living in nursing homes.14 Yet these institutions prosper when federal programs that foster living in the community are cut. There are also funding disincentives that the U.S. Congress, through Medicare and Medicaid, has created to ensure the profit bonanza of nursing homes. According to the activist disability journal Mouth (1995), there are 1.9 million people with disabilities living in nursing homes at an annual cost of $40,784, although it would cost only $9,692 a year to provide personal assistance services so the same people could live at home. Sixty-three percent of this cost is taxpayer funded. In 1992, 77,618 people with developmental disabilities (DD) lived in state-owned facilities at an average annual cost of $82,228, even though it would cost $27,649 for the most expensive support services to live at home. There are 150,257 people with mental illness living in tax-funded asylums at an average annual cost of $58,569. Another 19,553 disabled veterans also live in institutions, costing the Veterans Administration a whopping $75,641 per person.15 It is illogical that a government would want to pay more for less. It is illogical until one studies the amount of money spent by the nursing home lobby. Nursing homes are a growth industry that many wealthy people, including politicians, have wisely invested in. The scam is simple: get taxpayers to fund billions of dollars to these institutions which a few investors divide up. The idea that nursing homes are compassionate institutions or necessary resting places has lost much of its appeal recently, but the barrier to defunding them is built on a paternalism that eschews human dignity. As we have seen with public housing programs in the United States, the tendency is to warehouse (surplus) people in concentrated sites. This too has been the history with elderly people and people with disabilities in nursing homes. These institutions then can serve as a mechanism of social control and, at the same time, make some people wealthy.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“It is possible to identify numerous ways that students with disabilities are controlled and taught their place: (1) labeling; (2) symbols (e.g., white lab coats, “Handicapped Room” signs); (3) structure (pull-out programs, segregated classrooms, “special” schools, inaccessible areas); (4) curricula especially designed for students with disabilities (behavior modification for emotionally disturbed kids, training skills without knowledge instruction for significantly mentally retarded students and students with autistic behavior) or having significant implications for these students; (5) testing and evaluation biased toward the functional needs of the dominant culture (Stanford-Binet and Wexler tests); (6) body language and disposition of school culture (teachers almost never look into the eyes of students with disabilities and practice even greater patterns of superiority and paternalism than they do with other students); and (7) discipline (physical restraints, isolation/time-out rooms with locked doors, use of Haldol and other sedatives).11”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Students with disabilities, as soon as their disability is recognized by school officials, are placed on a separate track. They are immediately labeled by authorized (credentialed) professionals (who never themselves have experienced these labels) as LD, ED, EMH, and so on. The meaning and definition of the labels differ, but they all signify inferiority on their face. Furthermore, these students are constantly told what they can (potentially/expect to) do and what they cannot do from the very date of their labeling. This happens as a natural matter of course in the classroom. All activists I interviewed who had a disability in grade school or high school told similar kinds of horror stories—detention and retention, threats and insults, physical and emotional abuse.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Oppression is a phenomenon of power in which relations between people and between groups are experienced in terms of domination and subordination, superiority and inferiority. At the center of this phenomenon is control. Those with power control; those without power lack control. Power presupposes political, economic, and social hierarchies, structured relations of groups of people, and a system or regime of power. This system, the existing power structure, encompasses the thousands of ways some groups and individuals impose control over others.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Whereas people with disabilities have always struggled to survive, many are now struggling to change their world as well. The replacement of the false consciousness of self-pity and helplessness with the raised consciousness of dignity, anger, and empowerment has meaningfully affected the way in which many people with disabilities relate personally and politically to society.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“All governments treat disabled people badly. They all see us as a burden. All governments, whether socialist or capitalist, have separated us from the rest of society. By the end of the day, people are judged by their own activity. Until we are businessmen, politicians, community leaders, people at all levels of society, we will be marginalized and segregated.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“Oppression occurs when individuals are systematically subjected to political, economic, cultural, or social degradation because they belong to a social group. Oppression of people results from structures of domination and subordination and, correspondingly, ideologies of superiority and inferiority.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“In doing so, I attempt to answer, among other questions, why so many people acquiesce to oppression and why some people not only individually resist these conditions but also actively organize to change them.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment

“poverty and powerlessness are cornerstones of the dependency people with disabilities experience.”
― James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment