Dear James Cameron, Thank You for Teaching Me How to be a Cripple

All the other histories…

the-nomadic-writer:

“Schools have classes called ‘women’s studies,’ and ‘African-American literature’ because the standard for existence set by white men has yet to be rescinded in this age. ‘Normal’ history is the history of a certain class of white people, from the perspective of men. All the other histories are precisely that: other.”
— Cunt:  A Declaration of Independence.
(via shakethecobwebs)

I just love this quote. I love it the more I read it. Truth.
(via curlyingenue)

Truth, indeed.

But.

Some schools and public libraries recognize ‘gay history month’ but I’ve never heard of ‘transgender history’ being studied by anyone who wasn’t themselves trans*. Many ‘gender studies’ curricula only barely cover trans* and/or non-binary gender identities — if they mention them at all.

And what about people with disabilities? Aside from the ‘inspirational’ sympathy-porn schlock that in reality just others us even more, there’s virtually no one teaching ‘disability studies’ outside of a few universities… and the oldest such program is less than fifteen years old. History teachers may gloss over President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio and use of a wheelchair, or they may use him as a way of inspiring able-bodied students — ‘See, if he could accomplish all that, just imagine what you could do [since you’re not even crippled]!’ But other historical figures almost never even have their disabilities mentioned, whether they come up in history classes, literature classes, or any other school setting, thus rendering the reality of our lives invisible even to those of us who have disabilities of our own.

Most Americans have heard of abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, but how many know she lived with narcolepsy and epilepsy? Or that FDR’s cousin who preceded him to the White House, Teddy Roosevelt — known for being an explorer and outdoorsman of great strength and stamina — experienced both epileptic seizures and asthma attacks? What other historical personages whose names everyone learns also had epilepsy, you might wonder: Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, for two. History, literature, the sciences, music and visual arts; all are full of famous figures whose disabilities are never mentioned. We know that Beethoven became deaf, but that happened long after his musical genius was established, so it’s treated as a tragedy that befell him late in life rather than anything that was part of his identity.

It’s no accident that middle- and high-school history curricula in the United States end before any of the civil rights movements of the latter half of the twentieth century really began. Rather, the arbitrary truncation of ‘history’ as taught to American schoolchildren ‘conveniently’ means that the necessity for people to demonstrate and protest and struggle just to acquire even as much equality as anyone who isn’t a straight White able-bodied cis-gendered male who’s neither Latino nor descended from recent immigrants and professes to belong to a Protestant denomination can finally expect to enjoy (some of the time) today… doesn’t ever get mentioned. As if that’s irrelevant to the history of the United States.

Most school systems don’t recognize a month for teaching kids about the history (much less the present, even though we’re still here and not all dead) of Native or indigenous peoples, either. Some schools with high percentages of First Nations students will have dedicated units in their curricula, but it’s pretty rare to see in the rest of the U.S.; there were the ‘Indians’ who helped the Pilgrims not die in Massachusetts (and the fact that European diseases wiped most of those very same tribes out somehow never comes up) and then there were the ‘bad’ ‘Indians’ who fought the progress genocidal encroachment of white settlers all the way across the continent, but that’s all most kids learn about. Most non-Native ‘Americans’ not only have never heard of the Iroquois Confederacy and its system of government, they will refuse to believe that it inspired and influenced the design the ‘Founding (White) Fathers’ chose for their fledgling democracy’s system of government.

• I’m aware that this is an extremely United-States-centric rant. I don’t by any means intend to render people from other parts of the world invisible. But, having come through the U.S. educational system myself, I know only what is standard here. I do know that other countries’ educational systems are structured differently in addition to having different content, but I don’t know enough of the details of any other areas’ schooling to make any sort of statement about how inclusive — or excluding — the ways they teach their children are.

I welcome responses from people who do have experience with non-U.S. educational systems and who want to address how those systems measure up on inclusiveness.