Ableism: the discrimination against the disabled. Ableism is all around us: through speeches without sign language translators, missing wheelchair ramps, and the use of words such as “psycho” in casual conversation. As an able-bodied person, it's easy to forget about ableism and the struggles that the disabled face, as we never see them ourselves. However, painful reminders show up every once in awhile. For example, on August 18th, 2016 a deaf man by the name of Daniel Harris was shot and killed by an officer in North Carolina. Daniel Harris had a three year old son, a loving family, and an equally as deaf brother who got to spread the message that his brother no longer could.
His brother Sam Harris spoke via sign language for the press, and brought up some sad and thought-provoking points. He claimed that Daniel had already been afraid of the police prior to the incident due to unsavory encounters with officers in the past. All of it due to miscommunication - or the lack of training. Law Officers have to go through a surprising little amount of training. Police officers only have to go through 933 hours of training, while, for example, a hairstylist must have 1,600 hours, almost 700 more hours. This explains the lack of calm conscious and skill that a police officer may have in the field, and it certainly explains why the officer did not know to handle the situation. There is no section on how to deal with the disabled - if there was, maybe the officer would have realized Harris was signing when he got out of the car, and Daniel Harris would still be here today. It’s obvious that a mundane police officer typically doesn’t know how to handle the disabled now, but the rest of the community is just as bad.
Sadly enough, the remaining population is generally not much better. In my personal experience, people were very intolerant of anyone not in their able-bodied group. It was mid-summer when I first observed this, and I was sitting in the rectangular, overly air-conditioned waiting room of my father’s neurologist. When first walking in, I immediately noticed the two people leaning over the handles of their chairs, signing feverishly back and forth. After a solid three minutes of paperwork and me suppressing the urge to greet them in American Sign Language, I noticed the empty seat next to the presumed deaf man and sat down. Unfortunately, I waited in the waiting room for three hours, but got gifted the option to observe people's reactions to the disabled man next to me. Every once and awhile, the man would scuff his shoe on the ground loudly or let out a barking, sloppy laugh. The reactions to this varied greatly: the two elderly couples around the end sighed and whispered what looked like distastefully to one another, the nice old lady at the end chuckled and shook her head, and a man sighed un-rightfully exasperated to my left. Simple things like this would not have bothered those in the waiting room with me if the man name had not been disabled; this is because it would’ve been seen as a mistake or an unfortunate sounding laugh, not a representation of the traits of the deaf community. Humans seem to have absorbed a pre-dispositional bias against anyone who isn't able-bodied, just like the ones for attractive and stereotypical people. Many don't even consider learning the sign language of their country, which damages the social relations between vast amounts of people and is, quite plainly, very ignorant. As of 2012, over 38 million people dealt with deafness or hard of hearing in the United States. Roughly 13% of the population - that’s a lot of conversations and wonderful friendships missed out on, all because of the inability to communicate. Now, that’s something that affects us all.
