Conformity and Unity

"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model."  ~Vincent Van Gogh

"I just want to be treated like everyone else."  I have heard these words uttered over and over again by people with disabilities.  Certainly, I have thought them in the past.  They are an expression of our desire for equality.  No matter how powerful the laws are that require wheelchair ramps or sign language interpreters, our true desire will remain not to need such laws.  We want to be accepted and respected by our culture, not merely tolerated.

For this to happen, we must first accept and respect ourselves.  As people with disabilities, we need to find our own voice and our own pride.  I have recently heard talk about how Barack Obama is too "white."   Perhaps such accusations are built upon harmful stereotypes, but the idea that someone could possibly be too white is interesting to me.  I think people with disabilities can learn a lot from it. 

Any oppressed group is pressured to conform.  Many times, wanting to be treated just like everyone else is easily conflated with a tendency to ACT like everyone else.  Stigma and shame at difference is heaped upon us and we are discouraged from associating with people who share our oppression.  Group identity for an oppressed category of people is diminished and dismantled by a sense that we have to conform to the standards of our oppressors if we are to be respected.

My first Little People of America national conference was in 1989.  I was 7.  I had no idea that I was part of an oppressed group and had a great time playing with the other children there.  Shame was completely foreign to me.  Seven more years passed before I had the opportunity to go back to another national conference.  I was 14 and my conformist tendencies were in full swing as a teenager who desperately wanted to "fit in" as I am sure we all did.  This was a very different experience.  I remember freezing up the first night I went through the door of the nightly dance.  Was I really like these people?  They looked so STRANGE!  How could I possibly be treated just like everyone else if I was part of a group that was so different?  My friend Casey was in his late teens or early twenties by that point.  He quickly picked up on what was going on and practically dragged me over to a very pretty young lady who was also quietly stewing in a state of shock.  She and I didn't have much in common and we didn't end up keeping in touch, but it got me talking. 

This was one of the many turning points in my life when I realized that conformity would not win acceptance or respect.  Pride is what we need for that.  It sounds cheesy, but  we need to be able to see ourselves as valuable, as beautiful, just as we are.  It is this pride that will draw us together into a force of change.  We must defy the stigma that tells us to conform to the standards of a culture that rejects our differences.  We must celebrate those differences and from there demand that we are treated just like everyone else, not because we have conformed to their standards, but because we have forced them to redefine those standards.  We need prideful unity, not stigmatized conformity.