When someone asks "What can we do to make people with disabilities more welcome in our community", the first thing that is said is usually "make more elevators and ramps." This statement could be true, especially in areas where sidewalks are too rough to use a wheelchair or when there are no alternatives to staircases. However, more often than not, people with disabilities feel unwelcome in society because of certain behavior's able bodied people display to them in public.
The most common of these behavior's are staring at people with disabilities as they pass by in a public setting. Before I was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis, I was guilty of "staring" quite often. Children have a habit of noticing "anything out of the ordinary", and once their attention is drawn to something, they cannot look away. My perception of "staring" completely changed after I lost the function of my legs after AFM for several months. I remember when my cousin took me to Santana Row (a downtown), and the entire way down, I noticed people quickly flashing their eyes at me. I hated the fact that I was different, and even today feel slightly nervous in large public settings.
That feeling of hating public settings stems from a phenomenon called internalized ableism. Internalized ableism is when people with disabilites start to believe that they are "different" from able bodied people, leading to mental health issues. Many individuals think that a single act of staring at a person with a disability is harmless, but in reality it reinforces the false idea that people with disabilites are "out of the ordinary" and "different". Santana Row had all the ramps and elevators I needed to get around easily, but I despised it because of how people viewed me.
However, staring is a small problem compared to the ultimate form of disability discrimination, which is treating a person with a disability as though they are a baby/with pity. During my trip to Jamaica, I noticed some volunteers feeding a 30 year old man who had cerebral palsey. The frustration he must have felt when they called him "poor baby", or showing him Peppa Pig while he was eating is incomprehensible. People with disabilities are not any different from able bodied people, and should be treated according to their age.
It is true that the lack of disability related infrastructure is a massive problem, especially in third world countries. However, in my experience, the biggest form of disability related discrimination comes from people's preconcieved notions that people with disabilites are "different" and should be treated with pity.
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