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An Urgent Pause: Facing the Intertwined Constitution of Race and Disability

Elaine Cagulada, Queens University SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow & Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, Professor, OISE of the University of Toronto

To reference this paper: Cagulada, E. and Titchkosky, T. (2024). An Urgent Pause: Facing the Intertwined Constitution of Race and Disability. In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. 葫芦影业: University of 葫芦影业. 

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is Professor of Disability Studies in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Bringing DS praxis in conversation with Black, queer and critical Indigenous theorists, Tanya鈥檚 work traces the consequences of a restricted human imaginary and the demands it imposes on disabled people in everyday life as well as on education, public health, and on bureaucracies more generally. Her current work is funded, in part, by an Insight SSHRC grant, 鈥淩eimaging the Dis/Appearance of Disability in the Academy.鈥 Tanya is also part of the international research project hosting this event, Disability Matters, and holds an research award where her focus is on how medical and corporate health archives mediate the meaning of disability. Tanya is recipient of the OISE 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award, a member of the Disability Circle in Toronto as well as of the and founder of Doing Disability in Everyday Life Research and Activist group.

is a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies and Black Studies at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. She researches and writes in the fields of critical disability studies, black studies, gender studies, and sociology, and she also teaches in these areas. Elaine's work is concerned with stories as sites of containment and possibility, and with disturbing carceral logics and enclosures through the constitutive force of narrative. Alongside Professor Tanya Titchkosky and Madeleine DeWelles, Elaine is co-editor of  published in 2022 by Canadian Scholars' Press. Elaine is a member of the Disability Circle in Toronto and an alumni member of the Centre for Global Disability Studies. She is also a constituent of the. In 2023, Elaine was awarded.


 

Introduction (by Dan Goodley)

Welcome to the sixth Online Symposium of Disability Matters: A major six year pan-national programme of disability, health and science research, funded by a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award. I鈥檓 Dan Goodley - the Principal Investigator - and I work in the iHuman research institute at the University of 葫芦影业. I鈥檓 a white, early 50s, cisgendered bald man. A key ambition of Disability Matters is to make disability the driving subject of research. One element of our programme promotes scholarship that demonstrates the contribution of disability studies to a host of fields and disciplines. We are delighted that this symposium is being hosted by the University of Toronto; one of the university partners on Disability Matters.

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  • Paper presentations (45 minutes)
  • Q&A (up to 25 minutes)

Duration: 1hr 15m 

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URGENT PAUSE
Facing the Intertwined Constitution of Race and Disability 


Introduction (Tanya Titchkosky)

There is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body. The human sensorium has had to be educated to the appreciation of racial difference. When it comes to the visualization of discrete racial groups, a great deal of fine-tuning has been required. ()

The history of racism is a narrative in which the congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of their analogical intersection: the human body. It knits together science and superstition. ()

I am suggesting that the only appropriate response 鈥 is to demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking. ()

These quotations guide some of the methodological moves we are making today in our interpretive version of disability studies (DS) that is wide awake to issues of race and in touch with Black studies. We do this work from Tkaronto (Toronto), sacred land comprised of and cared for by the people of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, and the Haudenosaunee. We conduct our scholarship in hopes of unsettling some of the stories that have degraded the land and its peoples. Given there is no easy fix for human degradation, especially the sort that is born from visualizing discrete groups of lesser people, we assume that it is perception itself that needs to be investigated. Put differently, the perception of people and social issues are organized by the culture within which the perceiver of these problems is located 鈥 requiring us, as I have suggested elsewhere, to read our readings, watch our watchings (Titchkosky,), p9). Or, better, following what Gilroy suggests above, our sensorium, our perceptual wherewithal of any sort, has been 鈥渆ducated,鈥 even trained, through the knitting together of science and superstition, macro and microcosms of culture reflecting a racializing perception alongside raciological thought. Close attention to problems as much as to solutions is required since both are caught in the fine-tuning that perceives lesser humans and social issues. 

However鈥 the trickster of perception!  How to perceive how we perceive?!

How to attend to perception itself?  Dr. Elaine (), influenced by what DRs. Rod Michalko and Devon Healey refer to as 鈥淏lind perception,鈥 attends to perception so as to reveal the narratives that ground the possibility of 鈥渟eeing鈥 problems. Blind perception shows how some people, in this case Police, are positioned as 鈥淪ee ers鈥 of problems which makes other people appear as problems. We hope to demonstrate that a 鈥淚 see,鈥 鈥淚 feel,鈥 鈥淚 sense鈥 are the places where inquiry can (should?) begin to uncover how the sensorium has been  educated. Our bodies being of the world as much as they are in it (Fanon, 1967, 232) have something to teach us about our inter-relatedness knit together by science and superstition giving rise to the sensorium / perception.

Methodologically, we pause in the face of the certainty of sense. We are suggesting that pausing in the face of what already is apparent, is a pause guided by 鈥渃ritical hesitation鈥 (a term developed by Alia Al-Saji,). Such a hesitation is necessary in order to reveal how the complexity of social difference is made. Something happens, a problem appears, or perhaps a solution. We pause. A police encounter. Pause.  A new University policy for inclusion. Pause. How do these make sense? Enacting such a critical hesitation, supports our examination of 鈥渞ace鈥 and 鈥渄isability鈥 _as_ an intertwined construction making a degraded, 鈥渓esser human鈥 appear as if natural. 

With these few notes on how we are working (our methodological assumptions), we will offer two reflections today showing disability as a matter of cultural production tied to a racialized education of our sensorium. Our work is driven by the especially urgent sense that scholarship needs to pause in the face of taken for granted perceptions of problems since they affect all that we do, all that we say, including the stories we tell about who is a problem and how to solve it. We only indirectly address one of the most powerful educators of all 鈥 the field of medicine, but we will have more to say about this later. [724 words]

Take it away Elaine鈥 

Elaine Cagulada

, Andrea 鈥淒re鈥 Hollingsworth was detained by Las Vegas police officers at a traffic stop.

鈥淪it down, sit down, sit DOWN. Put your hands behind your back,鈥 yells a police officer to Hollingsworth before shoving her onto the sidewalk. The words of the barking officer are captured by Hollingsworth who livestreams the encounter with police on her cellphone. When asked later in an interview for a Deaf news source, 鈥淲hy

did you decide to go live? Did you feel something would happen? Can you explain?,鈥 Hollingsworth replied: 鈥淭he funny thing is, once they drove by...They were taking sharp turns and I felt something was off.鈥 As Gilroy says, 鈥淭here is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body鈥 (p. 42). What, then, to make of the perceptual training behind the utterances, 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back,鈥 and 鈥淚 felt something was off鈥?

In our brief time together today, I attend to these utterances and their pathways of arrival for some of the lessons they glean on the importance of pause in a world where 鈥 to quote Sylvia Wynter 鈥 鈥渢he hybridity of humanness鈥搕hat we are simultaneously storytelling and biological beings鈥攊s thereby denied鈥. Guided by interpretive methods in disability studies I pause at texts, utterances, moments that have already arrived, happened, and remembered so that I might attend to a formulation of humanness that Wynter tells us is repeatedly denied 鈥  that is, our existence as storytelling and biological beings.

The phrase, 鈥減ut your hands behind your back,鈥 in the video of Hollingsworth carries weight, world, and the weight of worlds. The weight can be read in the tone of the officer鈥檚 voice, a tone that is guttural and impatient. 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back,鈥 is not a request. The officer is not asking Hollingsworth, he is demanding her. These words, spat out by an officer, signal to a normative order鈥檚 stock stories, and here I鈥檓 thinking with, where multiple expressions lie in wait to be used and reused by the police in our 鈥渃ommon stock of cultural knowledge.鈥 Expressions such as 鈥減ut your hands behind your back,鈥 鈥渟top right there,鈥 鈥測ou have the right to remain silent,鈥 roll easily from the tendrils of my imagination. The ease with which I want to objectify these phrases as the language of the police teaches me of normalcy, and my situatedness within it. The hybridity of humanness is, therefore, a hybridity mired in contradiction. 

Returning to Hollingsworth鈥檚 encounter with Las Vegas police officers, let me pause at the grave contradiction of an officer yelling at a Deaf Black person to put their hands behind their back. Biology as a storyteller has trained me to understand that human hands

take a particular function and appearance. I was not taught in school to perceive the voices, languages, and communities that for many, unfold in the gestures that their hands help them make 鈥 even this is only one story of sign language. 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back,鈥 then, is a story of policing told by biology, where the hands expected to go behind the back are the flesh and bone beyond the wrist and not a language and a world indirectly possessed through that language (. 

This story of policing is made to make sense within the framing of the 鈥渞ealm of the visible.鈥 says, 鈥溾he realm of the visible, or what is taken as self-evidently visible (which is how the ideology of racism naturalizes racial designation), is recognized as the product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than a natural result of human sight鈥 (p. 16). Reading the realm of the visible, calls us into, as says, 鈥渨atching sight鈥 by reading sight as 鈥渟ocially achieved鈥 (p. 45). Institutions therefore bear stories that are continuously repeated to structure, and obscure, the realms in which we live and the social achievement of being human. The institution of police, in particular, is dependent on the production and exploitation of categorized humans. Following who says, 鈥淭he construction and maintenance of racial categories and hierarchies is crucial to the interlocking power relations that sustain colonial capitalism,鈥 the police should be understood as a colonial-capitalist institution in service of 鈥渨hiteness as a racial discourse and practice鈥 (375). The institution of police is borne, then, from stories that take for granted the process of constructing racial categories and ranking human lives as natural, making this way of seeing the human a normative perceptual practice. Influenced by, part of my enacting pause here is reading for how my readings of the police and its practices are key to instituting the domain of the visible as naturally-given rather than perceptually-provided. Tracing the production of the world as naturally-given guides us to the violence of whiteness as a racial discourse and practice and further, to the violence of a limited social imaginary.

A linear narrative of human value coordinates us into objectified ways of knowing the world and into believing this knowing to be a self-evidently normal and desirable way of seeing. Following, everyday desired forms of seeing are 鈥渉abitually 鈥榳hite鈥 forms of seeing and being鈥 (p. 476). Norms of seeing, then, can come to be understood as also 鈥榳hite鈥 forms of seeing and being formed through the habitual practice of linear storytelling that consigns the human to the realm of the visible. Norms of seeing, as white forms of seeing and being, might be revealed in the oft-repeated commands that fire from a cop鈥檚 mouth. The seemingly-ordinary phrase 鈥減ut your hands behind your back,鈥 and its repeated use by police, reflects a norm of seeing that trains perception to see the 鈥榩roblem-person鈥 as a 鈥榯rouble-person鈥 

Trouble, as helps me understand, is a space to begin questioning our perceptual habits. The police see trouble in Hollingsworth, raising their voices at the trouble that they see. The scared expressions in the faces of Hollingsworth鈥檚 daughters who are also on scene, the black and white cop cars, the guns confidently displayed on officers鈥 waistlines 鈥 these are caught on the livestream and might be understood as part of what Hollingsworth is seeing. While these may also be what the officers see, the stock commands that they bark at Hollingsworth and her children give them away. The perceptual habits of police are clouded by white forms of seeing and being. In a realm of the visible that attempts to naturalize norms of seeing, the trouble that Hollingsworth sees is irrelevant to the police who yell 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back鈥 at her and shove her onto the ground. In a normative order, what the police see is meant to supersede other forms of seeing. If the police see Hollingsworth as trouble, then, as the linear story goes, surely she is trouble. 

And yet, the weight of the worlds carried in Hollingsworth鈥檚 utterance, 鈥淚 felt something was off,鈥 disturbs the authority of what the police see as self-evident within the realm of the visible. Hollingsworth鈥檚 seeing, a seeing inflected by her worlds of deafness, blackness, queerness, and motherhood, prompts her to livestream the encounter with police officers before the police approach her vehicle. Deafness and blackness interrupt the norms of seeing that attempt to categorize her as trouble and that the police attempt to impose on her. Thinking alongside rendering of 鈥淏lack madness and mad Blackness,鈥 I wonder about the stories of Deaf blackness and Black deafness involved in training Hollingsworth鈥檚 perception such that the sharp turns of a cop car nearby might bring her to feel that something is off. 鈥淏lack madness and mad Blackness,鈥 says Pickens (2019), 鈥渇oreground the multiple and, at times, conflicting epistemological and ontological positions at stake when reading the two alongside each other鈥 (3). Hollingsworth felt something was off before her reading of something-off came her way. Her feeling is her seeing, shaping her decision to livestream what has not yet happened so that her community might see what she is seeing and how she is being seen.

In the same Daily Moth interview I reference earlier, Hollingsworth says, 鈥淭he police officers give a lot of mistreatment to Black people, so I feel the same, too. And even as a

Deaf person. Maybe they would assume and not want to provide an interpreter because they think I鈥檓 pretending. They already knew once my daughter said I鈥檓 Deaf, but they brushed that aside. That鈥檚 it. They looked down on me as a Black Deaf mother. Period. End of discussion.鈥 Herein lie the multiple epistemological and ontological positions at stake, to return to Pickens, in reading Deaf blackness and Black deafness alongside each other within the realm of the visible. The dominance of a biocentric story of blackness in relation to the institution of police, as if a natural result of sight and not socially and culturally produced, train both Hollingsworth and the Las Vegas police officers to perceive danger in each other. In the realm of the visible that naturalizes the normalcy of policing difference as if self-evident, however, what the police see is made to trump what Hollingsworth sees. When deafness appears on scene alongside what the officers seem to always already see of blackness, they, to quote Hollingsworth, 鈥渂rushed that aside.鈥 Even when Hollingsworth鈥檚 daughters try to speak deafness into the space, the police do what is often singularly understood as deafness 鈥 they do not hear what Hollingsworth and her daughters have to say. 

Importantly, and simultaneously at stake, is the normalcy of the institution of police and policing institutions of public health, the academy, and others, whose practices rely on an order of truth and knowledge upheld by a story of humanness as solely a biological phenomenon.  The realm of the visible, then, is hard at work erasing itself as crucial to the denial of what Wynter calls the 鈥渉ybridity of humanness鈥 (, where we are simultaneously storytelling and biological beings. Enacting pause is imminent such that the stories and therefore the weight, world, and weight of worlds carried within utterances such as, 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back,鈥 and 鈥淚 felt something was off,鈥 might train perception anew, disturbing norms of seeing that rely upon and authorize institutions of policing as arbiters of whiteness as a racial discourse. Hollingsworth feels through her seeing, and through her feelings sees, what鈥檚 to come and what will always come for disabled, deaf, Black, and racialized people as long as institutions of policing continue to exist unquestioned and untroubled as normative fixtures of everyday life. 

Just as the poor don鈥檛 wake up to breakfast, to quote normalcy does not wake up to attention. In a realm of the visible where what the police see is taken as ultimate truth, the culture of sight is nourished by what calls, 鈥渁 world of observation, still-ness, and entrapment鈥 that when unnoticed, eclipses the storying of life and living in strictly biological terms. Facing biology as storyteller opens us to how we are trained to perceive the body according to linear patterns鈥 a body with hands, a back, and hands that may be put behind a back (the stock police command is not, for instance, 鈥減ut your back in front of your hands鈥). Enacting pause paves the way for us to feel, as Hollingsworth felt, that something is off. Realizing that our feelings on disability, deafness, and race are entangled in the commitments of policing institutions, and being animated by the narrative character of this entanglement, may also make way for what calls, 鈥渄eciphering plantation logic鈥 (p. 11). How are the police trained to see and how are we trained to see the police? How are we expected to perceive the seeing of policing institutions as desirable, authority, and truth? When we see, who are the storytellers shaping our seeing?

In a modern economy that cannot escape its entrenchment in racialism, to cite, and that continues to persist in the dominant ways that disability, deafness, and race are storied today, careful and critical reflection is owed to how policing institutions are paid to see and what their seeing is paid to do. A return, or what) calls 鈥渁 restless reflexive return,鈥 to the realms in which we live can reveal the linear patterns of storytelling that constitute our everyday lives. Revealing the linear pattern of problem-people turned trouble-people interrupts narratives that attempt to confine the life, possibility, and complexity of embodied differences. In a global order that insists on narrating humanness in solely biological terms, enacting pause 鈥 as return and interruption 鈥 is one way to come home to ourselves as storytelling beings. 
 

Disability and Race-Thinking within the University Educated Sensorium (Tanya)

Inclusion is good, isn鈥檛 it?  It sure does feel good. But what really happens with disability, to disabled people, when we are included? How does inclusion appear and for whom? I return to some of Paul Gilroy鈥檚 guiding words:

There is no raw, untrained perception dwelling in the body. The human sensorium has had to be educated鈥 the visualization of discrete racial groups, [requires] a great deal of fine-tuning. ()

A fine tuning must go on when we perceive an 鈥渋nclusion problem鈥 organizing the visualization of discrete categories of who is in and who is out, what is accessible and what is not. This too must train the human sensorium [how we sense].
 

To consider this

I turn to the appearance of disability in University inclusion statements oriented to disability (Ahmed, 2006:12). The point is not to regard such statements as good or bad but as ways that our sensorium receives an education on how to perceive people. The university is an ideal place to conduct such an exploration since there we encounter practices of inclusion designed by the supposed 鈥渢he brightest and the best鈥 () whose sensorium has been educated by professional schools of thought. It is the place, too, where, as Sylvia Wynter () says  鈥渢he 鈥榠nner eyes鈥 with which we look with our physical eyes upon reality鈥 are trained.

 Since the world wars (and because of them and colonialism), every Western university has its stories of individual disabled people 鈥渋ncluded鈥 and thus represented in official histories, president reports, or other archived materials, occasionally in oral mythologies.  Prior to any legal mandate to include (), there are stories about disabled people included and they seem to be the exception that proves the rule to exclude most disabled people from Universities and perceive this as normal. The norm of exclusion is obvious in practices such as medical tests far beyond discerning the absence of an infectious disease; the measuring of the student body for its ability to participate in athletics (or a swimming test to enter dentistry), through university procedures that explicitly stated that disabled applicants need not apply, and through slightly less obvious practices such as not providing accessible dorms or classrooms or washrooms or learning materials (Titchkosky, 2022; Dolmage, 2018; Price, 2011; McGuire and Fritch, 2019; Slee, 2018; Ware, 2020).

However, with the advent of the UN Declaration of the International Year of Disabled People (IYDP) in 1981, accompanied by other changes in law (Prince, 2009), this taken-for-granted sense of disabled people _as_ naturally excludable was disrupted. The UN declared 1981 to be the year where there would be some sort of equalization of opportunities, as well as focus on rehabilitation and the prevention of disabilities. In Canada, (soon after signing on to the UN IYDP), there was the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada, 1982). The Charter, the highest law of the land, made it illegal to discriminate on a variety of grounds 鈥 鈥渞ace, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability,鈥 Or, so it was written by 1985. 

 Disability was, however, a ground for exclusion that almost every university practiced as a matter of course. And still does. 

Nonetheless, these legal shifts soon provoked universities to respond. The University of Toronto, where I have worked since 2006, developed its very first statement 鈥渁ffirming the inclusion鈥 of disabled people in 1981. In the administrative archive with ABD Maddy DeWelles, we found that this statement was circulated widely, e.g., in meeting minutes, distributed to all faculties, and published in the student newspaper and other newsletters. While mostly forgotten, it represents a common way of perceiving disability as a problem. (For earlier versions and further discussions of this see Titchkosky, 2022; Titchkosky & DeWelles, 2020). If you have spent any time in university meetings, in any other bureaucracy, or involved in campus disability politics, you will sense the familiar. Facing this historical repetition is a way of attending to the perception of disability that makes this policy possible, sense-able, sayable* 鈥 and thus a critical hesitation is necessary.


Approved in principle by Governing Council on March 26, 1981

The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons

 The University of Toronto, with a very large number of old buildings and sprawling urban campus, can present a formidable challenge to disabled persons. Adaptations have been made to Erindale and Scarborough, but the situation on the St. George campus remains difficult. The task of reviewing the University鈥檚 facilities in terms of physical accessibility, assigning priorities for improvements, and finding funds for the changes that will be necessary is equally formidable. The financial aspect is particularly troubling at a time when the University鈥檚 needs in so many areas are acute, its resources eroded and its prospects for relief in the near future dim.

Given these constraints, it must be recognized that progress will be slow. However, the University has made a beginning, and intends, to the extent that is possible, to take the following steps toward improving accessibility in the months and years ahead.
 

1. The University endorses in principle the objectives of the United Nations General Assembly resolution proclaiming 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons.
 

2. The University will continue to develop administrative procedures to facilitate the integration of disabled persons into the University community including academic, administrative and support services.

3. The University will encourage faculty and staff to make

accommodations for the requirements of disabled persons.

 -2-

 4. The University will seek funding with a view to ensuring that its buildings, services, and programmes are made accessible where feasible. The goal shall be a major improvement in accessibility within ten years [not reading =]according to a list of priorities established in consultation preferably with recognized groups of disabled persons at the University of Toronto, or failing such groups, with disabled members of the University community. When significant structural alterations are made or new facilities are built the needs of disabled persons will be considered.

5. The University will consult and work with other academic institutions in the province in the belief that the needs and issues require a co-operative effort on a system-wide basis.

6. The administration will place before the Budget Advisory Committee on an annual basis an appreciation of the University鈥檚 progress in making the campus accessible to the physically handicapped and a set of recommendations for continuing improvements.

Office of the Vice-President鈥

Personnel and Student Affairs

February 12, 1981


The main assumption?  Disabled people _are now_potentially partial participants who might be included but only as an unexpected expense. While not necessary participants, we are necessarily expensive ones. Still, if included, it will be as a considered expense. Facilities, budgets, priorities, programs, policies, so much!, are depicted not only as necessary but also as set against the inclusion of disabled people. Tying the potential participant to a partial and precarious status is the sense that constraints in the physical and social environment are to be perceived as natural/expected; disabled people are not perceived as such.

The sensorium has had an education! 

See hostile social environments, perceive nature! 鈥淭hat鈥檚 just the way things are.鈥 See disabled people precariously positioned struggling to participate, perceive an unnecessary and even unwelcome struggle. The university educated sensorium is one able to perceive disabled people as vulnerable to established universities' ways since we can鈥檛 claim  reciprocity. After all 鈥渢he needs of the University are acute鈥 making the possibility of change 鈥渄im鈥. Disability 鈥渋s鈥 an administrative problem of shifting import since disability is not regarded as natural or as a needed taken-for-granted aspect of university life (Finkelstein, 1998; Stiker 1999). 

Disabled people are incorporated as an object of concern but not imagined as part of the 鈥渋ntersubjective, social humanity, in its species being鈥, as Gilroy (2000: 46-47) puts it. As a problem, as an unexpected object, disability serves the University as an end point for any sense of our shared human fragility. The university sensorium has been educated to perceive disability as the end of any needed reciprocity between people. Insofar as some people are trained to see some other people as the endpoint of reciprocity, the physical and social environment remains exactly as it is. 

 This, suggests Paul Gilroy, is race thinking.

Race, as a formation tied to thinking and acting, can be read as a consequence of the fissures used to degrade some lives in ways that sustain the structure of the world through what can be conceived of today as the 鈥渃oloniality of power鈥 (Alcoff, 2007; Mignolo 2001; 2014; Wynter 1994; 2003). Gilroy (2000: 40; 53) explicates how the making of race both involves and goes beyond the color line, knitting 鈥渟cience and superstition鈥 together in 鈥渕icro and macro鈥 ways of perceiving the body made to fit hierarchical notions of normal humans and their Others. This is not to say that the seeing of color is not part of racism; But, I am suggesting that the fine tuning of 鈥渟eeing color鈥 read as a sign of a lesser human, is not steeped in eyes that see, nor in skin color, but in cultures that determine versions of humans. For example, much fine tuning goes into making people perceive who has to be responded to and who is outside of a reciprocity of recognition. The seeing of color is made possible by a sensorium finely tuned to a hierarchy of humanity. This is part of raciological perception and it is everywhere e.g., 

Signing - - 鈥淲hat did you say?  I am Deaf.鈥  

Yelling: 鈥淧ut your hands behind your back!鈥

Patient to Doctor: What time is it?  

Doctor to Patient: Have you taken your meds yet?  

Worker to Boss: I need to go pee.  

Boss to Worker: Have you signed in to work yet? 

Person sitting on the street: Buddy, do you have a coin? 

Passerby 鈥 passes by. 

72,654 Palestinian鈥檚 injured says the news report;

The News and its watchers move on to the next news item.

For a sensorium educated in racioloigcal perception, disability is normally sensed as a version of the lesser-other. Structured as such, few alternatives are imagined.

By pausing in the face of disability-designations to consider how they are aspects of a race-thinking, it is possible to receive a jolt and start to notice what in the world has provided for limited/ing perception. By attending to how we typically perceive disability as a fissure in the expected and normal goings-on of daily life, we can learn something about the borders that disability is made to outline and how disabled people are typically perceived as not-quite legitimate subjects. Disability conventionally appears as if it is a natural way to delineate the borders of belonging, participation, and even the boundaries of thought and politics (Goodley, 2023,; Goodley and Michalko, 2023). Noticing this (perhaps) we can reawaken imagination that is more life affirming.

Whether our own disability or that of others, 鈥渘ormal鈥 perceptions of disability carry 鈥渋nto the core of contemporary concerns the same anxieties about the basis upon which races exist鈥 (Gilroy, 2000: 40), concerns such as the body when conceived in strictly functional terms that is made a sign of  a lesser-being serving only as 鈥渕aterial resources to be exploited鈥 unknown information to be surveilled鈥 (Al-Saji, 2018: 348). As objects upon which science operates and as fodder for the medical industry, disabled people are made into 鈥淭he vulnerable鈥 without reciprocity (Michalko, 2022: 108-114; see also Hughes). The urgent pause is what we need since how we perceive informs any sense of our relations affecting all that we do, all that we say, including the stories we tell about who is a problem and how to solve it.

Mattering to Disability Matters

 Some points:

  • Why this way of working should matter to disability studies 
  • Medicine as a storyteller
  • That we can even read medicine as a storyteller 鈥 what does this say of the importance of reading our readings
  • All perception is active and being acted upon 鈥 no raw or untrained perception 鈥 attending to our perceptual habits and practices makes the familiarity of institutional harm, caused by the university, the police, etc., unfamiliar again (politics of wonder)
     
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Robot reading books

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