TW /// mentions of N@zism, eugenics, child murder

A point that stood out to me when reading “The Social Model of Disability,” specifically this line about how society classifies people with disabilities and people who do not. “Disabled people are an oppressed group, and often non- disabled people and organizations…are the causes or contributors to that oppression.” This quote specifically reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a close friend about two programs that are present in many schools — public and private — in the United States: Special education and the “Gifted & Talented” program. In this conversation we had come to the realization that majority of students placed in gifted & talented programs were just as neurodivergent as the students placed in special education, the only difference between them was if the school staff perceived these students as “useful” vs “a burden.” I say this as someone who went through my schools version of the “gifted & talented” program from K-12, I have yet to meet someone who had gone through one of these programs in school that did not also get diagnosed with ASD and/or ADHD in their adulthood. These student’s did have disabilities, ones that significantly impacted how they interacted with the world around them, and yet not only were they classified as “non-disabled,” they were actively made to feel superior to their peers who were classified as “disabled” yet shared the same if not similar conditions.

So why does this happen? Why is does this disconnect between the medical model and the social model of disability happen, and why does it often pit people with disabilities against each other? In a way I like to think that society uses people with disabilities that are disabled in ways that are seen as more “beneficial” are used as a weapon against those who are disabled in ways that do not serve society. Even just the language around how we classify people with disabilities changes depending on if they are seen as beneficial or burdensome. A person classified as “gifted & talented” is meant to feel that they are superior to the rest of the population, especially in comparison to a person classified as “special needs,” perpetuating this idea that a disability is something that can be “overcome” and that those who are unable to are at fault for being unable to navigate a world that was not built for them in the first place.

This is not a new phenomenon, historically society has divided those with disabilities based on how “useful” or how “burdensome” they were seen as. The biggest example of this I can think of is the condition “Asperger’s Syndrome.” The creator of the term, Hans Asperger, was instrumental to the eugenics practices of the Nazi regime which actively classified autistic children based on who had “good vs bad genetic traits” that the Nazi regime would want to pass on. Children who presented as having “good genetics” were labeled as having “Asperger’s Syndrome” because they would be more likely to be well educated and take on high positions in society, thus making them “more valuable.” On the flipside, children who presented “bad genetics” were labeled “autistic psychopaths” and “undesirable” to the Nazi regime, which led to them being institutionalized at first, but from 1939-1945 these children would be systematically murdered under the state-sponsored child euthanasia program, Aktion T4, a program that Hans Asperger himself was complicit in. As we know today, “Asperger’s Syndrome” is really just a certain manifestation of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and is no longer considered its own sperate condition after being removed from the DSM-5 in 2013. That being said, how it has been used historically tells us a lot about how we classify people as disabled vs non-disabled, how being disabled in the medical sense doesn’t mean you are unable to contribute to the oppression and subjugation of other people with disabilities. In a way, society is the lumberjack, but they use the disabled people who are “useful” as the axe to further chop down a tree they don’t want.

Yet the whole time, we’re both wooden sticks, one was just given a blade.