Ableism in What We Grow Up With

Nov 21, 2024

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To help me deal with the overwhelming sense of doom from the beginning of November, I put up all of my holiday decorations that weekend. I’ve gradually been putting my decorations up earlier because I don’t really think Thanksgiving is worth celebrating, and it’s also so much work to put them all up that it’s nice to have them up as long as possible because when New Year’s Day comes, I’m takin’ it all down. This year, the intention was to give myself more of a mood boost though.

One of my favorite groups to listen to at the holidays is an acapella group called Pentatonix. My dad and I watched them win a short-lived vocal competition show called The Sing-Off and have been fans ever since. As a self-proclaimed choir nerd myself, I am obsessed with their beats and voices and there’s nothing they do better than holiday music.

One of their songs came on while I was decorating, a well-known Christmas hymnal called “Mary, Did You Know?” Though I don’t count myself as religious anymore, I went to Christian school for a while and I’ve also always loved Christmas music—including the religious stuff—even if I don’t really subscribe to the message anymore.

A certain part of the lyrics of “Mary, Did You Know?” really jumped out at me this year:

Mary, did you know?
The blind will see
The deaf will hear
And the dead will live again
The lame will leap
The dumb will speak

Those 6 lines got me thinking about how much the music I listened to and things I watched growing up contributed to my own internalized ableism. Those 6 lines are talking about how Jesus healed people, but the bigger message behind them is that people who were disabled were fixed, meaning there was something wrong with them to begin with. I don’t think I need to point out how problematic the use of the word “dumb” is either anymore.

I’ve also had a lot of people tell me they hope I’m healed or that they’ll pray for me over the years. Obviously, I know the intent behind that isn’t malicious, but it too sends the message that there’s something about having a disability that makes it “wrong” or something to be pitied or fixed.

After Matthew Perry passed away last year, I rewatched the whole series of Friends too and there were some episodes that definitely made some pretty cruel and ableist references.

“Let’s Get it Started”, a song by the Black Eyed Peas that came out in 2003 was the radio, “clean” version of a song actually titled "Let’s Get Retarded”.

When this is the messaging you hear when you’re growing up, how could you expect to feel anything other than the belief that you’re less than? The worst part is, I didn’t even realize what was happening. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to know that this was a load of crap I was being told. It’s a bit of a catch 22 because I believed I wasn’t enough anyway and a lot of things around me just reinforced that idea. For non-disabled people too, this messaging was seen as totally normal too (and for some people, it still is).

These are just a few examples that stand out but it’s taken me down an interesting path of unpacking where else I might have gotten the messaging that I’m flawed because of my disability or that I need fixing.

Do you have any examples like this that you can think of in your life? Even if you’re non-disabled, maybe there’s something you can think of growing up that you heard or saw?

I’ll leave you with a video of Pentatonix singing one of my all time favorites of theirs that’s not really a holiday song, but is one of the best examples of their incredible harmonies