What is Ableism?

While looking at submissions guidelines for magazines to sell articles to, I recently came across the word “ableist”. One magazine’s “Writer’s Guidelines”, stated they didn’t publish “ableist writings”. HUNH? What’s an A bleist? What is Ableism? I needed to look it up to find out. Now you can find out right here.

“Ableism”, is a term often used to describe discrimination against people with disabilities in favor of people who are not seen as being disabled. That’s easy enough.

Apparently we live in an “ableist society”, an ableist Society treats abled bodied people as the standard of “normal living”. This can lead to all sorts of problems for all sorts of people. The result is public and private places, education systems and social work, that are designed for people without too much disabilities. Which effectively cuts off the more disabled people from that society.

An “inclusionist society ” on the other hand, does the exact opposite, and would be one where all products and services can be used by as many people as possible. Ableist societies tend towards isolation of disabled individuals, while inclusionist tend toward integration.

There appears to be a problem here, however. I n an ableist society who decides what counts as able bodied ? In an inclusionist society, who decides the meaning of, “as many people as possible?” What is the cut -off point? Is there a cut _off point ?

Even more confusing, is the fact that Ableism, is also called “Dis-ableism”, in many parts of the world, it has yet to appear in most dictionaries, but is gaining in use as it is more talked about.

That seemed easy enough. Until I sat down to write this article.

In the UK one in seven people are considered disabled. That ‘s a lot of people to exclude from your society ! In the USA the number is higher, 20 percent. 54 million people. That’s an awful lot of people to exclude !

Unfortunately, the term “Ablism”, suffers from the same confusion as terms like Sexism, Racism and most other “isms”. They are terms defined by the people the “-ism” descriminates against. With 54 million disabled people in the United States, and many others around the world, that’s a lot of different definitions. While writing this article and trying to keep it objective, I ran into a lot of them. I’m still not sure wether the article in question was ableist or not, but I only know one way to find out. I’m going to submit it and ask, because often, asking is the people you are concerned about discriminating against, is the only real way to find out.