Hi, I’m Ash, but you can call me Icon for
short.
I recently made a video about disability,
covering some basic concepts and terms, but
in this video I wanted to address something
that I felt was necessary to discuss.
At time of writing, the United States is experiencing
an ongoing pandemic, in large part thanks
to the incompetence/eugenicist leanings of
our leaders and continuing disinformation
campaigns.
Adequate precautions were not taken, personal
protective equipment was in short supply when
the disease first hit, testing is not widely
available, and public health is being put
at risk by pushes to reopen businesses.
The United States’ failure to adequately
respond to this pandemic has resulted in the
most transparent crystallization of ableism
I can think of.
In recent months, it has been made clear that
disabled people will be deprioritized in
favor of nondisabled people, largely due to
judgments of disabled people’s “quality
of life” as being lower than a nondisabled
person’s.
This value judgment is one that is not uncommon.
Think about how many people talk about “suffering”
from a disability, how they couldn’t live
with themselves if they were disabled, etc.
This deprioritization of disabled people’s
care in response to COVID-19 is a borderline
textbook example of the specific ableist idea
I want to discuss here: disposability.
Like literally, this kind of thing was listed
in my textbook when I took a human services
course on disability.
Disposability is a social position not exclusive
or unique to disabled people, but it is one
that disabled people seemingly always occupy,
and this is largely because disposability
is rooted in pity.
Just as a quick refresher, pity is a specifically
negative view of disability as being inherently
burdensome.
Disabled people viewed with pity are creatures
whose entire existence is defined as suffering.
It doesn’t usually matter what the disability
is, and it doesn’t usually matter if the
person actually experiences any pain as part
of their disability.
Disabled people are considered disposable
because their lives are not viewed as being
worth anything.
From this perspective, their existence is
equivalent to suffering, so disposing of them
is sometimes even seen as doing them a favor.
The disabled person may want to live, and
people may be able to help them, but they
will be allowed to die purely because their
lives are not seen as valuable.
This intersects with other attitudes, for
example disabled people are usually seen as
a fundamentally unproductive class of people,
so their death wouldn’t hurt society or
the economy.
Disabled people can be seen in a more negative
light as leeches, drains on our resources,
and so their deaths can be justified as rationing
supplies to save others.
The fundamentally unproductive role disabled
people have been given in society is one that
is largely borne of capitalist notions of
productivity.
Under a capitalist economic system, the priority
of the economy, and many have argued of society
more broadly, is the maximization of profit.
Businesses in general exist to make profit,
and if a business is not profitable, it is
likely to be viewed as a failure.
Disabled people, because of their relative
lack of access to society, are not able to
be maximally productive.
This is not to say that disabled people are
incapable of working well or effectively,
but that they face unique challenges in society
and the workplace that limit their productivity.
If a job requires a lot of movement, people
with mobility issues will not be able to do
that job as quickly or easily as an abled
person.
Because disabled people are often unable to
be maximally productive laborers, for some
time now, they have been relegated to a tenuous
position of the “worthy poor”.
The “worthy poor” are those in society
who are unemployed and poor, but through no
fault of their own, and thus should be helped
by the productive members of society through
some system of social welfare.
This idea goes back a couple hundred years,
but it naturally spawned an inverse that became
a somewhat troubling concept.
The “unworthy poor”, in contrast to the
“worthy poor”, were people whose poverty
and unemployment were seen as a result of
poor character or incompetence, and their
presence in society was not tolerable.
Social darwinists and their ideological relatives
often sparked fears of these “unworthy poor”
unjustly taking the charity meant for the
more deserving, and thus positioned these
people as leeches on society.
This is part of why so many people test disabled
folks to see if they’re “really” disabled
– they’re seeing if this person is deserving
of their charity or a leech on others’ good
graces.
This tension between the model, deserving
“worthy poor”, and the scheming, lecherous
“unworthy poor” has a hand in why society
is so lacking in accommodation for disabled
folks.
The “worthy poor” were never really meant
to be part of society in any meaningful capacity,
they were supposed to be society’s charity
cases, living off the work of others because
they weren’t capable, in the minds of the
public, of participating in society.
Disabled people, thus, are put into a social
role of nonproductivity, and since a capitalist
society has no need for people who cannot
be – or are not expected to be – productive,
they are therefore disposable.
This, functionally, makes disabled people
the cushion for society from facing significant
consequences should something threaten the
population.
Social ills can be thrust onto disabled people
by people in power, and this is unlikely to
cause any meaningful problems for those powerful
people.
COVID-19 has illustrated this clearly, as
many Republicans, including my own father,
have argued over the course of the pandemic
that the only significant threat is to disabled
people, and we should not have to disrupt
our entire society for this small group of
already vulnerable people.
This is, unfortunately, not merely a theoretical
or abstract position.
On June 11th, 2020, Michael Hickson, a disabled
black man, died from complications due to
COVID-19 in a hospital in Texas.
His doctors and legal guardian, Family Eldercare,
made the decision to put him in hospice care
after his condition had worsened.
In a recorded phone call between one of the
medics and Hickson’s wife, the doctor says
that the treatment they could give Hickson
would not improve his “quality of life”.
Hickson’s wife fought in court to be given
legal rights to be in charge of her husband’s
care, trying to keep his doctors from giving
up on him, but the judge placed Family Eldercare
in charge of Michael Hickson’s medical decisions.
This case is appalling for many reasons, but
it embodies a fear that disabled people have -
that at some point, a decision will be made
for them that their life is no longer worth
living.
The facts of Michael Hickson’s case are
disputed by the hospital where he was treated,
and I’ll have articles below you can check
out to look into it, but what is indisputable
is that his doctors emphasized his disability
as something that lowered his “quality of
life”, and used it as justification when
speaking to Hickson’s wife about placing
Hickson in hospice care.
Disposability is a social position disabled
people occupy because their lives are assumed
to be worth less than nondisabled lives.
Fellow autistic YouTuber Faye Fahrenheit unintentionally
gave a great example of how pervasive this
attitude is, when writing a post on Reddit
detailing their thoughts around COVID and
disability.
Many of the comments underneath their post
immediately assumed that either this was some
sort of mistake on the part of Hickson’s
doctors, or that his life was being sacrificed
for some greater good.
Both of these responses highlight how disabled
people are intended to be disposable by illustrating
that the immediate response to the death of
a disabled person is callous indifference
at best, and a myth of noble sacrifice at
worst.
Sure, this disabled person died, but it’s
not like they count.
Even if they did, though, their doctors were
making a tough call, doing what needed to
be done, sacrificing their life for the greater
good.
A significant part of the problem with this
mindset is the amount of deference given to
doctors and medical personnel.
Indeed, this problem was also part of why
this happened in the first place.
Doctors are supposed to be specially trained
people who prioritize the wellbeing of their
patients, and the popular image of doctors
is one of overworked, earnest, well-meaning
individuals.
I don’t mean to imply doctors or other medical
personnel have it easy, the recent crisis
has made it abundantly clear how ill-prepared
our healthcare infrastructure was for this
sort of influx of patients, and nurses and
doctors have been under immense pressure in
the last few months, working in often dangerous
conditions without proper equipment.
However, a reality that disabled people are
often acutely aware of is the way doctors
interact with patients on a regular basis.
Based on the stories of disabled folks I know,
as well as research into this issue, doctors
are far too willing to ignore the concerns
of disabled people, and are influenced by
their own education and societal conditioning.
Doctors are trained with an ideal human
body in mind, one that functions within certain
parameters, and disability is seen as a flaw
to be corrected or treated, and society generally
promotes the idea that one’s relationship
to their disability is hostile.
It’s unsurprising, then, that they may perceive
a disabled individual’s life as being of
lower quality.
They are like a damaged machine, not operating
at peak efficiency, and the solutions one
has when presented with a broken machine are
to fix it, or throw it out.
If your phone screen cracks, you don’t accept
it, you fix it or throw it out.
Medicine in general has served to disempower
disabled people for a few hundred years, as
solutions focused entirely on what abled people
could do to fix them, rather than find ways
for disabled people to cope with their issues
and integrate into society.
This trend has partially altered course in
the last hundred years or so, but the attitude
is still ingrained in the institution of healthcare
as a whole.
The case I cited earlier had legal guardianship
given not to the people who had Hickson’s
best interests at heart, or the people who
advocated on his behalf, but the institutional
body that is expected to know the best way
to treat people.
There’s a can of worms I won’t go into
here about science in general being used as
a tool of institutions to disempower the general
population, but for now, medicine and healthcare
in specific have ingrained prejudices toward
disability that frame it as not only deviant
or undesirable, but fundamentally incompatible
with one’s wellbeing.
There are also a lot of racist ideas still
being taught to doctors which I can’t not
mention here, like that black people experience
pain differently from white people, which
almost certainly affected the decisions of
Hickson’s doctors.
Hickson’s doctors and the hospital where
he received care strongly deny all accusations
that their medical decisions were affected
by Hickson’s disability or race, but I don’t
exactly find these denials compelling, when
there is recorded evidence of one of Hickson’s
doctors emphasizing his low “quality of
life” as a strong factor in their decisions.
Michael Hickson was a human being.
He was a disabled black man whose life was
not valued by the medical staff entrusted
with it.
His wife and four children were forced by
the courts to sit back and watch as their
loved one died with no intervention, knowing
that at least in part, the decision to let
him die was based on devaluing his life.
Disposability isn’t just some abstract concept,
a theory that explains disabled people’s
role in capitalist society, it’s a mindset
that contributes to the deaths of disabled
people.
I wanted this topic to have its own video
because it’s a heavy one, and I don’t
like the idea of making it a footnote in a
larger point.
Michael Hickson deserved to live, and he shouldn’t
be relegated to being the third body paragraph
in an essay about disability.
The attitudes that underlined the decision
to let him die are worth understanding, so
that we can more effectively combat them.
I’ll have relevant links in the description
to this video where you can learn more, and
show your support to Michael Hickson’s family.
Please note, the GoFundMe for Hickson’s
family, at time of recording, has reached
its goal of $10,000, but if you have a few
extra bucks lying around,
 I’m sure they wouldn't mind the extra support.
