Shame about disability is not innate but learned from a careless world

Evidence

I know something of how they feel. When I was a teenager, my mother had a severe stroke and permanently lost many of her physical abilities, and some of her cognitive ones. As her caregiver, I learned quickly about our world of carelessness and grew to recognize the looks of disgust and impatience from people who clearly believed that disability should be hidden away. Even so, I carried my own shame and was not always able to see the beauty in the different ways that human brains and bodies meet and interact with the world. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 725

Categorization

• XREF: Klein rooting her empathy in her mother’s stroke connects to her broader method of grounding political analysis in embodied, biographical experience rather than abstraction.