Is a far-right white nationalist Republican candidate who is a white male SCI wheelchair user a good time to talk about why I think eugenics explains society's greater comfort with injury-caused disability? https://theslot.jezebel.com/my-dark-journey-into-the-soul-of-a-model-young-republic-1844324325?utm_campaign=Jezebel&utm_content=1597065921&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=twitter

It's pretty straight forward.

There are no 'bad genes' involved. It's an injury. It could happen to anyone 'healthy.' Being injured is not the same as being 'sick' or 'diseased' or being born with 'defects.'

The former can happen to 'healthy' people.

I'm waiting for a book to arrive about the origins of care homes in BC. And I'm told many were originally set up for men who came here alone to work at resource extraction jobs and became disabled from injury.

Colonialism & settler society desired 'fit' and 'able-bodied'

Our immigration laws specifically prohibited (and while less overt still do) the immigration of disabled people. But fit and abled men who became disabled while here were, to some extent, the cost of doing business - tho support was purely via charity.

So disabled by injury was 'tragic' and 'sad' but not dangerous or demonized in the way that other disabilities were.

People who became physically disabled via injury did not face forced sterilization for example.

The (obviously false) 'superiority' and purity of race politics that motivated eugenics doesn't perceive injury as a threat to their belief system or whiteness. Whereas a white person who is born disabled or has an illness is perceived to have inferior genes & therefore is.

There are 61 million disabled people in the United States.

It is estimated "17,730 new SCI cases occur each year and between 249,000 and 363,000 people are currently living with SCI in the United States"

So SCI accounts for a small fraction of disabled people & yet...

How many people's only concept of disability is a white male SCI wheelchair user?

Or a white female SCI wheelchair user if you live in BC.

Former Rick Hansen Foundation - founded to raise funds for SCI research - 'ambassadors.'

They are disabled people and experience oppression of ableism but in minds of some ableds they are ableds who are injured. Or as one of the murder ball players put it "we aren't *that* kind of disabled."

And honestly a lot of what helped inform my analysis of this is Peter Kavanagh's comments in this excellent but still frustratingly uncaptioned video from @cbc archives.

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/is-rick-hansen-man-in-motion-tour-doing-more-harm-than-good#:~:text=Not%20everybody%20agreed%20with%20Peter,and%20abilities%20of%20the%20disabled.

Peter Kavanagh points out the public appeal of this young white athlete who was injured in a car accident. He says 'the Crohn's tour' would not have same sex appeal and Rick Hansen should cease his traveling telethon & stop undermining crips fighting for structural change.

If you think of some of the celebrity supercrips (white, male, SCI), a big thing too is the dangled hope of some day walking again. So much money is poured into and made off of that.

For example - exoskeletons, which btw just happen to have military applications.

It's was interesting watching how this played out at GF Strong and funding of healthcare in present day.

SCI has their own gym. All the other disabled people share a gym.

BC Liberals changed the funding structure. So the type and time of your rehab wasn't determined by a physician based on your needs but by which category you fall into.

SCI is a category. (majority men)
I am not SCI. I have auto-immune disease (majority women).

So my category was catchment for basically everything not head injury and not SCI. My category meant that as someone who had been in hospital bed for years I got same rehab as someone who had a knee replacement.

Whereas the SCI program seemed to be geared towards preparing people to live as a disabled person, mine was preparing me to die.

The decision was made to put me in a power wheelchair not bc I needed one but bc 'eventually gonna get worse anyway so why bother?'

Btw, just because it's Twitter, I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean SCI folks don't aren't subjected to and harmed by ableism and inaccessibility same as rest of us. I'm just explaining why you can end up with a white nationalist wheelchair user imo.

ugh one too many words.

my body is having opinions about things while I'm trying to write this thread.