This week was focused on what the Kanye West incident tells us about disability in our culture.
- I wrote a brief blog post about it here, linking it to another post on the “pencil test.”
- It got a very good response, so I wrote another piece about it for CNN, building on the argument.
- That too got a big response, so I wrote another piece about disability as a spectrum, rather than a simple either/or binary.
- Finally, at the end of the week, I took two emails (which were emblematic of another hundred emails and comments), and wrote them into yet another post about Hidden Disabilities. In some ways, that may be the most important piece of the week, highlighting the voices of a skeptic who wants to be a good person, and a person whose disabilities cannot be seen.
This week embodies what I value about the blog. Any individual post might get from 100-2000 readers, but the posts are iterative, linking together, building a more complex argument or set of examples than any single piece of writing, and periodically poking through to mass media. I am grateful to each reader, each share, each comment.
I also wrote two other little posts.
- One about #JusticeForEthan, a topic to which I return again and again, and the terrible brother of the sheriff who wants to deny people with disabilities and families of people with disabilities their independence.
- Another about conference interviews, a practice in academia that perpetuates inequality. More on this next week when Vitae publishes an essay of mine.