“I was just trying to help,” is a refrain disabled people hear nearly every time they go out and someone tries to foist their assistance on a body. People grab the arm wielding the cane or holding the handle of a guide dog harness. They push wheelchairs without asking. They make assumptions the disabled person wants something they don’t want and end up insulted because their help was denied, rebuffed, explicitly handed back to them.
Once upon a time, I was living in Pittsburgh and I was waiting at a bus stop. Lots of people were waiting at the bus stop. But a man walked up to me and asked, “Do you want to cross the street?”
I gave him an odd glance. After all, I was in the middle of the block. I don’t cross the street in the middle of the block.
“No, thank you,” I answered.
“Do you need to get somewhere?” The man persisted.
“No, thank you.” I maintained courtesy while wishing he would go away.
“Can I help you find something?” The man was determined to do something for me.
“No, thank you.”
In frustrated tones, he demanded, “Then what are you doing standing here?”
As if my standing there was any of his business.
“What,” I asked, waving my arm to encompass all the people around me, “are these people doing standing here?”
“Well,” the man said, “they’re waiting for a bus.”
My patience gone, I demanded, “Then what the hell do you think I’m doing here?”
He spluttered something incomprehensible and walked away.
When I told my father about this encounter, he said I shouldn’t have embarrassed the man.
I didn’t embarrass him; he embarrassed himself. He presumed that I couldn’t possibly be waiting for a bus despite me standing at a bus stop. To him, disabled people didn’t take buses. Or maybe he didn’t know the law and thought I couldn’t take a bus with my dog. Whatever his reasoning, he singled me out to annoy with his numerous questions to which he had no right to an answer.
Mind you, basic safety says don’t tell a stranger where you’re going or why you’re going there. I am often in big cities, so maintain these cautions. Yet stranger after stranger at corners, on L platforms, in hotel lobbies approach me and work with the assumption I must need help.
When I lived in Arlington, Virginia, I didn’t have a dog for a couple of years. My cane skills are quite good, and I knew my neighborhood well. One day, I crossed the street and a man blocked my path, asking, “Where are you going?”
“I can’t see that that’s any of you business,” I said, then tried to go around him.
He blocked my path again. “I’m a police officer,” he said as though that made a difference to me.
“I still don’t see why that gives you the right to ask me where I’m going,” I responded.
Of course it wasn’t. No manhunts were afoot. No crime scenes lay in the direction in which I was headed, no accident blocked the sidewalk. Yet he thought he had a right to stop me and demand I tell him where I was headed.
And he didn’t seem to comprehend that, regardless of what he said, I had no way of knowing whether he was a cop.
I’m sure his intentions were good. He just wanted to help. He probably intended to walk me to my destination, which was about twenty feet from the corner. Yet his intentions, like the man at the bus stop, were not good.
They were the kindness of ableism. The intentions were right; the attitude was incorrect.
Why would kindness ever be wrong? When it is ableist. When a person makes the presumption that the disabled person needs help.
Why, ask yourself, would that person in the wheelchair need me to push him? Why keep forcing aid upon the person when they request one to stop? Why would you grab a blind person’s arm? That’s not even the right way to guide a blind person. Why would you think a blind person couldn’t possibly be getting on a bus, walking into an expensive store, acquiring a passport?
If you wouldn’t grab a sighted person, don’t grab a blind person. If you wouldn’t push an able-bodied person up the sidewalk, don’t push a wheelchair up the block. And, for goodness sake, when you’re told to leave the person alone, for god’s sake, do it.
You were only trying to help because you thought that person needed help. You only thought that person needed help because that person has a disability. You thought the disability required the person to need help because you think of a person with a disability as being less capable than anyone else. This is ableism, pure and simple.
Do disabled people never need help? Of course not. Everyone needs help at times. I was standing on a busy corner in Chicago one day, where the traffic was so backed up, it covered the intersection. I couldn’t read the light because parallel traffic wasn’t getting through. I had my head tilted, listening for a pedestrian of whom I could request help, when a man called to me, “I’m a police officer. Do you need some help crossing?”
I smiled and nodded. He approached, never touched me, just guided me and my dog with his voice. And he had told me who he was first.
Here’s a story to demonstrate my sick sense of humor that often emerges when I’m sick of ableist pedestrians.
I was crossing a street when a woman grabbed my left arm, my dog handling hand and arm. This is actually quite dangerous because my dog can’t signal danger to me if I don’t have control of my left arm, so I was a little pissed she’d done this.
“That’s a good way to get yourself bitten,” I said.
The woman laughed. “That sweet little dog wouldn’t bite me.”
“I didn’t say the dog would,” I responded.
She dropped my arm like I was a porcupine and had just quilled her.
That “sweet little dog” was a Golden retriever and might have bitten her had he perceived her as a physical threat to me. He had nearly bitten my ex-husband when he knocked me down one day. Gave me the impetus to leave the asshole. I didn’t want to lose my dog because he was protecting me.
But that’s another story for another day. For now, think of why you are even offering, let alone foisting, your assistance on someone with a disability.
