I’m reading Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan at the moment, a great novel about obsession, race, class, and online idols, and one chapter in particular got me feeling sheepish. The line that stood out to me the most goes:
“It is how we can have a ‘name’, we can sit on the panels and talk about ‘diversity’, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we well, we know what Britain is and you don’t, buy my book to find out the Truth’.”
If you’ve ever spoken on a panel about diversity, there’s a strong chance that that also got you in the jugular, feeling both seen and ashamed. I write this to you in a Substack that you pay to read - a case and point has never been so easy to deliver - and as we are one sleep away from the polling stations opening for the Family and Care Referendums, I am learning a lot about activism and allyship online, and will learn more about the real life actions of activism and allyship when the results trickle in over the weekend.
A few years ago, I stopped writing the original Legless blog because I felt like access wasn’t improving in Dublin and that I was repeating myself to an audience that was only half listening. I picked Legless back up last year because I found that more and more of my peers were becoming more progressive and earnestly political, but their version of inclusion always fell short when it came to disabled people.
The confusion around the wording of the Care Referendum proves exactly that. The fact that GCN ran a cover story encouraging a Yes Yes vote on February 23rd, and then yesterday, March 6th, they released a statement that read:
“Over the course of the [Yes Yes] campaign, it has been highlighted that we were leaving a whole section of our community behind: those who live with disabilities and those who provide care.”
If you are disabled, or are in the position of a carer of being cared for, that’s a statement that has an overfamiliar sting. Being left behind is, unfortunately, par for the course for us, and we are quite used to tugging on the sleeves of our progressive and earnestly political friends to remind them that we are here too.
It’s amazing that the staff of GCN had the humility to admit that they took a wrong turn, but like many people I know, the progressive spin that this Referendum has taken took a lot of us for a ride.
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