Transcripts for Everyone!

Introducer: We're going to welcome someone who doesn't need an introduction, but here he is - here's Ari.

[applause]

Ari: Well, thank you very much. Can you all hear me? Alright, great.

Thank you very much for having me. First I want to assure you that this conference is starting on time - Autistic Standard Time, to be precise. [laughs] But, it's very exciting to be here, and I want to thank Syracuse University and the organisers of this conference for putting this together.

To me, this is something of a historic event, because when I got involved in the neurodiversity movement, y'know, the only neurodiversity-oriented conference I was familiar with was Autreat, and the idea that we would have conferences at a major university, or that we would be receiving this level of interest from the academy, was one that was, at the time, frankly very alien to us; we were still this strange idea that people talked about on blogs, y'know - harboured the peculiar concept that autistic people could be a minority group like any other.

And, y'know, what's exciting for me about this coming together is, I see this symposium as the beginning, not only of a process that's been going for some time - the infiltration of the neurodiversity movement into academia - but also as the continuation of the recognition of neurodiversity and of autistic self-advocacy, and of this broad scope of activity which we could refer to as "moving forward the frontiers of the disability rights movement", as things that are being accepted into the main stream of American life. And that is something that a lot of people have been very resistant to; there are people who look at the neurodiversity movement and, y'know, think that we are trying to advance some radical or strange concept by saying that autistic people and people with other disabilities should not be considered a second-rate minority group; that we should be considered equal citizens of our socieity; that the focus of autism advocacy should be to try and create a world that is better for autistic people, as opposed to creating a world that has no autistic people. There are people who think that that is a very novel and unique idea, and they don't like novel and unique ideas.

But by moving forward on these kinds of events, we send a message that this is not something that's happening at the fringe. This is something that's happening over the course of our society, and it is not going to go away.

Now, in keeping with that, I think one of the things that always jumps out at me at these kinds of events is a sense of history. And I believe that history speaks to us, y'know, and I mean this in a number of senses. First, I want to acknowledge the history from which the neurodiversity movement springs. If not for the fact that Jim Sinclair, who's somewhere in the audience, ah... Jim, right back there [points], and he's going to be presenting this afternoon... wrote "Don't Mourn For Us" when I was five years old, I certainly would not have gotten involved in the autistic self-advocacy movement or the neurodiversity movement. I imagine the same could be said of many of the people who are involved with it today. So, some recognition of the history of our own movement is important.

But equally so, it's essential that we recognise that neurodiversity is an outgrowth of disability rights. And disability rights is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. I often think of an anecdote a friend of mine told me. She's at a major midwestern research university, and she told me about how when she joined the faculty, she had heard about something that had occurred twenty years before she joined. In the 1940s or 50s, this university decided to take the novel step for the time of hiring female faculty members in the hard sciences, and... for the time it was a novel idea! "Oh, a woman could be teaching chemistry and physics...", y'know, things that involved the mind. [taps head] And, y'know, there were opponents to this, this controversial new plan, new policy. And one of the issues that emerged was they discovered that they had a little bit of a problem: the science faculty building had no women's restrooms in it. [laughs] 'cuz... why would a science faculty building need women's restrooms within it?

And imediately, of course, when the opponents of this new policy realised that they would have to pay money to retrofit some of the existing bathrooms, or rooms to make them women's restrooms, they started talking about how this was assigned(?), the entire policy was misguided, because look at how expensive integration is!

Now, of course, today, when we build a building, we generally remember that it should include both men's and women's restrooms. And we're starting to remember - starting to remember - that it should be accessible for people with disabilities. We haven't, y'know, gotten all the way there, even on those issues of physical architecture, but when we move forward the conversation to discussions around schools, or discussions around curriculum, or discussions around events, or any number of other things... that component of access, that component of thinking the way to do it right from the beginning, and the cost of doing it right from the beginning, and to do it in a way that's accessible and inclusive, is often forgotten.

Now, this is something that is not new to the neurological disability world, and we often talk about autism as the main area where the neurodiversity movement is growing and playing out its perspectives, and goals, and objectives, but really it's much broader than that, and I'm very pleased that there are here today a number of people from other disability communities that see the neurodiversity construct as something that's relevant to them.

But this is something that's frankly not novel to the neurodiversity movement. There have been people who have been fighting over what the proper objective of disability advocacy should be, all the way back to not just the last century... which wasn't that long ago nowadays, but the century before that... if you go back to 1880, another time period when people think about disability rights, 1880 was the year in which the very first self-advocacy group was formed, the National Association of the Deaf. And, the National Association of the Deaf was formed for a variety of reasons, but one of them - and one of the main reasons why it grew very quickly after that - was a growing concern about the American Eugenics movement.

How many of you have heard of Alexander Graham Bell? [hands go up] Good, you know, inventor of the telephone, and, y'know, because this is Syracuse, you're probably also familiar with the fact that Bell was a very strong supporter of eugenics. To read a brief quote from Bell: "Those who believe as I do - that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world - will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the objective of applying a remedy." So, as we can see, Bob Wright of Autism Speaks is not the first man who was made rich by telecommunications and decided to subscribe to a eugenics philosophy with regards to disability! Going all the way back to that early period in American disability history, there were those that defined their ideas about what the country should be striving for about disability NOT as 'greater inclusion, greater employment, greater quality of life' but a world that only had the people within it that were deemed as 'appropriate' and 'acceptable' to their modes of thinking.