Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

And my feeling wasn’t righteousness or pride in having told the truth, it was horror that I had committed such a faux pas, and that if things like that happened you just weren’t supposed to talk about them. And you certainly weren’t supposed to announce it at a dinner party. Kate Christensen

The political sphere is where you engage with your humanity. You have not merely a right, you have an obligation to participate, to make sure the people, as a whole, are able to make good decisions, and pass good laws and treat you as a human. And if one group subjugates another, if it says 'You can talk about anything you want, except everything that matters to you,' then you are not a full member of the polity. - Eric J. Miller (Emphasis Added)

The averted gaze and a smothering of empathy - Matthew Scully

The editors of this weblog have looked for other blogs about the stigmatized disabled, that are actually by the stigmatized disabled rather than by those who help us, and so far have not found any. If they exist, they are rare and not well known. The reason is not hard to find. "Normal," "decent" society tacitly admits that the disability cohort are a targeted minority (as in the quote by the late "liberal" columnist Ms. Ivins which begins this post), but has failed to provide the civil rights remedies enacted for other persecuted groups. "There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities." - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons
The just-world hypothesis works, in part, by blaming the stigmatized disabled for the pervasive social targeting which marginalizes and disenfranchises them. "A familiar experience of our people is the case where our family, friends, or co-workers imply that we should have done better, considering our background; and completely ignore the crucial fact of our lives: Discriminatory social attitudes reduce our life chances." It is considered divisive and socially unacceptable to speak out about our situation, even though people like Ms. Ivins can allude to our second-class citizen status in full confidence that this is readily understood by their readership.
We who write this remember that most of our lives we ourselves kept silent. And there is an internal struggle against convention every time we add another post to this weblog. A struggle, like that described below, against the tendency to feel guilty about having been honest about a situation which is widely covered up:

Novelist Kate Christensen, author of the memoir Blue Plate Special, talks to Dave Davies about exposing her father’s abuse:

I remember looking up at the group of grownups [at a dinner party], and feeling an upwelling of anger at my father. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I don’t even know where it came from, what caused me to blurt out, ‘My father hit my mother and she cried,’ to the group.

And there was a silence, and my father was ashen, and there was a sort of collective in-drawing of breath from the people in the group, and I realized that was just not cool, what I had just said. And on the way home my father yelled at me for it, and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again! Don’t ever say something like that in front of my friends! You just really embarrassed me, and everyone was horrified and you should never do that again.’

And my feeling wasn’t righteousness or pride in having told the truth, it was horror that I had committed such a faux pas, and that if things like that happened you just weren’t supposed to talk about them. And you certainly weren’t supposed to announce it at a dinner party. - Blue Plate Special

But if we do not attempt a narrative of liberation, who will?