I took the Disabled/Abled persons implicit bias test in which I had to sort pictures based on whether the individual appeared to be disabled/abled. I also had to sort pictures of disabled/abled individuals to be either good or bad. My results were that I have no preference between Disabled Persons and Abled Persons- which isn’t much of a shock to me. Growing up, I helped my family take care of my great-grandmother, who was disabled. I never viewed her as an inferior human being to more abled-body persons, such as myself. If anything, I held more respect for her being disabled. In high school, I also volunteered a lot with Special Olympics, a non-profit organization committed to supporting individuals with intellectual disabilities. These experiences definitely influenced my mindbugs to not view disabled persons as being somehow less valuable or preferable than abled-persons. At the end of the day, human life is a human life.
Critical Thinking
I think your test is a great example of how what we grow up with and consider normal effects our implicit biases throughout our lives. It’s also super cool that you worked with the Special Olympics!
I volunteered with Special Olympics while I was in high school, and it really was a great program that I think helped the disabled/abled persons culture in my school. At my (very large) school, we had the highest rate of disabled students out of all the schools in our county, and even though most students didn’t mind and embraced them as any other student, there were a couple of incidents of where obvious prejudice was shown. It wasn’t until my junior year, when we hosted a county-wide Special Olympics in our own football stadium, that disabled- and abled-bodied students got to hang out for an entire day, and it although it didn’t “end ableism,” I could feel some of those barriers come down between my peers.