Disability as Privilege

• Issues of privilege, power, and difference cause injustice, anger, conflict, and suffering.
• Everyone is part of the problem in a society that was not created by them, and can be part of the solution if they know how.
• Privilege and oppression provides potential to make a difference, requiring a conceptual framework grounded in research and everyday experiences.
• Defensiveness keeps people stuck, especially among men, whites, women, and minorities being blamed for oppression.
• The focus is almost entirely on gender, race, social class, disability status, and sexual orientation.

Disability as Privilege

• Non-disabled individuals may struggle to recognize disabled people's oppression due to disability's unique place in human life.
• Disability status differs from gender, race, and sexual orientation, can change during a person's lifetime, constant reminder of vulnerability and lack of control.
• Treating people with disabilities as invisible, inferior, or less than human, enables the denial of a basic condition.
• Cultural idea of being autonomous, independent, young, and strong is especially difficult for non-disabled people in the United States.
• The term "nondisabled" is preferable to "abled" because it highlights the reason for including disability issues.
• "Nondisability privilege" means not bearing the burdens and stigma associated with being identified as disabled.

Focus Areas

• The book does not include social class as an example of privilege, power, and differences due to nature and dynamics being beyond the scope of text..
• Focus on how differences lack inherent connection to social inequality, used as a basis for privilege and oppression.
• Social class differences are inherently about privilege and play a role in the forms of privilege that are the focus of this book.
• Upper-class whites can hire women of color for domestic work, benefiting from investments in industries that use people of color as cheap labor.
• Working-class whites have preferential treatment in hiring and promotion, access to unions or mortgages, and less vulnerability to police force.

Differences

• Achieving wealth/power protects Blacks/Latinos from racism.
• Children of elite black families in Ivy League colleges experience subtle microaggressions.
• Perspective is shaped, in some part, by social location as a white, heterosexual, cisgender, nondisabled, upper-middle-class male.
• The author supplements experiences with research of others, through coursework of class and capitalism, the sociology of gender, feminist theory, and race in the United States.

Chapter 1

• The Rodney King incident led to an exasperated question that echoed across the racial divide of US "Can we all get along?".
• 21st century evidence is very clear despite Obama's presidency the answer is no.
• People of color are singled out for arrest, prosecution, and punishment with drug crimes as an example.
• Segregation in housing and schools still exists.
• White families earn 20x more than black families.
• Whites can be 50% less likely to be unemployed that black/latinos.
• White people’s income is on average 44/60% greater than blacks/latinos.
• Some white readers may be put off by “privilege," “racism,” "white,” and white privilege.
• Defensive language often stems from misperceptions that need clarification.

Social Issues

• Gender equity struggles continue, men earn 30% more than women.
• Most women are confined to lower status jobs.
• Men get paid more than women and are more likely to advance to supervisory positions like nursing.
• One in five college students sexually assaulted during college, sexual assault pervades the military.
• LGBT people still face harassment, discrimination, and violence despite signs of acceptance like same-sex marriage.
• 54 million disabled US residents are vulnerable to abuse and stereotyped as damaged,helpless, and intelligent.

Solutions

• Cannot survive without community, feel belonging, and look to others for validation.
• We want to be encouraged todo our best and also be valued for it.
• Treating one another with decency and respect, appreciating the best in each other is needed.
• The simple truth is that there is no such thing as abstract groups and the whites are not more abstract in the group.
• There is no way one group difference can involve just one of us.
• "the "problem" of race cannot be just a problem of being black, Asian, Arab, Sioux, or Latino".
• It also means being more willing to solve the problems that face us all and be more creative and generous and giving.
• People who have privilege must feel obligated to solve the problem of privilege, and to do something.
• Difficulties arise when naming issues like oppression, but we have to reclaim and make use of discredited words to make sense of how things are.
• It must be realized that system that was inherited at birth.
• Stepping back and looking at what the language points to is important and making changes.