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I was walking with Emir and Ayelen through our neighborhood grocery store the other day. I don’t know what was going on, but it was a busy day there. We bumped into five different classmates and their families from both Emir’s and Yaya’s school. Emir’s middle schooler friends were like, “hi.” Yaya’s peers are still cute huggers. Kids are just so comfy around each other, but their parents most of the times seem to be confused. Maybe not all of this confusion is related to the fact that Emir and Yaya have Down syndrome, but I can’t help but feel the connection between the disability and the, “How do you know them?” question. That’s what I call the Inclusion Problem, and I think we can fix it.
Reflecting on this very typical situation in our lives, I sat and started writing once again about inclusion.
I started reflecting on my generation – the parents of my children’s classmates. It is “us” who grew up segregated from diversity in an attempt to “protect” us from the atypical behaviors of our peers with disabilities. We are the ones who were placed in mainstream classes created especially for the typical student to avoid the distraction and trouble that nontypical peers can bring. We are the ones who have truly missed out when we think about how the lack of inclusion has affected our lives and perceptions as adults.
The reality is that we lost an opportunity to develop empathy. We didn’t have the chance to celebrate diversity. We missed a crucial life lesson: to learn from interaction instead of judging out of ignorance. We have so much trouble with inclusion as adults simply because we never had a chance to enjoy it naturally as children.
Because we missed our natural opportunities to understand inclusion as children, we have grown without those foundations. This leaves us in the present time choosing to isolate ourselves or be a part of protected groups whose members are very much like us. What many times we fail to understand is that by segregating ourselves, we choose to feed our minds with prejudice. We become close-minded people because we are missing interaction with people who are different from us. Without this interaction, it is simply impossible for us to learn to celebrate a different reality. In fact, we are so scared of diversity that we just choose to hide our prejudice behind labels or groups that justify prejudice as a value, perpetrating the sad consequences that isolation and segregation can cause for everyone.
Maybe if we had grown up included in classrooms along with peers with all kind of abilities and different ways of expression and existence, just maybe, we wouldn’t have been so shocked when we were told that our own child had a disability. Perhaps we wouldn’t feel the urge to fix or change people with disabilities because we would know that they are just perfect the way they are. Maybe we are the victims of the lack of inclusion that we have experienced for so long. Perhaps all that we needed to become better people was that natural exposure to diversity.
We have this absurd tendency to refer to inclusion with a focus on what “they” gain. What if we choose to change the approach and we focus on ourselves and our gains as individuals? In understanding that inclusion is actually convenient for us and we, neurotypical people, benefit from living inclusive lives. What if we viewed inclusion not as a favor for people with disabilities, but as a favor for ourselves, giving us the opportunity to evolve?
I think there are two kinds of people here: those who don’t know but once they learn they understand the value that inclusion and diversity can bring to all and those who don’t know and don’t want to know, so they tend to use their experience or professional preparation to attack inclusion. These people believe that inclusion is not for all, but is only for some who meet an arbitrary criteria to be in a typical classroom. However, besides the formal data collection that intends to measure the learning ability of a student, there are things that we are never going to be able to measure, at least not in a typical way. And I am not just talking about people with disabilities, I am talking about all of us. In the end, lack of inclusion affects everyone, and when someone tries to differentiate some from the others, they demonstrate the true need for inclusion: to be so focused on celebrating diversity, we don’t create differences among us where there needn’t be.
