Come back to new day northwest.
My next guest is a Seattle based writer,
educator and activist for disability rights.
Her new book, being seen one death,
blind woman's fight to end
ableism is out tomorrow.
And please welcome to new day.
Elsa Humason,
thank you for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
So first of all,
I look at your book, keeps it real.
I mean you, you, you're pretty
much straight out and say, hey,
this is an inspirational story.
This is my story.
Why does your memoir go
against the grain? In that
way, because for every disabled person,
we're sort of expected to be the inspiration.
And so everybody looks at me and they say,
oh, you're wearing a nice outfit.
How did you pick that out?
You must be so amazing to
do that when you're blind.
And it's like, no, I'm a grown up.
So I I get that a lot.
And other disabled people get that a lot.
And most memoirs lean into it.
They say, oh look at me.
I went and climbed Everest.
Ohh look at me.
I did this thing and I actually want
people to not look at me that way.
I see that it makes sense.
And you know you have been blind
and deaf since birth. So what?
We're having a conversation right now.
Can you tell us how this
happened?
So I'm wearing bilateral hearing aids.
They're very sparkly.
I love the sparkly hearing aids,
and they help me with amplification.
We're currently in a very quiet room,
which means that it's really easy for
me to have a conversation with you.
If this were a loud bar,
much more difficult.
I also read lips.
We're close enough that I can read lips.
If you were further away,
that would be a lot harder for me.
But being deaf blind doesn't just mean
completely blind, completely deaf,
completely unable to speak.
With your mouth,
there's a really wide,
vast experience for deaf blindness,
and that includes mine.
You said people comment on how
you can get yourself dressed,
but not only it's your life is not
what a lot of people might imagine.
You drive, you travel independently.
You're a Seattle mom who likes to hike.
You've refused to be a
victim of your circumstance.
What do you attribute that to?
Well, I don't drive.
Washington State says that a me
driving would be a bad life choice.
They drove a car for the book to see what
that was like and it's not a good idea.
But I don't want to live the life
that society told me to have.
Institutionalization of disabled
people didn't really stop until 1990.
And my parents were told that they
should stick me in an institution and
forget about me. Didn't want that.
Didn't want to live a quiet little
life where I didn't do anything.
And so, yeah,
I'm a Seattle mom who takes my kids on hikes.
I am involved in the PTA.
I have a dog, I have a cat,
I have a day job,
and I do all of the things that I want to do,
even with a body that's not.
Adopted to a non disabled society.
Yeah, we'll talk about the PTA,
you and I later. But let's talk
about the day-to-day realities of
someone who lives with disabilities.
Why was that important to discuss?
Because most people don't want us
to live out in public. It's hard.
You go to a building and it's hard
to find the entrance because you
can't see where the entrance is.
For wheelchair users,
all of the wheelchair ramps are in the back.
They're never in the front.
That's where the garbage is.
For me, as a blind person,
I've been in elevators that were
specifically for the garbage,
and the ADA is supposed to protect us.
But the reality is,
is that the ADA needs to be
updated to support real lives,
not partial lives.
And that's what people expect.
They expect that you can just kind
of get by and what you're given
and not get by on what you need
and not. And trying to skirt
that law is is unacceptable on
top of writing and the activism.
They're also a media studies professor.
How are disabled people represented
in the media? In your opinion,
very badly. 90% of the time,
if you see a blind woman on screen,
she is arms out, looking around,
can't find your face, wants to touch
it to find out what you look like.
Which, I'm sorry, we live in a pandemic.
I shouldn't be touching your face.
But also looking for walls,
looking for things.
That's not how it works.
When you saw me walk in here today,
was I reaching my arms out?
No, no, I just used my cane.
On the step, stepped up,
found the car.
Yeah, it was fine.
And so media gives us this
image of helpless people.
It gives us this image of
people who can't do things.
And that sticks in people's brains.
It really, really does those movies,
the films that we've seen.
How are those portrayals so harmful?
Well, it means that if I'm out on
the street and I look at my cell
phone to figure out where I am
because I can't read street signs.
Excuse me? No, you're fine.
Sometimes people will come up to me and say,
are you really blind? And they'll try
to people actually say that 100% no,
they do. They do. Come on, really. Yeah,
they do. They do that. And they,
they try to tell me I'm not really
blind because I can look at my phone.
Ohh, I I can't even with the audacity,
right? But go back to that concept of
institutionalization for a second, right?
We're supposed to be behind closed doors,
not in public, the instant that
a disabled person is in public.
Our bodies become public commentary and
our experience becomes public commentary.
And if you've seen all these movies that
make you think you know what a blind person
or a deaf person looks like, you feel.
Or at least maybe you don't feel like this.
But a lot of people do feel like they get
to tell me what my experience is like
and whether or not I'm a blind person.
How do we how do we end
ableism? Or at least try
to start it, starts with telling your
kids that being disabled is OK. Hmm.
It starts with inviting blind and
deaf people into your classrooms and
having them talk about what it's like.
It starts with not doing what
randos on the street do to me.
It starts with recognizing inside
of yourself that you don't know
what disability looks like,
and also that it would be OK
if you became disabled because
everybody's really afraid of it.
And I have to tell you,
if you wear glasses, you have a disability.
If you wear hearing aids and you're
in your 70s. Still a disability.
Yeah, and we try to skirt around
that and pretend that's not true.
But it is.
It is a really
good, important thing to hold on to.
Thank you Elsa so much for coming on
the show, for sharing your story, for
sharing your truth and being just so real.
I really appreciated talking to you
today. Thank you so, so much for
having me. It wasn't real great.
Anytime. And if you. By the way, Elsa is
going to be launching the paperback
version of her book on Monday,
November 21st at Elliott Bay Book Company.
Hopefully you can go meet her there meantime.