I’m stupid. Stupid and lazy. I’ve been told that my whole life.

 

I’ve also been described as brilliant and hardworking.

 

The truth is, the interplay of my strengths, my disabilities, and various environments I’ve been in can lead me to appear as, and to function as, brilliant, or stupid, or something else.

 

I have spent nearly my whole life managing stupidity.

 

Not managing stupid people, you understand. I don’t believe in stupid people.

 

But people (one of whom is often me) who function as stupid because of environmental barriers, or who are treated as stupid.

 

I once sat in a grad student lounge and watched a graduate teaching assistant slowly walk an undergraduate student through a philosophical text. The student, who identified as having a learning disability, was having a great deal of trouble extracting the argument from the written words. Once it was explained to him in familiar terms, however, he was clearly taking it on board and grappling with the ideas. Both men were working hard, and they were making real progress.

 

I was a teaching assistant myself at the time, and I was idly thinking about how much I loved my students with learning disabilities to whom so little in philosophy came easily and who still stuck with it, who kept coming to office hours and raising their hands, and worked as hard as the young man across from me. I was thinking what a joy it was to teach students so eager to learn, and how lucky we were to have those students.

 

When the young man left my colleague turned to the rest of us and sighed. “He tries so hard,” he said. “Too bad he has no intellectual merit.”

 

(I had no idea how to respond in the moment. I wrote him a letter later.)

 

If I don’t have the tools I need to understand, to process, to express myself effectively, I’m not going to do those things. And you’re probably going to see my poor performance but not the reasons for it, and assume I just can’t do those things. You’re probably going to assume I am short on “intellectual merit,” in other words.

 

You’re probably going to treat me like I am just unable to do what I don’t do, which means not giving me more tools and probably conveying to me that I can’t (and that message, repeated often enough, sinks in), and I will keep not doing those things, but also I’m likely to become less and less engaged in trying because I don’t like how I’m treated.

 

Back when I was teaching, I had multiple students with learning disabilities — wonderful students who were a joy to teach — who wanted to hire tutors at their own expense rather than come to my office hours “because I don’t want you to think I’m stupid.” That’s a well-earned fear. It comes from having been treated as stupid over and over.

 

They were treated as stupid because they did not learn, or did not express their learning, to the degree expected.  There may have been some innate limitations that contributed to that — you can expect every math student to become another Srinivasa Ramanujan, but even if they have all the tools possible, most won’t — but a lot of it is that they have been expected to learn and to demonstrate learning in ways that simply do not support them.

 

But because they have been forced into functioning as “inadequate” scholars (compared to students who have been provided with at least minimally adequate tools) and then that “inadequate” functioning has been attributed to their own “lack of intellectual merit,” they are less and less likely to get improved access to better tools.

 

So now people get treated as stupid, and may even think they are stupid — and they have to manage stupidity — not their stupidity, because people aren’t stupid but the phenomenon of stupidity — by such means as working extra hours to pay for tutors so their profs and teaching assistants don’t think of them as stupid.

 

I once taught a module on calling for help to a group of women who lived in a group home for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Some had grown up in state institutions and some in family homes. None of them had been in regular classrooms. They wanted to know how to help if one of their housemates had an emergency.

 

I was feeling pretty proud of myself. We had talked about what is and is not worth calling Nine-One-One over. We had talked about when a situation might call for police, or firefighters, or paramedics. We had talked about and practiced giving the address clearly, and about what other kinds of information might be important to convey. We had talked about staying on the line until help arrives or the Nine-One-One operator says it’s time to hang up. I thought I had given these women everything they needed. Yeah, I thought I was doing fine.

 

And then at the tail end of the last conversation I had a horrible thought. “Hey, Sarah,” I said, “What’s the number to Nine-One-One?”

 

Blank faces looked back at me.

 

If you know the number to Nine-One-One (it’s 9-1-1), it’s really obvious. If you don’t, and if you are accustomed to all kinds of thimgs having all kinds of confusing names, it’s not. It’s really not. And instead of preparing these women to be ready to take decisive action in an emergency, as they had asked me to, I had set them up to fail badly at a moment when failure would have had real consequences. I was not doing fine. I had prepared them to be stupid at a moment when they could have been brilliant and saved a life. And they weren’t going to ask, because their whole lives they had been encouraged to accept that they were just not the kind of people who know things, to accept that nobody is going to slow down and make sure they have the tools to learn.

 

So then everybody else learned the number to Nine-One-One from me, and I learned something about lesson planning from them. But it almost didn’t happen — and if there had been an emergency, and someone had shouted “Hey, Sarah, call Nine-One-One!” the story later would have been “Sarah can’t even dial a 3-digit phone number.” Nobody would have thought it was I who had failed. In a real sense in that context, I couldn’t fail: every bad outcome would have been blamed on the women. Because in that situation they were seen as stupid, and I was seen as smart.

 

That’s privilege and oppression for you.

 

I’m at high risk for this spiral, because it is known that I have cognitive disabilities and because the tools provided by default often don’t work for me. But that risk is mitigated and sometimes eliminated because I can make effective use of some tools that are routinely available and in certain circumstances I don’t trip the “stupid” stereotypes but the “intelligent” and “educated” ones.

 

So here I am, stupid and brilliant, lazy and hardworking. It’s very confusing. I don’t know who I am.

 

The truth is, I’m neither stupid nor brilliant. I have found very effective ways to do some things with the kinds of supports that are routinely provided, so I do them well and people respond by assuming I have innate talents. But some barriers stop me in my tracks, some supports are inadequate, and sometimes I stumble, I fall, I fail miserably so that people assume I have innate and insurmountable mental deficits.

 

The truth is that in some ways the world — the social and intellectual world that is constantly made and remade by its participants — around me is well-suited to me, and this is a form of privilege; in other ways it is poorly-suited, and this is a form of oppression. One of our words for this kind of privilege is “intelligence”; one of our words for this kind of oppression is “stupidity.” But intelligence/stupidity is not seen as a forms of structural injustice; the concepts are associated with innate (and largely unalterable) traits.

 

What I am not saying is that there is no variation among us. Again, not everyone can ever be a Srinivasa Ramanujan, or even one of those of his peers who made it to Cambridge in part because they were offered much more support as children than he ever was, and who would have needed far more than the few moments of good fortune that enabled Ramanujan to ride his talents that far.

 

It is not that the people we know as great minds do not have talents few of us share or that they haven’t worked hard to make use of them; it is that talent and hard work are not enough. Billions of people — all people — have real talents, which they are never able to even see recognised as talents, let alone to develop, because the supports and tools which would make those things possible are not there. And yes, I am explicitly including people with intellectual disabilities, who are regarded as the most innately limited, and who in every case have talents to develop if only they can be provided the right tools.

 

This is why we in the community of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have something called “the presumption of competence.” The basic idea, first formulated by Anne Donnellan, is that if you cannot be sure which of several things is true, you should adopt the “least dangerous assumption.” People with power will do greater harm to a person who is capable of developing their talents with the right supports by not bothering to try to find the right supports than they will to someone for whom no right supports are possible by trying to find ways to support them better, for instance, so when you cannot tell, you should assume that better supports are possible.

 

In practice, the presumption of competence looks like the attitude that everyone is worth fully including, that people who seem untalented probanly do not have the tools needed to display and use their talents, combined with willingness and some skill to work on accommodating them better.

 

And in the real world, few people are presumed to be competent. There is a double bind in cognitive disability: sometimes you are considered “not disabled enough” to be worth accommodating because “you should be able to get by if you try,” and sometimes you are considered “too disabled” to be worth accommodating because “really, what’s the point?” Either way, though, you are forced to function as a stupid person because you are not accommodated.

 

And so your relationship to stupidity — and to laziness, which is what it is often called when you are functioning as stupid but others still insist that you could find a way to function as intelligent, if only you wanted to enough — must be carefully navigated to preserve your self-image, your reputation, and your access to opportunities to use your talents.

 

So yes, I’m stupid and lazy. By which I mean that my mind is not one of the ones society is set up to accommodate, and some people think that the result of my inability to navigate the world as it is is down to innate incapacity and others think I don’t try hard enough.

 

But I am not without some massive privilege here, so also, I’m brilliant. Many people are usually treated pretty consistently: they may be thought of as brilliant or smart or normal or stupid — and because the reflection of their minds that the world offers them is so consistent, they come to see themselves that way.

 

And so at the same time that I am trying to negotiate my own relationship to stupidity — again, not innate stupidity, but the idea and the trap of stupidity — a fair amount of what I do involves communication, which means I have to navigate others’ relationship to stupidity.

 

Nobody likes to feel stupid. Nobody likes to function as stupid. Nobody likes to be treated as stupid.

 

If you have a role which involves trying to get people to do things or support them in doing things by means of communication — if you are a teacher or a politician, a political organizer or a benefits counselor, a salesperson or a manager, an information and referral specialist or a doctor, a team leader or a journalist, a fundraiser or a tour guide, a direct support professional or an advertiser, a mentor or any of a thousand other things — you have some ability to affect how some of the people you deal with function: will they, in their dealings with you, be able to develop and use their talents, or will they be trapped in the enforced stupidity of a lack of accommodation?

 

We can communicate in ways that make other people feel stupid, or feel like we think they are stupid; we can communicate in ways that make it impossible for them to understand, process, and express themselves effectively. We can communicate in disabling ways.

 

Or we can comnunicate in enabling ways.

 

What counts as an enabling way, an inclusive way, a way that permits people to use and display their inherent strengths, varies from person to person. But one begins with the presumption of competence. There are some basic approaches that work pretty well for general communication, like plain language and easy read. There are more carefully thought-through approaches for specific audiences. There is a lot of earning people’s trust and a lot of trial and error to find out what works. And it’s worth it.

 

Look, we are all different. We all have limitations. But we also all have strengths. And we also all tend to overestimate the innate limitations in others — and often ourselves — and miss many of the barriers, and to therefore miss our on those strengths.

 

I don’t believe in stupid people. But stupidity hurts.