I have been thinking about something the young self-advocate Bobby Lucas says.

When he talks about winning his fight to be fully included in the regular classroom, he talks about being “smart again.”

It’s really tempting to take that as “I feel stupid when they make me go to the resource room and do work that doesn’t challenge me, and now I don’t feel that way.” Or even “When I am in the resource rooom they treat me like I’m stupid but in the regular classroom they treat me like I am smart.” I’ve no doubt both things are true; Bobby is hardly the first person to make those observations.

But — and let me openly acknowledge that I haven’t spent enough time sorting through Bobby’s theoretical work (that is, the things he says and does to explore and deepen the way he he understands the world to work, and to conmunicate that understanding to others — and as Eric Warwick has pointed out, everyone who takes volitional action in the world theorizes) to have any confidence whether this is what he intends — what if we take him literally?

What if, in the regular classroom, Bobby is smart, and in the resource room he is not?

Because here’s the thing: how intelligent or how stupid you function as is to a significant extent about how well or poorly you are supported.

“What kind of supports do they need? What do we need to come up with? What is the plan that needs to be done? You know, figure it out. Don’t just sit there on the problem. Find the solution!”

– Bryon Murray, self-advocate

Let’s talk about the section of Emma Van der Klift’s and Norman Kunc’s book Being Realistic isn’t Realistic that addresses ability and opportunity as two necessary components of performance.

“It is widely seen as self-evident in our Western Culture that ability leads to opportunity,” Emma and Norm tell us. “If you’re good at something, the reasoning goes, then those skills, talents, and abilities will certainly foster opportunity. We rarely question this belief. When it comes to disability, fostering ability in both schools and human services has traditionally focused on teaching life skills as a prerequisite for entering the “regular” community. This approach fits with an equally unquestioned belief that improving a disabled person’s ability is the best way to improve their quality of life and increase the likelihood of later opportunities. But is this necessarily so?“

They conclude, after brief reflection upon the evidence, that it is not.

“Opportunity is determined by social convention, not ability. That is, opportunity is not afforded to those who are most able but to those our society deems worthy of that opportunity.”

Let me push that a little farther: ability is fluid within limits (I will never duplicate the achievements of the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan no matter what, but there is a range of performances in mathematics I am capable of, from the hopeless inability I displayed in 10th grade geometry to the real skill I honed in logic, model theory, and set theory classes. Just dont ask me to study calculus. I have adopted the position that what happens under the curve, stays under the curve), and those limits are largely determined by opportunity.

We have the formula backwards.

Look, we all know that disabled people live in a world in which access — or the power to use things to achieve desired ends — is inequitably offered. Much as we tend to reserve the word “access” to refer to power that is often denied disabled people the power to use things because those things are designed to require abilities that not everyone has, any marginalized status comes with barriers to access. If you want to take your group to DC to lobby your Senators, for instance, some people do not have access to that trip because the medical equipment they need can’t go, or because because they can’t afford to take a personal care attendant or direct support worker, or because they can’t pay their own way,or because they can’t get time off or childcare, or because safe interstate travel requires documents, or because ….

We all know that the services we offer people depend on the kind of people we think they are, including what abilities they. That’s why all the testing. That’s (part of) why it matters whether you say the R word or “learning disability” or “intellectual disability.” That’s why the National Council on Severe Abli- sorry, Autism (NCSA), is working so hard to establish that there is such a thing as severe autism, which neurodiversity advocates both pretend does not exist and spend way too much time talking about, and which requires by its nature the suspension of rights-based protections. It’s why IEPs are basically annual mandatory meetings in which children are portrayed as incompetent.

If you are living in Oregon and working for part-time minimum wage, and your partner is working 4 jobs, and you are barely making ends meet for your 5 kids, and your youngest keeps getting kicked out of daycare because she seems to have ADHD, and you don’t have documented status or health care, and you have to keep a close watch on your eldest because he can’t be trusted not to talk back to a cop while Black yet … we will never know what kind of DC lobbyist you could have been.

But for those of us who need services and supports, what we do or don’t get determines what we can do. And therefore they play an important causative role in what we actually do. And then what we actually do is used to determine what kind of people we are, including what abilities they have.

In other words, this formula is backwards, too.

Echoing my own experience, a self-advocate, Bryon Murray, has reported, “You know, when I travel, I hear a question: ‘what happened to people with the really bad behaviour? What happened to people who hurt themselves or hurt others?’ Supports! If you take the Bryon that you see today, 11 years ago I’d be slamming my head towards the wall. I’d be biting people because I feel trapped. I’d be running away. Run. Don’t understand. Don’t understand what traumatic brain injury does. Don’t understand disabilities. Not accepting it, denying it. Then when I got my supports, this is who I am. You know what? Instead of asking that stupid question, ‘What happened to people with behaviour?’ – okay, what kind of supports do they need? What do we need to come up with? What is the plan that needs to be done? You know, figure it out. Don’t just sit there on the problem. Find the solution!”

Social psychology offers us the insight of the fundamental attribution error: we tend, as a species, to overestimate the role of a person’s innate nature, and to underestimate the role of situational factors, when explaining their observed behavior. In the resource room, Bobby Lucas’s vocabulary differs from his abled classmates’ because of his Down Syndrome, not because his educators make sure to use smaller, simpler words around him than his classmates hear because they do not believe he is capable of more. Bryon Murray and I smashed our heads into walls because we were inherently self-injurious, not because we were forced into situations where we could not cope. Black Lives Matter activists are in the streets because they don’t bother with “more appropriate” methods, not because 400 years of “more appropriate” methods has still not ended in a real reckoning with what it means to be Black in a white supremacist society. Fundamental attribution error.

Interestingly, if you show an audience a video of a police interrogation shot at an angle where the suspect’s face and the back of the cop’s head, they are more likely to attribute any confession to consciousness of guilt; if you show the exact same interrogation with the angle adjusted so you see the cop’s face and the back of the suspect’s head are shown, the confession is more likely to be attributed to coercion. We attribute significance to whatever we are paying attention to rather than identifying what is significant and paying attention to that. If you went to school to become a special ed teacher or work in human services, there’s a good chance you’d be better at your job if you had taken a class in misdirection from a stage magician.

So when people say, “you are nothing like my child!” (or “my student!” or “my client!” or “my individual!” (blergh)) as an effort to shut down discussions of how to improve their child’s (or whoever’s) circumstances, they are often pointing out that the advocate’s circumstances are nothing like their child’s circumstances. Which was the point.

So back to Bobby Lucas.

Yes, he is included enough — he is getting good enough services and supports in the regular classroom — that he actually functions, and is seen as, smarter than when he was in the resource room — and can trade on that later in his educational career to further fine-tune services and supports, and advocate for more opportunity. That’s not just about physical presence (Emma and Norm have more on that); resentfully dumping a disabled kid in the regular classroom and letting them flounder isn’t inclusion. It’s about the fit of services and supports.

The NCSA crowd has a point to this extent: their loved ones aren’t getting quality services and supports in the community. But instead of calling for better services and supports, they want to pull all community services and supports on the theory that the failure to benefit adequately from community services and supports is inherent in their loved ones, not a sign that their loved ones are being shortchanged. Fundamental attribution error.

The BIPOC and not-cis-male community sees a failure of services and supports too, because the needs of white cisgender boys and men — even marginalized white cisgender boys and men — are different, in a society that consistently privileges white cisgender boys and meds, from the needs of people socialized in a world that does not privilege them in those ways. But those are the services they get (at best; often it is services customized a bit to the heavily-groomed preferences of parents of inadequately supported white cisgender boys and men, designed to meet the needs of professionals who believe they are entitled to control disabled lives while decorating their curriculum vitae with sciencey-sounding accomplishments).

Let me repeat the words of my teachers and friends: “[O]pportunity is not afforded to those who are most able but to those our society deems worthy of that opportunity.” And that has tremendous consequences for who gets to “be smart.”

Congratulations, Bobby Lucas, on your win. May it be followed by a tsunami of wins for other students who want, and deserve, the opportunity to be as smart as you are. And may you continue to use the opportunities you have been afforded, and the support of your loved ones, in your work as a self-advocate to make the world better for others.