Crip Camp Documentary Notes and Quotes PDF

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Notes on quotes and information from Crip Camp Documentary, one of the media pieces/provocations in the course for the final exam and essay....

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Crip Camp Notes Started in 1951 → closed in 1977 due to financial difficulties Crip Camp → split adults, girls and boys → had counsellors in each room “Jimmy” Lebrecht - Spinda bifida ● Children his age (primary school) sent to institutions ● Dad told him. He had to be really outgoing and go up to people and introduce yourself because they’re not going to come up to you.” ● “Barriers all over the place” ● “At camp, everybody had something going on with their body. It just wasn’t a big deal.” ● “Because I was in public school, I wasn’t around other people with disabilities… I could come and go more or less as I pleased. And not everybody at the camp had those advantages… Some of them were isolated a lot of the time. You had people from institutions. ● Going back home → “I had to try to adapt. I had to fit into this world that wasn’t built for me.” ● “I really felt like I had overcome my disability.” ● “But because of the regulations being signed, the physical world around me began to become more accessible.” The Center for Independent Living ➔ “Is unique because it is run by the handicapped for the handicapped, a model for the rest of the nation. A center where the severely disabled help themselves.” ➔ “Goal is to make the handicapped self-sufficient.” ➔ Heumann → “You wanna live in a house, that that’s your right. Counsellors → Never had experience with people with disabilities → never seen so many in one place Denise Sherrer Jacobson → “It was so funky. But it was a utopia. When we were there, there was no outside world” ❖ “At home, some people had a hierarchy of disability.” ❖ The polios were on top because they looked more normal and the CPs were at the bottom. But at Jened you were just a kid. ❖ Went to live alone → “I was very isolated. I was homesick for jened. I had to take a bold step. I was an intern at United Cerebral Palsy.” ❖ Surgeon said/thought “How could she be sexaully active?” ❖ Decided to go back to school and get “a master’s in Human Sexuality ❖ Motorized chair first time in life → “It was very liberating.” ❖ “The ADA was a wonderful achievement. But it was only a tiny tip of the iceberg. You can pass a law, but until you change society’s attitudes that law won’t mean much.” Neil Jacobson ● Grad school for computer science

Larry Allisopn - Camp Director ❖ “Jened was an opportunity to try to do some different kinds of things” ❖ Started/opened in 50s → normal camp program → evolved in 60s and into 70s ❖ “What we tried to do was to provide the kind of environment where teenagers could be teenagers without all the stereotypes and the labels” ❖ “by product of the times… social experimentation” ❖ “We realized the problem did not exist with people with disabilities. The problem existed with people that didn’t have disabilities. It was our problem. So it was important for us to change.”

Judy Heumann - counsellor - contracted polio as a child and couldn’t walk ➢ “I felt like it was important to be inclusive, because i didn’t really have a lot of role models, as I was growing up, who had disabilities. It made people feel like they were more a part of what was happening.” ➢ “It was more free and open, than certainly what I was experiencing in my day-to-day life at home.” ➢ “It was an awakening that people saw me, not as Judy, but as somebody who was sick” ➢ Principal said she couldn’t enroll in school because she could not walk and would pose as a fire hazard. ➢ Enrolled in a Special Ed class → “The classes for disabled kids were in the basement. The other classes were upstairs. We would call the non-disabled kids “upstairs kids” ➢ Upstairs kids “they were allowed to come… meet us in our classroom and push our wheelchairs ➢ “And I think we respected each other, and we all felt that what we were saying was important.” ➢ “Even when we were that young, we knew that we were all being sidelined.” ➢ We didn’t wanna sideline anybody. We wanted to hear what everybody had to say. We were willing to listen.” ➢ “I never dated outside of camp” ➢ “Personal assistance was built into all of our lives, who needed help.” ➢ “It was also the beginning of my experiencing what it would be like to have someone other than my mother or my father have to do all those things.” ➢ Had discussions which “allow[ed] [them] to recognize [they] needed to look at ways of doing things together. Not just at camp but after camp.” ➢ Disable in Action ➢ “One of the real problems is that, when you grow up being disabled, it’s the fact that you’re not considered either a man or a woman and even the beginning of any kind of relationship.. Beginning at all because you’re just thought of as a disabled person. Person being... second and asexual” ➢ “I dont think I felt, really, shame about my disability. What i felt more was exclusion… the camp experience really was empowering, because we helped empower each other that the status quo is not what it needed to be.”

➢ Willowbrook → frightening because “recognized that myself and other friends could have easily been in this institution” ➢ Civil rights movement all around us → “that was an opportunity to talk about why were we excluded and what did we need to do.” ➢ Rehabilitation Act 1972 → Section 504 (anti-discrimination provision)→ No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, as defined in section 7(6), shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” → Nixon vetoed it → no enforcement ➢ “We decided that we were gonna sit down in the street and we were gonna stop traffic.” ➢ “We wanted to be able to mobilize disabled individuals in D.C. to express the feelings of the disabled community around the United States, and that in unity we do have strength..so that we don’t have to fight each other, but that we can all get our adequate services.” ➢ “Schools and universities, and even hospitals, didn’t want to have to spend the money to make their buildings accessible.” ➢ “The harassment, the lack of equity that has been provided for disabled individuals, and that now is even being discussed by the administration… separate but equal, the outrage of disabled individuals across this country is going to continue, it is going to be ignited. “ ➢ “We will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals. We want the law enforced. We want no more segregation. We will accept no more discussion of segregation.” ➢ “The congress, the press, the American public has seen that we have stamina, strength, intelligence as anyone else does. That disabled individuals, because they’re disabled are not, by definition, sick.” ➢ “I’m very tired of being thankful for accessible toilets… If I have to feel thankful about an accessible bathroom, when am I ever gonna be equal in the community?” Lionel Je’ Woodyard → counsellor ● At the camp, you could do anything that you thought you wanted to try to do. You wouldn’t be picked to be on a team back home. But at Jened, you had to go up to bat. ● Disability act had not been passed. ● Trip to town → staring, “we dont want them here because they make our other costumes feel uncomfortable. ● Whatever obstacles that were in my way being a black man, the same thing was held true for individuals in wheelchairs Discussion ● Parents too protective of them → “No, you can’t do it. You’re handicapped.” → they keep reminding me of the fact that I’m in a chair ● Parent is afraid to show that their child is disabled or handicapped → more out of fear than overprotectiveness

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Steve Hoffman “What everybody wants is to be alone sometimes in their life… to think alone and be alone.” → “denied the right of privacy” “We were brothers and sisters there”

Other ● “Through this conditioning, we come to think of the handicapped as objects of fear or pity or loathing.” Corbett O’Toole → writer and activist ★ “I didn’t realize how heavy that burden was until I was with people where I didn’t have to pretend.” ★ “We were witnessing each other’s truths.” Steve Hoffman → “If you’re a handicapped person, and you happen to have a passive nature about you, you’re really screwed.” Hollynn D’Lil → journalist ● Paraplegic after accident ● “I had all the assumptions and prejudices that people have about people with disabilities and about disabilities, and suddenly I was one.” ● “I’d never been around so many people with disabilities and so many kinds of disabilities, all in one place and all chanting about rights.” ● “I’d never really thought about it as applying to me.” ● “A school district was allowed to designate one school, as the school that children with disabilities and students with disabilities could go to… That’s separate but equal.” Dennis Billups - 504 Protest Leader ➢ “The more we talk, the more we discuss, the more we change and regroup, and the more we learn about our own handicap inside of our own coalition. Learning sign language, learning braille, learning about hidden disabilities like epilepsy, arthritis, and learning about all our disabilities we will become a tighter and firmer group.”...