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A Conversation with Al Condeluci

This article was printed on page 47 of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Winter 2002 issue of Facets.

In his role as Executive Director of United Cerebral Palsy of Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Al Condeluci works daily with individuals who have broad-ranging disabilities. During the conversation that follows, he shares his insights and observations about the difficulties that people with disabilities encounter as they attempt to assimilate into communities.

Q:What do you see as the emerging trends in the disability community?

A: There’s a paradigm shift in how services are being crafted. Society is finally realizing that people can determine what’s best for them… that consumers can have a choice. So we’re moving to a model that’s much more empowering to the individual. But it remains a challenging goal and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Unfortunately, the average person still doesn’t get it. Self-determination is an idea that they have not yet embraced.

Q: Why has society resisted self-determination in the past?

A: People with disabilities are often sized up from a problem or abnormality perspective. The notion that there’s something wrong with them that needs to be fixed stops the average person from thinking that people with disabilities can make good decisions for themselves. They fall into the trap of thinking that people with disabilities are abnormal or that their disability is the major thing that they’d change if they could. In reality, often, they’d change other things first.

Q: Empowering people with disabilities to make choices for themselves should not be so difficult. Why is it such a foreboding challenge?

A: Three themes have historically defined people with disabilities. First, there was moral devaluation. Then, there was economic devaluation. This occurred when a person’s value was determined by perceptions of physical, cognitive, and emotionally productivity. People with disabilities didn’t fare well here. Finally, they created an institutionalized attitude where people with disabilities were seen as different.

Sometimes this is not malicious. Parts of society believe that people with disabilities are better off being taken care of.

Q: How do we change these fundamental beliefs and encourage society to accept people with disabilities as capable decision-makers?

A:That’s the subject of my new book, Cultural Shifting. I studied how something new becomes diffused and accepted until it’s just part of the landscape. Then, I applied this logic to how communities accept people with disabilities. I asked, “How would an anthropologist see this issue?”

The book looks at the concept of the gatekeeper – someone who’s indigenous in the community who can endorse the new person. People with disabilities often need gatekeepers. Finding individuals who are capable of filling this role and who are willing to do so is the challenge.

Q: If recruiting gatekeepers is key, how can society encourage more gatekeepers to step forward?

A: First, we have to realize that the gatekeeper is taking a chance. He’s sometimes risking his own social capital to endorse someone.

In any culture, you have 20 percent who are positive gatekeepers and 20 percent who are negative gatekeepers. That leaves 60 percent who have not formed an opinion. A gatekeeper endorsing an idea can shift 60 percent of the population’s opinions.

Q: Some ardent disability advocates would argue that people with disabilities have fundamental right to be an integral part of any community. Why do they need gatekeepers to exercise this right?

A: Well, it takes someone inside the belly of the beast to make sure that the beast opens up. For years, rehabilitation professionals focuses on what they could do to make the person with a disability more functional. They were thinking microscopically about the person. But, the problem is: How do you get the community to change, not the person with the disability? Social change has always been drive by the oppressed person. But, this is slow and tedious. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s only when you get a critical mass of the culture shifting that its opinions that you have true change.

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