Who Is Expected to Keep Up? Power, Ability, and the Illusion of Fair Standards

Expectations are often treated as moral instruments, quiet arbiters of effort, responsibility, and worth. They are framed as neutral standards that reward diligence and discipline while discouraging complacency. Yet this framing conceals a more uncomfortable reality: expectations are neither universal nor evenly distributed. They are shaped by power, enforced through normativity, and sustained by systems that presume a narrow range of bodies, minds, and capacities as default.

What is commonly described as “fairness” is, more often, standardization without context. In such a landscape, expectations cease to function as tools for growth and instead become mechanisms of exclusion, particularly for those whose lives do not align with dominant assumptions about ability, productivity, and independence. The central question, then, is not whether expectations are necessary, but who is expected to keep up, under what conditions, and in service of whose definition of success.

The Architecture of Expectation: Power, Norms, and Design

Expectations are not abstract ideals; they are designed and maintained through institutional architectures. Educational systems privilege linear learning and sustained output. Workplaces reward speed, endurance, and uninterrupted availability. Healthcare and social services often require disabled people to perform needs in ways that are legible to bureaucratic criteria rather than refl ective of lived reality.

These systems are undergirded by ableist norms that position independence as the highest virtue and dependency as failure. Such norms obscure the fact that interdependence is the actual condition of human life. All people rely on networks of care, infrastructure, and collective labor; yet only some forms of reliance are stigmatized.

Power determines which expectations are codified as “reasonable” and whose inability to meet them is treated as individual rather than as a design failure. In this way, expectations do not merely measure ability; they produce hierarchy, sorting people according to their proximity to an able-bodied, neurotypical, and economically secure ideal.

Expectations Within the Disabled Community: Survival, Legibility, and Constraint

Within disabled communities, expectations often emerge from necessity. When access is scarce and legitimacy is constantly contested, there can be pressure to demonstrate coherence, productivity, and resilience. Advocacy itself may become contingent upon one’s ability to communicate fluently, sustain engagement, and translate lived experience into policy-friendly language.

While these expectations can foster collective momentum, they can also reproduce exclusion. Those whose disabilities affect speech, cognition, energy, or emotional regulation may fi nd themselves marginalized even within spaces ostensibly committed to inclusion. The expectation to be the “right kind” of disabled, to be articulate but not angry, visible but not disruptive, and accommodated but not inconvenient, can narrow the range of acceptable participation.

Disability justice challenges this dynamic by rejecting respectability politics and insisting on collective access: access that is not conditional on performance, productivity, or palatability. It asks not who can keep up, but how communities can adapt so no one is left behind.

Expectations Outside the Disabled Community: Equality Without Equity

Beyond disabled spaces, expectations are frequently defended under the banner of equality. The insistence on “holding everyone to the same standard” is framed as impartiality, even as it disregards unequal access to resources, accommodations, and support. In this framing, deviation from the norm is tolerated only insofar as it does not disrupt existing structures.

Accommodation is often treated as an exception rather than a fundamental component of equitable design. Disabled people may be expected to justify their needs repeatedly, to accept partial or temporary solutions, or to express gratitude for supports that merely mitigate barriers others do not face. The result is a system in which inclusion is conditional and precarious.

Anti-ableist norms call this into question by asserting that the problem is not difference, but infl exibility. They challenge the assumption that uniform expectations yield fairness, highlighting instead how such standards entrench exclusion while absolving institutions of responsibility.

Living Between Contradictory Standards: A Personal and Structural Reality

For many disabled people, daily life involves navigating mutually incompatible expectations. One may be expected to demonstrate independence while simultaneously proving eligibility for support. Competence is demanded, yet accommodation is framed as a concession. Capability is praised, but only when it minimizes disruption to normative routines.

This constant negotiation produces not only fatigue but also a form of epistemic harm: lived experience is routinely questioned, reframed, or dismissed in favor of institutional criteria. The resulting exhaustion is often misinterpreted as disengagement or lack of effort, rather than recognized as the predictable outcome of navigating systems that were never designed with disabled lives in mind.

Here, personal experience is not anecdotal; it is diagnostic. It reveals the structural contradictions embedded within prevailing standards of expectation.

Reimagining Expectations: From Individual Compliance to Collective Responsibility

If expectations are to serve an ethical function, they must be reoriented away from individual compliance and toward collective responsibility. This requires abandoning the myth of the “average” participant and embracing variability as a design principle rather than an inconvenience.

Disability justice offers a framework grounded in interdependence, sustainability, and dignity. It asks institutions to consider not only whether expectations are achievable, but whether they are just. It reframes success as something produced through access, support, and shared accountability, not through endurance alone.

Such a shift does not entail the absence of standards. Rather, it calls for standards that are contextual, fl exible, and responsive to lived reality. Expectations, in this model, become tools for inclusion rather than instruments of exclusion.

A Measured Call to Action: Policy, Practice, and Accountability

For advocates, policymakers, and institutional leaders, this reframing carries concrete implications:

• Design expectations with disabled people, not merely for them, ensuring that lived experience informs policy development.
• Embed collective access into institutional practice, moving beyond individual accommodations toward systemic flexibility.
• Audit existing standards for ableist assumptions, particularly those tied to productivity, independence, and speed.
• Shift accountability upward, recognizing that when people consistently fail to meet expectations, the standard, not the individual, may be the problem.

These steps do not require radical reinvention, but they do demand humility: a willingness to question long-standing norms and to accept that fairness is not achieved through uniformity.

Conclusion: The Ethics of Asking Who Keeps Up

Unquestioned expectations have a quiet power. They determine who is granted patience, who is afforded flexibility, and who is rendered invisible. When treated as self-evident truths, they transform structural inequity into personal failure and call it fairness.

The ethical task before us is not to eliminate expectations, but to interrogate them; to ask whose lives they center, whose labor they presume, and whose exclusion they normalize. Until expectations are grounded in interdependence and collective access, the question of who is expected to keep up will remain less a matter of ability than of power.

And power, left unexamined, has a way of mistaking itself for neutrality.

Note of Thanks

Thank you for engaging with this work in a spirit of care and critical reflection. Disability justice reminds us that access is not an individual accommodation but a collective responsibility and that understanding emerges through interdependence rather than isolation. By taking the time to read, refl ect, and sit with the questions raised here, you participate in a broader effort to challenge ableist assumptions and to imagine standards rooted in dignity, context, and shared accountability. Your engagement is part of that ongoing work, and it is deeply appreciated.

Ian Allan

Self-Advocate for The Arc of Northern Virginia

Ian Allan is a self-advocate with a deep commitment to policy literacy, systems change, and disability justice. Through The Arc of Northern Virginia, he works to ensure that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not merely served by systems, but are actively shaping them.