After dropping a note reading “Help! Wendy!” from her assisted living facility in March, 61-year-old Wendy Williams told police, “I am not incapacitated as I’ve been accused.” She makes incapacitation sound like a crime. But in a country where disability makes people even more vulnerable to police violence, it might as well be.
March’s incident was Williams’ resistance to being forced to live on the memory floor of a facility and stripped of access to her money, phone, cats, and the outside world. This month, however, new neurological tests reportedly cleared Williams of the frontotemporal dementia diagnosis that placed her under court control. Now, after three years, her legal team may get her conservatorship terminated.
Conservatorships, especially when misogynoir, ableism, and ageism are involved, aren’t for patients’ benefit. Patients become property, and everything they own is placed under their guardians’ control. Let’s also remember that celebrities, like Britney Spears, Nichelle Nichols, and Michael Oher, aren’t representative of most conservatees.
Most conservatees are ordinary 76- to 81-year-old women with “low-to-moderate” incomes. Black elders are already “most likely to face psychological and financial exploitation.” Their homes have been seized and assets sold, robbing their communities of their financial and cultural legacies.
When we regret the family recipes lost to time, or hate to see the For Sale sign in front of Grandma's house, conservatorships are just one piece of the story. Cases like Williams' are opportunities for us to protect the Black elders in our lives and to be vigilant against bad actors, deputized by the state, who circle like vultures.