by Paul Edwards
Early this fall, the National Broadcasting Company and Newsweek sponsored a two-hour colloquy on racism which was held at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. At this church in 1963, four little girls were killed by a bomb that shattered a peaceful Sunday School meeting and shocked America into action as no previous racist abomination had.
If this program is rebroadcast or if you can get hold of a tape of the event, I urge each of you to watch it. It certainly caused me to think deeply about many issues and, for me, there were many parallels between the experiences of recognized ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
There were many comments made during that program that could just as easily have been made by people with disabilities as by people who are African-American or Hispanic. I am not going to try here to reiterate any of these but want to share some thoughts that I believe need sharing. Some of what I am going to say may be controversial and I certainly would not dare to claim I know how to get past some of the problems I will raise. I do, however, believe that all of us who are disabled need to spend more time thinking about these issues and that we need to learn from the experiences of other minorities.
First of all, I must point out that I was outraged by the fact that there was not a single mention of disability during this whole program. There was mention of gender and class, and Hispanics and blacks and Asians, and young people — as oppressed minorities — but not one word about people with disabilities. Even though we are the largest minority in this country and are, many believe, the most disadvantaged of them all, it seems that people from all those minorities who are also disabled are marginalized and disenfranchised by the more “relevant” minorities of which they are members. I have noted this before. I have railed against it before. Now it is time that we confront it. Now it is time that we face some harsh truths about our society, about ourselves, and about the relationship between the two.
The fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil rights law without teeth is not an accident. It is rather a reflection of society’s firmly held conviction that the condition of having a disability does not comprise the status of a recognizable, valid minority. Society rejects our minority status because it is not prepared to face up to the notion that people would willingly and knowingly discriminate against a population they pity and admire. I think there is also a continuing fear of contamination by our disability that underpins this attitude. There is also the fact that, while skin color or cultural affinity are relative, disability is absolute and immutable. Either we are cured or we are forever different and less than other members of society.
If my hypotheses are accepted, there are others that follow. Perhaps the most obvious is that integration as an option for people with disabilities is a chimera beyond our reach. It is a goal that is unattainable because we are a reminder to society with our every achievement of the unmet potential that may describe the rest of society. Each of us who succeeds must therefore be regarded as the exception that proves our inherent inferiority.
I think it is also fair to say that many people with disabilities connive in this notion of who we are by pretending that their disability doesn’t exist. In a very real sense, the notion of full inclusion in our schools and in our society is the greatest threat to the disability rights movement because it encourages children and adults alike to see themselves as part of a larger society at the expense of their identity as people with disabilities. The best and the brightest of our disabled young people are graduating from high school and college with little or no contact with others who are disabled. The very technology that is beginning to level the playing field is the harbinger of death to disability culture. It is giving those who have access to it the capacity to pretend they are not disabled. And why not?
Families are ashamed of disability and shudder at the thought that a child would actually want to embrace it. The media portray people with disabilities either as helpless or self-centered. We are a part of society. How can we not be infected by the same values that permeate it? Most of us, in our heart of hearts, see ourselves as pitiable and inherently inferior.
Nothing I have said so far is new or revolutionary. Many who have studied disability culture have arrived at similar conclusions. Perhaps they have not stated them quite so baldly or emphatically and have often hedged them about with a range of other variables so that their reality might not seem so stark. Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? Those are hard questions; I will try to deal with the second question first.
I think it is absolutely crucial that we confront these issues. Unless we do, we will continue to be marginalized by our society and by the minorities of which many of us are members. This is not an easy road I ask us to travel and we will have to stare many hard truths in the face along the way.
I am absolutely convinced that, unless we confront and accept the reality of what it means to be disabled, time and technology will erode our movement. More important, I am convinced that until we actively change the way we see ourselves and until we demand that society confront its view of us, we will not change the stark statistics that all of us abhor. Can rehabilitation succeed when education, the media, and the whole weight of society promote values diametrically opposed to the very objectives rehab seeks?
There are things we can do. Some of them I have already talked about. We can actively insist that the curricula in our school systems include positive portrayals of disability. There has never been a black or a Hispanic or a woman president. There has been a president with disabilities, but, at best, those disabilities are a footnote in many textbooks. We must also force schools to recognize that the most important component of education is exposing students with disabilities to successful role models who are themselves disabled. Earlier this summer I was pleased to attend a state leadership conference for high school students with disabilities, where the high school kids were exposed to adults with disabilities and the disability rights movement. We must do more of this and start much earlier.
We must also embrace our disabilities militantly. We can no longer simply accept a disability as just a part of who we are. From now on, I will be a disabled person: not a person with a disability. Only by making disability the core of who we are can we convince society that we are truly proud of that. I am blind and I’m proud and everyone around me should know it!
We must demand that the media begin to tell the truth about disabilities. Force the American public to confront the millions of us forced to live in poverty by society’s marginalization! Show the diabetic afraid to go to work because he or she might not have insurance! Show the tyranny of the rehab system and the indifference of our fellow man. Focus on the discrimination and point at the real culprit: our society!
We must intervene with families so that they are not ashamed of their disabled children. We must reach out to the vast majority of disabled people so that they are not ashamed of themselves! We must find ways to persuade those who have turned their backs on disability to turn around and see us as we are with all our flaws and imperfections that we and they together have made!
Can we do this? I have a nightmare that, unless we try, nothing else we do will amount to very much!