Here is a quote from a recent NYT article about disability:
“Sure, I’d given workshops and lectures hundreds of times, but this would be my first time speaking to an audience made up entirely of people with disabilities. To be perfectly honest, I’d always felt uncomfortable around disabled people. Suppose I said the wrong thing? Came off as insensitive?”
Replace “disability” with, say, “Latino” in this paragraph, and hear how it sounds:
“Sure, I’d given workshops and lectures hundreds of times, but this would be my first time speaking to an audience made up entirely of Latinos. To be perfectly honest, I’d always felt uncomfortable around Latinos. Suppose I said the wrong thing? Came off as insensitive?”
How does this paragraph read now? Doesn’t it give you that rolling-your-eyes, my-isn’t-she-backward type of feeling? That’s because reading this paragraph, we can easily see that the author should stop stereotyping people and simply treat her audience as human beings. In the original paragraph, if we look closely we can see that she’s not uncomfortable around disabled people, she’s uncomfortable being around people she stereotypes as overly sensitive.
The real discomfort here is the fear of the angry disabled person. The prickly cripple.
Can we be hard-bitten? Sure, we can. Sometimes you have to be to survive. But the disconnect here is that most of the able-bodied community thinks that what needs to be survived is the disability alone. They do not understand that the society that is built around us causes us just as much pain and discomfort, if not more, than the disabilities themselves. They think I’m prickly because I can’t walk – but it’s mostly because of society’s reaction to the fact that I cannot walk.
This reminds me of the stereotype of the angry black person (the First Lady has had quite a time trying to get out from under that one). The feeling here is not that black people have something to be angry about, but rather that the anger is some sort of intrinsic quality about blackness. As it is with disability: the able-bodied community thinks that disabled people are angry not because they have a bone to pick with society, but because being disabled itself is so horrible that a person has no choice but to simmer in rage their entire life. It’s not us, they say, it’s you.
The stereotype of the prickly cripple gives society a chance to escape responsibility. If people think that we are angry only because of our different minds and/or bodies, then society gets off the hook for prejudice. They get off the hook for not installing ramps, for parking in handicapped spots when they’re not supposed to, for not looking us in the face like human beings. Stereotyping means that one does not have to attempt to understand where the other is coming from. If my anger is all about my disability then society need not bother to understand, because obviously disability is a murky, uncharted water that cannot be fathomed by the uninitiated. It is much easier to throw one’s hands up and declare that understanding is futile than to take a long, hard look at how one may be contributing to the hurt and anger another feels.