Pop culture makes denigration of people with disabilities acceptable

WHILE watching the movie "Hancock" on TV, I was struck once again by how little impact the experiences of people who live with disabilities have had on the treatment of disability in popular culture, and by how effectively those attitudes sabotage any broader recognition and respect for disability concerns.

What does "Hancock" have to do with disability? The theatrical version had a running gag with characters calling Hancock an "a**hole." To avoid offending the broadcast audience, the word was overdubbed and replaced with "psycho."

Our nation's viewing sensibilities allow such denigration of people with mental illness, because pop-culture monsters influence those sensibilities more than our family members and friends, who are the real face of mental illness in America.

Each year, millions of American families experience the reality of mental illness, but fear and prejudice keep their stories isolated. Instead of informing a public discourse, they are pushed into the margins by the myths and stereotypes that dominate popular culture. This is just as true for other types of disabilities.

Noted cultural critic, bell hooks (Gloria Watkins), observed on national radio that her friends reacted to her return to Kentucky by treating her as if she were "retarded." The humor in this intended self-deprecation assumes a wall separating the speaker and her audience from the disparaged "other" — a wall reinforced by the use of a derogatory term as a punch line.

Ostracism, dismissal and institutionalization are often what it means, in our culture, to be treated as a person who has an intellectual disability. They are not humorous when you experience them.

Describing the character Captain Falcon, from his National Book Award-winning novel, "Middle Passage," Charles Johnson has said "he's a dwarf physically because spiritually, he's a very small human being." This claim is a useful social yardstick. The extent to which this disturbs us less than it would for a contemporary writer to use skin color, or another similarly charged nondisability characteristic, as the emblem of a character's degraded spiritual state, measures how far we remain from including the concerns of people with disabilities in our public ethics.

More recent and prominent examples of disability as monster, insult, metaphor or punch line are common in pop culture, but these better demonstrate the subversive influence that prejudicial attitudes exert when they pass unchallenged in the marketplace of ideas. They show that profound insight into the politics of difference and the power of language to oppress is an inadequate defense against an unexamined assumption.

The common attitudes toward disability will reflect unexamined assumptions until we sustain a public dialogue informed by people with disabilities. While each experience of disability is unique, and people with disabilities are as individualistic as anyone else in our perspectives on our lives, some themes will emerge from this dialogue.

It will demand recognition of disability as a natural, common element of human diversity. It will demonstrate that a disability is merely one characteristic of an individual that reveals little of substance and nothing reliably about that person's character, interests, talents or quality of life. It will show that, like everyone else, we see ourselves in terms of the things we do, not those we cannot do.

When people with disabilities tell stories about ourselves, they will not tend toward melodrama. They will be love stories, domestic comedies and thrillers with us as the heroes. Our stories of triumph and defeat will focus on the audacity of the goal or the humanity of the hero, not the disability.

When these voices and stories begin to find their way into popular culture, our popular ethics will begin to reflect the understanding that attitudes that deny or obscure the humanity of people who have disabilities corrode the humanity of those who hold them.