Exploring the Hierarchy within the Disability Community

Exploring the Hierarchy within the Disability Community

Keith Murfee-DeConcini

Disability and Diversity (605) Thesis Paper

CUNY School of Professional Studies

Written on 6/11/2018

One could assume that the greatest threats to the disability community in the United States are the attitudes of the nondisabled society and the constant attempts to undermine the rights given to the disability community by the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), such as access to public buildings and businesses (Powell 2017). In recent years, the issue of health care has been in the news as several proposed bills have tried to reclassify disability as a preexisting condition, thereby allowing insurers to charge more for health-care coverage, thus taking healthcare back to the days before the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Abrams 2018).

However, this paper will argue that the greatest threat to the disability community is not some external force; rather, it is judgments within the disability community itself. The hierarchy within the disability community that seeks to classify and pass judgment upon impairments and their severities in relation to others has caused significant damage to the disability community as it seeks to further advocate for disability rights and justice.

To better understand this problem, we must first look at how the U.S. media has covered disability and the terms used to describe disability over the years. This is of vital importance because without the negative media representation of disability there would not be the hierarchy within the disability community, and vice versa. Before the term disability came to be the standard norm in describing someone with a disability, there were terms like handicap and cripple, which have long since fallen out of favor with the disability community. As far back as the 1960s, disability advocates have pushed for a “‘frame’ in which society views them and their issues as a legitimate minority group that faces societal barriers and discrimination” (Haller, Dorries, and Rahn 2006, 63). “The dominant culture, or majority, generally resists these language shifts, often derogatorily labeling them as ‘just political correctness’” (Rieser 2001). However, as Haller, Dorries, and Rahn (2006, 62) argue, “We suggest that even something as mundane as the words used to refer to a group are important because they have ramifications both for the self-perception of people with disabilities and what the general public believes about disability.”.

Some disability advocates have started taking back the word cripple and turning it into a positive instead of a negative (Pepper 2016). For example, the author of this paper knows a disability advocate who has a blog entitled That Crazy Cripple Chick (Liebowitz 2013). There is even a movement within the disability community called “crip culture” that is further explored in the subject of “crip theory.” Wright State University on their “Breaking Silences” page describes crip theory this way: “Crip theory considers disability to be a viable identity variable to be recognized, acknowledged and celebrated. Crip theory also recognizes the importance of the intersectionality of one’s disability identity with all other identity variables. By doing so, crip theory acknowledges the historical exclusion of diverse groups within the disability community (e.g. persons of color, gay, lesbian, transgender) as a consequence of internalized oppression within the disability community” (Wright State University 2017).

Without reclaiming terminology that the nondisabled society deems as negative, Haller, Dorries, and Rahn (2006, 66) contend that “many disabled people (particularly youth) internalize labels and language used.” This leads us to internalized ableism. Ableism is the deeply rooted discrimination against people with disabilities, in preference of nondisabled people. Often, it can manifest in very subtle ways, such as if a person with a disability is in a cab and the driver calls them “sweetheart,” “buddy,” or “pal,” despite the fact that they have never met before. It can also manifest in more pronounced ways, such as a person with a disability being refused a job, a date, a home, or any opportunity because of their disability. There are seemingly endless combinations of ableism.

People who refuse service or opportunity are not usually blatant about or even consciously aware of their bias; this is certainly not an excuse for a person not showing empathy to another person, nor is it cause to assume that no one in the nondisabled society is aware of ableism or the fact that they are being ableist.

Internalizing ableism can be very easy for a person with a disability to do, even if they are not consciously aware of it occurring. This can happen to even the most positive and proud disability advocate because the negative connotations surrounding disability are everywhere and are present every day. It can become extremely exhausting to deal with the constant negativity, knowing that people are more than likely going to look down on you simply because you have a disability. This exhaustion can fester in a person with a disability for days, months, or years and result in doubt about one’s self-worth and in lower overall quality of life.

This festering of internalized ableism is one of the pathways that can lead to what is known as the hierarchy of disability. A blog post was written by Crippledscholar (2015), entitled “Fighting My Internalization of the Hierarchy of Disability,” explains the concept this way: “It is a social construct that makes certain kinds of disabilities more acceptable than others . . . The basic idea behind the hierarchy is the prejudicial idea that disability is equated with being a burden or public nuisance (by this I mean that people are immediately forced to deal with the fact that the disabled person exists and might interact with them unexpectedly). So to maintain higher status a disabled person must not be perceived as either of those things.” Now, in that definition, the hierarchy is focused on how the nondisabled society views disability; however, since most of us in the disability community have been taught this hierarchy at some point in our lives and have thus on a mostly unconscious level internalized it, we fall prey to it as well.

When people with disabilities buy into the hierarchy of disability, it often has devastating impacts on the advocacy of the entire disability community: the hierarchy divides the disability community “because either some people distance themselves from the disability rights movement altogether or have tunnel vision and ignore the needs of disabled people whose lives are different from your own” (Crippledscholar 2015). As Abraham Lincoln said in a speech, quoting the Bible, “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Lincoln 1858).

The hierarchy of disability is a very troubling social construct, especially when it is committed by people with disabilities against others in that same community. When the hierarchy is used in this way, it is on par with, if not more damaging than, the negative connotations about disability put forth by the nondisabled society. Members of the disability community should not be judging each other or get into petty infighting; disagreements happen, but holding a grudge, for example, is entirely different. Being envious of someone who has the same disability as you but less of it or functions in a different way than you do—or in a different way than you think they should—only confounds the devastating impact of ableism, internalized or not.

Hardly anyone who is outside a disability studies program or doesn’t have some personal stake to disability (for example a disabled family member) talks about ableism. As mentioned above, one could think that a lot of people simply are unaware that ableism exists—at least consciously. However, that argument falls flat because the sociocultural nondisabled society still finds it completely acceptable to expect people with disabilities to hate themselves, and it has for many decades because nondisabled people shudder to think about imperfection or diversity of human function. That’s the real problem that the disability community should be addressing, not, for example, wondering: “Who has it better than me and why?” “Is he or she from money, and if they are, are they doing enough for the community as a whole?” “Can they ever understand what it means and feels like to be truly disabled?” How are any of those questions helpful in seeking a truly inclusive society that is open to all?

It’s time to realize that the hierarchy of disability (when used by people with disabilities) breeds ableism as much as negative connotations about disability by the nondisabled society do. Mark Deal (2003, 898), in his article “Disabled People’s Attitudes toward Other Impairment Groups: Hierarchy of Impairments,” expresses the notion that “if we accept there is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ in being a disabled person, then being viewed as one sub-group or another, based on impairment, should not, in theory, cause anxiety or insult. Yet it often seems to.” This is troubling, as stated above because while no one would expect the disability community to agree on absolutely everything regarding the issues it faces, the undeniable fact that ableism exists and is forced upon disabled people on a daily basis should form an unbreakable sense of comradery. As Deal (2003, 907) concludes, “Those ranked lowest in the hierarchy become even more vulnerable to the vagaries of social policy without the support of those who should be their comrades and defenders. Thus, we, as disabled people, may need to acknowledge our own prejudices before we can truly argue we demand a wholly inclusive society.”

This festering within the disability community leads to the continued fracturing of the disability rights movement, and the longer it persists, the more work that will have to be done. The fracturing of the disability community is one of the defining purposes of systematic ableism. Haller, Dorries, and Rahn (2006, 64) state, “Some disability activists criticize the Disability Rights Movement for the ‘media problem,’ saying it stems from lack of a single, national voice for the movement.” While some weight can be given to that argument, the disability community can’t simply wait for a disabled national figure with the presence and voice of Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge.

 We in the disability community can hide behind all the vast complexities of the issues that touch our expansive community, or we can seek to break through the internalized ableism that has haunted us for far too long and build or rebuild bridges between the subgroups of disability. Only by doing that hard work can we as a community truly push back against the hierarchy of ableism.

References

Abrams, Abigail. 2018. "'Our Lives Are at Stake.' How Donald Trump Inadvertently Sparked a New Disability Rights Movement." Time, February 26, 2018. http://time.com/5168472/disability-activism-trump/.

Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorries, and Jessica Rahn. 2006. "Media Labeling versus the US Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language." Disability & Society 21 no. 1: 61-75. doi:10.1080/09687590500375416.

Crippledscholar. 2015. "Fighting My Internalization of the Hierarchy of Disability." Crippledscholar (blog), August 23, 2015. https://crippledscholar.com/2015/08/23/fighting-my-internalization-of-the-hierarchy-of-disability/.

Deal, Mark. 2003. "Disabled People's Attitudes toward Other Impairment Groups: A Hierarchy of Impairments." Disability & Society 18 no. 7: 897-910. doi:10.1080/0968759032000127317.

Liebowitz, Cara. 2013. That Crazy Crippled Chick (blog). http://thatcrazycrippledchick.blogspot.com/.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1858. "House Divided Speech." June 16, 1858. http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm.

Pepper, Penny. 2016. "We’ve Had All the Insults. Now We’re Reclaiming the Language of Disability." The Guardian, November 22, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/22/language-of-disability-stereotypes-disabled-people.

Powell, Robyn. 2017. "On Eve Of ADA Anniversary, Republicans Voted to Set Disability Rights Back Decades." The Huffington Post, July 27, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-eve-of-ada-anniversary-republicans-vote-to-set_us_5979e577e4b06b305561ce53.

Rieser, Richard. 2001. "Does language matter?" Disability Tribune, October 2001.

St. Pierre, Joshua. 2014. "Internalized Ableism, or, Why Do I (Still) Hate Myself?" Did I Stutter? (blog), July 8, 2014. https://www.didistutter.org/blog/internalized-ableism-or-why-do-i-still-hate-myself.

Wright State University. 2017. Breaking Silences, Demanding Crip Justice Conference: Crip Theory. https://www.wright.edu/event/sex-disability-conference/crip-theory.