While many people are sympathetic to the hardships that people with physical and mental disabilities face in their everyday lives, these people may not realize that their benevolent sensitivity is hindering those with disabilities rather than helping them integrate into society. Historically, persons with intellectual disabilities have been denied the right to live in the community, marry, procreate, work, and receive an education. They have been subjected to incarceration, sterilization, overmedication, and cruel or unusual punishment. In the 1930’s, most people disabled by polio and cerebral palsy had their job applications stamped with “PH” for physically handicapped, as a signal to not give these people jobs, and most were institutionalized thereafter. While society today strives to sympathize for and accept those with disabilities, many are unaware that by segregating these people and viewing them as different, we are still withholding their opportunities to flourish and prosper in their daily lives. Instead of feeling sorry for someone simply because they are different from us, society must embrace these differences (as the affected individuals already have) and help integrate them into the community by giving them the tools they need to attain the lives we have withheld from them for hundreds of years.
Although the general attitudes towards persons with physical and intellectual disabilities have evolved from malevolent disregard to somber acceptance, this progression may not be as benevolent as one would think. Ellen Barton claims that the experience of disability is often one more of segregation and prejudice than one of integration and welcome. She claims that we have constructed overly simplistic stereotypical representations of disability primarily by erasing the complex experience of individuals with disabilities (Barton 172). Although it may appear that the general attitudes towards disability have transcended the past malicious views, it actually seems that Americans’ acceptance of persons with disabilities is primarily due to pretending the hardships faced by these persons do not exist. We discredit their seemingly small, but in actuality enormous strides towards integrating into the community. These new beliefs, while benign, “effectively erase the complex experience of disability by adults whose legitimate interests in independence and autonomy are therefore never represented; this also establishes a binary distinction between the able-bodied and the disabled, separating and distancing the disabled from the abled” (Barton 173).
In addition to Barton, many social models have highlighted oppressive social and political structures that exclude and marginalize people with disabilities. Within this framework there is a strong call to the notion of rights and respect for individual rights as the basis for removing discrimination and enhancing the participation of disabled people in the community. By removing these persons with disabilities from our communities, whether it be by denying employment, or simply denying equality in a conversation, we are denying persons with disabilities their divine human rights and preventing their opportunity to further their own valued personal projects without interference.
“Human rights set down the minimal conditions required to lead to worthwhile lives. At the heart of such lives reside individual judgments and the pursuit of personal goals… If there is one group that has historically been denied the dignity and value attached to the status of being human it would have to be people with intellectual disabilities” (Ward 297). While Barton claims our social construction of persons with disabilities as dependent, pitiful members of society belittles the enormous burdens they overcome and damages their well-deserved respect, Ward claims that our disregard for the challenges they face in their lives devalues the life of a person with a disability and denies them the status of being human by denying their human rights granted to them at birth.
Thus, by diminishing the experience of people with disabilities, we ultimately diminish the understanding of disability by society at large. This reinforces the stereotype of disability as life-long dependence (Barton 197). By creating this idea of incompetency, people with disabilities are frequently denied the opportunity to live their lives according to their own interests and preferences. It is assumed they are “eternal children,” unable to speak and make their own decisions. Such reasoning claims that people with physical and intellectual disabilities should not be allowed to fully participate in the world or be allowed the skills necessary to do so (Ward 305). The ethical requirements of human rights obligate our communities to work harder in ensuring the interests of a person with a disability are acknowledged, and he or she are given the tools they need to live the life they desire.
Sources:
Barton, Ellen L. "Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way." Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Eds. Wilson, James C., and Cyntheia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 169-199.
Ward, Tony, and Claire Stewart. "Putting Human Rights into Practice with People with an Intellectual Disability." Journal of Developmental & Physical Disabilities 20.3 (2008): 297-311. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
