This is the story, the history, of our society's biases against impairment and being different. There was a member of my congregation who worked at a local hospital as a receptionist and clerk at a snack shop close to the front door. She was grea…
This is the story, the history, of our society's biases against impairment and being different.
There was a member of my congregation who worked at a local hospital as a receptionist and clerk at a snack shop close to the front door. She was great at her job. As time went by, she developed emphysema, and used an oxygen bottle with nasal device, when getting around, and when standing at her counter. She was removed and the shop shut down. She was quite devasted and resented that a hospital, of all places, would demonstrate such a negative attitude toward one who not only could keep working despite her problem, but contribute toward good care of in-patients and their families by showing a friendly and genuinely interested face as they entered the hospital. The bias against a disability was out of place and harmful. (Further to such a wrong attitude can be found in this article: When it comes to accessibility, architects must hold themselves to a higher standard - The Globe and Mail.)
That is one story I can tell. There are more: a long history of thoroughly documented bias against disability in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere. The books I cite deal primarily with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there are examples to show that we have not generally progressed to better attitudes. The information below will, I think, show how and why the society in general is biased against those with disabilities, and that the most common built structures mitigate against impaired people being accepted as "normal," rather than exceptions.
I don't claim to "prove" my point, but I can say that as a parish minister in rural, downtown, and suburban churches, and as a clinically trained chaplain at two psychiatric hospitals, I have assisted, counseled, and advocated for people who are having great difficulty "making it" in this society. My own impression is that societies' attitudes continue to place moral blame on the impaired, rather than accept that social, political, and physical barriers persist, unrecognized.
The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public by Susan Marie Schweik, gives a startling account of how biases against disability were enshrined in American laws in those times:
Starting in San Francisco in 1867 (and ending in Los Angeles in 1913), several municipalities and states passed laws making it illegal for a person with a disability to solicit alms in public places. What was determined to be a disability ranged from exhibiting "physical and mental deformities" (p 55) to having a body that is "deformed, mutilated, imperfect or has been reduced by amputations, or [being an individual] who is idiotic or imbecile " (p 56). Schweik produces a convenient appendix of these laws. Her broad aim in this book was to discuss the American concept of disability in public from the late 19th to early 20th century and how disability was iconographic in controlling the poor and less fortunate. From a legal perspective, one of her more specific stated aims was to "illuminate the conditions of disability—and municipal law's constitution of those conditions—in the late nineteenth century and at the century's turn, so as to better understand law, culture, and disability in the present" https://www.english.upenn.edu/sites/www.english.upenn.edu/files/Schweik-Susan_Ugly-Laws_Law-Language.pdf.
(I have not been able to procure this book, but have read about its content in other books and in the review above: it has contributed greatly to others' research.)
There are three dominant values which society applies toward the disabled: charity, a dread fear of allowing dependency, and moral worth. The attitude toward disability elides with that toward poverty in general.
I remind the reader of the quote from Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion:
I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agin [against] middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: 'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.' But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that's the truth.
There are different ways to understand Higgins' distinction: that some people deserve being poor because of "immoral" actions such as laziness or drunkenness or other addiction, or marriage or family failure, or theft or other crime; while some are poor through no fault of their own. All these suffer even more during COVID. Their plights are like bright streaks of molten lava flowing through the gaps in our society. No one deserves to be sick or starving or too cold or hot for healthy living. No one deserves to be isolated through lack of means to make it in this world. And yet, this is the world we have constructed.1
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