Race and Disability: From Analogy to Intersectionality

The Minority Model and Disability Essentialism

Despite its obvious benefits, the analogy work performed in the disability rights movement has contributed to a form of “disability essentialism,” which remains embedded in much disability activism and critical disability scholarship (Mollow 2006). Disability essentialism assumes disability discrimination is a monolithic experience that is divorced from other forms of oppression. In other words, disability essentialism assumes that there is a defining essence to disability experience and inequality. Although ostensibly race neutral, the disability essentialism generated through analogizing with race has assumed a white racial identity. It is only from the starting place of a white disabled person’s positionality that parallels can be drawn between the distinct categories of race and disability. In other words, because disabled people of color cannot divide aspects of themselves or their experiences, it is only from a white disabled person’s standpoint that racism and ableism can be segregated and compared (Grillo and Wildman 1991).

Schweik (2010) provided a poignant example of how race, social class, and gender can be rendered invisible under the minority model of disability. Schweik examined the history of ugly laws and the construction of a particular narrative about this set of laws by disability rights activists and scholars. At the turn of the twentieth century, urban city governments passed a series of unsightly beggar ordinances, known as “ugly laws,” that prohibited individuals with visible disabilities or other bodily anomalies from begging on urban streets. For disability activists and scholars, ugly laws came to be a touchstone for disability oppression, serving as a tangible manifestation of the negative cultural values and profound discrimination with which disabled Americans have contended. Schweik argued that the use of the euphemism “ugly laws” to refer to this set of ordinances served an analogous purpose for disability activists, as it linked the discrimination and body policing of disabled people to resistance efforts that were under way in the civil rights, Black power, and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet Schweik argued that ugly laws and their uneven enforcement were far more complicated a story than a one-dimensional focus on disability suggests. The laws were not enforced against a monolithic group of disabled people, but poor disabled people who occupied locations of suspicion generated at the intersections of race, nativity, gender, and sexuality on urban streets. Thus, by claiming ugly laws as a shared oppression experienced by all disabled people, the disability rights movement and critical disability scholarship have erased the ways these ordinances were constructed and carried out at the intersection of oppressions.

The focus on independence and legal rights, which were hallmarks of the disability rights movement, also reflected the cultural values of middle-class white Americans and emphasized solutions to disability injustice that most benefited those with social class privilege and those with clear-cut experiences of discrimination on the basis of the singular status of disability (Shaw, Chan, and McMahon 2012; Spade 2013). Because legal rights tend to operate around singular-identity statuses, people who experience multiple forms of inequality, and for whom racism and ableism are powerful, interlocking forces in their lives, cannot as easily benefit from the legal rights model, which demands proof of blatant and intentional discrimination directed at an individual on the basis of a singular aspect of the victim’s identity (Bagenstos 2009; Shaw et al. 2012; Spade 2013). According to Spade (2013), movements that prioritize obtaining legal rights tend to use singular-identity models that inevitably draw boundaries between deserving and undeserving members of the marginalized group. Spade distinguished between rights-based movements such as the disability rights movement and justice-based movements such as the disability justice movement, whose intersectional frameworks lead them to make more radical demands for structural change. We will return to the disability justice movement later in this article.

Although analogy work has given way to more intersectional perspectives in recent scholarship within disability studies, these analogies still permeate the cultures of disability communities. For example, in his study exploring how blind people understand race, Obasogie (2014) found that white blind people continue to draw analogies between their experiences of oppression and that of racial minorities, while blind people who are members of racial minority groups do not draw such comparisons. Furthermore, the minority model, predicated on this analogy work, undergirds fundamental tenets of disability activism and critical disability scholarship. For example, the minority model of disability has emphasized prejudice and discrimination leveled against people with disabilities as the central form of political injustice facing disability communities. Yet for communities marginalized at the intersection of racism and economic inequality, the acquisition of disability itself is also a major source of injustice (Mollow 2006). The minority model paradigm has not left room for interrogation of the fact that disabilities are frequently caused by racial and class-based inequalities, including economic injustices, environmental degradation, war, and mass incarceration (Dunhamn et al. 2015; Finley 2011; Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018; Ralph 2012). Erevelles (2014) illuminated this tension when she asked,

What does it mean to say “no more disability” for those “becoming” disabled via violence and then compelled to live in deplorable social conditions? And what do these negations mean for disabled people who have struggled valiantly to convince the world at large that living with a disability is an “ingenious way to live”?

Critical disability perspectives often demand an unequivocal rejection of the medical model. Because the medical model has portrayed disability as an unwanted deficiency, dislodging disability from the clutches of biomedicine has been central to the cultivation of disability pride. Yet this tenet of disability activism masks the tensions that arise when intersections of inequality are considered. People of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have disproportionately experienced the harm that comes from medical coercion and surveillance of disabled people, the very forms of medical injustice that have driven the rejection of the medical model. But these groups also commonly experience lack of access, or denial of access, to quality medical care that middle-class white Americans are less likely to endure (Nelson 2011). In other words, there is a privilege in being able to call for a distancing from the biomedical regime, a privilege not enjoyed by those whose oppression has included denial of medical care.

Mauldin’s (2016) findings from her ethnographic study of a cochlear implant clinic illuminate the ways these multiple forms of inequality operate and converge. Mauldin identified patterns indicative of common critiques of the medical model leveled by deaf and disability activists: the pathologization of deafness and deaf culture, the blame placed on deaf and disabled individuals and their mothers when the promises of biomedicine fail to be realized. Yet Mauldin also found another pattern of inequality. Medical professionals assumed the role of gatekeeper for this technology, and their decisions about which families were “good candidates” for cochlear implantation were largely determined along ethnic and social class lines. Families who were poor and families who spoke multiple languages were deemed to be inadequate candidates for a child’s cochlear implantation.

Living Intersectional Oppression: Junius Wilson

Born out of the U.S. disability rights movement, the minority model sets disability up as a form of inequality analogous to racism. Yet this framework leaves little room for deepened understandings of how racism and ableism interact to shape the lives of people of color with disabilities. Few biographies more powerfully illuminate the complex and devastating interaction between racism and ableism in the United States than that of Junius Wilson, a deaf black man born outside of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1908. Wilson spent much of his childhood at the North Carolina School for the Colored Deaf and Blind, a residential school that segregated deaf and blind children on the basis of both race and disability. With few educational resources and no exposure to American Sign Language, black students and staff members cultivated their own sign language system. As a teenager, Wilson returned home to a community in which he was linguistically isolated from both hearing and deaf people. Accused of the attempted rape of a neighbor, Wilson was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in 1925, where he was incarcerated for 76 years, castrated, and forced to labor on the institution’s farm. Hospital staff members concealed the fact that the criminal charges against Wilson had been dropped in 1970. Jim Crow segregation, along with profound ableism, generated a context in which Wilson was linguistically isolated for nearly the entirety of his life. These historic forces also led to a denial of due process at multiple points, leading white officials to read his black, gesturing body as particularly dangerous and professionals later to deny him the right to the freedom to which he was legally entitled.

Whiteness, Normalcy, and the Disability Metaphor

The historic intertwining of whiteness and normalcy play an important role in our overreliance of the disability metaphor in racial discourse. Under the Enlightenment, democratization, and industrialization, notions of the worthy citizen came to be defined against categories of deviance. To protect the fledgling democracy against the dangers of social disorder, white elites made concerted efforts to delineate between legitimate Americans, who were worthy of the rights to full participation in the new democracy, and bad citizens, who threatened the precarious social order (Baynton 2001; Carey 2009; Nielsen 2013; Samuels 2014). Ideals of good citizenship, including independence, rugged individualism, and moral and intellectual competence, were delineated through the othering of bad citizens, those who were defined as dependent, incompetent, and morally depraved. In fact, the word normal in its current meaning entered the English language in the mid-1800s, as the binary between “normalcy” and “deviance” was solidified (Davis 2013). Thus, notions of deviance, disability, and normalcy were imbued into citizenship laws, practices, and cultural values.

Developing notions of race and of disability were inextricably interwoven. White elites relied on imagery of disability and deficiency to argue that African Americans, immigrants, women, and the poor were groups inherently unfit for citizenship rights. Proslavery advocates argued that blacks possessed defective minds, bodies, and moral character, rendering them best suited for a life under slavery (Baynton 2001; Nielsen 2013). Others argued that freed slaves were more susceptible to acquiring debilitating disabilities, including deafness, blindness, and mental illness, as they were not equipped to handle the responsibilities of citizenship (Baynton 2001). Similarly, antisuffragists argued that women were incapable of effectively exercising political rights because they were evolutionarily inferior to men physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Anxieties about disabled people were also intertwined with fears about newly arriving European immigrants during the late 1800s. Immigration policy reflected a deep fear that immigrants possessed inferior genetic makeup and would spread disability if allowed to enter the country. U.S. officials monitoring the influx of European immigrants were charged with identifying immigrants who had, or were suspected to be hiding, physical, sensory, or mental impairments. As newly arriving immigrants sought to enter the country through Ellis Island, officials marked those suspected of having disabilities on their backs with chalk to identify them for more rigorous scrutiny (Baynton 2001; Nielsen 2013). Entire groups of ethnic minorities were also labeled as disabled on the basis of their supposed inferior genetic makeup.

Although racial and ethnic minority groups were attributed with disability labels of deviance and defectiveness, a pattern of unwhitening also occurred for white disabled people. For example, John Langdon Down, who identified the condition now known as Down syndrome, originally conceptualized the disorder in 1866 as marking evolutionary and racial regression of the European children he studied. Down labeled the condition mongolism, likening it to the “mongoloid” racial category of the time. In the paper in which he first identified the condition, Langdon wrote, “It is difficult to realize he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt they represent ethnic degeneration” (cited in Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014:8). Similarly, in the early part of the eugenics movement, poor white women labeled with cognitive disabilities and/or insanity were the targets of eugenic sterilization practices (Isenberg 2017; Wray 2006). The label feeble-minded became a catch-all category for various groups of white women who were defined as “tainted whites” because of poverty, sexual promiscuity, ethnic origin, and disability. The majority of so-called feeble-minded Americans institutionalized and sterilized during the early part of the eugenics movement were white women defined as being a threat to the purity of the white race (Isenberg 2017; Wray 2006). Thus, the category of feeble-mindedness became the signifier of tainted whiteness. In later decades, the focus on controlling poor white women, particularly those labeled as disabled, would give way to a focus on women from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Within this historic context, how did those committed to racial justice both within and outside the academy rely on disability to make claims for racial equality? Discourses emphasizing how “racism is disabling” date back to abolitionism. Abolitionists often emphasized the debilitating consequences of slavery, and freed slave activists and writers emphasized, even displayed, the wounds acquired through slavery and freedom journeys, highlighting how slavery damaged the body (Boster 2013). This discourse continued through the twenty-first century. For example, Wailoo (2001) documented how sickle-cell anemia took on cultural and political meanings in the 1970s and 1980s as the disorder came to symbolize suffering in black American communities. Finally, disabled activists of color have confronted discourses in racial justice activism, which claim that all black people are disabled by racism (Lukin 2013).

Although disability served as a category into which activists and intellectuals would lean to claim the perniciousness of racial injustice—because discourses of defectiveness and damage were used to justify racial/ethnic oppression—disability simultaneously became the category against which racial minority groups had to distance themselves to make claims to citizenship rights (Baynton 2001; Boster 2013). The effort to distance race from disability is particularly pronounced in scholarship on race. This makes sociological sense given the ways previous work in the academy, which established a false association between race and “normalcy,” demanded to be undone (Gould 1996). Yet this legacy has diminished dialogue between race and disability scholarship. Research that should ostensibly sit at the intersection of race and disability has often failed to problematize disability inequality. Thus, scholarship on a variety of topics conveys the message that the problem is simply that racial minorities have been attributed with disability. This has been the case with scholarship on freak shows (Samuels 2011), eugenics (Duster 2000), and the racialization of special education (Connor, Ferri, and Annamma 2015). Scholars have rarely deconstructed the disability tropes used to justify other forms of inequality, even as they critique the ways these tropes have been deployed against other groups. As Baynton (2001) argued,

While many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attributing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously denied and condemned by their targets, and what this tells us about our attitudes towards disability. (p. 41)

Living the Metaphorical Other

What does the pervasive use of disability metaphor in racial discourse mean for members of racial minority groups who also experience disability? Rowden’s (2009) study of the legacy of black blind musicians in American history provides a compelling illustration. Chapter 2 of his book The Songs of Blind Folk explores the self-presentation strategies of black blind blues singers in the rural American South. To appeal to their audiences, these blind musicians emphasized their blind identities, but only as a metaphor for the suffering black Americans endured. These musicians downplayed their corporeal experiences of blindness, as it was thought to be alienating to their sighted audiences.

A controversy over a statue of Representative Barbara Jordan, erected on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is also illustrative of the ways disability metaphor, used within a conversation about racial justice, can render invisible the embodied lives of people of color with disabilities. Jordan occupies an important place in American history, as the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction and the first African American woman from the South to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She was also a disabled American. In 2008, the original design of a statue honoring Jordan was unveiled. The design depicted her sitting on a bench, reflecting the fact that Jordan was a wheelchair user. The representation of Jordan received outrage from the community, as outspoken critics argued that the statue diminished Jordan’s power, particularly in comparison with the erect statues of white men already found throughout the campus. The controversy resulted in a new design being selected, which depicts Jordan standing. One local newspaper headline proudly proclaimed, “Standing Like She Stood Up for the Constitution” (Faires 2007). Two years later, the same reporter began an article with the description: “She stood watch over the Constitution of the United States, and now she’s about to stand watch over the University of Texas.” The article goes on to say, “Barbara Jordan will take up permanent residence under West Campus’ Battle Oaks with the unveiling of a bronze statue in her likeness” (Faires 2009).

The emphasis on disability as metaphor clouds our ability to recognize that the statue does not, in fact, represent Jordan’s “likeness,” as it erases the disabled body she inhabited. The controversy over the representation of Jordan illuminates the ways disability metaphor can render disabled identities invisible. It appears difficult to both hold onto disability metaphor—to emphasize standing as a metaphor for Jordan’s strength and leadership, yet also recognize her as not only a black woman but a disabled black woman. The controversy begs some important questions. How does the use of disability metaphor diminish opportunities to engage with people of color who have “real” disabled bodies? Who claims ownership over representations of those who experience multiple forms of marginalization and who belong to multiple communities?

Disability Justice: Challenging Police Brutality at the Intersections

More recently, the disability justice movement has emerged, propelled by local organizing groups in urban areas and by social media activists. Led by disabled people of color and LGBTQ activists, the disability justice movement calls for a more intersectional approach to dismantling disability oppression. These activists challenge the emphasis on independence that was a hallmark of the disability rights movement. They also call for more expansive models for inclusion than the popular, but narrow, focus on legal rights and accommodations. While the goals of the disability rights movement prioritized the interests and perspectives of wheelchair users, the disability justice movement seeks also to center the experiences of people with psychiatric disabilities, chronic illnesses, and other disability groups that have been marginalized in previous disability organizing efforts.

One issue centered by disability justice writers and activists is that of patterns of police brutality, which are generated at the intersection of racism and ableism. It has been widely documented that black men are most likely to experience injury or death at the hands of law enforcement (Hyland, Langton, and Davis 2015; Ross 2015; Roussell et al. forthcoming). Disability also appears to be a high predictor of the likelihood of experiencing police force; however, because disability remains relatively invisible as a demographic category, we lack comprehensive research on patterns of police use of force against civilians with disabilities. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies are not required to report instances of police violence against civilians with disabilities, and no national database tracks these patterns. And although the discipline of sociology has produced important research on the hypercriminalization of racial minorities, the intersection of race and disability remains largely unexamined in this literature.

A few media outlets have compiled databases tracking police shootings, and this evidence suggest that between one quarter and one half of police shootings involve people with psychiatric disabilities (Perry and Carter-Long 2016; Treatment Advocacy Center 2013). These studies have not tracked other disabilities, however, and they do not include forms of police-on-civilian violence outside of shootings. In the most comprehensive analysis of media coverage of police violence and disability known, Perry and Carter-Long (2016) found that approximately one half of instances of police violence involved civilians with disabilities.

Although law enforcement’s engagement with people with psychiatric disabilities is receiving some public attention, these patterns are not often placed within a broader disability story. Yet evidence suggests people with a surprisingly wide range of impairments are at heightened risk for police brutality (Perry and Carter-Long 2016). Disabled people are also subjected to unique, and particularly brutal, forms of violence at the hands of law enforcement. For example, journalists have called attention to several recent incidents in which law enforcement officers have pushed people from their wheelchairs. In one such case, the officer did so to “prove” that the civilian was faking his disability (Perry and Carter-Long 2016). Incarceration continues to be a profound injustice committed against Americans with disabilities. People with disabilities, particularly those with psychiatric disabilities, are overrepresented in prisons and juvenile detention centers (Binswanger, Krueger, and Steiner 2009). These institutions often breed unique and brutal forms of degradation, including physical, sexual, and emotional violence (Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018). Inhumane treatment within institutions, such as solitary confinement, can also cause permanent impairments and exacerbate the severity of existing medical conditions (Arrigo and Bullock 2008; Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018). Police abuse of people with disabilities, both inside and outside of institutions, also includes denial of accommodations or attention to medical issues.

The complex enmeshment of racism and ableism has been rendered largely invisible not only in scholarship but also in racial justice and disability activism. This issue was not taken up by the disability rights movement, perhaps because it was not central to the lives of middle-class white activists and perhaps because people with psychiatric disabilities have traditionally been marginalized in the disability rights movement (Jones and Lewis Brown 2013; Gossett Zakrajsek et al. 2014). Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement has largely been silent on the issue of disability, despite their pronounced commitment to intersectionality. Thus, writers and activists of color, who also belong to disability communities, have organized to call out how the intersection of racism and ableism has fallen through the cracks by multiple social justice movements who fail to recognize these patterns. The Harriet Tubman Collective, an organization of black deaf and black disabled organizers, released a statement challenging Black Lives Matter for failing to include disability in its vision statement, even as this platform committed the movement to amplify the voices of “the most marginalized Black people.” Although other intersections of inequality were named, the vision statement of Black Lives Matter did not mention disability once. The Harriet Tubman Collective challenged this erasure, questioning “how a movement whose primary focus is ending police brutality, could outright ignore the violence experienced by Black Disabled and Deaf people.”

Challenging Disability Essentialism

Finally, we turn to two examples of how resistance at the intersection of race and disability can potentially unsettle taken-for-granted tenets of the minority model of disability. Resting upon the race analogy, the minority model locates the “problem” of disability as prejudice and social exclusion and simultaneously seeks to divorce disabled people from the pathologizing gaze of medicine. Consequently, pain, fatigue, and problems relating to “impairment” have been regarded as private matters that should not take up too much space in public conversations about disability. Ralph (2012), however, found that ex-gang members in Chicago who experienced paralysis as the result of gun violence often emphasized, even displayed, the bodily shortcomings and failures they lived with as they spoke to youth about the dangers of gang violence. In doing so, these men defied values and codes of conduct shared in the disability rights movement in service to social justice. As Ralph argued, these men were willing to disempower themselves in order to empower the youth for whom they are committed to reaching:

Disabled ex-gang members are willing to insist on the defectiveness of their bodies in order to highlight the burden that violence creates in communities like Eastwood. Their methods contrast sharply with the aims of the disability rights movement, in which constructing physical difference as an inferior identity is routinely and unequivocally criticized.

Thus, allowing multiple forms of disability-inflected resistance requires a recognition of the ways fundamental tenets of disability studies have been coded white.

Although we have critiqued the unreflective use of disability metaphor in critical race literature, the use of playful disability metaphor and performative disability embodiment within hip-hop begs consideration of the ways analogy can be used to empower at the intersection of race and disability. Language and performative styles within hip-hop both draw from and transform dominant conceptualizations of disability and damage imagery (Bailey 2011; Porco 2014; Rios 2011). Porco (2014) argued, “As vernacular theory and practice, hip-hop flips the script on disability, transforming a physical condition and social stigma into a desirable aesthetic value.” One example of this playfulness is the hyphy movement, which emerged in the Bay Area during the early 2000s. This hip-hop style involves performances termed “going hyphy,” “going dumb,” and “getting retarded” (Rios 2011). In these displays, black and Latino youth intentionally embody deviant identities of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and intellectual disability of which they are disproportionately labeled in schools. In contrast to the ways boys distance themselves from disability identities in other social spaces (Morris 2012; Pascoe 2007), youth in the hyphy movement transform disability into symbols of empowerment and resistance. Going “hyphy” or “retarded” challenges the racialized patterns in which these labels are deployed and simultaneously imbues these symbols with positive social meanings. Although this form of resistance might be unsettling to disability activists who have called for the rejection of the “R” word, intersectionality calls us to sit with the disquieting recognition that our own universal prescriptions are layered with racialized meanings.