source reviews - ram pages · 2017-03-14 · source reviews 1. past and present perceptions towards...
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Source Reviews
1. Past and Present Perceptions Towards Disability: A Historical Perspective
Chomba Wa Munyi. “Past and Present Perceptions Towards Disability: A Historical
Perspective.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 32 no. 2, 2012.
<http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3197/3068>
This article serves to synthesize what little literature there is on disability history in order to
follow the development of the perception of disability throughout history to the current
perceptions of disabled people that culminates in a “coherent literature review on cross-cultural
factors that influence perceptions towards children and adults with disabilities from a historical
perspective.” Munyi posits that these factors are the categorization as deviants, the intensity of
social training in the family unit, and the value ascribed to certain body parts. The article then
ends with “a few examples that illustrate positive steps taken by the international community,
and several countries, to improve disability perception.”
This article is useful to my paper because it uses historical context to set the stage for the
development of the perception of disability, and then examines common factors affecting it. It
provides background knowledge on the perception of disability and the effects of this perception,
providing examples and synthesis of a great number of important concepts. This is all useful for
my paper’s focus on the perception of disability, how it develops, and the effects it has on
disabled people.
● “Persons with disabilities were completely rejected by some cultures, in others they
were outcasts, while in some they were treated as economic liabilities and grudgingly
kept alive by their families. In other settings, persons with disabilities were tolerated
and treated in incidental ways, while in other cultures they were given respected status
and allowed to participate to the fullest extent of their capability.” This is really
interesting, the black and white thinking of disabled people as either godlike or
subhuman is reminiscent of the black and white thinking of disabled people as either
fetishized or completely non-sexual, which I plan to touch on later in my paper.
● While throughout the world many changes have taken place in status and treatment of
persons with disabilities, the remnants of tradition and past belief influence
present-day practices affecting such group (Du Brow, 1965; Wright 1973).
● “Thomas (1957) sees societal perceptions and treatments of persons with disabilities
within cross- cultural settings as a kaleidoscope of varying hues that reflect tolerance,
hatred, love, fear, awe, reverence and revulsion.” I just really love this quote because
it beautifully develops the ambiguous nature of the power that societal perception has.
● “History shows that ignorance, neglect, superstition and fear are social factors that
have exacerbated isolation of persons with disabilities.”
● “The desire to avoid whatever is associated with evil has affected people’s attitudes
towards people with disabilities simply because disability is associated with evil. Most
of these negative attitudes are mere misconceptions that stem from lack of proper
understanding of disabilities and how they affect functioning.” This quote exemplifies
just how strong the power of stigma is when influencing one’s treatment of disabled
people. Misconceptions = connection to post truth
● “Society furnishes in addition to roles and languages, a customary attitude towards the
handicapped” (Gellman 1959 pg. 4).
● “The meaning of one’s own disabled physique to a person with a disability and to
others who interact with him or her will depend in general upon the values of the
cultural group to which they belong (Barker et al. 1953). The affective attitudes
discussed by Wright (ibid) include pity, fear, uneasiness, guilt, genuine, sympathy and
respect.” and “Prevailing attitudes not only determine the social expectations and
treatment accorded to a person with a disability in the society, but also his or her
self-image and function. Hobbs (1973) states that, the message that a child with a
disability receives about himself from his environment determines to a large extent his
feelings about who he is, what he can do and how he should behave.” These exemplify
some of the many ways that the stigma and subsequent treatment of disabled people
can effect them to the point of influencing their sense and perception of self.
● “Since few non-disabled people in the larger society interact directly with persons
with disabilities, they rely heavily upon stereotype in their response to persons with
disabilities. “Each group of people learns the stereotypes that others have on it and
then develops its auto-stereotypes to match it” (Triandis 1971 pg. 107).” This explains
the development and perpetuation of stigma.
● “The self-image of persons with disabilities is therefore more often than not a
reflection of social stereotypes or reactions to them. Rejection, for example, produces
inferiority, self-consciousness and fear (Barker et al., 1953; Roeher, 1961; Wright
1960). Thus, community attitudes affect self-perception. They also limit the
opportunity to associate with others, the extent of one’s mobility and the possibilities
of employment (Hobbs, 1973).” To reiterate what I said earlier about stigma’s power
being so great that the treatment it causes develops one’s self-image and perception is
striking.
● “societal attitudes are significant since they largely determine the extent to which the
personal, social, educational and psychological needs of persons with disabilities will
be realized (Jaffe, 1965; Park, 1975).” Can connect this to the sick role and the
symbolic power dynamic of the majority witholding what the minority needs on the
condition that they assimilate.
2. Stigma Power
Link, Bruce G., Phelan, Jo. “Stigma Power” Social Science & Medicine, 103, 2014. pp. 24-32.
US National Library of Medicine. United States Department of Health and Human Services, 1
June 2015. Accessed 26 Jan, 2017. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451051/>.
Link and Phelan’s “Stigma Power” defines and illustrates the concept of stigma and its
effects, particularly in the context of mental illness. They use Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic
power to develop the concept of “stigma power” in order to explain the ways in which stigma
affects certain groups, the processes by which it is used to oppress them, and the motivations the
dominant group has for developing and utilising this stigma. Lastly, the conduct a survey of
mentally ill patients in order to determine empirical evidence for the existence and negative
affects of disabled stigma on disabled people.
This article is extremely useful for this paper because it not only further develops the concept
of a disability stigma and the power of that stigma, but develops the reasons for this stigma in the
structure of society and its uses in benefiting groups of this structure at the expense of others on
both theoretical and applicable levels. Its inclusion of the identity-based group power dynamics
involved in stigma are invaluable when arguing the existence of stigma by explaining the
motivations one would have in developing and utilizing a stigma against a group of people. By
operating at the theoretical level of sociology and escalating to empirical evidence, this article
helps one to understand the sociocultural reasons stigma exists and how it is used to oppress
disabled people, but provides actual evidence of the negative effects of this stigma and thus
illustrates its power.
● “When people have an interest in keeping other people down, in or away, stigma is a
resource that allows them to obtain ends they desire.” This introduces stigma’s role as
a tool for oppression.
● “Stigma is used to refer to instances in which stigma processes achieve the aims of
stigmatizers with respect to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others.” This
develops the role of stigma in oppression, which has inarguably negative effects on
those being oppressed.
● The generic processes of discrimination are useful when illustrating the different ways
that stigma is used to negatively impact disabled individuals, and in explaining the
consequences faced by and motivations of the stigmatizer.
● “when efforts to keep people in fail as common-sense approaches to curbing
symptoms are revealed to be ineffective, keeping people away can be substituted as a
strategy to avoid non-normative behavior. And to the extent that keeping people away
is more easily achieved when people are relatively powerless we might expect that
keeping people down would also be prominent in the case of serious mental illnesses.
Thus we expect a strong initial motivation to stigmatize mental illnesses resides in
efforts to keep people in, but when symptomatic behaviors endure and efforts to keep
people in fail, motivations to keep people down and away are also evident.”
● Modified labeling theory is useful because it is a theory that Link developed that
“specifies a threat to people with mental illnesses in general societal conceptions and
then examines coping orientations people adopt to deal with that threat.” Using this
theory, one can examine the detrimental affects of stigmatization as a threat, and how
mentally ill people are affected by and cope with that threat.
● Minority stress is the chronically high levels of stress of minorities due to conflicts
caused by their minority status, such as discrimination or internalized prejudice, and
the subsequent conflict one faces as a result.
○ This is incredibly useful in illustrating the effects of stigma on disabled
people by showing the internal conflict and consequences of that conflict.
○ Link and Phelan cite the connections between the cultural assessment of the
value of mentally ill people and them being kept in, away, and down and
how those concepts affect the thinking and behaviour of mentally ill people,
cultivating anxiety and fear and thus; conformity.
● The results of the study are extremely useful because it illustrates empirical evidence
to support the sociological theories behind stigma and its power to negatively impact
many aspects of a disabled person’s life.
3. Sick Role
Turner, Bryan S. “sick role.” The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
The entry on the “sick role” in Bryan Turner’s Dictionary of Sociology defines the sick role
and its four components and explains how it developed and its intended purpose. Then, Turner
addresses its criticisms and how the sick role is used as a method of social control on the basis
that illness (disability) is a deviant behaviour.
I included this source because it is a perfect example of how ableist narratives based in
misconceptions (“truthiness”) are developed, accepted, and applied in the medical community. It
follows the development of this concept from a practice intended to aid in the treatment and
quality of life of disabled people -though rooted in ableist, sensationalised, and later disproven
research- to a method of social control that uses stigma to force disabled people to conform to a
norm.
● “Parsons classified sickness as a form of deviant behavior which required legitimation
and social control. While the sick role legitimizes social deviance, it also requires an
acceptance of a medical regime. The sick role was therefore an important vehicle for
social control, since the aim of the medical regime was to return the sick person to
conventional social roles.”
○ This quote not only directly identifies disability’s classification as a deviant
behaviour, which is relevant to the discussion of the development of the
disability stigma
○ introduces the concept of the ‘medical regime’ and the aspects of social
control intrinsic in the treatment of disabled people on both an individual
and institutional basis.
○ Illustrates the of the stigma -disability is bad and curable no matter what-
and its effects: disabled people must conform or face consequences
● “The concept does not pay sufficient attention to conflicts between patient and doctor;
[…] Doctors do not invariably behave in a neutral or universalistic manner towards
their clients; they are influenced by the gender, social class, and ethnicity of the
patient.”
○ This shows the power dynamics at play within a medical treatment setting
○ Shows bias, also introduces the blind trust placed in the integrity and
knowledge of the doctor at the expense of their patients, a concept which I
plan to further cover in this paper.
● “in effect a description of the patient role rather than the sick role. Not all sick people
become patients..”
○ Introduces the responsibility placed on the disabled person despite the
general lack of autonomy
○ Can connect to classism- not everyone can afford to be a patient
○ Can connect to the aforementioned ‘blind trust’ in doctors
● “Despite these criticisms, Parsons’s concept of the sick role has played an important
part in the development of medical sociology, and has remained influential in
understanding doctor-patient interaction.”
○ Can connect to post-truth- even though the criticisms are huge and valid,
and this concept was based in ableist, biased, disproven concepts; it is still
very important and influential and still affects disabled people
4. For The Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilisation in the U.S
Boggs, Belle. “For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilisation in the U.S”
The New New South, August 2013. Edited by Andrew Park.
<https://longreads.com/2014/11/19/for-the-public-good/#>
This is a long-form journalism article about the history of forced sterilisation in the U.S and
its ties to eugenics. It gives a background history of eugenics and follows the stories of two
individuals who were sterilised without their consent because of percieved disabilities. It also
goes into the psychological affects of involuntary sterilisation.
This piece is useful to me because it goes into one of the greatest violations against human
rights in American history, but also follows its conceptions and practice. It shows the reader that
horrifying, institutionalised abuses against disabled people are commonplace and often never
reported on or taught or met with outrage. Sterilisation, like the restriction of immigration, were
integral parts of the eugenics movement.
Notes:
● People generally have two reactions when they hear about American eugenics
programs for the first time: the first is shock, and the second is distancing. How could
those people have done that to them?
● Few realize that some of the inspiration for Germany’s eugenics program, and even
the language for the Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, which among other restrictions
banned sexual intercourse between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, came from
eugenicists who had been practicing for years in the United States. Some 60,000
American citizens were sterilized, often under coercion or without consent
● Pennsylvania, her home state, never passed a eugenics law, but managed to sterilize
270 people anyway, and also to perform the first known eugenics-motivated
castration, in 1889. The first state to enact a eugenics-based sterilization law was
Indiana, in 1907; it was followed 2 years later by Washington and California.
Eventually 33 states would pass such legislation. Internationally, the list of countries
with a history of forced sterilization includes Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Czech
Republic, Denmark, Japan, Iceland, India, Finland, Estonia, China, Peru, Russia,
Sweden, Switzerland, and Uzbekistan.
● It is human nature to distance oneself from what now seems cruel, violent,
reprehensible. We tell ourselves that we would not have done that, that our country is
better than that now. But that same distance —I am not like that, I am better — is
what motivated the first eugenicists and their followers.
● The American eugenics movement is often characterized as a progressive folly for its
faith in science and its big-government intrusiveness, but the truth is somewhat more
complicated. The American Eugenics Society counted among its members some of the
country’s most influential Progressive Era businesspeople, philanthropists, and
activists, including J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke Biddle, and Margaret Sanger, but the
group of scientists and eugenicists who founded it also included well-known racists
and anti-Semites. Early outreach efforts often included a mix of public health
education and racist, anti-immigration messages.
● this fear of social dependency had already primed the culture for an embrace of
negative eugenics. Large-scale asylums for the homeless and mentally ill, built in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, raised fears that increasing numbers of handicapped
citizens were a drain on public resources. The country’s first major immigration law,
the Act of 1882, specifically prohibited entry by any “lunatic, idiot, or any person
unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”
● Among the many artifacts of the eugenics era collected in North Carolina’s state
archives is a pamphlet produced in 1950 by a group called The Human Betterment
League. “You Wouldn’t Expect…” was circulated to citizens to gain financial and
political support for what it referred to as “North Carolina’s humanitarian Selective
Sterilization Law.” Written and illustrated in the style of a children’s book, the
12-page pamphlet begins, “You wouldn’t expect… a moron to run a train, or a
feebleminded woman to teach school.” Subsequent illustrations depict “mental
defectives” crashing cars and fumbling with money, then asks why the
“feebleminded” are allowed the most important job of all: parenthood. “The job of
parenthood is too much to expect of feebleminded men and women,” the pamphlet
reads. “They should be protected from jobs for which they are not qualified.”
● Francis Galton- Father of Modern Eugenics
○ Likely influenced by the achievements of his own illustrious family, Galton
believed that talent and ability are transferred genetically rather than by
environment. To Galton’s mind, his particular aptitude for geography,
language, and the sciences came not so much from his education and
privilege as from his eminent forebears.
○ But the term eugenics was not coined until 1883, when Galton published
his fifth book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In it, he
combined the Greek word eu, meaning good, with the suffix -genes,
meaning born, and defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under
human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future
generations.” He identified both positive eugenics (encouraging the
breeding of the best) as well as negative eugenics (discouraging and even
preventing the unfit from procreation), though he found the former more
practical and socially palatable.
○ With his amateur background in anthropology, Galton classified humans
along a line of “Mediocrity,” or average talents.
● Will Lynch
○ Often in trouble for fighting, he was sent at age 11 to the Caswell Training
School for the Mentally Handicapped, which housed not only those with
intellectual disability but also juvenile offenders and unwed mothers.
Located 100 miles away, in Kinston, Caswell was too far for visits from
family members, and he received only two weeks in the summers to spend
at home.
○ At Caswell, Lynch woke at 3 a.m. to milk the cows, and he was homesick
for family and friends. His mother, who was on welfare, struggled to
provide for her seven children, and though she missed her son, she didn’t
have the resources to bring him home. Lynch says the school’s strict
discipline policy taught him to stop fighting, and he made friends and did
his best to get along. But 2 years after he was committed, he was taken to a
nearby hospital, where he was to undergo a vasectomy. He remembers little
about the surgery itself, only a mask being held over his face, and being
asked to sing a song to a nurse, but he can still recall doubling over in pain
when he tried to walk, the next day. “That’s when I knew something wasn’t
right,” he says. He never received sex education in public school or at
Caswell, and he had to put the pieces together on his own.
○ The Eugenics Board’s records show that Lynch had been targeted as
“feebleminded” on the basis of an IQ test. Feeblemindedness is a catch-all
label that was used by eugenics boards across the country to identify those
unfit to reproduce. The feebleminded, those with low IQ scores and
“abnormal” behavior, were seen as particularly dangerous by eugenicists,
who connected their condition (believed to be hereditary) to promiscuity,
criminality, and social dependency. Eugenicists feared that the
feebleminded could easily pass as normal, reproducing with the general
population and passing on undesirable traits to their children.
5. Post-truth, information, and emotion
Laybats, Claire and Luke Tredinnick. “Post-Truth, Information, and Emotion.” Business
Information Review , vol. 33, no. 4, 2016, 204-206.
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0266382116680741>
This article is a succinct and brief introduction of the post-truth concept, specifically how
it relies on emotion. It argues that social media is one of the biggest perpetrators of post-truth,
because of the emphasis on the popularity of stories as opposed to their accuracy.
Post-truth and the misconceptions it causes contribute hugely to the development of
stigma. This emotion-based misinformation has been used for centuries to develop stigma that
becomes accepted as fact, post-truth is just the name ascribed to this concept recently. This
article posits an argument for how an age with instaneous communication and information,
which one would think would prevent misinformation, actually has increased its occurrence.
● “The facts of the matter are of secondary importance to free-floating opinion. Instead,
truth is replaced by demonstrative arguments that appeal to the electorate on a more
visceral and emotional level” (205) This posits the post-truth focus on emotions in order
to spread misinformation, illustrated by the eugenics movements’ use of this post-truth
strategy to restrict immigration.
● “It is characterized by a wilful blindness to evidence, a mistrust of authority, and an
appeal to emotionally based arguments often rooted in fears or anxieties” (205). This
summarises the negative effects of post-truth, all of which are used to develop stigma and
use it against the stigmatised group, illustrated in Link and Phelan’s ‘Stigma Power’
● “The filter bubble of social media is perhaps only a mirror of the filter bubble that
individuals have always created for themselves by choosing to prioritize relationships and
to consume information content that reinforces their existing values, opinions, and
beliefs” (205). This shows how an age of instantaneous, accessible information and
communication perpetuates post-truth rather than remedying it.
6. When Truth Falls Apart
Bustillos, Maria. “When Truth Falls Apart.” The Awl , 3 November 2016,
<https://theawl.com/when-truth-falls-apart-b4667d39575b#.y6600tuyh>. Accessed
In this article, Bustillos introduces the concept of ‘post-truth,’ the process that it follows,
and its effects. She illustrates this by walking the reader through the role of post-truth and its
process in the Bush campaign against John Kerry. Lastly, she posits a new term to explain the
nature of post-truth: dismediation, which is the spread of misinformation in order to make its
targets distrusting.
This article is helpful because it discusses and develops the definition and process of
post-truth strategies, providing a recent example and walking the reader through how the process
was used. In addition, it touches on the prevalent faith in whoever we deem to be knowledgable
on the topic, which introduces the role that the government and medical communities have
played in perpetuating the stigma and legitimizing their use in restricting immigration.
● “the key idea of the “post-truth” society was this: if a given public utterance had
sufficient appeal — emotional, political or otherwise — its empirical truth was
immaterial. What we can be persuaded to wish to believe, in other words, is as good as
the truth”
○ This is another great definiton of post-truth that is a perfect way to explain the
popularity and unquestioning acceptance of the blatant mistruths that have been
and continue to be used to restrict immigration.
● “The mammoth amount of available media in the internet age almost guarantees that we
will see everything through the pinhole of our own worldview. We can so easily choose
to experience only what we wish, and too often it’s the things we already agree with and
believe. The walls of our gardens are grown very thick.”
○ This further explains how social media has greatly increased the occurrence of
post-truth tactics.
● “That is to say, we choose not to investigate and reason out every question, but to trust
authorities in whom to place our confidence to do so for us. It is an old vulnerability
become newly dangerous, as the sources of information and disinformation have spread
and multiplied.”
○ This introduces the opportunity to discuss the role that the medical community
played in the acceptance of baseless, bigoted assertions which were used to justify
immigration restrictions.
7. Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History
Bayton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.”The
New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri
Umansky, New York University Press, 2001, p. 17-31
This article is about how disability and its stigma are not only used to oppress disabled
people, but also other minorities by ascribing disability to them. This practice was a significant
factor in three civil rights/citizenship movements: Black freedom and post-slavery equality,
women’s suffrage, and immigration restrictions. Though disability is a often a justification for
oppression, it is rarely a subject of historical inquiry; this article explores why and explores
discourse involving the ableism and lack of concern for disability and its role in these issues that
is present in their discussion by historians.
This article, which has become my primary source, is useful because not only does it
illustrate the disability stigma and how it affects disabled people, but how the disability stigma
affects other groups of people and how the equality politics lead to the perpetuation of disability
stigma and subsequent maltreatment. In addition, it explores the ableist implications of the lack
of historical inquiry and analysis of disability stigma, especially when it plays such a large part
in the oppression of other groups. Its focus on immigration makes it all the more helpful to me.
● “Disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people
themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups. That is, not only has
it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of
disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing
disability to them” (17).
● “When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability
was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded
from, citizenship” (17).
● “The metaphor of the natural versus the monstrous was a fundamental way of
constructing social reality in Burke’s time. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, however, the concept of the natural was to a great extent displaced or
subsumed by the concept of normality. Since then, normality has been deployed in all
aspects of modern life as a means of measuring, categorizing, and managing populations
(and resisting such management)” (18).
● “The natural and the normal both are ways of establishing the universal, unquestionable
good and right. Both are also ways of establishing social hierarchies that justify the denial
of legitimacy and certain rights to the individuals or groups. Both are constituted in large
part by being set in opposition to culturally variable notions of disability- just as the
natural was meaningful in relation to the monstrous and the deformed, so are the cultural
meanings of the normal produced in tandem with disability” (18-19).
● “Just as the counterpart to the natural was the monstrous, so the opposite of the normal
person was the defective” (19).
● “As an evolutionary concept, normality was intimately connected to the western notion of
progress. By the mid-nineteenth century, nonwhite races were routinely connected to
people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or
throwbacks. As a consequence, the concept of disability, intertwined with the concept of
race, was also caught up in the ideas of evolutionary progress” (19).
● “Down syndrome, for example, was called Mongolism by the doctor who first identified
it in 1866 because he believed the syndrome to be the result of a biological reversion by
the Caucasians to the Mongol racial type.”
● “James W. Trent argued in a recent article that at the 1904 World’s Fair, displays of
“defectives” alongside displays of “primitives” signaled similar and interconnected
classification schemes for both defective individuals and defective races. Both were
placed in hierarchies constructed on the basis of whether or not they were “improvable”
or not- capable of being educated, cured, or civilised. Whether it was individual atavism
or a group’s lack of evolutionary development, the common element in all was the
presence or attribution of disability” (19).
● The author discusses the role disability played in the issues of slavery, segregation and
women’s suffrage which would be really useful to illustrate how baseless assertions made
because of bigotry can lead to wide-scale normalised human suffering and oppression and
still affect those groups today. I’m not going to take notes on it just yet because I don’t
think I’ll have the pages to spare for it.
● “One of the fundamental imperatives in the initial formation of the American
immigration policy at the end of the nineteenth century was the exclusion of disabled
people. Beyond the targeting of disabled people, the concept of disability was
instrumental in crafting the image of the undesirable immigrant” (26).
● “The first major immigration law, the Act of 1882, prohibited entry to any ‘lunatic, idiot,
or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public
charge.’ Those placed in the categories of ‘lunatic’ or ‘idiot’ were automatically
excluded. The ‘public charge’ provision was intended to encompass people with
disabilities more generally and was left to the examining officer’s discretion. The criteria
for excluding disabled people were steadily tightened as the eugenics movement and
popular fears about the decline of national stock gathered strength” (26).
● “Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who worked his way through law school as an interpreter at Ellis
Island, wrote that “over fifty percent of the deportations for alleged mental disease were
unjustified,” based as they often were on “ignorance on part of the immigrant or the
doctors and the inability of the doctors to understand the particular immigrant’s norm, or
standard” (26 ).
● “Superintendents of institutions, philanthropists, immigration reformers, and politicians
had been warning for decades before 1924 that immigrants were disproportionately prone
to be mentally defective- up to half the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe
were feeble-minded, according to expert opinion. Rhetoric about the “slow-witted Slav,”
the “neurotic condition of our Jewish immigrants,” and in general, the “degenerate and
psychopathic types, which are so conspicuous and numerous among the immigrants,”
was pervasive in the debate over restriction” (27).
● “The issues of ethnicity and disability were so intertwined in the immigration debate as to
be inseparable” (27).
● “Arguments for immigration restriction often emphasize the inferior appearance of
immigrants, and here also ethnicity and disability overlapped and intertwined. Disability
scholars have emphasized the uncertain and shifting line between and impairment of
appearance and one of function. Martin Pernick, for example, has described the
importance of aesthetics in eugenics literature- how fitness was equated with beauty and
disability with ugliness. Lennard Davis has maintained that disability presents itself
“through two main modalities- function and appearance.” Restrictionists often
emphasized the impaired appearance of immigrants” (28).
● “The initial screening of immigrants was mostly a matter of detecting visible
abnormality. Inspectors, who prided themselves on their ability to make a “snapshot
diagnosis,” had only a few seconds to detect the signs of disability or disease as
immigrants streamed past them in single file” (28).
● “As one medical officer explained it, the “immigrant of poor physique is not able to
perform rough labour, and even if he were able, employers of labour would not hire
him.”The belief that an immigrant with a disability was unfit to work was a justification
for exclusion; but the belief that an immigrant was likely to encounter discrimination
because of a disability was equally justification for exclusion” (29).
● “Historians have scrutinized the attribution of mental and physical inferiority based on
race and ethnicity, but only to condemn the slander. With their attention confined to
ethnic stereotypes, they have largely ignored what the attribution of disability might also
tell us about attitudes toward disabled people. Racial and ethnic prejudice is exposed
while prejudice against people with disabilities is passed over as insignificant and
understandable” (29).
● “Still today, women and other groups who face discrimination the basis of identity
respond angrily to accusations that they might be characterized by physical, mental, or
emotional disabilities. Rather than challenging the basic assumptions behind the
hierarchy, they instead work to remove themselves from the negatively marked
categories- that is, to disassociate themselves from those people who “really are”
disabled- knowing that such categorization invites discrimination” (30)
● “Even disabled people have used this strategy to try to deflect discrimination. Rosemarie
Garland Thompson notes that ‘disabled people also often avoid and stereotype one
another in attempting to normalize their own social identities.” Deaf people throughout
the twentieth century have rejected the label of disability, knowing its dangers; and the
tendency of those with less-stigmatized disabilities to distance themselves from those
with more highly stigmatized disabilities is a common phenomenon. ”
● “This common strategy for attaining equal rights, which seeks to distance one’s own
group from imputations of disability and therefore tacitly accepts the idea that disability
is a legitimate reason for inequality, is perhaps one of the factors responsible for making
discrimination against people with disabilities so persistent and the struggle for disability
rights so difficult. As Harlan Hahn has noted, “unlike other disadvantaged groups,
citizens with disabilities have not yet fully succeeded in refuting the presumption that
their subordinate status can be ascribed to an innate biological inferiority.”” (30).
● “It may well be that all social hierarchies have drawn on culturally constructed and
socially sanctioned notions of disability” (31).
8. Britain rejecting child refugees is no surprise
Sloan, Alistair. “Britain rejecting child refugees.” Aljazeera . 14 February 2017.
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/02/britain-rejecting-child-refugees-surprise-17
0214081706478.html>. Accessed 8 March 2017.
This article provides a discussion of the factors that influenced the UK’s recent decision
to block child refugees, as well as the Brexit situation, and connects these two events to the
blocking of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. It also identifies and discusses the role of
post-truth in these three events.
This article is incredibly useful to me because it discusses three major events occurring
over time involving immigrants and post-truth’s role in each of them. It introduces Brexit and its
aftereffects, which I plan on using as an example of anti-immigrant post-truth propaganda. It also
introduces the Holocaust, which I plan on discussing, specifically the roles that American
eugenics and post-truth strategies played in it, and the treatment of immigrants and disabled
people as a result.
● “There are four factors: a refusal to acknowledge our historic indifference to refugee
suffering, the moral rot of the British conservative press, an austerity programme which
has legitimised public selfishness, and an even more marked exodus of compassion in
post-Brexit Britain. These four factors have created a perfect storm that has stacked the
odds against refugees, even if they are desperately vulnerable children.”
● “In Britain, there is a romanticised view of how the country acted towards the refugees
that were being targeted by Hitler.”
● “These papers have also championed austerity. They used the same journalistic
techniques to promote the government's punitive austerity agenda - which targets the
poor, disabled and women, in particular - as the methods used to oppose immigration:
misinformation, selective reporting and fearmongering opinion pieces.”
● “To illustrate their point, newspapers have, since the 1990s, gathered anecdote after
anecdote about "bogus asylum seekers", again seeking to present anecdotal evidence as
systemic.”
● “Recent reporting has veered into extreme callousness, including a reporter from
Breitbart London photographing child refugees into Britain and ruthlessly speculating
about their age, while the Conservative MP, David Davies was accused of "vilifying"
child refugees by asking them to undergo dental checks.”
● “The nail in the coffin for the 90 percent of child refugees who will now be turned away
from Britain's borders is the toxic anti-immigration atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain.”
● “In the run-up to the vote, Jo Cox, a Labour MP was assassinated partly for wanting
Britain to accept more refugees.”
● “Britain has changed after the Brexit, but the changes are, perhaps, not as severe as being
made out. From our Britain's approach to Jewish refugees in the World War II, to the
decades of anti-refugee propaganda pushed by the press, to the selfishness promoted
through six long years of austerity; there is a steady pattern of behaviour that means
rejecting child refugees who were promised a place here, should have been no surprise.”
9. Disabled child refugees
Agerholm, Harriet. “Disabled child refugees entry to UK through resettlement scheme suspended
by Home Office.” The Independent. 9 February 2017.
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/disabled-child-refugees-uk-suspend-entry-h
ome-office-resettlement-unhcr-united-nations-lord-dubs-a7571451.html>. Accessed 3 March
2017.
This article is a brief, succinct summary of the UK’s decision to suspend the acceptance
of disabled child refugees. It includes the defenses given for this decision, and the reactions of
various individuals and groups.
This article is useful as a supplement to the previous article, making the connection
between the last article’s post-truth and the treatment of specifically disabled refugees. It
provides an example of the way that post-truth misconceptions lead to decisions based in bigoted
mistruths can affect disabled immigrants on a massive scale.
● “The Government has stopped accepting disabled child refugees fleeing war in Syria and
other countries because it says it cannot cope with their needs.”
● “The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which processes
applications, said the Home Office had requested it “temporarily limit” requests from
people with mobility problems and learning disabilities because there was not “suitable
reception capacity” for them.”
● “Shantha Barriga, director of Human Rights Watch’s disability rights division, said:
“Shutting the door on vulnerable children is an affront to British values.“People with
disabilities endure unimaginable hardship during conflict, and many faced huge hurdles
in escaping the violence. That the UK now says it’s not prepared to accept refugees with
disabilities is unthinkable.“It’s an indefensible decision and blatant discrimination. The
UK is not simply lacking ‘suitable accommodation’ in this case, but seems to be lacking
political will.””
10. Silver Bullet source: The person in the disabled body
Aagmon, Maayan, Sa’ar, Amalia, and Tal Araten-Bergman. “The person in the disabled body: a
perspective on culture and personhood from the margins.” International Journal for Equity in
Health. vol. 15, 2016. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024466/> Accessed 8
March 2017.
This article discusses and makes conclusions and assertions about disability based on a
two-year participant observation of newly-diagnosed disabled people aged 45-60 at an Israeli
rehabilitation daycare centre. It utilises a holistic approach by focusing on the person in the
disabled body, rather than the medical approach that focuses on the afflictions of the disabled
body.
This is useful to me because it shows the ubiquitous nature of discrimination and
misconceptions towards disabled people. It also touches on the Holocaust, which I plan on
discussing, and its effects on the Israeli Jewish view of disability. In addition, it displays an
approach to disability discourse that none of my other sources do: the holistic approach.
● “We draw on anthropological understandings of“person” as a holistic category to
resurrect the personhood of individuals with disabilities, as a correction to the
overwhelming tendency to reduce their humanity to their physical injury. We likewise
reverse the analytical gaze by using these individuals' experiences to understand the
normative, culture-bound perception of “healthy” persons. We thus highlight Israeli
culture's conditioning of normative personhood on having a perfect body, and its
concomitant construction of individuals with physical disabilities as lesser persons.”
● “In Israeli culture the healthy body is a key component of normal personhood. The
forming of the Jewish nation has centered on the project of forming a new Jew, with
sturdy muscles and an upright body, to replace the presumed feeble and disabled body of
the Jew in exile. The subjects with disabilities presented in this study, in their unintended
deviation from the ideal of “the chosen body” shed light not only on the local cultural
understanding of a healthy body, but also on what it means to be a “worthy” person.”
● “The message that the attendees were lesser persons was communicated through a series
of symbolic dichotomies. A basic distinction between healthy and disabled was
reinforced through the symbolic treatment of the latter as children and their construction
as asexual. It was likewise expressed in attendees’ continuous lamenting their inability to
fulfill their appropriate gender assignments, and through their poignant sense of
disjunction between their life before and after the injury. While participant observation
revealed that these distinctions did not go unchallenged, the message they communicated
was unmistakable and their cumulative effect powerful and oppressive.”
● “This social construction of individuals with disabilities draws on three interrelated
classifications: that produced by the psychological discipline, that produced by the
biomedical establishment and that which is part of Israeli culture more generally. These
three distinct cultural discourses share a perspective of the universe organized across a
grid of rigid dichotomies. In the biomedical discourse these dichotomies are expressed by
medical classifications such as “normal” vs. “abnormal.”... In the psychological discourse
they are expressed in strict distinctions between men and women, children and adults,
and again, normal and abnormal. The Israeli cultural discourse, lastly, has filled these
categories with a social content that may well be even more rigid, especially regarding
the body and its physical performance. For instance, Israel has the highest rate of
abortions of imperfect embryos in the world and a flourishing industry of pregnancy
check-ups. This emphasis on the unblemished healthy body, which recurs in various
situations all through the individual’s life span, emanates partly from the collective
memory of the Holocaust, but also from the Zionist ideology of the “new Jew” .
Although they are not identical and in fact draw on distinct historical legacies, the three
cultural discourses–the biomedical, the psychological and the general Israeli–effectively
reinforce each other in creating a sense that healthy and injured persons are ultimate
opposites, and that injury to the body automatically also impairs the person’s mental,
sexual and social faculties.”
11. Sick Role
Turner, Bryan S. “sick role.” The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
The entry on the “sick role” in Bryan Turner’s Dictionary of Sociology defines the sick role
and its four components and explains how it developed and its intended purpose. Then, Turner
addresses its criticisms and how the sick role is used as a method of social control on the basis
that illness (disability) is a deviant behaviour.
I included this source because it is a perfect example of how ableist narratives based in
misconceptions (“truthiness”) are developed, accepted, and applied in the medical community. It
follows the development of this concept from a practice intended to aid in the treatment and
quality of life of disabled people -though rooted in ableist, sensationalised, and later disproven
research- to a method of social control that uses stigma to force disabled people to conform to a
norm. In addition, this article both illustrates the dangers of putting too much faith in experts
(which is connected to post-truth in Bustillos’ When Truth Falls Apart) and highlights the fact
that, in situations when individuals are prescribed a disability they do not have as a tool of
opression (connected to immigration in Bayton’s “Disability and the Justification for American
Inequality), they recieve all of the downsides of the social role described in this entry with none
of the already scarce benefits.
● “Parsons classified sickness as a form of deviant behavior which required legitimation
and social control. While the sick role legitimizes social deviance, it also requires an
acceptance of a medical regime. The sick role was therefore an important vehicle for
social control, since the aim of the medical regime was to return the sick person to
conventional social roles.”
○ This quote not only directly identifies disability’s classification as a deviant
behaviour, which is relevant to the discussion of the development of the
disability stigma
○ introduces the concept of the ‘medical regime’ and the aspects of social
control intrinsic in the treatment of disabled people on both an individual
and institutional basis.
○ Illustrates the of the stigma -disability is bad and curable no matter what-
and its effects: disabled people must conform or face consequences
● “The concept does not pay sufficient attention to conflicts between patient and doctor;
[…] Doctors do not invariably behave in a neutral or universalistic manner towards
their clients; they are influenced by the gender, social class, and ethnicity of the
patient.”
○ This shows the power dynamics at play