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