Friday, July 1, 2011

Oh Charles Johnson No

I knew that bell hooks had been pretty disappointing to the disability movement, but Johnson's "he's a dwarf physically because spiritually, he's a very small human being" took me by surprise. As Olson indicates, statements like that shows how limited people's awareness of the trouble with ableist stigma is — nobody says that they assigned a certain race or ethnicity or (at this time in history) sexual orientation to a character because of his/her vicious nature.

[But what's with the article using a Will Smith movie, a black American public intellectual, and a black American novelist for its three examples of ableist discourse? Something wrong there.]

No comments: