ABSTRACT
The fact that disabled people share histories of discrimination, margin-alization and civil rights-based struggles with other racial minority groups in the United States is little discussed. These histories are intertwined*/often to a substantial degree*/but run on parallel tracks because the integrity of one’s own marginalization can seem diminished when it between
eugenics-based applications as they cross-reference disability and racial
‘inferiority’. If the historian of racism George Fredrickson proves to be correct, racism can be historicized as a relatively recent, and thus historically finite, phenomenon.1 Likewise, disability disenfranchisement also appears
no more than 200 or 300 years old.2 Consequently, we want to suggest that these two forms of ‘body-based’ disqualification*/according to which a population’s access to influential cultural privileges and institutions is understood to be ‘innate’ and therefore inevitable*/share a surprisingly intimate lineage in western discursive traditions.3 Not in the sense of having
been subject to interchangeable kinds of mistreatment and segregation strategies, but rather that both groups’ exploitation having been the result of
an attendant incapacity. The notion of this deficiency, termed ‘in-built inferiority’ by Fredrickson, is based on the idea that a group’s shortcomings are biologically encoded and cannot be transcended to any significant
Recently, some of the coordinates of this shared experience between
African Americans and people with disabilities came to light during a daylong summit held in Salt Lake City, Utah on the dual status of disability and race. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune , the summit revealed that ‘both
groups say they face similar hurdles such as poverty, discrimination, lack of political clout and, sometimes, a public backlash created by perceptions that
they get special treatment. Many also share a fear that they cannot find help or afford services.’5 Importantly, the summit helped to identify a series of little discussed ‘hurdles’ that both groups face despite divergent historical
origins of discrimination. While a transatlantic slave trade forms the foundation of African-American discrimination, for instance, disabled people’s devaluation results largely from a history of institutionalization
and reproductive control. However, divergent causes do not preclude an investigation into the shared social rationale that reinforces explanations
of why neither population ‘thrives’ in a social sense. There may be some
significant lessons to be drawn from the paralleling of these two groups, particularly in that disability (unlike gender or race) can be experienced by any societal grouping at any time.
