1 Deborah Gallagher
Department of Special Education
Special is a Nice Word, But What it Really Means is Segregated
Like colleges of education across the nation, the College of Education at the University of
Northern Iowa has invested concerted efforts toward promoting diversity and expanding social
justice for all citizens. These initiatives are based quite properly on the premise that these are
among the worthiest goals we can pursue as educators. And while we strive conscientiously to
accord equal treatment to all forms of diversity, only one of them – disability-- has its own its
own “special” curriculum in our teacher education program.
So, what could be wrong with that? On the face of it, one might happily assume that this
arrangement is both enlightened and progressive. It is also no doubt based on good intentions.
But I want to suggest that these good intentions are based on an outdated and decidedly
impoverished conception of disability, one that doesn’t lead to the advancement of diversity and
greater social justice but rather to their opposite. I also think it’s important to draw attention to
the rather opaque but powerful role this conception of disability plays in the ongoing
marginalization of other historically oppressed groups. Ultimately, I hope this essay might
prompt conversations about how we might join together in reconsidering our teacher preparation
programs in the College of Education.
In the not too distant past, the meaning of disability was thought to be universally self-evident—
the inability to do something that most others can do as a result of a specific impairment in
physical, psychological, or intellectual functioning. Subsequently, “[t]o have an impairment was
regarded as a ‘personal tragedy’” (Barnes, Mercer, & Shakespeare, 1999, p. 10) that, despite the
seemingly compassionate regard of the “able-bodied” essentially rendered the disabled person a
“failed normal” (Johnson, 2003).
But all of this was about to change as disabled people led the way in challenging the public and
professionals’ taken for granted image of them as defective, deficient, and dependent. During the
1950s and 60s, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States emphasized the need to recognize
and address inequalities based upon race, gender, sexuality. And although most people are only
vaguely (if at all) aware of the history of disabled people, they launched their own civil rights
movement. With their allies, they mobilized to pass bills, change laws, increase access to all
aspects of society, claim rights, and, most of all, to define themselves (Fleisher & Zames, 2001).
In the United Kingdom, the Disabled People’s Movement was launched in 1972 through the
efforts of the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). In their statement
entitled, Fundamental Principles of Disability, UPIAS activists took specific aim at the
traditional understanding of disability – a medicalized understanding that framed disability as a
problem or set of problems directly and solely attributable to the individual who “has the
disability.” “In our view,” they stated, “it is society which disables physically impaired people.
Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily
isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (UPIAS, 1976, p.3).
2 Building from this statement, Oliver (1990) elaborated and promoted what is broadly known as
the social model of disability. Rather than conceiving of disability as an “individual problem,”
and “a personal tragedy,” the social model sought to make clear that the problems of disabled
people derive from society’s collective response to their impairments. Barriers and restrictions of
all kinds stemming from discrimination enforce conditions of unemployment, poverty, isolation,
segregation, and dependency, among others. In sum, the social model of disability constituted a
reframing of the very concept of disability that asserted that disability is not about certain forms
of human variation, which should all be understood as natural and part of the broader human
experience. Instead, disability is about how certain kinds of human differences are made (by the
rest of us) to make a difference. Put differently, it is not inevitable that not seeing, hearing,
moving, thinking, or acting in certain culturally valued ways must be construed as a form of
deficiency. The line between “abled” and “disabled” is an arbitrary one in any event.
In the United States, during the late 1970s, the American counterpart to the U.K.’s early social
model emerged. Explicitly drawing from lessons learned from the civil rights movement, the
early U.S. social model claimed that people with disabilities were a minority group who were:
• accorded less status than non-disabled citizens;
• subjected to significant, ongoing inequalities in most aspects of life;
• subjected to widespread discrimination; and
• relentlessly misrepresented and actively stereotyped in the media (Shapiro, 1993;
Zola, 1982)
Both U.K. and U.S. models confronted, “the idea of defective citizenship by situating disability
in the environment, not in the body. Disability, from this point of view, requires not individual
medical treatment [or other forms of “intervention”] but changes in society” (Siebers, 2008,
p.73). It is important to note that the “environment” Siebers referred to includes not only the
physical surroundings, but also the cultural, economic, institutional, and educational practices
that impose significant restrictions on individuals with disabilities. It is likewise important to add
that since its original founding the social model has been extended to include all disabilities,
Goodley, 2001).
The social model does not deny that people differ from each other. Rather, it frames these
differences (physical and otherwise) as “normal” human variation. It places a moral/ethical
demand on us to own our interpretations of normality/abnormality and ability/disability by
asking – What kind of differences make a difference to us, and why? It further entreats us to
address the kinds of barriers we create as a community that turn some people’s differences into a
disadvantage we then come to understand as a disability.
Despite this momentous reconceptualization of disability, most of the world, including the world
of academics who might otherwise know better, continues to conceive of disability through the
lens of the outdated medical model. Consequently, it is somewhat difficult to conceive of
disability as a form of diversity on par with other forms of diversity. I think there are other
explanations for this situation, as well.
One is that the history of disabled people is rarely if ever taught in either secondary or postsecondary schools. It might therefore reasonably seem that other minority groups have been
more deeply and unrelentingly persecuted. But that is simply not the case. Disability Studies
3 scholar Lennard Davis (1997) captured the persistent prejudice and discrimination directed
against people with disabilities as follows:
People with disabilities have been isolated, incarcerated, observed, written about,
operated on, instructed, implanted, regulated, treated, institutionalized, and controlled to a
degree probably unequal to that experienced by any other minority group. As fifteen
percent of the population, people with disabilities make up the largest physical minority
within the United States. One would never know this to be the case by looking at the
literature on minorities and discrimination. (p. 1)
While much, if not most, of our work on diversity initiatives has centered on the very crucial
concerns surrounding race, ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, and
religious/ideological preference, disability as a form of diversity has arguably received less
attention. This is the case even though the history of disabled people reveals a long saga of
tyranny and oppression every bit as horrific as that of other minority groups. Anyone who thinks
otherwise is unlikely to be deeply familiar with the brutally inhumane conditions in the
institutions and asylums that have incarcerated generations of disabled people (see: Blatt &
Kaplan, 1966). He or she is unlikely to have heard of the “Ugly Laws” instituted throughout the
United States between the 1860s to 1970s that made it illegal for people with “unsightly or
disgusting” disabilities to appear in public (see: Schweik, 2009), except at “Freak Shows” (see:
Thomson, 1996).
Many are likewise unaware that the first victims the Holocaust were disabled children (then
adults). While everyone has heard of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald, how many are
familiar with Hadamar, Grafeneck, and Hartheim (Nazi facilities specifically designed to
annihilate disabled people whom they contemptuously referred to as “useless eaters” and “life
unworthy of life”) (see: Evans, 2004)? Even less known is the fact that the Third Reich took both
its initial inspiration and legitimation from leaders of the American Eugenics Movement who
were busily implementing involuntary sterilization and anti-immigration laws aimed at ridding
the country of “the feeble-minded,” blind and deaf people, etc. (see: Kuhl, 1994). The list could
go on and on.
A second explanation for why it is difficult to embrace disability as we do other forms of
diversity has to do with what Alain de Botton (2004) referred to “status anxiety” – the individual
and collective anxieties arising from the desire to “climb the social ladder,” coupled with fears of
failing to measure up in the eyes of oneself or others. It seems that for the anxious among us
(whom de Botton would say is just about all of us), disabled people are uniquely provocative. I
say uniquely provocative because while it is either impossible or highly unlikely that we’ll wake up
tomorrow morning as a member of a different minority group, it is always possible that we’ll
become disabled through accident, injury, illness, or aging (Davis, 1997). That awareness,
however tacit, tends to incite what Heshusius (2004) called “exclusionary fears,” meaning a deep
need to keep a safe distance from those who remind us of our own vulnerabilities and thereby
threaten our ideal self-images as competent, healthy, intelligent, and therefore “worthy” people.
Subsequently, disability doesn’t seem to sit easily with our sensibilities surrounding diversity
because,
4 [t]he idea presented by diversity is that any identity is one we all could imagine having,
and that all identities are worthy of choosing. But the single identity one cannot (and,
given the ethos of celebrating diversity, should not) choose is to be disabled. No one
should make the choice that his or her partner be disabled, or that their child be born with
a disability. So how could disability legitimately be part of the diversity paradigm, since
it speaks so bluntly against the idea of choice and seems so obviously to be about
helplessness and powerlessness? If diversity celebrates empowerment, disability seems to
be the poster student for disempowerment. (Davis, 2011, p. B39)
But actually the opposite is true. Further, and however counterintuitive it may seem, disability
has remarkable potential for galvanizing the diversity project.
For one thing, there is a far closer kinship between disability and other forms of diversity than
might meet the eye. In fact, Douglas Baynton’s (2001) vivid historical analysis demonstrated that
disability discrimination has long served as a central tool for justifying the oppression of racial
and ethnic minorities as well as women and LGBTQ people. During the nineteenth century,
distorted cultural understandings of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the creation of the normal
curve, and the rise of the eugenics movement served as pseudo-scientific footing for a “natural”
hierarchy placing the “able-bodied,” the Caucasian, the heterosexual, and the male as the
standard by which the all others were to be measured.
Racial minorities were depicted as evolutionary “throwbacks” and disability was frequently
ascribed to them to vindicate slavery and Jim Crow segregation after emancipation. For example
Black Americans were assumed to be genetically disease-prone and intellectually impaired.
“Mulattos” were judged to be more intelligent, but miscegenation laws were enacted to prevent
“race-mixing.” African Americans, it was argued, were too inferior to withstand the challenges
of freedom, which was said to trigger mental illness, tuberculosis, and so on. Even the desire to
escape enslavement was framed as a disability known as “drapetomania” – a disease that caused
slaves to flee, and occurred when slave owners made themselves “too familiar” to the slaves by
treating them as equals. Moreover, a condition known as “Genu flexit” was said to be a trait built
into the bodies of Black people (they, after all, were thought to be naturally servile). Whites
further rationalized the denial of education to Black people by arguing that it would lead to their
demise through overexertion of their weak constitutions. White people with disabilities were
understood to be reduced, through their disability to the status of Black people; and, Down
syndrome was called “Mongolism” because Asians were understood as a race lower on the
evolutionary hierarchy.
Women were seen to be inherently disabled by their frailty, irrationality, tendency to hysteria,
and emotional excesses. “Female Hysteria” was thought to be a real, psychological disorder in
women until the 20th century. Notably, the medical term "hysterectomy" (designated in 1879)
comes from the root word "hyster" referring to the womb and "ectomy" meaning removal. The
reason the root word "hyster" refers to the womb is derivative of the word "hysteria" based on
the sexist assumption that the womb itself caused uncontrollable, emotional behavior. Like
racial minorities, women were viewed as a case of atavism or arrested development; and for this
reason, women were not viewed as capable of responsible voting and were understood to lack
endurance to be educated. Overuse of their brains, it was thought, would impair women’s
reproductive capacities.
5 As Baynton further elaborated, immigration legislation has long used “the concept of disability”
to deny immigration to various ethnic groups.
That is, while people with disabilities constituted a distinct category of persons
unwelcome in the United States, the charge that certain ethnic groups were mentally and
physically deficient was instrumental in arguing for their exclusion.
The laws forbidding entry to the feeble-minded were motivated in part by the desire to
limit immigration from inferior nations, and conversely, it was assumed that the 1924 act
would reduce the number of feebleminded immigrants. The issues of ethnicity and
disability are so intertwined in the immigration debate as to be inseparable. (p. 4748, emphasis added)
Gays, lesbians, and others of diverse sexual and gender orientations were classified as mentally
ill under this immigration legislation. The banning of their immigration under these laws was not
lifted until after the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973.
A more current example of using disability as a tool for oppression is conspicuous overrepresentation of racial minorities in special education. A study by Harvard’s Civil Rights
Project (Losen and Orefield, 2002) substantiated the fact that a disproportionately high number
of minority students are indeed placed in special education. African American children are
almost three times (2.88) as likely as white children to be identified as having an intellectual
disability, 1.9 times as likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed, and nearly 1.3 times as
likely to be identified as having a learning disability. Native American children are 1.3 times as
likely as white children to be identified as having an intellectual disability, 1.24 times as likely to
be identified as emotionally disturbed, and 1.50 times as likely to be identified as having a
learning disability. Latino children are 1.17 times as likely to be identified as having a learning
disability. Not surprisingly, minority students are significantly more likely than White students to
be placed in unequal and segregated special education classes for more of the school day. The
extent of this phenomenon has led researchers to conclude that these disability identification and
placement patterns have systematically expedited the racial re-segregation of American schools
(Artiles & Trent, 1994; Ferri & Connor, 2005; Fierros & Conroy, 2002; Losen & Orefield,
2002).
At the conclusion of his analysis, Baynton noted an irony pertinent to our discussion here. “Still
today,” he observed,
women and other groups who face discrimination on 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. (p. 50-51, emphasis added)
But perhaps it is time we did just the opposite. To acknowledge disability as another form of
diversity, one that is every bit as much of cultural construct as race, ethnicity, gender, and so on,
is an empowering move – not a disempowering one. We can begin by reimagining our teacher
education program to reflect such a move. To be explicit, such a reimagining would aim to
prepare all of our teacher education majors to work with all students in inclusive classrooms. It
6 would be a program that recognizes the inadequacy of the medical model of disability, the
discriminatory effects of disability labeling, and the pernicious consequences of educational
segregation. But the elimination of such effects is not the only thing we stand to gain. As
importantly, teachers prepared in such a program will be far better teachers for every student,
including “high achievers” and those who appear to be doing quite well in school.
I think such a transformation is one well worth pursuing. For far too long, disability has been
tacitly thought of as a special kind diversity, one that has seemed in some ways related to but in
another way distinct from others. Consequently, the idea of disability has existed on the margins
of what we think of as diversity writ large. A morally viable teacher education program must
recognize this situation -- and act on it.
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