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Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Why disability studies entails the study of everything else

Over the past few months I’ve been corresponding with a graduate student at another university who’s just getting into disability studies and beginning to offer disability studies courses.  At one point, she asked me if I’d attended the MLA session on “Citizenship and United States Writing”; I replied that my MLA was almost entirely given over to administrative matters, and that I’d only had time to attend two sessions.  She told me that no one on the panel had addressed citizenship in the context of disability, whereupon I said, “hey, that sounds a lot like the American Studies Association,” whereupon someone else said, “sounds pretty much like the American Historical Association, too” whereupon someone wondered whether the American Sociological Association had done anything on disability and citizenship, whereupon we all agreed that everyone who wants to talk about the history of U.S. citizenship, from here on in, should be required to read Douglas Baynton’s essay, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky.  Notice is hereby served.

Baynton writes, “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” (33).  Baynton explicitly aligns his essay with Joan Scott’s groundbreaking “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (American History Review 91 [1986]: 1053-75), and closes by arguing that disability is “more than an identity, [it] is a fundamental element in cultural signification and indispensable for any historian seeking to make sense of the past. . . .  It is time to bring disability from the margins to the center of historical inquiry” (52).

So for today, let’s take a look at what Baynton has to say about the intersection of disability and race in American history:

Disability arguments were prominent in justifications of slavery in the early to mid-nineteenth century and of other forms of unequal relations between white and black Americans after slavery’s demise.  The most common disability argument for slavery was simply that African Americans lacked sufficient intelligence to participate or compete on an equal basis in society with white Americans.  This alleged deficit was sometimes attributed to physical causes, as when an article on the “diseases and physical peculiarities of the negro race” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal helpfully explained, “It is this defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium, and an excess of nervous matter distributed to the organs of sensation and assimilation, that is the true cause of that debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.” . . .

A second line of disability argument was that African Americans, because of their inherent physical and mental weakness, were prone to become disabled under conditions of freedom and equality. . . .  Dr. Samuel Cartwright, in 1851, for example, described two types of mental illness to which African Americans were especially subject.  The first, Drapetomania, a condition that caused slaves to run away—“as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation”—was common among slaves whose masters had “made themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals.” The need to submit to a master was built into the very bodies of African Americans, in whom “we see ‘genu flexit written in the physical structure of his knees, being more flexed or bent, than any other kind of man.” The second mental disease peculiar to African Americans, Dysaesthesia Aethiopis—a unique ailment different “from every other species of mental disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body”—resulted in a desire to avoid work and generally to cause mischief.  It was commonly known to overseers as “rascality.” Its cause, similar to that of Drapetomania, was a lack of firm governance, and it was therefore far more common among free blacks than among slaves—indeed, nearly universal among them—although it was a “common occurrence on badly-governed plantations” as well.  (37-38)

Things become more complicated, of course, when people who are stigmatized by association with disability seek to claim membership in a community of citizens by distinguishing themselves from people with disabilities, who are thereby treated as if their stigmatization is appropriate to their condition:

The attribution of disease or disability to racial minorities has a long history.  Yet, while many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attributing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously denied and condemned by their targets, and what htis tells us about our attitudes toward disability. (41).

Did we discuss Baynton’s essay in my disability studies seminar today?  You bet we did, along with three other essays.  Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment on disability and gender!

Posted by Michael on 02/08 at 04:02 PM
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