The Intersection of Race and Disability

• Pages: 365-386
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

365

Chapter 16

THE INTERSECTION OF

RACE AND DISABILITY

It has only been in recent years that scholars who concentrate

on race have paid any sustained attention to disability. The reverse

is also true: Only recently have scholars who specialize in disability

paid any serious attention to race. The historical siloing of “race

studies” and “disability studies” has prevented theorists from

recognizing that the processes that racialize people, and subordinate

some, work in tandem with the processes that disable people and

marginalize those so disabled. On this point, scholars Jennifer James

and Cynthia Wu observe that “the categories of race/ethnicity and

disability are used to constitute one another” and that similar

practices and discourses have kept racial minorities and persons with

disabilities “in strikingly similar marginalized positions.”

1

If James

and Wu are right, then studies of race ought to investigate disability,

as it is only through investigating disability that we will come to truly

and completely understand race, racialization, and racial inequality.

And, of course, if James and Wu are right, the reverse is also true:

Studies of disability ought to investigate race, as it is only through

investigating race that we will come to truly and completely

understand disability, the processes by which individuals are

disabled, and the subordination of persons with disabilities.

This chapter explores scholarship that scrutinizes the

intersection of race and disability, beginning with a description of

Disability Studies and an exposition of some of the insights that the

field has generated, and then exploring the discipline’s turn to

investigating race.

I. What Exactly Is Disability Studies?

Legal theorist Arlene Kanter provides a helpful definition of

Disability Studies when she describes it as an area of inquiry that

“applies social, cultural, historical, legal, philosophical, and

humanities perspectives to understanding the place of disability in

society”; it is a field that “explores disability as a social and cultural

construct and as a phenomenon reflecting and constituting identity

formation.”

2

Disability Studies arrived on the U.S.’s academic scene

1

Jennifer C. James & Cynthia Wu, Editors’ I ntroduction: Race, Ethnicity,

Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions, 31 MELUS 3, 4 (2006).

2

Arlene S. Kanter, The Law: What’s Disability Studies Got to Do with It or an

Introduction to Disability Legal Studies, 42 COLUM. HUM. RTS. L. REV. 403, 404 (2011).

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THE INTERSECTION OF

RACE AND DISABILITY

Ch. 16

in the 1990s as an effect of the social agitation in which persons with

disabilities had been engaging since the 1960s. One of the primary

interventions that the discipline has made since its arrival is its

challenging of what scholars have called the “medical model” of

disability. This model understands disability to be a biological or

physiological fact that is located in the individual. Pursuant to this

understanding, disability is pre-social, existing prior to and

independent of society. Because this model posits that social

arrangements have absolutely nothing to do with disability, it

proposes that disability is best managed by medical specialists—

professionals who might be able to “fix” or “treat” the disabled person

or, at the very least, make them more comfortable.

Disability Studies rejects this medical model and, instead, offers

a “social model of disability.” This model proposes that while people

may have impairments, it is society that disables people. This

paradigm asserts that, we, as a society, have made choices about how

we will build our physical environments, and we have established

norms around behaviors that mark some behaviors as good and

“normal” and others as bad and “abnormal.” Thus, while an

individual may have an impairment that prevents them from being

able to use their legs to walk, we disable them when we build stairs

instead of ramps that persons in wheelchairs can negotiate. And

while an individual may have an impairment that renders them

clinically depressed, we disable them when we do not make

allowances for incapacity—when we expect everyone to go to work

every day to earn a wage and to care for their children when they

return home at night.

The social model of disability proposes that the way we have

arranged society is not at all neutral. It claims that it is not impartial

to order society in a way that privileges those who can walk and those

who are not depressed. Quite the contrary, it argues that “biases are

built into [society’s] very structures, norms, and practices.”

3

While

these biases may not produce the impairments that individuals have,

they do produce disability.

4

Those incapable of walking are only

3

Kimani Paul-Emile, Blackness as Disability?, 106 GEO L.J. 293, 298 (2018).

4

It might be important to note that some scholars would challenge the

distinction between impairments and disability. To say that impairments are the stuff

from which disabilities are socially constructed is to suggest that while disability is a

social construction, impairments are “pre-social,” “real,” or “objective.” Education

scholar Subini Ancy Annamma and coauthors argue that there is nothing “objective”

about impairments. They write, “[A]ll dis/ability cate gories, whether physical,

cognitive, or sensory, are also subjective. In other words, societal interpretations of

and responses to specific differences from the normed body are what sign ify a

dis/ability.” Subini Ancy Annamma et al., Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit):

Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/ability, in DISCRIT: DISABILITY

STUDIES AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN EDUCATION 9, 10 (David J. Connor et al. eds.,

2016). This is to say that in order to know what counts as an “impairment,” we have