The following excerpt comes to us from Inclusion Daily:
S.E. Smith: Social Obstacles Are The Real Problem For Disabled People
(The Guardian)
September 24, 2010
FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt] Reading obituaries, I am usually struck by a recurring narrative which often appears when high-profile people with disabilities die. Inevitably, the words “overcome” or “courage” crop up, often in the first line of the obituary — as seen in the case of Helen Keller, eulogized in the New York Times as a person who “overcame blindness and deafness” right in the opening line.
Christopher Reeve, the attorney Thomas Siporin and the baseball pitcher Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown (known as “three finger” after his disability) are also regularly referred to in those terms. The most recent example was Ian Cameron’s death last week, typified in this extract from an article in the Times: “Ian Cameron was determined not to be limited or defined by what he has always refused to call his disability.”
The term “in spite of their disabilities” is often used to describe successful disabled people, eliding the many factors that contribute to their success. Oddly enough, despite the assurance in the obituary that these individuals refused to be defined by their disabilities, their memorials often have the effect of reducing them, and their accomplishments, to their disabilities: they are role models and heroes because they had full lives while disabled.
Some of the high-profile disabled people dying today were born in an era when the disability rights movement was a far cry from what it is now, and thinking about disability was very much informed by 19th-century ideas. Disability was primarily perceived as a problem among war veterans; public accommodation for disabled people was minimal, and disabled children were deemed to be figures of tragedy. Had they been born into different families, their life stories might have been radically different.
Entire article:
Social obstacles are the real problem for disabled people
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0924g.htm
Planet of the Blind 
Ms Smith, in the Guardian article to which you refer remarks that, “Disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to face discrimination in the workplace. These barriers are social, not personal, and cannot be ‘overcome’ through sheer force of will. What’s notable about many of the high-profile people with disabilities we see in the news isn’t that they ‘overcame’ their disabilities. They overcame the social obstacles presented to disabled people, and many did so largely thanks to a happy accident of birth, or as a result of success before becoming disabled, as seen in the cases of many disabled athletes. They attended excellent schools, had jobs ready-made for them in the family firm in some cases, had family members with the time and resources to provide accommodation when it wasn’t made available and to fight for equal access, had the earnings of distinguished careers to use in modifying homes and buying mobility devices – opportunities not available to your average disabled person.”
So often when we lump people with disabilities (or any feature that differentiates people from on another) into a cohesive group, the truth is distorted. In the same erroneous way, people can view Barrack Obama as an inspiration to Black Americans when his background and upbringing was quite atypical when compared with the typical Black American’s experience.
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