Last week Chana Joffee-Walt launched a blockbuster series of stories on National Public Radio about social security disability benefits. The stories argue there’s massive fraud–the number of people claiming disability benefits has gone up alarmingly. What’s of interest from a disability studies perspective is that Joffee-Walt offers (as a means of laying the foundation for her story) that there’s no medical diagnosis for disability–a matter that she finds shocking.
Disability isn’t a medical condition for obvious reasons: the limitation of function that renders a person “disabled” depends on multiple factors–some have etiologies, some have a great deal to do with structural and social barriers. This is why scholars who study disability do so through both medical and social analyses. NPR’s analysis lacks any of this sophistication. This glaring failure means that poor people with disabilities can be held as suspect for not being–well, rich.
I am for instance a blind man with a graduate degree from the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop”. I teach at a major university. With a talking computer and a guide dog I can work productively. When my back aches from a herniated disc the university will provide me with a Herman Miller chair and pay for physical therapy. I have the same disability that keeps 70 per cent of the blind and visually impaired unemployed. My advantages? A combination of luck, education, and white collar privilege.
A man going blind, who, for the sake of argument, works the register at MacDonald’s, who has perhaps, a high school degree, will be unemployable without further education, rehabilitation, orientation and mobility training, assistive technology and a superbly adventurous employer. Note the statistic above: 70% of the blind are already unemployed, and many of them have all the attributes I’ve just described. That’s why I mentioned luck in the paragraph above. Paul Newman once told Larry King the reason he started his “Newman’s Own” charity and the “Hole in the Wall Gang” was because he knew for a fact there were better actors in New York City in the years following World War II. And yet he got the lucky break. He never forgot that much of his success had something to do with forces beyond his talent. Americans tend not to understand this. Certainly NPR has failed to recognize that poor people with disabilities face a monstrous task–one that is nearly impossible. Over the past decade (the same decade in which the claim of massive disability fraud is fixed) rehabilitation agencies have closed, the VA has fallen behind its case loads by years, and poverty and aging have increased.
If you can no longer stand, or bend over and you’re a blue collar worker, you are in fact disabled. It doesn’t matter that Joffee-Walt has an acquaintance in her circle with the same condition who works like a bull dog. Disability is a social construction not a medical one. I’m still astonished by the bad reporting NPR has unleashed. Amazed to read that Ira Glass thinks that same reporting is “just fine”–my amazement has as much to do with the failure of attention to the fuller dynamics of the subject as it does with the evidence of ableism.
Related:
See Lennard Davis at Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lennard-davis/npr-reporter-chana-joffew_b_2971443.html
Planet of the Blind 