What's Wrong with Inspiration Porn?

Yesterday my friend and colleague Bill Peace (who blogs as “Bad Cripple”) wrote a post regarding a young man with a disability named Shane Burcaw who’s been in the national news because he’s been promoting himself as a motivational laugher. Mr. Burcaw has one hell of a disability, a condition called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a genetic disease compromising the motor neurons of the spinal cord, affecting body movement, and often resulting in total paralysis and early death. Faced with these trials Mr. Burcaw has lately been blogging under the handle “Laughing at My Nightmare”. In addition he’s been using Twitter to garner support for an appearance on the “Ellen DeGeneris Show”.

Disability is the most complicated human subject because it involves cultural and medical calculations. I use the algebraic term because neither culture or medicine can answer what will make a life with disability livable, and in fact both will do a great deal to assure that it isn’t. Faced with the prospect of early death and living with serious paralysis a decision to adopt jaunty laughter as a motto is preferable to deleterious depression, and no one should doubt it.

Samuel Johnson said that “disease generally begins that equality which death completes” by which he means (among other things) that physical deterioration buries everyone equally. But this is only true in a philosophical sense and to believe it is a mistake. I am blind and of the solid middle class; I’ve a friend who’s blind and can’t find a job. I have a dental plan; he doesn’t. Which of us has the worse toothache?

I won’t tell Shane B not to laugh. But people with disabilities “out in the world” struggle with a cultural problem, one that’s familiar to people of color, women, and many other historically marginalized groups. I call this thing the “uppity complex” because white bigots have long used “uppity” to characterize black folks who dare to assert their rights and/or dignity. I walked out of a barber shop in Columbus, Ohio when a white customer, seeing the black mayor of the city on TV said: “He’s uppity!” The barber (also white) agreed and I told them to read a book some day and walked out. Oppressed groups are told in countless ways to remain servile, live on sufferance, and by all means stay cheerful. If you’re prevented from entering a restaurant because of your wheelchair or guide dog and by god, you show honest emotion or principled umbrage, then the ableists can say you probably deserve your crumby fate because you have a bad attitude.

That’s the real problem when you’re oppressed–you’re marked as deserving your crappy maltreatment because you weren’t laughing along with the bigots.

Shane Burcaw is laughing and why the hell not? I happen to know some very dark jokes about Stalin, told to me by Soviets. But there’s a cultural and political component to disability. Inspiration porn critiques the idea you can overcome your disability with a great attitude and a song in your heart or a really good shtick. The public, many of them more than a little bigoted about disability eats this up.