In her superb book Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, Ellen Samuels describes, among other things, the long history of impostor narratives in America. Samuels and Martin Norden (author of the Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies) have both revealed a quintessentially American fascination with ersatz or manque cripples—the former is a pretender and the latter isn’t crippled enough. In either case the role of popular film in deceiving the public about disability is ubiquitous and a matter of long standing. By this I mean to say, perhaps inelegantly, that disability is seldom an either/or circumstance. In the case of blindness one may “see” rather poorly but still see well enough to read a sign from a distance of 8 inches. A wheelchair user may be able to walk five feet. In America where people are either rich or poor; black or white; anything that troubles this hardened exclusivity is (and has always been) considered cheating.
Samuels’ book is properly analytical about what is fake and what is real and one should be mindful always that America loves, truly loves, some kinds of fake but not where the human body is concerned. Trans people, and partially sighted people, and light skinned black people all know the drill. They walk through the long dusk with rudely scrawled signs proclaiming they’re not fakers. “Fake” means, among other things, thievery. Years ago when I was a visiting writer at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, I took a walk with my guide dog. I walked her on a dirt road with just her leash and I didn’t use the harness. There were no cars. I wanted my dog to have the opportunity to dawdle in the ferns and smell the wild turkeys. Would’t you know? A fellow artist in residence—a rather angry older woman—told the MacDowell administration I was a “faker”; I was faking blindness, just to have a dog at the arts center. Disability is always seen as something devious, performative, and dishonest. Always.
People who are not disabled do not generally understand this. And in my view, this is why it’s so important for colleges and universities to hire actually disabled people to serve in offices of disability support or as ADA Coordinators. Unless you’ve felt the shifting sands of social acceptance under your own feet or wheels, you probably don’t understand the hourly struggle to achieve citizenship that disabled people endure.
Fake also means malevolent. I’m going to steal something from you. Perhaps I’ll steal your good health. The fake blind man, grabbing your good fortune and stuffing it into his little bag.
Planet of the Blind 