Want to Help Disabled People? Treat Them as Individuals

Our human nature, something that is capable of cruelty or goodness, is something we all have in common, whether able or disabled.

There are undoubtedly unresolved issues concerning disabled people’s lack of prospects in terms of employment and in the wider social world. Not long ago, a person’s physical deficiencies led others to assume that their characters were inherently flawed, which has led to various forms of discrimination across society, including education, healthcare, and housing. While this is decreasingly the case, many of these problems still linger.

However, in working out how to best integrate disabled people into society, I worry that some well-intentioned attitudes put disabled people at risk of being exploited by group-based identity politics that infest much of modern culture. After all, it seems to me that stigmatization and sentimentalism are both sides of the same coin; both involve a shallow engagement with a disabled person that is arguably equally dehumanizing.

I was led to this line of thought once again after watching the Hollywood production Wonder, based on a book of the same name, about a young boy who suffers from “a previously unknown type of mandibulofacial dysostosis.” The condition leaves his face deformed, making him vulnerable to bullying from his peers, as well as to bouts of the understandable “why me-ism” that punctuates the lives of anyone born disabled.