Where Prejudice, Disability and "Disabilism" Meet Silvia Yee

Introduction

In many ways, this collection of papers on the burgeoning field of national, regional, and international instruments directed towards the redress of disability discrimination is really about the existence of disability prejudice. Most of the papers focus on practical or theoretical issues raised by the laws themselves, or the jurisprudential, social and political choices that shape the drafting and enactment of laws. Nonetheless, every paper is built on the conviction that disability prejudice is a fundamental force behind the exclusion of people with disabilities from a myriad of social and economic opportunities, and one author in particular writes in detail about the personal and systemic consequences of persistent disability prejudice and stereotypes. This paper certainly does not dispute the existence of disability prejudice, but it does seek to take a direct look at disability prejudice to argue that the phenomenon of disability prejudice is not widely understood or truly accepted among the political, legal, and social institutions that are counted upon to put antidiscrimination laws into practice.

It is my claim that disability prejudice has been viewed through the lens of prejudices such as anti-Semitism, racism, feminism, and homophobia-intolerances that may not be pre-existing, but have been generally recognized and theorized earlier in time. While many prejudices may share certain elements of behavior or even a common trajectory of development, they are not equivalent in their historical, social or psychological dynamics. To assume that they are equivalent poses a theoretical straitjacket on prejudices, allowing us to fall into the habit of believing that perpetrators of prejudice all act and think a certain way, and victims of prejudice share inherent characteristics. We confidently set legal and social prohibitions on the former in order to protect the latter, and we are then surprised to learn that there is a disjunction between the goals we set for disability discrimination laws and the experiences of prejudice the people with disabilities continue to undergo.

The claim that modern society is unfamiliar with disability prejudice may seem incredible in the face of governmental findings, the reports of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nations (UN) bodies, and the enactment of national and international disability anti-discrimination laws. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) declares that the “continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis…and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and non-productivity. Even prior to the enactment of the ADA, the United States Supreme Court stated that:

By amending the definition of “handicapped individual” [in the Rehabilitation Act] to include not only those who are actually physically impaired, but also those who are regarded as impaired and who, as a result, are substantially limited in a major life activity. Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

This seemingly unambiguous understanding that people with disabilities are bereft of social, educational  and economic opportunities not because of individual medical conditions, but because of external social conditions is reiterated throughout numerous international instruments as well. In 1993, a major UN Conference on human rights found that:

 

The place of disabled persons is everywhere. Persons with disabilities should be guaranteed equal opportunity through the elimination of all socially determined barriers, be they physical, financial, social or psychological, which exclude or restrict full participation in society.

The work of such NGOs as Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI), which has documented the wide-spread and commonly overlooked denial of the most basic human rights of people with mental disabilities in numerous countries, has provided further evidence of discrimination and prejudice against people with disabilities. With the new millennium, the denunciation of disability prejudice and discrimination in all aspects of life has advanced beyond an exercise in political rhetoric and moved towards the enactment of national laws and international instruments. The first binding regional convention concerning discrimination against people with disabilities finally entered into force last year, and the United Nations (UN) General Assembly has just convened an Ad Hoc Committee to actively investigate and set proposals for a binding international instrument concerning discrimination against people with disabilities.

 Even international human rights tribunals have shown a corresponding willingness in recent years to interpret general human rights instruments in a way that recognizes the failure to extent human rights to people with disabilities as a clear violation of international law, and not simply an unfortunate consequence of an individual’s impairment. Both the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Human Rights Commission and the European Court of Human Rights have denounced the prejudicial mistreatment and particularly high potential for the denial of human rights faced by people with disabilities in situations of involuntary confinement. In the European case, the Court specifically noted that there was “no evidence in this case of any positive intention to humiliate or debase the applicant,” but nonetheless found a violation of the Convention: “to detain a severely disabled person in conditions where she is dangerously cold,, risks developing sores because her bed is too hard or unreachable, and is unable to get to the toilet and keep clean without the greatest of difficulty, constitutes degrading treatment contrary to Article 3. In the face of such escalating activity and official acknowledgment, how can it be asserted that disability prejudice is unheard of?

In fact, I do not believe that disability prejudice is unheard of, at least in modern Western society, and all over the world, nations are paying attention to the reality of discrimination claimed by people with disabilities. I do, however, believe that the precise inability or unwillingness of many people, including people who have suffered from other kinds of prejudices themselves, to truly grapple with the what and why of disability prejudice lies at the heart of much of the resistance and backlash that disability discrimination legislation and policies have recently faced in the United States. While this paper certainly does not purport to supply final answers to such critical questions as what disability prejudice is, how it operates and is communicated, and how to combat it, I hope to initiate a closer examination of the many assumptions inherent in the way we currently answer these questions.

The first part of my paper will look briefly at the development of disability studies with regard to the idea of prejudice. Second, I will examine how studies of prejudice as a social, psychological and cultural phenomenon has evolved since the area’s first large influx of work in the post-World War II period. These fields of study can inform one another, but they have so far generally failed to do so. This part will also focus on some of the complicating social and historical factors that make disability prejudice such a complex topic of study as an area of prejudice. The failure to study or even to see this theoretical gap threatens the future of disability antidiscrimination, because laws and policies are only effective in so far as they are maintained, enforced and accepted by a society that understands the underlying need of such laws. Finally, I will review how the historical emergence of disability rights awareness and its specificity as an area of prejudice has influenced the social and legal acceptance of disability prejudices. A short conclusion will consider areas for future development.

A.     Prejudice In Disability Studies

The idea that society fails to perceive disability prejudice is hardly news to anyone who has or has had experience living with a disability. The increasing unification, political identity and self-advocacy of people with disabilities has occurred with remarkable momentum over the last four decades, and a key component in this swift progression has been the re-conceptualization of disability as a product of relations between people and not as an individual characteristic. One critical turning point in this process of re-conceptualization occurred in 1976 with the work of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in Britain. UPIAS clearly distinguished between impairment, which it defined at the time as “lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body,” and disability, “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.” The resulting view of disability as a socially created mandate was later coined the “social model of disability” by Michael Oliver, a leading British disability academic.

If the gravamen of disability is located in contemporary social organization, then it logically follows that society holds perceptions about people with impairments whether subconscious or cognitive, socially or psychologically caused, individually communicated or culturally preserved that appear to justify the exclusion of people with disabilities. If these perceptions, often deeply imbedded and naturalized over time, are based on over-generalization or myth or stereotype, or fail to accord with reality or the actual experiences of people with disabilities, then the result is aptly called prejudice.

Interestingly, disability studies have tended to focus on discrimination and stereotype far more than what could be considered the more primary study of disability prejudice. That is, the focus has been re-interpreting overt acts that exercise control over the options available to people with disabilities, rather than on theorization of the attitudes presumed to be behind the actions. I posit at least two reasons for this. First, people with disabilities were living lives that were always imminently and profoundly circumscribed by social rules established by people without disabilities; regardless of attitudes, people with disabilities needed the rules to changed before they could hold any hope for a future free from prejudice. Second, people with disabilities are historically one of the last groups to come to a sense of self-conscious political and social awareness. An abundant academic and theoretical discourse concerning the nature and effects of prejudice and its root role in the social oppression of ethnic and racial minorities, as well as women and gay people, already existed and continues to grow. Rather than contribute to this often psychologically focused exploration of the types of individuals who hold prejudice, people with disabilities concentrated on recognizing commonalities between their own experiences of oppression and those of other minority groups, and on revealing the social treatment of people with disabilities as discrimination, and not simply as something objectively and inescapably dictated by the physical, mental, or cognitive conditions of people with disabilities.

This is the approach taken by Paul Hunt, a first-generation disability activist, who in the 1960s chose to write:

…largely in terms of our relation with others, our place in society. This is essentially related to the personal aspect of coping with disablement, which I hope it will at the same time illuminate, since the problem of disability lies not only in the impairment of function and its effects on us individually, but also, more importantly, in the area of our relationship with “normal” people. If everyone were disabled as we are, there would be no special situation to consider.

Hunt was discussing his own specific situation of being a person with a physical impairment that is commonly considered severe, and identified five distinct facets of this situation: society considered people with such impairments as “unfortunate, useless, different, oppressed and sick.” In his experience, people without disabilities believed that people with disabilities were “unfortunate” because the latter led “cramped lives” in which they were deprived of such things as freedom of movement, independence and the enjoyment of material goods. People with disabilities were also considered “useless” because they were “unable to contribute to the economic good of the economy.” Both of these aspects contributed to the assessment that people with disabilities were “different” – “abnormal, marked out as members of a minority group.” Hunt drew an analogy to the situation of other minorities, among which he included Jews, Blacks, homosexuals and the mentally disabled who also feel the “constant experience of the pressure towards unthinking conformity.” He also explicitly evokes a correlation to the better-recognized racial and ethnic minorities when he concludes that the fact of being “different” subjects people with disabilities to “prejudice which expresses itself in discrimination and oppression.” The final aspect of being considered “sick” arose from disability’s uncomfortably close association with such things as depression, pain, loneliness, poverty and other aspects of tragedy and the unknown in the minds of non-disabled people.

By linking disability prejudice with both general cultural expectations for such things as material goods and employment, and social perceptions concerning the inability of people with disabilities to achieve such expectations, Hunt was one of the first activists hitherto assumed endemic in the mere fact of having an impairment. In Britain, where Hunt continued his work with UPIAS colleagues in the 1970s, disability studies developed as an independent academic area that conceived of disability as “a complex and sophisticated form of social oppression or institutional discrimination on a par with sexism, heterosexism and racism, and criticized disciplines such as medical sociology that “have been unable to distinguish between illness and disability and have proceeded as if they are the same thing.”

Building on the powerful and liberating idea that disability discrimination is based on larger social relations rather than individual impairment, British academics – many of whom had disabilities and a number of whom were sociologists – drew heavily on Marxist materialist theories to trace disability oppression to the historical emergence of modern capitalist society and the cultural ideology of industrialism. According to Michael Oliver, capitalist ideology’s emphasis on individual entrepreneurship and achievement, and aided by “peripheral ideologies associated with medicalization and underpinned by personal tragedy theory, have presented a particular view of the disabled individual.” The social construction of disability as “dependence” is not derived from “functional limitations on [people with disabilities] capacities for self-care,” but because dependence is shaped by “politicians, planners and professionals who have to manage (control) this dependency in accord with current social values and economic circumstance.” Later British academics such as Tom Shakespeare have taken a somewhat different approach to studying the role of culture in the social construction of disability, focusing on discursive practices related to disability and cultural representation of disability “in broader linguistic and artistic environment.” Regardless of the precise emphasis, British academics and scholars are united in their conviction that impairment is disabling because a social and physical environment historically created by non-impaired people makes it so.

U. S. accounts of disability equally refute the individual, impairment-based medical model of disability in favor of a social model, but the most powerful and well-known of these accounts tend to accomplish this refutation through the immediacy of experiential narrative rather than the direct exposition of social theory. One of the first disability studies scholars, the political scientist Harlan Hahn, writes of people with disabilities as subject to “the pervasive sense of physical and social isolation produced not only by the restrictions of the built environment but also by the aversive reactions of the nondisabled that often cosign them to the role of distant friends or even mascots rather than to a more intimate status as peers, competitors, or mates.” Jenny Morris, a successful political activist and feminist when she became disabled as an adult, argues that the lack of an inclusive forum in which people with disabilities can express their views of themselves and their social relationships enables the medical model’s view of impairment to be self-perpetuating. “Disabled people – men and women – have little opportunity to portray our own experiences within the general culture…[and] this lack of a voice, of the representation of our subjective reality, means that it is difficult for non-disabled [people] to incorporate our reality into their theories, unless it is in terms of the way the non-disabled world sees us.”

How do we determine what is interesting, what is “newsworthy” or significant? In the late 1980s, journalists increasingly begin to give press coverage from the viewpoint of people with disabilities. The journalist Joseph Shapiro recounts that in 1988, a public relations woman from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society called him with a story about how New York’s lack of accessibility had forced the Society to take extraordinary measures just to get their “Man of the Year” from his hotel room across the street to the club where he was to be honored. Shapiro declined, asserting that was seeking a story “with broad national significance, something important that was happening in the lives of all disabled people throughout the country.” The woman then told him about the efforts of something called the disability rights movement, and about an upcoming meeting in Washington, D. C. to consider a bill called the Americans with Disabilities Act. Shapiro went to Washington to watch as “an utterly anonymous presidentially appointed council” put together “dreamy, pie-in-the-sky legislation.” He found the council’s impassioned discussion about rights, and the irony of a sweeping civil rights bill being proposed by a council that had been appointed under then-President Reagan, not known for his support of civil rights causes, “interesting” but was still “not sure that [he] saw a story.” Later, standing in line for a taxi after checking out of his Washington hotel, Shapiro witnessed a taxi driver make an abrupt U-turn to avoid picking up the next person in the queue, a well-dressed young man in a wheelchair. Shapiro writes:

His face showed no anger, no emotion at all, as if getting passed by cabdrivers was an everyday occurrence. I was reminded of the MS Society’s Man of the Year, unable to cross the street in one of the world’s most modern cities, stranded without transportation….if not for cabs, how would this man get back to his office or to his home? Few buses in Washington had wheelchair lifts. The subway system was accessible, assuming the elevator at his stop was working. But the subway reached only some parts of the city. Access to transportation, then, would circumscribe where the man lived and where he worked, or if he even worked at all. If people like him were precluded from working, then they would depend on welfare. If a society expected its disabled people not to work and instead need public assistance, would if even try to give them a decent education? Back at my office, I began writing my first story about disability as a rights issue.

Shapiro eventually found the interesting and significant story he was looking for, but doing so was not a matter of unearthing more facts about the disability rights movement. Rather, it was a process of re-evaluating facts that were already before him. He grew to understand the logical social connection between the story of one person being unable to cross the street and systemic problems of transportation, employment, education and social expectations for people with disabilities. Ultimately then, U. S. experiential writings point squarely, as do the British sociological studies, to the interaction between people with disabilities and those without as the place where (lack of) understanding of disability is socially created, defined and maintained.

U. S. accounts of disability that are less experiential or narrative, and more directly theoretical or oriented toward historiography have tended to focus on specific institutional or policy aspects of disability, rather than to offer broad structuralist critiques of capitalism. As such, they may not be written with the express goal of exposing systemic prejudice and stereotype, although they usually acknowledge the presence of such. In the last decade, U. S. scholarship on disability has also grown increasingly cross-disciplinary as academics from fields as diverse as philosophy, ethics, literary, criticism, archaeology, and cultural anthropology have joined sociologists in examining disability as a formed and forming aspect of modern culture. The resulting body of disability-related work has provided rich and thought-provoking support for the claims of the social model of disability.

Certain fields, such as cultural anthropology, are particularly adept at illustrating how disability is a function of cultural and social understanding rather than a self-evident state of being, since the discipline must disassociate itself medical or technical understandings of disability that are not by any means universally embraced or understood. The method of cultural juxtaposition requires anthropologists to “relate concepts of disability to notions about power and bodies, normality and order, individual capacity and social existence,” and further demands the understanding that cultural concepts “are not just ‘found in’ cultural analysis. They are asserted by the media, the clergy, health personnel, and development agencies; they are negotiated by parents, represented in ritual, contested or ignored by people with impairments.”

Other seemingly more distant disciplines such as literary criticism or cultural studies add valuable insight by virtue of the fact that social assumptions and beliefs are in large part communicated through visual, literary and popular culture. Thus Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines the mid 19th to 20th century American “Freak Show,” sentimental fiction and black women’s liberatory writings to reveal the “critical gap between disabled figures as fashioned corporeal others whose bodies carry social meaning and actual people with atypical bodies in real-world social relations,” because she recognizes that “representation informs the identity – and often the fate – of real people with extraordinary bodies.” Other humanities scholars bring into question language itself, especially those discursive practices commonly used to describe the difference of disability. Lennard J. Davis provides a compelling portrait of how modern ideals of “normalcy” and the “normal” body are less a constant feature of the human condition than “a configuration that arises in a particular historical moment. It is part of a notion of progress, of industrialization, and of ideological consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie.” From the appearance of words such as “norm,” “average,” and “abnormal” into the English language in the mid 19th century, through to the normalizing plot devices, character development and very structure of 19th – and 20th century novels, the “hegemony of normalcy” extends its influence to “the very heart of cultural production.” Davis traces this path to show that “the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person.

With the close scrutiny of administrative categories, and the addition of cross-disciplinary techniques, disability studies have grown increasingly sophisticated in tracing the often subtle ways in which cultural rules, norms, language and social institutions create disability as different and lesser. Nonetheless, the first major insights of disability studies still hold. Even if one were bored by philosophy, disinclined to read anthropology or cultural studies texts, and preferred the comics over political editorials, the connection drawn by Shapiro outside his Washington hotel room is truly not that obscure. Do people without disabilities simply not notice or understand that accessibility is linked to social and economic opportunities, the lack of which leads to poverty, physical isolation and political powerlessness, with these in turn becoming a “naturalized” status quo for people with disabilities? When a persons with a wheelchair is halted by a single step at a public place or university lectures are given without sign language or transcripts for the Deaf, people with disabilities are substantively excluded. On the other hand, if the implications of a built and technologic environment that excludes people with disabilities are truly “inescapable,” as Anita Silvers maintains, why it is that “nondisabled people appear sincerely to regret these profoundly marginalizing outcomes, yet they do little to avoid them?”

Furthermore, even if a nondisabled world is apathetic about the “incidental” (this is, non-intentioned) exclusion of people with disabilities, the current failure to take account of the subjective expression of individuals with disabilities requires at least some measure of active avoidance. Irrespective of theorizing, and as any chronicle of the disability civil right movement shows, people with disabilities have been growing increasingly active and vocal about encountering inaccessibility every day in all aspects of their lives. Obviously, people with various kinds and levels of disabilities are capable, willing and desirous of communicating their personal experiences of people with disabilities is obviously not an inevitable or “natural” consequence of impairment. Therefore, any continuing lack of these voices in mainstream social or political agendas can not logically be attribute to the mere fact of disability, so much as to an assumption that people with disabilities have little to say and even less to share. This longstanding stereotype, like most stereotypes about people with disabilities, has long gone unquestioned in the nondisabled world, even though it has been factually disputed by people with disabilities time and again.

Various explanations have been advanced for the origin and persistence of stereotypes about people with disabilities in contemporary society. Barnes look to history and the roots of Western culture in ancient Greek civilization’s “obsession with bodily perfection, as evidenced in Greek myth, competitive sport and the practice of infanticide for children with impairments.” Others hypothesize a deeper, psychological rationale for stereotypes in stating that for the nondisabled, people with disabilities are a threatening reminder of the ever-present possibility of accident, impairment, helplessness. One author asserts that irrational prejudice against the mentally disabled occurs ”because we fear the unknown, and we fear the possibility that we may become mentally ill. To make the world less indeterminate, we simplify via stereotypes that simultaneously demonize and infantilize. And we continue to irrationally conflate mental illness with dangerousness.” Other academics point out how the 19th century provided a particularly fertile breeding ground for stereotypes: “[a]s we looked up, isolated, and segregated people, the perception of their lives became one of speculation and mystery rather than based [sic] on fact and experience. As the curve of social isolation increased, so did misunderstanding.”

Disability scholars have addressed issues of stereotyping and discrimination, but the factor of prejudice is usually asserted without a similar degree of systematic theorization. From an experiential viewpoint, such theorization is unnecessary. What else could possibly account for the world’s refusal to acknowledge or care that its institutions, social rules and cultural expressions ignore both the needs and capacities of people with disabilities? How can prejudice not be present when the mere fact of a disability or impairment can not objectively explain pervasive differences of treatment? The experience of a profound gap between what people with disabilities feel and believe their lives and their worth to be, and the way in which they are persistently excluded, assessed and portrayed – so similar in many ways to the experience described by Jews, Blacks, women, gay people is held in common by victims of discrimination. Like those other victims, people with disabilities turn to prejudice as the root explanation for the misperception, damaging stereotyping and discrimination that marks their lives.

Hunt expressed something of this feeling of affinity with other minorities when he wrote:

Maybe it is invidious to compare our situation with that of racial minorities of any way. The injustice and brutality suffered by so many because of racial tension makes our troubles as disabled people look very small. But I think there is a connection somewhere, since all prejudice springs from the same roots.

Attempts to compare the sufferings of people with disabilities and racial minorities might be of arguable worth, but Hunt’s general understanding of all prejudices sharing common roots remains essentially unchallenged in disability studies. In the 1960s, when Hunt wrote these words, he would have found virtually uniform agreement among scholars of intolerance and prejudice. This is no longer the case. For immediate victims of intolerance and discrimination, this academic splintering may seem of little moment, but anymore with a stake in how our society analyzes, judges, punishes or combats the consequences of prejudice in general, and disability prejudice in particular, will find it worthwhile to further investigate the junction of prejudice and disability.

B.     Disability In Prejudice Studies

Prejudice as an independent topic of scholarly investigation in the Western world came into its own after the Second World War. Studies in Prejudice, a five volume series of social science enquiry into-Semitism, intolerance and intergroup conflict, was commissioned in the U. S. by the American Jewish Committee as a serious attempt to understand and avoid the forces that allowed the Holocaust to occur. While experientially based literary and historical accounts from within the Black community as victims of prejudice were also being written during this period, these usually were not focused on the broad subject of prejudice in and itself. In the 1950s, rising social awareness of intolerance and violence in U. S. race relations provoked a corresponding increase in the academic theorization of prejudice as a seemingly inescapable ingredient in all human relations.

Gordon Allport’s seminal The Nature of Prejudice is the most widely quoted and classic English study of prejudice in the post-World War II era. Allport sought to provide a thorough review of scholarly work that had been undertaken to date, but even more importantly, a “framework” for the future investigation of prejudice in all its manifestations. Innumerable college texts have adopted not only Allport’s definition of prejudice, usually formulated as “prejudice is an unjustified attitude, positive or negative, directed toward others because of their membership in social category or group, but also his entire approach to studying the subject. Endemic in this approach is both a conceptual conviction that despite prejudice’s various manifestations, “the basic causes and correlates are essentially identical,” and a professional faith in the social sciences as a means of easing and solving the dilemma of intergroup conflict. Both themes are evident in the following:

In recent years men in large numbers have become convinced that scientific intelligence may help us solve the conflict [of group rivalry and hatred]…Men are saying, ”Let us make an objective study of conflict in culture and industry, between people of different color and race; let us seek out the roots of prejudice and find concrete means for implementing men’s affiliative values. Since the end of the Second World War universities in many lands have given new prominence to this approach under various academic names: social sciences, human development, social psychology, human relations, social relations. Though not yet securely christened, the infant science is thriving…

The present volume does not pretend to deal with the science of human relations as a whole. It aims merely to clarify one underlying issue – the nature of human prejudice. But this issue is basic, for without knowledge of the roots of hostility we cannot hope to employ our intelligence effectively in controlling its destructiveness.

Allport’s belief in the transforming power of the social sciences probably strikes most contemporary readers as na?ve, but his understanding of the essentially singular nature of prejudice generally has remained entrenched in subsequent studies, albeit with increasing emphasis on the unlikelihood that the social sciences will ever succeed in finding one unified theory of prejudice.

Allport himself used various “lenses” historical, psychological, cultural, economic to view the phenomenon of prejudice, and endorsed specific techniques ranging from field interviews to psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, results obtained from interview/questionnaire studies in particular led him to state that “[o]ne of the facts of which we are most certain is that people who reject one out-group will tend to reject other out-groups. If a person is ant-Jewish, he is likely to be anti-Catholic, anti-Negro, anti any out-group.” This in turn fueled his conclusion “that prejudice tends to be a general trait in personality,” a “generalized attitude.” In further support, he notes “[t]he fact that scapegoats of different breeds are so often harnessed together [in verbal condemnations] shows that it is the totality of prejudice that is important rather than specific accusations against single groups.” In this regard, Allport built on the earlier work of Theodor Adorno and his fellow Marixst social theorists in their development of the “F-scale,” a measure for tendencies and personality traits that exhibited an affinity with fascism (authoritariasim). These concepts, of an “authoritarian personality,” a “generalized attitude” behind prejudice, of ethnocentrism in which hostility is more or less “naturally” directed towards anyone who falls outside of one’s self-defined ”in-group,” all reinforce the understanding of prejudice as a unitary phenomenon.

In the last couple decades, theories concerning prejudice have grown increasingly diverse in the approach, but these theories often continue to present the many manifestations of prejudice as rooted in a single thing, whether that thing is fear of the unknown, dislike of the unknown, competition for scarce resources, or hierarchical social structure. Similarly, different disciplines advance theories that present prejudice in terms of evolution (sociobiological roots), group interactions (structural roots), individual tendencies (social-psychological roots), or the ways in which people communicate through symbols (roots in linguistics, rhetoric, discourse, and historical power relations), with the implicit premise that any given theory is equally applicable to any particular manifestation of prejudice. After thoroughly reviewing and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of numerous representative examples of prejudice studies from each of these four conceptual frameworks, Michael Hecht and John Baldwin propose “that intolerance can exist at various levels and be expressed in different ways…we argue that although there may be an underlying, global, or unifying construction of prejudice, there also are various intolerances; even ethnic intolerances can be expressed differently toward one group than toward another.

A glance at the British and American disability writings reviewed in Part A of this paper reveals a fairly fluid appropriation of various of these theoretical approaches. In other words, disability writers have not sharply distinguished between presenting disability prejudice as fear of difference and the unknown, as a consequence of capitalist ideology and an individualistic culture, or as the product of hegemonic cultural and representational norms. As might be expected in an emerging field of study that is prominently marked by strong narrative and personal accounts of actual experiences of disability, disability scholars have not felt compelled to maintain watertight compartments of prejudice theory. Nor, however, has any disability scholar explicitly rejected the implication that disability prejudice shares the same roots and course of development as other prejudices.

In fact, the adoption of terms like “disablism” and “sanism” advances an implicit premise that disability prejudice is a prejudice “like the others” – for example, prejudices such as anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism that have gained earlier popular, academic and cultural recognition. The term “disablism” is useful in many ways. It instantly connotes a relationship of prejudice and social oppression, and by doing so serves as a rallying point for members of the disability community. “Isms” are publicly recognized as a civil rights issue requiring legal action and policy redress. On the other hand, the use of the term also necessarily invites comparison between victims of disability prejudice and victims of other kinds of prejudice, as well as a search for conceptual correlation in the motives and actions of those who harbor disability prejudice and those who display other prejudices. Ultimately, I believe this process of comparison does a disservice to the unique social dynamics and evolution of disability prejudice, and obscures the operation and purpose of disability antidiscrimination measures. Without discounting the possibility of similarity to other prejudices. I agree with recent theoretical assertions that there are prejudices rather than prejudice, each with its own internal logic, historical subtleties and political issues.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, one of the strongest critics of the “unitary prejudice” idea, presents a multi-pronged and deeply theorized approach to prejudices, specifically anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the remainder of this section, I would like to discuss aspects of her approach that could prove particularly relevant to our understanding of disability prejudice.

1.      Prejudices in Act and in Interpretation

In The Anatomy of Prejudices, Young-Bruehl begins by describing an incident wherein a number of white varsity wrestlers at her university were overheard discussing the rising number of young Asian-American wrestlers on the team. Their apparent apprehension over this fact was collectively and laughingly dispersed by mutual assurances that the new Asian team members would not ”be much of a threat in the competition for girls, because they have such small penises…condom manufacturers could make a killing if they designed a condom just for these small penises.” The gist of this locker room conversation was reported by the campus newspaper, provoking a wide range of reactions from outrage to casual dismissal. Young-Bruehl describes the furor as follows:

Like most publicized instances of prejudice, this one had two stages: one of word or deed, and one of interpretation. Prejudices manifested in slurs, acts of discrimination, attacks, are followed by prejudices – not necessarily the same ones – manifested in rationalizations, self-serving descriptions, denials, commentaries, often ones designed to discredit the victims’ truthfulness or belittle their pain. Prejudices have histories, and the second stage commonly involves a reference to history or an argument about the applicability of history: this episode is like or unlike that one in kind or degree or intention. Theoretical or interpretive prejudices or spins, which can, of course, serve rawer forms of prejudice, come into play. There are wars, and there are culture wars.

This insight has particular significance for disability prejudice, and indeed, any intolerance that has achieved public and legal recognition after the traditional ”troika” of racism, sexism, classism. The economic exploitation and abuse of socially lower classes has led to various civil wars and revolutions in many cultures and nations when those classes sought better treatment. After World War II, the horrific revelations of the Holocaust were a brutal picture of ethnic intolerance. In the U. S., Blacks were subjected to racial prejudice long after the abolition of slavery, exhibited in forms ranging from social and legal segregation to mob violence. No doubt, there are still rare individuals who actually deny these events, or look back upon them and “interpret” them as rational or at least justifiable actions taken by divinely-appointed rulers, a politically oppressed nation, a superior race. For most people, however, these examples serve as unequivocally clear instances of prejudice in action. And they are models not only for the acts of prejudice themselves, but for our intellectual and emotional interpretation of acts of prejudice.

We recognize an act as one motivated by prejudice when it takes lives that we believe are innocent – that is – when victims have been targeted and acted against on the basis of differences that we know are either totally irrelevant or simply created in the imaginations/needs of the majority. We acknowledge prejudice in the actions of others and ourselves when we have sought utter exclusion, extermination or complete control. Or perhaps when our reaction to an objectively discernable difference is utterly disproportionate or unreasoning. In any event, we want an action by which we can judge the motivation. Prejudice against people with disabilities has taken the form of “purposeful unequal treatment,” but it has also included forms such as “discriminatory effects” from an inaccessible built environment, the “failure to make modifications” and subjection to judgements ”based on characteristics that are beyond the control of such individuals and resulting from stereotypic assumptions not truly indicative of the individual ability of such individuals to participate in, and contribute to, society.” While the U. S. Congress has recognized these as discrimination, and they are certainly experienced as such by people with disabilities, they lack the prototypical indicia of prejudice. “Average” able-bodied Americans may follow Davis’ argument about the hegemony of normalcy, but they can do so without agreeing that prejudice is involved. They may feel sympathy and even empathy for people with disabilities, but they will not feel culpable. The dissemination of experiential minority writings and feminist theory may increase our appreciation for the subtlety of prejudices in their modern forms, but the bulk of that appreciation is still likely to be credited towards groups that have been traditionally subjected to the extremes of discrimination noted above.

2.      Feminism, Consciousness Raising, and “Victimhood”

The familiarity of academic references to “racism, sexism, classism” impression that the history of prejudice is one that encompasses equal scholarly consideration of each element of the troika. In fact, this has not been the case, especially in the “melting pot” of the U. S. where racial tensions among people of color have exploded so violently and recurrently since the 1960s. As Young-Bruehl observes: “[a]ntisemitism, the prejudice over which social psychology had its immediate postwar flourishing, has disappeared from ‘the social psychology of prejudice’…[w]hile race prejudice has become Prejudice, sexism, like antisemitism has had its own books. But sexism has its own books without ever having been, historically, included in the Studies of Prejudice traditions.” The evolution of sexism, both as a term and as a socially and legally recognized prejudice, is of particular interest to disability studies because of certain parallels in the situation of women and people with disabilities as oppressed groups.

In reviewing the American feminist literature of the 1970s. Young-Bruehl remarks on “the emphasis on consciousness raising”:

The first thing that the writers, most of them middle-class and educationally privileged, had to do was to convince themselves and other women that they were, indeed, oppressed and oppressed as women. They had to legitimate their status as victims, something that no victim of “racism” – the word on which “sexism” was modeled – ever had to do. But they specifically had to alter their consciousness, their minds, their thoughts; they had to resist as thinkers. Eventually, the designation “theorist” was appropriated and “feminist theory” was born. This focus on thinking, on theory, was the answer to the central modality in which the oppression of women was felt by that generation of educated, middle-class, and predominantly urban and white feminists…Victim groups must respond to their oppression first at the site where it most threatens their ability to respond…a group attacked for its mindlessness, which means body-onlyness, responds with consciousness raising.

For privileged women to say, clearly and unequivocally, “we are oppressed,” or ”we are the victims of sexism,” required analysis of sexism as a complex and multifaceted form of mind control and body control.

…women in households, experiencing domination in the paternalistic mode, “mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights,” did not see themselves as a group and did not perceive themselves as potentially political, as resisters…Consciousness raising was the necessary step to resistance for women, who had to make themselves into a group and learn solidarity.

From the beginning, the disability rights movement faced the challenge of forging solidarity among widely heterogenous individuals who potentially shared nothing in common except for the fact of experiencing disability. Not only did disability cut across every other minority identity, the difficulty of achieving solidarity was exacerbated by the need to reconcile the vested social and political interests of established groups that had historically organized according to particular disabilities (for example, blindness), as well as groups who did not consider themselves disabled at all (for example, the Deaf). Ultimately, the experience of discrimination is the commonality that united people with disabilities, but defending themselves against this discrimination is a complex theoretical challenge. If the site where women are most threatened by oppression is the assumption of mindlessness, then the corresponding site for people with disabilities is helplessness. If privileged white women have to raise their own consciousness and that of others concerning their status as victims of prejudice, people with disabilities face a similar task, but with the added complication of simultaneously refuting their status as victims of disability, per se.

‘As a theoretical and practical exercise, this task has proven astonishingly difficult. The general public often responds with profound ambivalence to people with disabilities, seemingly motivated by a complex interaction of admiration and pity. The most logical way to fight stereotypes of needy, childlike and dependent people with disabilities is to provide stories and images of people with disabilities as strong, independent and enjoying life to the full, but this not only contradicts social expectations, it may be perceived as a contradiction of the disability rights movement’s claim concerning the effects of pervasive institutional and social prejudice.

Women are challenged to establish their oppression for being different while proving their capability with difference. This is also a core challenge for people with disabilities, and for many, the way forward has been to challenge social and economic assumptions about what capability really means. Once again though, such approaches are a departure from the traditional social and legal understanding of prejudice as it has been established through racism. An employer who declines to hire an individual because of a disability that makes the desired work environment particularly dangerous to him or her simply is not prejudiced in the same way as someone who puts on a white hood and goes out to burn crosses on the lawns of Black neighbors. Therefore, we may conclude that the Black homeowners are victims of prejudice, while the individual seeking a job is a victim of his disability or bad luck. In any event, this entire discussion presumes that prejudice is intentional and cognitively controlled – at least enough so that once victims can intellectually or physically prove their capabilities, prejudice will go away or be suppressed. This is an oversimplification.

3.      Ideologies of Desire

The “generalized attitude” approach to defining prejudice implies a certain level of cognition. “Isms”, even if subconsciously shaped and irrationally resistant to change, are intentionally held. This may be due in part to an understanding of a unitary prejudice that is rooted in the very general notion of ethnocentrism as the rationale for modern prejudice. The theory of love of one’s own group, of dislike or fear towards other groups, fails to explain how prejudices are manifested to such obviously varying degrees of violence, paternalism, justification, directed toward certain groups and not others at certain points in history, and resistant to social change. Young-Bruehl makes a distinction between ethnocentrism, which she defines more narrowly as ”a form of prejudice that protects group identity in economic, social, and political terms” and the broader concept of “ideologies of desire”:

Ideologies of desire are, generally, backlashes against movements of equality; they are regressive prejudices that reinstate inequalities and distinctions when the force of movements for equality has been registered and (often unconsciously) rejected… Prejudices institutionalize at deeper and more inchoate individual and social or political levels the differences between “us” and “them” that movement for equality address.

…the era of state economies and world wars, of internationalism and what is now known as globalism, which gives all local conflicts larger contexts of interference, has been an era in which “us versus them” has been both enacted and rationalized, converted into ideology, in quite distinctive ways…Progress on legal fronts has changed the contexts of prejudices. But the needs those prejudices serve stay very much the same. Sometimes the needs simply find a new target when their familiar ones become harder to hit because it [sic] is somewhat protected.

Young-Bruehl goes on to develop a theory of three distinct types of modern ideological prejudices, each linked to a broad “character” type. She links anti-Semitism with obsessional prejudice, racism with hysterical prejudice, and sexism with narcissistic prejudice. I raise Young-Bruehl’s typology not necessarily to endorse her specific analysis, although I find it quite compelling, but to make the point that all of her prejudices operate both discretely and collectively against people with disabilities, even though distinctions between them are invariably subsumed within the general rubric prejudice. I take this as evidence of the idiomatic difficulties of untangling disability prejudice, which intersects with such a wide variety of historical ethnocentrisms, modern fears and social expectation. This, in combination with the insidious understanding of prejudice as both unified and somehow “unchanging” is leaving disability prejudice in a place of exile – not “prejudice” as the law or general public expects it to be, but nonetheless extant and active against people with disabilities in hidden ways that are difficult to fight.

A)     Narcissistic Prejudices

Young-Bruehl describes sexists as people:

Who cannot tolerate the idea that there exists people not like them, not – specifically – anatomically like them. Their prejudice has a narcissistic foundation, and it is, of the ideologies of desire, the most universal…narcissistic prejudices are prejudices of boundary establishment…On the other side of the narcissists’ boundaries there is not a “them,” a “not-us,” but blank, a lack-or at most, a profound mystery.

The marks of difference in women, especially female sexuality and reproductive capacities, threaten male gender identity, and according to Young-Bruehl, the deepest course to that anxiety is control over female difference. “Sexism is expressed in many ways, but its essential meaning is control over female sexuality and reproduction, and its essential purpose is to keep men from recognizing women in their difference or from succumbing to their fear of becoming women.”

Young-Bruehl applies her analysis very specifically to sexism, but the threat to self-identity and desire for control that is the hallmark of narcissistically-based prejudices are easily discernable in prejudices commonly exhibited against people with visible disabilities. Narcissistic prejudices recognize disability as difference and perceive a threat to their very identify as human beings. The way to assuage this fear is to linguistically and socially control access to what will be considered human. If narcissists cannot tolerate the thought of “people not like them” upon being confronted with people not like them, they will refuse to acknowledge that they are being confronted with people at all.

Throughout history, societies “have believed that people with disabilities were closer to wild animals than humans”, have presented people with mental illness” as being wildmen, savages, wildwomen, or animals”; “have thought of and labeled people with physical disabilities or deformities as monsters or monstrosities”; and “have viewed people with developmental disabilities as inhuman, subhuman, or biological throwbacks.” Women, even when given a narrowly circumscribed role by narcissists, still had to be recognized as necessary to the continuation of the human race (this remains essentially true despite recent developments in cloning and genetics); this was not true of people with disabilities as individuals or as a group. If “the disabled” were considered inhuman, then they did not even have to be acknowledged as “other,” any more than one would considered a fox or a weasel an “other.”

With the rise of Christianity, people with disabilities were perceived as unclean and judged by God, in which case they were divinely separate from the rest of humanity who were created “in the image of God,” or more  â€œcharitable” impulses prevailed and disabilities “were not specifically distinguished from other forms of misery or suffering” that were common in the Middle Ages. Even if the more humane latter view prevailed, however, “the ethical and spiritual integration of difference did not accomplish social integration. The infirm were marginal, cared for by their families or by charitable patrons, without any social function or identity as a distinct group.” From a narcissistic point of view, if people with disabilities could no longer be denied their humanity, they could at least be avoided and controlled. Once it was no longer socially acceptable or common to call people with disabilities inhuman, the medical model of disability and its pervasive influence in rehabilitation medicine and social/unemployment welfare controlled the segregated category of “the disabled”, in relation to both who was admitted and their treatment upon admittance.

The narcissist’s deep need to deny and control the difference of the Other continues to evolve. Davis describes contemporary media portrayals of people with disabilities as follows:

Whether we are talking about AIDS, low-birth weight babies, special education issues, euthanasia, and the thousand other topics listed in the newspapers every day, the examination, discussion, anatomizing of this form of “difference,” is nothing less than a desperate attempt of people to consolidate their normality.

Davis interprets this as the need of the nondisabled to single out an Other by which to define themselves. To my mind, Young-Bruehl’s ideas present an equally plausible explanation: narcissistic prejudices drives those who have them to restrict the totality of the world to people who are as they are themselves. Those who persist, willingly or otherwise, in being Other are labeled, treated, rehabilitated, confined, and even abused and eliminated – whether outright, through eugenics, or by being offered the “choice” of assisted suicide.

B)     Hysterical Prejudices

In distinction to sexism and the narcissistic prejudices. Young-Bruehl states that:

Racism, by contrast, exemplifies hysterical prejudice, by which I mean a prejudice that a person uses unconsciously to appoint a group to act out in the world forbidden sexual and sexually aggressive desires that the person has repressed. …The victims are, like victims of the most common forms of classism, another hysterical prejudice, “lower.”

…The ”others,” either as domestic servants or slaves as a fantasized part of the prejudiced person’s household, are love and hate objects in the loving and hating of whom no bans or incest or on rivalry are violated; they are the safe – for the prejudiced person – objects of childhood passions. Ideally, the victims do not get destroyed completely or flushed away as the obsessional’s victims do; they are needed alive, so that they can be loved like mommies, prostituted or raped like whores, sexually mutilated, beaten, deprived of their power, crippled, emasculated-and in all instances, kept in their places.

Again, Young-Bruehl clearly characterizes hysterical prejudices in the context of the historical reality of white racism as it has developed against Blacks in the United States. I am struck, however, by the parallels between her description and the prejudices exhibited against people with disabilities – developmental disabilities in particular. Historically, prejudices against Blacks, lower socio-economic classes and people with disabilities coalesced in the 19th century as people with developmental disabilities were ”viewed as the product of degenerate families, which formed a major part of the lower economic strats… ‘degenerate’ families spawned disease, disability, dependency, and social misfits…People with developmental disabilities were included in these groups of perceived racially inferior and hypersexual people.” Since people with developmental disabilities were assumed to have “lower moral intelligence, poor judgement, and subhuman characteristics, they were seen as sexual predators frequently wanting sex.” The cluster of stereotypes around people with developmental disabilities follows them and colors the way that they are perceived, treated and spoken about, even by those with whom they have prosaic daily contact, and even when they are clearly in a position of powerlessness.

Jane Hubert, in her paper on the effects of long-term segregation in mental institutions, writes of life in a locked hospital ward in Britain, where 20 adult men diagnosed with severe cognitive or developmental disabilities and “challenging behavior” had lived most of their lives. She describes how at the beginning of her project, before the field work in the ward had begun, ”the female psychiatrist in charge described all the men in the ward as either perpetrators or victims of sexual abuse (or both), and added that the ward “smelled of sex”. She then adds that:

Subsequent experience in the ward did not bear out any of this: it smelled of feces, and urine and drug-laden breath, but not of sex. What she was really suggesting was something quite different – that these men were sexually uncontrolled, polluted and polluting, a common fantasy about the ward. What this psychiatrist was saying could often be heard in the voices of other professionals, especially those who did not actually work directly with the men. There were clear undercurrents of fear, and prurience, in the way they spoke of them: fear of potentially uncontrollable sexual activity, of violence, ugliness, the unknown, and of the undefined power of people who are perceived as almost totally ”other”.

Hubert further illustrates her point by describing her interactions with David, a resident who has lived in institutions for some 30 years since his first admittance as a child. David is “very tall” and at first sight is “both strange and threatening” as he “strides around the ward for most of the day, often roaring loudly.” The most striking thing about David, however, is that he never has any clothes on. Even though the ward staff may tolerate degrees of undress from other residents, no one else is allowed to walk around with clothes. David is the exception because he simply tears up clothes when he is put in them. As Hubert notes rather dryly, ”[i]n normal” society, we do not accept nudity in the everyday social environment.” In the ward there are 19 other residents, various visiting health professionals, domestic staff, maintenance men, and so on, and approximately 40 male and female staff members who are trained to closely observe for and protect against sexual abuse towards or among the residents, ”yet, sitting with the other residents, walking around among them, is a naked man.” David is placed outside of the boundaries of normal adult social rules, but he is simultaneously ignored as an adult male even though he obviously is one. “To all intents and purposes his sexuality is denied. He is de-sexed and de-gendered.” Hubert concludes that for David and the other men, “although their sexual dangerousness is often used as a justification for controlling them within a locked environment, at the same time, not only are they denied normal gender roles, but also their sexuality is mocked.”

Hubert’s observations capture the hysterical prejudices that lie at the heart of modern society’s interest in keeping people with developmental disabilities physically and socially isolated, ostensibly maintaining purity in the community while resigating the Other to an imagine sexual degeneracy that yet remains biddable, reportable, accessible. We can imagine institutions where they get to walk around without clothes, gesticulating obscenely and saying words that the rest of us blush to think. They are free to have sex and not consider the consequences or be subject to any moral, emotional or ethical constraints. Even as people with developmental disabilities are institutionalized and constricted medically and socially in ways that often strip away even the possibility of having significant intimate relationships, they function as fantasy figures for society at large – unfettered from constraints imposed on “the rest of us” by social mores and upstanding public morality.

For a final comment on hysterical prejudices in disability prejudice, I refer to Young-Brurehl’s statement that “societies in which hysterical individuals are common and sexual repression or puritanism rife are societies split…committed to visions of equality and fairness,…at the same time, sexually and aggressively explosive.” I doubt that many would consider 21st century U. S. culture puritanical or sexually repressed, but I do propose that the hypocritical social “double vision” implicit in Young-Bruehl’s statement is fairly found today with regard to people with disabilities in general. When it comes to the sexual identity and activity of people with physical disabilities, Western society is extremely limiting and repressed. Especially for women with physical disabilities, “identification with a disability is to be socialized in a way that brings one’s competence in sexuality, procreation and nurturing into question.” At the same time, people with developmental disabilities are mythologized as promiscuous and prolific. The manner in which these two distinct stereotypes about people with disabilities interact, or rather fail to interact, reveals the impacted and entwined roots of disability and gender prejudices, and the operation of all of this against a backdrop of civil rights and a commonly endorsed belief in sexual freedom enables us to see how society is deeply and hysterically prejudiced against people with disabilities.

C)     Obsessional Prejudices

“Obsessional prejudices are the prejudices toward which people who are given to fixed ideas and ritualistic acts gravitate through which they can behave sadistically without being conscious of their victims.” Young-Bruehl writes. This is her first category of prejudices, and she cites anti-Semitism, anti-Communism during the McCarthy era, and the more contemporary, “Japan-bashing” by U. S. commercial interests as exemplars. She continues:

The obsessional prejudices feature conspiracies of demonic enemies everywhere, omnipresent pollutants, filthy people, which the obsessionally prejudiced feel compelled to eliminate – wash away, flush away, fumigate, demolish. The obsessionally prejudiced attribute to their victims a special capacity for commercial or economic conspiracy and diabolical behind-the-scenes cleverness, and they both envy this capacity and, acting imitatively, turn the fruits of this cleverness (particularly in the domain of technology) on their victims. They imagine the conspirators as having the capacity to penetrate them, get into their bowels and their privacies.

At first glance, it may seem that people with disabilities are not targets of Young-Bruehl’s obsessional prejudices. While people with disabilities have been depicted as demonic and unclean, this is usually connected to narcissistic or hysterical forms of prejudices that respectively seek either elimination or control of the difference that is disability or maintenance of a prurient interest in the perceived sexual waywardness of people with certain disabilities. Since the very category of “the disabled” is a late historical development, it is not surprising that conspiracy theories have not evolved against people with disabilities as a group. Nonetheless, I argue that such conspiracies are evolving right now. People with certain disabilities are facing the emergence of a modern, and possibly milder form of the obsessional prejudices. Ironically, the fact that these prejudices as are emerging is attributable in part to the very success that has been enjoyed by people with disabilities in fighting social, political and economic discrimination caused by other kinds of prejudices.

I have already mentioned the existence of a negative media backlash against the ADA, but running through the reports of excessive and nonsensical claims is a particular thread that attacks certain segments of people with disabilities as undeserving of the law’s protection. Invariably they refer to the “real” intentions behind the law, and implicitly or explicitly allege that some people with (or without) disabilities are collectively taking advantage of loopholes or uncertainties in the ADA to gain economic and social advantages. In 1997, Joseph Perkins wrote that “President Bush…hardly could have imagined that of all the discrimination complaints filed under the law, most have come not from blind or deaf or wheelchair-bound Americans, but from folks claiming back problems (that’s right).” Almost two years later, a story appearing in the same paper indicated that “a decade after the landmark civil rights legislation was crafted to integrate disabled workers into the job market, a flood of workplace discrimination complaints has come not from employees who are blind or deaf or using wheelchairs, but from workers claiming psychological stress.” The sentiment behind these statements is clear: the ADA is for people who are blind or deaf or use wheelchairs. These are “real” victims and everyone else, regardless of whether they have faced discrimination or not, is merely illicity taking economic advantage of the law. Identifying himself as a “supporter” of the law. Perkins nonetheless criticizes its regulations “[t]hey do not merely provide workplace equality for our fellow citizens with mental disabilities. They give the mentally disabled workplace rights and entitlements that are far above those of not only non-disabled workers, by physically disabled workers as well.”

Other U. S. writer go one step farther, and intimate that even people with undisputed physical disabilities take advantage of the law and actually conspire – in league with the government – against American businesses and freedoms. The case of PGA Tour, Inc v Martin, which pitted a well-known non-profit professional sports association against a professional golfer with a circulatory disorder and a resulting malformed right leg, sparked a series of critical media responses from the first trial court summary decision in Martin’s favor until the U. S. Supreme Court’s final denial of the PGA’s appeal. Among the first of these criticisms was an editorial that commented “[t]o argue that walking the course is a mere detail, an expendable part of the game of professional golf, is absurd. To argue that Casey Martin derives no advantage from being able to ride and conserve energy while other competitors must expend theirs to be dishonest.” Clearly the author takes issue not only with the court’s opinion that walking is not essential to the game, he disputes the court’s uncontested finding that Martin easily suffered as much or more fatigue, even riding a cart, than able-bodied competitors did walking the course. Such active disbelief, coupled with a general criticism of the “absurd  and outrageous judicial overreach” that “endows [disabled Boston University students] almost with the status of a separate species” reveals a prejudice that has taken on an obsessional character. Martin’s case is tragic because his golfing talent is “nullified by a disability,” but somehow this same disability is entirely discounted when it comes to considering its impact on the fatigue and physical effort that walking 18-holes is supposed to impart. Treating unlike persons as if they are alike violates a formal model of justice, but the writer seems to argue that this principle should not apply if the difference “is not my fault.” This is the social model of disability at its worst, with the additional implicit assertion that any court or law that interferes with able-bodied society’s right to set its own rules exactly and only as it wishes is engaged in some kind of dishonest subversion.

This emerging “conspiracy aspect” of disability prejudice is even more apparent in a press release issued by the Libertarian Party after the initial Martin decision. According to Steve Dasbach, then-national Chairman of the Libertarian Party:

The real issue isn’t whether Martin should be allowed to use a golf cart… The issue oisn’t even whether Martin has gotten a bum deal from life – or whether it’s a personal tragedy that he couldn’t complete in a sport he loves. The real issue is: Who decides? Do professional sports associations have the right to set their own rules? Or does the federal government have the final decision-making power over every aspect of our lives – including professional sports … if you think the government will stop with professional golf, you’re probably protected by the ADA because of your chronic case of gullibility… The ADA is a bureaucratic disease that’s getting worse every year – and the only question is which sport or industry will be the next victim.

This recasting of one individual’s request for a personal accommodation in pro golf into a government plot to interfere with “every aspect of our lives” exemplifies many aspects of obsessional prejudices. People with disabilities are assigned the role of Others who want to corrupt and disrupt the system, using and/or being used by a “big brother” federal government. Rather than propose outright destruction, which would be socially unacceptable, obsessional prejudices centered on disability propose a kind of social extermination in they forcefully attack those tools of social understanding, cultural education and civil laws that have enabled people with disabilities to achieve a new life of growing economic power and political self identity. Holders of these prejudices applauded when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Toyata Motor Mfg v. Williams, further narrowing the field of those who are disabled enough to call on the equal protection promise of the ADA.

There are other unique facets to obsessional prejudices as they are beginning to be applied to people with disabilities. The obsessional fear that conspirators have “the capacity to penetrate them, get into their bowels and their privacies” is particularly acute when the category of disability is both extremely heterogenous and very fluid. People with disabilities are not necessarily visibly distinct. Health conditions and symptoms are not necessarily medically static or identically incapacitating. The next-door neighbor could develop a back problem and suddenly turn into a claimant under the ADA, or your own widowed father-in-law’s lethargy and loneliness could be diagnosed as a clinical depression that requires accommodation in the workplace. Not only do we all face the possibility of getting a disability ourselves, a child with a disability can “issue forth” from one’s own lions, intractably a part of one’s own social group and identity. Amidst this reality, the prejudicial fear of omnipresent disability conspirators seeking and getting “special treatment” must loom especially large.

People with disabilities share this aspect of fluidity with the category of “homosexual” in which it is also “not clear who should be registered in it.” Young-Bruehl notes that “homosexuals pervade all ‘racial’ and most if not all ethnic population groups; the chances that a homophobe will be hating someone who is kin are very great.” Further:

The homosexual is a kind of fiction, because homosexual behavior occurs along a continuum, ranging from entertaining homoerotic fantasies to having a single experience or period of experience to exclusive to exclusive preference. And at least some people can move back and forth on the continuum during their lifetime-from a homosexual preference in adolescence, for example, to heterosexuality in adulthood, or vice versa. Such complexities have led many people to say, simply, a homosexual is a person who identifies himself or herself as a homosexual.

Until recently, homosexual self-identification has not led courts or the public to try and strictly control entrance to the category, though this issue may have been subsumed in the continuing battle among gay activists, religious communities, scientists, and social scientists over the origins of homosexuality. People with disabilities have never been given the privilege of self-identification. Stone attributes this to the fact that disability, “even in its early incarnations as more specific conditions, was seen to exist in both genuine and artificial forms. People could either be truly injured or feign injury. In the modern understanding of disability, deception has become part and parcel of the concept itself.” For Stone, “disability entails (or may entail) at least as much political privilege as it does social stigma. [that is, exemption from a work-based distributive system, military service, criminal liability, and so on]…the intense political interest in disability benefit programs in recent years can only be understood if we see that the flight is about privilege rather than handicap or stigma.” This is an excellent point, but it is not one which can or should account for the social tendency to concentrate on the political privilege aspect of disability to the utter exclusion of the stigma aspect of disability. There may well be people who fraudulently claim a disability to gain political or economic privileges, but this fact fails to fully explain the common perception that people will freely and eagerly choose to categorize themselves as disabled. I submit that obsessional prejudices play a part in this myth,  strengthening a belief in the conspiratorial ability of target groups to “work the system” to their own advantage, and impeding the understanding or belief that there is such a thing as a social stigma attached to disability. Absent the measurable physical impact of a “real” medical condition, and at times even with such evidence, the obsessional character believes everyone claiming a disability to be tarred with the same scheming brush.

In this potent mix of stereotype, competitive fear and political paranoia, Gavin Langmuir’s insight into what he saw the dual nature of anti-Semitism is pointedly applicable:

On the one hand, there are situation in which Jews, like any other major group, are confronted with realistic hostility, or with that well-nigh universal xenophobic hostility which use the real conduct of same members of an outgroup to symbolize a social menace. On the other hand, there may still be situations in which Jewish existence is much more seriously endangered because real Jews have been irrationally converted in the minds of many into a symbol, “the Jews,” a symbol whose meaning does not depend on the empirical characteristics of Jews yet justifies their total elimination from the earth.

Langmuir identified the second type of prejudice described above as “antisemitism of ‘chimerical character,’ which paved the way to Auschwitz.” My impression is that as obsessional prejudices develop against people with disabilities, they will not necessarily be so cleanly reality-based or chimerical. One person may be prejudiced against people with back injuries because she had an acquaintance that purposefully and falsely exaggerated the extent of her disability to collect unemployment insurance. Others may be convinced without any evidence that “the disabled” cost U. S. businesses millions of dollars, weaken the economy, control the Federal government and courts, and take away the jobs of better-qualified Americans like themselves. “The disabled” become the symbol of the lazy, duplicitous, undeserving “Other” who threatens our most cherished rights and institutions from a privileged insider’s position. Symbolic prejudice against people with disabilities may never reach the levels needed to initiate an explicit plan for their physical elimination, but the mere fact that such a prejudice is coalescing bears watching.

4.      Disability Prejudices

For many, the malleability and self-identification of homosexuality as described above by Young-Bruehl, along with her attendant observation that “all the types of prejudice can appear in homophobic forms,” may seem totally inapposite to the context of disability. If disability consists of a medical fact, a chronic, pathological and measurable deviance from the norm, then flexibility in categorization seems like mere wishful thinking on the part of disability advocates. If people are prejudiced against “the disabled” it is because they either attach unjustified consequences to the fact of, or unreasonably refuse to make the smallest accommodation for, the fact of the disability. As disability studies have established, however, disability is not confined to medical facts, and certainly is not inherent in the way that human beings adopt to the environment and live out their lives, or are socially and institutionally inhibited from doing so. Categorical certainty is artificially imposed for socially created reasons, such as the administrative imperative of benefits distribution. As Jerome Bickenbach puts it, the definitional boundaries drawn around “the disabled” are not “facts of the world – like gravity – but negotiable political and economic stances which, in a democratic setting, should always be open to challenge, debate and revision.”

In this contested arena of disability definition, Robert Burgdorf advances a vision of the ADA that has nothing to do with categorical certainly. As the drafter of the original bill that eventually became the ADA, Burgdorf describes a misconception that there are:

Two distinct groups in society…those with disabilities and those without – and that it’s possible to have a list of all those who have disabilities… That’s simply not reality… People vary across a whole spectrum of infinitely small gradations of ability with regard to any given function… The focus of the Act was – and should be – on eliminating employers’ practices that make people unnecessarily different.

What makes anyone “eligible” for protection under the ADA is the same thing makes any of us “eligible” for protection under the laws against age discrimination or under discrimination: We’re ”eligible” to use the law once we run into discrimination… Where the courts have gone wrong is to try and first establish some “group” for whom the ADA offers protection. That’s simply not how civil rights laws work in this country.

In contradistinction to civil rights, most prejudices do work by identifying and establishing a target group. People with disabilities, especially in the U. S., have worked hard to define and solidify their own collective social identity, and the effort has resulted in unprecedented gains in political and legal strength. At the same time, cultural awareness of people with disabilities as a group means that they are more easily targeted by modern narcissistic and hysterical prejudices. By refusing to allow nondisabled society to medically define disability or “norm-ally” define humanity, by resisting confinement in homes and institutions, and by fighting for equal opportunities in all facets of life, people with disabilities increasingly threaten the narcissist need to control difference and the hysterical need for ”lower” love and hate objects. At the same, the inherently dynamic and heterogenous nature of the disability community, with its tremendous variety of physical, social and racial characteristics, aggravates obsessional prejudices, which imagine people with disabilities everywhere gaining power in all ways. While Burgdorf’s interpretation of the ADA makes perfect theoretical sense with regard to social justice and civil rights, they exacerbate the obsessive fear that there is no way for the nondisabled to fully guard against, control or exclude people with disabilities.

I have not delved into Young-Bruehl’s framework for identifying ideologies of desire simply to enable academics to exhaustively catalogue disability prejudices. Nether am I trying to present a picture of unmitigated hopelessness where first, last and always, people with disabilities will face prejudice. First, cataloguing disability prejudices is impossible given the gradations, combinations and dynamic nature of real life prejudice against people with disabilities. Prejudices develop as they are communicated, exhibited and repressed in various social and institutional settings, and these further dimensions of prejudice need to be investigated in their own right. Second, identifying and trying to understand the pervasive and subtle operation of various prejudices against people with disabilities is not the same as admitting defeat in face of prejudice. In fact, the more the social sciences and disability studies can combine their understanding of disability as an historically specific target of specific prejudices, the greater the possibility of crafting effective long-term social strategies for containing these prejudices. My goal is simply to raise questions about how to best fight disability prejudices that do not have the same internal logic, meet different psychological needs, favor distinct means of institutional expression and propagation, and do not even apply equally to all people with disabilities. If different disability prejudices are distinctly motivated and expressed (that is, in laws, medical policies, popular culture and so on), there are practical and important implications for people with disabilities, collectively and as individuals, as well as for those who study disability and prejudice, and for our lawmakers and courts.

C.     Some Consequences And Implications Of Disability Prejudices

At one point in her discussion of ideologies of desire, Young-Bruehl gives her opinion that:

The needs manifested in the various types of ideological prejudices are, as the end of the twentieth century approaches, being challenged not so much by antiprejudice efforts and campaigns for tolerance and human rights as by peoples once victims and more powerful, each in a different mode – by gaining international standing, by gaining numerical strength, by appearing in public, and so forth.

Young-Bruehl seems to imply that institutional actions of anti-prejudice, such as the enactment of laws and educational campaigns, lie at one end of a response spectrum while individual and collective actions of self-empowerment by victims of prejudice lie at the other. For people with disabilities, historically unrecognized as victims of prejudice, such a view of anti-prejudice action underestimates the vital connection between human rights campaigns and victims standing up for themselves in response to discrimination.

Since World War II, the existence of human rights have been recognized in international law, and to varying degrees, in most domestic legal systems. Putting aside the question of how effectively these laws are enforced, they very fact of their enactment has changed the political and social landscape of the world. Working from basic Allportian concepts of prejudice and discrimination, and recognizing how human rights are historically denied to others on the basis of certain recurring grounds, most of these national and international instruments making a ringing declaration along the lines that “human rights shall not be denied on the basis of,” followed by a specific enumerated list that typically includes the grounds of race, ethnicity, national origin, and gender.

There was no doubt after the attempted genocide of World War II and the realities of racial segregation and violence all over the world that racial and ethnic minorities belonged to this new “human rights club,” and women gained entrance with both increased political self-consciousness and overwhelming evidence that half of the world’s population endured physical abuse, political oppression, and diminished economic and social opportunities with no common link other than their gender. Disability, on the other hand, was not initially admitted into the club; the diminished consequence of their individual conditions and an issue for charity, not a matter of human rights being denied. Until relatively recently, disability has never been specifically included as a prohibited ground for the denial of human rights. Even now, the United Nations tends to frame disability matters as an agenda item of economic and social concern rather than a matter of ”pure” human rights, which remains dominated by civil and political issues. Within this historical context, the achievement of unequivocal inclusion in international human rights instruments and law, and civil rights traditions wherever this exist, is an integral aspect of people with disabilities empowering themselves and believing that they are fully accepted and protected as human beings.

Obviously the importance of achieving “rights party” is not unique to people with disabilities. Particia Williams describes the feelings of Black Americans upon the enactment of racial anti-discrimination laws:

“Rights” feel new in the mouths of most black people. It is still deliciously empowering to say. It is the magic wound of visibility and invisibility, of inclusion and exclusion, of power and no power. The concept of rights, both positive and negative, is marker of our citizenship, our relation to others.

Nonetheless, the achievement of international human rights recognition and civil rights laws has been especially rewarding for people with disabilities after modern society’s long resistance to the idea that there was even such a thing as disability prejudice.

On a related point, people with disabilities have come to political and social self-consciousness at a certain point along the historical development of disability prejudices. Wherever the disability rights movement has made a mark, the medically-oriented, charitable view of disability as an exclusive concern for rehabilitation and welfare has been the first, and tempered the most violent and intentional aspects of disability prejudice. That is, even where intentional physical and mental abuse, social segregation and euthanasia are still visited upon people with disabilities, these things co-exist and have generally been subsumed within another view “born out of the Christian tradition which emphasized charity towards the disadvantaged. Societies have gone to great lengths to pity and feel sorry people with disabilities.” Of course, traditional charitable institutions carry their own oppressive ethos, “in which the helpers invariably occupy positions of power and authority within agencies, and the helped stand is circumstances subordinate to these.” But they do not look or sound like the Nazi regime or the Ku Klux Klan or invading armed forces, and the discriminatory acts engaged in by members of the former groups, even though the underlying prejudice typology (that is, obsessional, hysterical or narcissistic) may be the same.

My claim is that much of modern society, even though it has enacted laws that reflect reality of disability prejudice, continues to demonstrate that it lacks an interpretive history for accepting and understanding disability as a target of prejudice. Throughout this and the prior section, I have discussed unique aspects of disability’s history and social development that make recognizing disability prejudice to difficult. In such circumstances, the most natural tendency is to build on the strengths and insights of movements that have already gained recognition as victims of prejudice (that is, ethnic and racial minorities, women, gay people), and draw analogies to the barriers and prejudice that they face. The strength of these analogies is rooted in the common subjective experience of those who have been targets of discriminatory practice, but invariably this approach fails to fully investigate or account for the ways in which the prejudice behind any particular discriminatory act may be like or unlike any other. Similarly, the analogy approach runs into difficulty when dissimilarities between people with disabilities and other minority groups emerge. Bickenbach refers to these problems after he criticizes the ADA and the U. S. disability rights movement’s minority group analysis for distracting from what he sees as the true problem of distributional injustice:

None of this is to deny that the root cause of the distributional injustice are either attitudes that people have or economic forces that operate to sustain capitalist structures, and that either or both of these phenomena perversely justify the denial of opportunities to disabled persons. Nor is it to deny that the impact of these attitudes or economic forces in concentrated upon those who have, or are viewed as having, impairments or disabilities. But this does not entail that the process is that of discrimination, and the victims form a discrete and insular minority defined in part by their experiences of a common discriminatory response.

Of course, it should be remembered that prior to this time, people with disabilities had little or no legal recourse at all in the face of discrimination. Still, it is true that the foundational assumption behind the use of terms such as “disablism” and “sanism,” and the collective identity building that is so important in a civil rights approach, leave little room for a nuanced understanding of disability prejudices as either manifold or divergent from other legally recognized prejudices. In their defense, disability advocates are usually too busy on the front lines, fighting to preserve legal and social gains that have finally given people with disabilities social options and economic opportunities, to construct detailed social theories. This preference for action and a theory that will lead to and support social change is also expressed by disability scholars:

The social constructionist view sees the problem as being located within the minds of able-bodied people, whether individually (prejudice) or collectively, through the manifestation of hostile social attitudes and the enactment of social policies based upon a tragic view of disability. The social creationist view, however, sees the problem as located within the institutionalized practices of society.

The important advance that the social creationist approach makes over the social constructionist one, therefore, is that it does not assume that the institutionalized practices of society are nothing more nor less than the sum total of individual and collective views of the people who comprise that society. To make the point again; ideas are not free-floating, they are themselves material forces. The point, however, is not to choose between these two views but to find a way of integrating them…

In countries with a common law tradition, precedent and analogy are central to the interpretation of law. As soon as people with disabilities gained legal rights modelled on those of existing civil rights laws, disability discrimination had to fit within existing legal standards for statutory or constitutional discrimination. The fact is, however, the applicability of precedent and analogy is decided by people, along with the contents – both conscious and unconscious – of their minds. I suggest that the fact that concepts such as prejudice, discrimination and equal treatment have been legally established on the basis of discrimination as it has been experienced historically by other minority groups means that there is another interpretive layer applied to people with disabilities before they even reach the substantive requirements of the law. On the one level, people with disabilities have to prove what is being done to them – discrimination in accordance with legal precedent. On another level, they must show that they are victims of prejudice just like other victims. That is, they are implicitly held to account for establishing that they are something – a blameless and targeted member of a discrete and insular minority, and that the actions complained of were not something – reasonably justifiable in any way. Such a reading would explain the following statement from the majority decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in a critical decision on the applicability to state governments of the ADA’s Title I (employment) damage provisions:

States are not required by the Fourteenth Amendment to make special accommodations for the disabled, so long as their actions towards such individuals are rational. They could quite hard headedly – hold to job qualification requirements which do not make allowance for the disabled. If special accommodations for the disabled are to be required, they have to come from positive law and not through the Equal Protection Clause.

This is a journey of some distance: from the theoretical conception that prejudice is a single phenomenon, through the accretion of a narrow public understanding of prejudice as intentional, to the socially institutionalized and increasingly legally entrenched view that anti-discrimination law will only guard against prejudice that looks and acts a certain way. Ruth O’Brien traces some aspects of this journey as it has played out in the context of the ADA’s employment provisions:

On one hand, the legislation provides people with strong statutory rights. It ascribes much of the joblessness of people with disabilities to employment discrimination, not their inability to work, On the other hand, the legislation gave the federal courts the discretion to interpret these rights, knowing that the courts might make it difficult for people with disabilities to obtain them. And indeed, this is what has happened. The lower federal courts have followed the Supreme Court’s notion that society’s prejudicial attitudes about people with disabilities should not be highlighted. The Court’s perception has been that these attitudes do not stop disabled people from securing employment. Rather, it is their actual physical or mental impairments that limit job performance and, therefore, their ability to find and maintain work.

…Interpreting the employment provisions for the first time, the Supreme Court decide against disabled people, not because they could not perform a job, or their requests were unreasonable, or even that they caused an employer endue hardship. Instead, the Court held that they should not be protected under the ADA.

Reflecting on how the federal courts have used the term “mitigation” in the ADA to effectively assess the very identity of a person with a disability. O’Brien concludes that “[t]he federal courts have essentially stripped down the meaning of employment relations provisions to one based not upon rights but upon vulnerabilities and needs. People with disabilities must demonstrate that they have done all that can be done to mitigate their condition. If they cannot compensate… then and only then will be federal court rule that they have a disability and allow them to proceed to trial.” Such an interpretation of the ADA can only be explained by the courts’ lingering perception that an accommodation under the ADA is equivalent to giving a plaintiff an unfair advantage unless the plaintiff can show that he is more needy than his co-workers – an interpretation that completely undermines the law’s rights orientation.

The federal courts’ apparent inability to perceive the presence or effect of disability prejudices, and their resistance to recognizing the ADA’s full rights orientation, could be interpreted as signs of hysterical and obsessional prejudices in themselves, taking place within the very legal and social institutions that are appointed to protect the equal rights of people with disabilities. The fear that people with disabilities are receiving undeserved benefits under the ADA on the backs of innocent businesses, and the determination to cast protection under the ADA into a charitable mold, bespesak a need to keep people with disabilities “in their place,” and even deny them their legal existence under the ADA. This is not to assert that any or all of the members of the supreme court are personally “prejudiced” in the manner that we usually associate with that term, but merely to point out that the failure to deeply examine ourselves and the assumptions that influence our ability to perceive the presence of “prejudice” and “disability” will have an effect on every aspect of society, even those that are supposed to be enforcing disability rights. If, as Jones and Basser Marks claim, the success and value of law “depends on its ability to discipline behavior via an ideology of normalization,” then the Supreme Court’s failure to ”normalize” disability in a way that fully recognizes the oppressive presence of prejudices in the lives of people with disabilities is highly discouraging.

If courts, the media, and other social and cultural institutions will not or cannot recognize disability prejudices for what they are because of the fundamental error that prejudice is monolithic and must look and operate a certain way, then what can we do about it? One thing legal scholars can do is direct their attention to those interstices of anti-discrimination law through which inconsistencies or social presuppositions in judicial reasoning can be glimpsed. Two recently published papers do precisely this. Christine Jolls examines the relationship between anti-discrimination and accommodation. Given the Supreme Court’s tendency to view accommodation as an “irrational” and disproportionate requirement of the ADA while disparate impact is (still) within the purview of Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Joll’s finding that the two things are factually and operationally similar raises questions about the existence of deeper, non-economic reasons behind the courts’ attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the two concepts. Michelle Travis investigates how courts have tried to determine liability in employment discrimination to be treated similarly, thereby triggering full liability, or they decide that the employer’s conduct is ‘too far away’ from prototypic discrimination claims to be covered by the statute, thereby resulting in no liability at all.” Travis propose a “limited remedies” approach that would take account of, and impose sanctions for, intermediate states of employer discrimination. These topics and others concerned with employer cognition, carry the potential for opening up a dialogue into the nature of discrimination, the prejudices that motivate it, the role of law, and the almost instinctive, socially shaped assumptions that every judge brings to the bench when considering anti-discrimination laws.

Prejudice and disability scholars also need to work together in this area. When Young-Bruehl published her study of prejudice in 1996, she lamented the fact that both sexism and homophobia had yet to gain recognition as prejudices in official social scientific texts, instead, each area had developed its own independent base of theoretical and experiential literature, while social scientific studies of prejudice confined themselves to either studying prejudice broadly as ethnocentrism or examining racism as the prototypical prejudice. In the six years since, the situation has not radically altered. Recently published college texts with titles like Dealing With Differences: An Introduction to the Social Psychology of Prejudice essentially equate prejudice with ethnocentrism, perhaps paying some lip service along the way to the role of feminism and homophobia in intergroup conflict. Cross-disciplinary anthologies with titles like Hatred, Bigotry, and Prejudice and Communicating Prejudice now habitually include contributing articles that focus on sexism and homophobia, but disability and disablism often are not even found in the index, much less included as an actual paper topic. Young-Bruehl’s The Anatomy of Prejudice contains only the briefest, passing mention of disability as a target of prejudice. If the social sciences will not bring it investigative tools to bear on the multiplicity and complexity of all modern prejudices, institutions such as the media and courts are even less likely to question their own outdated or incomplete understandings of disability and prejudice in general. For its part, disability studies can add a more deeply theorized understanding of prejudice’s roots and contexts to its already rich experientially based consideration of disability prejudice. In a modern society constantly confronted with the most extreme results of violent intolerance and prejudice, a principled and clear exposition of how disability prejudice can be both like and unlike other prejudices evident in the world may ultimately have as much value for the disability movement as the consciousness-raising revelations of the original social model of disability.

For those who would rather be active in the trenches, the reality of different disability prejudices gives disability advocates the challenge and opportunity of building even more effective cross-disability coalitions and cross-minority affiliations. This picture of prejudice also helps us to understand why having the experience of being victimized by prejudice immunizes us from neither holding prejudices ourselves, especially those that are based on a different need and logic than the ones with which we are most familiar, nor holding different prejudices to varying degrees. While the resistance and complex adaptability of Young-Bruehl’s ideologies of desire are certainly intimidating they serve as a very potent reminder that even the strongest laws still require a constant campaign of social and cultural education to be effective. As Jones and Basser Marks emphasize, ”even if there existed a perfect regime of human rights, a system of formal law promoting and empowering people with disabilities, this is only going to be a small part of what is necessary to bring about true equality for people with disabilities.” Fighting disability prejudices shape and are shaped by history and social conditions, and even the laws change. If individual attitudes and social perceptions are flexible enough to be changed by the habits engendered by law, a belief inherent in the social rational for civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, then they are also flexible enough to be modeled into new and far less obvious patterns prejudice and discrimination once individual and institutional resistance to law comes into play.

Minority groups who are aware of the various types of modern prejudices and their distinct psycho-social tendencies are able to shape educational and organized social and legal responses to more effectively combat the prejudices that victimize them. Since disability is capable of being targeted by any of the three typologies of desire advanced by Young-Bruehl, disability advocates must understand the myriad ways that disability prejudices can surface. For example, hysterical prejudices may endorse legal regulations that help keep people with developmental disabilities in institutionalized environments, or resist legislative measures that would help people with disabilities gain economic parity and high-quality community services. The Other is thereby kept in an officially sanctioned and “cared for” position while still available to be an actual or imagined sexual figure. Obsessional prejudices will tend to avoid enmeshing themselves too much in official government activity because of their fear of government conspiracies, but they will publicly rail and campaign against civil rights and other laws that would be viewed as giving unfair advantage and power to the disabled Other. Narcissistic prejudices can be very subtle, proactively undermining the educational and social initiatives of the disability community on the simple argument that private spheres – the very spheres in which a medical, personal tragedy model of disability is often socially constructed and maintained – should remain private. Efforts to paint assisted suicide and the euthanasia of infants with disabilities are purely private matters between an individual and/or a family and their doctors serve as examples of actions that can be motivated by narcissistic prejudice.

Conclusion

Most individuals feel that they have encountered negative perceptions, been judged as different and less worthy, at some point in their lives because of an irrelevant characteristic, trait or personal choice. The experience of discrimination is, in this way, truly universal. Similarly, virtually everyone can probably recall holding a “view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it,” especially if the “group” in question can range from being others of our gender to our circle of friends in high school. When discrimination and prejudice are expanded to embrace such general desires as feeling left out or wanting to belong, the terms lose their usefulness as either social scientific concepts or part of the experienced reality of socially oppressed groups.

My point here is not merely one of definition. In the above, broadly drawn notion of prejudice as the motivation behind leaving others out, prejudice not only appears universal, but eternal as well, something that has plagued humanity since the origins of social organization. It is a very short step from here to conceive of prejudice as a single phenomenon, rooted in human nature, one that thrives under the same conditions, uses the same internal logic, and proceeds along the same continuum of development from simple avoidance to extermination, no matter which outgroup is targeted. In this paper, I have argued that such a notion of prejudice completely fails to capture the historical specificity and virulence of modern disability prejudices. Further, the pervasive influence of such an all-inclusive conception of prejudice has hampered not only social scientific investigation into disability as a grounds of prejudice, but has impeded public and judicial perception of disability prejudice and discrimination, even with the enactment of anti-discrimination laws. However much nuance is added by disability studies’ exploration of, and debate over, the various social and psychological factors that motivate disability prejudice, the unified theory of prejudice continues to unduly influence the ways that courts interpret laws and other international instruments.

People with disabilities have encountered particular difficulty under the notion that prejudice is a single phenomenon because disability least fits the social and legal mold set by earlier recognized victims of prejudice. If prejudice is only ethnocentrism brought to an extreme, the easiest way for minority groups such as Blacks and Jews to counter prejudice is to demonstrate the potential for assimilation despite difference. Even when everyone agrees that assimilation is undesired, unnecessary, unfair, foolish, wasteful, politically impossible, and so on, the potential for assimilation can still be recognized and proven. This approach may be somewhat less applicable to women, but it is wholly inapplicable for people with disabilities. Hence the court’s lingering difficulties with accepting disability prejudice, because ultimately, people with disabilities cannot be assimilated into the social, economic and physical environment as it stands now; the latter must be adapted for the former. The need for adaption stands at the crux of current legal and social objections to the use of law to combat disability prejudice. If prejudice is one single human problem, then no single minority group should need something that others do not. This is the point where disability studies and prejudice studies can join forces, and effectively demonstrate the unique nature of nature of disability prejudices as a prejudice.

In all of this, the underlying challenge will be to move beyond being sheerly defensive, and towards a vision of a genuinely inclusive society where prejudices are not only barely kept in check in their worst excesses, but specifically recognized and intelligently denounced in all their manifestations. For this to happen, individuals and society as a whole must advocate not only for a bare tolerance of difference, but for a celebration of diversity, intrinsic worth and human ability in all its forms. Given the “uncomfortable, subversive position from which [people with disabilities] act as a living reproach to any scale of values that puts attributes or possessions before the person,” people with disabilities have a particularly important and leading role to play in developing such a radically transformed world. Will this vision be achieved by the enactment of national and international anti-discrimination laws? Not likely. But the more important question for people with disabilities today is whether this vision could ever be achieved without such laws. Clearly, the answer is no.