TEDxSalford

You Can’t Turn A Flight of Stairs Into A Ramp By Smiling At Them

I first read the book Nobody’s Perfect by Hirotada Ototake, a survivor of tetra-amelia syndrome, when I was seven. The cover sported a huge photo of him in his wheelchair with a giant smile on his face. No arms or legs, but he had a giant smile. Reading his memoir, I cried. I was inspired.

I mean, if this guy could learn to swim, run a race, and attend one of the most prestigious universities in Tokyo, all with no arms or legs, I had absolutely nothing to complain about, having all of my limbs intact.

This kind of thinking, though, is exactly what objectifies people with physical disabilities.

In her popular TEDxSydney talk, comedian and journalist Stella Young managed to win over the audience with her humor and drive her point home at the same time.

“I was not doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation,” she said, as she described her childhood in Victoria, Australia.

We’ve all seen those images of adorable kids running on prosthetic legs… the list goes on and on. Stella Young (fittingly) calls these images “inspiration porn.” Sure, they tug at your heartstrings, but no matter how you look at it, they’re people just like you and me.

If you could take physical disability out of the equation, we would find that people don’t do things that are worthy of recognition any more than their able-bodied counterparts. They just do things differently in order to use their bodies to the best of their abilities.

This objectification phenomenon occurs all over the world. Students with disabilities are given extra tools in order to accommodate for their individual conditions and ensure that they perform to the best of their ability. The same is true in the workplace.

As ordinary, physically able-bodied individuals, we have to look at the societies in which we live and the norms that make us think that it’s okay to objectify the physically disabled population by spreading inspiration porn around the Internet.

Sure, it’s fine to be inspired by some things. But if you take the mentality behind Scott Hamilton’s quote and run with it, you’re forgetting one really important thing.

No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp.

We need to start questioning what we think we know about disabilities, rather than spreading the inspiration porn and thinking that disability makes us exceptional.