Culture Of Disability Culture Essay

Disability Culture and the Need for Mentorship Programs within the Disabled Community Were you born like that? I didn’t even realize you were disabled. Can you be fixed? You don’t act disabled. These are comments that people with disabilities often encounter, I myself, as a person with a disability, has encountered some of these as well. Over one billion people in the world, or fifteen percent of the world’s population, are disabled--making people with disabilities the largest minority group (The World Bank). While, disability is present in every society, disability rates are higher in developing countries since they often lack the resources to treat, and in some cases, prevent disabilities. Around the world, different cultures view and treat …show more content…
We can understand how disabilities were viewed throughout time by looking at how media and pop culture portrayed people with disabilities. People with disabilities were often not accepted into the general population or considered contributors to the general culture. In the US and England, initially, disabled people were viewed as spectacles. They were put on display. Mothers of children with birth defects would often travel the country, displaying their children for money. This was the birth of what are now commonly remembered as “freak shows”. Decades later, society began to see disabilities as “tragedies” and the only times TV shows featured disabled characters were in stories of tragedies or “special achievements”. Always in these programs people with disabilities were seen as less than the general population and were portrayed in stereotypical ways. Later, TV moved away from showing people with disabilities in only two ways, and disabled people, since the last quarter of the 20th century, starting appearing in ads. However, people with disabilities are rarely seen in all the roles non-disabled people are seen in. For instance, disabled women do not appear often in typical female roles, such as mothers or midwives, and they are never sexualized (Barnes). By looking at how disabled people have been portrayed by popular …show more content…
Therefore, disability culture may not exist in countries, yet it still exists in much of the world. For example, in some African cultural groups, disability culture may not exist or may not be as strong as in other parts of the world. In these cultures, emphasis is placed on social competence and willingness to overcome personal difficulty rather than emphasis on individual achievements. Persons with intellectual disabilities are not viewed negatively since they are not criticized for not meeting certain standards, rather they are praised for helping their community and collaborating with others which they are skilled in (Baxter). In these communities, culture is more of a collective mentality, therefore, there is less of a disability culture since the broader community is accepting of disability and do not necessarily view people with disabilities for what they cannot do, but rather for how they can contribute to the group. Persons of disability would not share common experiences of exclusion over which to bond and form a culture together. This fits in with the idea that was mentioned earlier: disability culture is created by the dominate culture, not necessarily by persons with disabilities. Therefore, if the dominant culture views certain members as “disabled” and chooses to exclude and separate them from the “abled”, then