One Perspective on Disablity

Keah Brown is a disability advocate and freelance writer who is best known for creating the viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute to dispel the myth that being disabled and attractive are mutually exclusive. Pop culture is one of her passions and she works to increase the visibility of people with disabilities in media in hopes it might shift the cultural view of disability.

​While Brown does not pretend to speak for all people with disabilities, her essays in The Pretty One, the LWV ABC May Book Club selection, raise some interesting points to think about:

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• She prefers the term “disabled”.  She views terms such as “handi-capable”, “differently abled” and “special needs” as coined to make abled bodied people more comfortable.
•  “Disabled” acknowledges difference and when we acknowledge difference we must acknowledge the privilege that comes with being abled bodied.
• What she needs as a disabled person are her rights, respect and opportunity, not pity or unsolicited advice about how to “cure” her disability.
• Societal norms value constant movement and equate stillness with laziness which results in disabled people pushing themselves beyond healthy limits in order to be valued.
• We live in a world that designs things under the assumption that everybody is able-bodied and fully functioning at all times.
• Media portrayals of people with disabilities spend too much time making everything about the disability, so much so that the character stops being a person and just becomes the disability.
• On TV shows disability is a joke and a horror.  Disability is punishment.
• She has yet to see herself, a black disabled woman, reflected in any media portrayal.  In Hollywood, “disabled” is usually a white man in a wheelchair.

Read more of Keah Brown’s perspective on disability:

• Disability Representation and the Problem with “Inspiration Porn”
• Disabled People Are Not an Inconvenience
• Saying Stephen Hawking Is "Free" From His Wheelchair Is Ableist
• Disabled People Love Clothes Too​

Keah Brown has cerebral palsy, which causes her disability.  Here's a website that provides information on identifying and living with CP: ​ birthinjurycenter.org/cerebral-palsy/

Join the LWV ABC Book and Film Club Discussions!