othering

In “Disability,” Nancy Mairs scrutinizes with candid and humorous language the lack of realistic portrayal–if at all–of disabled people in media culture. At one point in the essay, she switches abruptly from her wry quips to a serious tone with one forthright statement: “This kind of effacement or isolation has painful, even dangerous consequences, however.”

These blunt words reveal another aspect of the multifaceted concept of othering. While I know that people are commonly outcast from society based on appearance, race, religion, or gender, it never struck me till now that there are many in this world who are banished to the fringes of humankind solely owing to their disabilities. 

When people shun others based on certain characteristics they deem repulsive, they do so secure in the belief that they are more powerful, more superior because they are removed beyond the other’s fatal flaws. Yet this is precisely where disability differs. Because as Mairs unflinchingly posits, “the fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time.” Those who view disability as “a chronic incurable degenerative disease” and thus attempt to blot out the presence of the handicapped should use their narrow-mindedness as a catalyst for an acute awareness of their “own physical vulnerability.” For then it should come as no surprise that they are labeled by the very people they avoid as mere “Temporarily Abled Persons.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words in the famous Brown vs. Board case ring true even in light of Mairs’s piece, almost as if they are an elucidation of the “painful, even dangerous consequences” she foretold. He said that such baseless othering of those different from us “generates [within them] a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” And as long as we don’t bother to “insert disability daily into our field of vision,” these words will remain as applicable and valid as they were to society six decades ago.