Media, Microaggressions and the Paralympics

Last week my niece picked me up from work, and as we were driving back to my sister’s for the night, we got on the topic of the Olympics verses the Paralympics. My niece was shocked to discover that although the Olympics gets two full week of coverage. The Paralympics gets only a few hours a day at most.

“Why?” She asked me, sounding baffled. I shook my head. “I heard that they are afraid of losing sponsors.” Of course, I have no idea if that is true. However, I cannot think of one good reason for it, or the fact that Michael Phelps is a worldwide celebrity while Trischa Zorn is virtually unknown. It just is. My acceptance of this issue troubled me. So did my niece’s next question: “They can’t do that can they, isn’t that discrimination?”

I didn’t answer her right away. For weeks I’d been having this same conversation, and of course everyone is baffled. “Why?” they ask. “That’s stupid.” They say. But nobody had come right out and called it discrimination.

Dictionary.com defines discrimination as: treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit.

I’ve been discriminated against in the past. When I was eleven years old, I went to fifth grade camp with my school. It was a tradition; everyone went. I remember it being for a week, but it may have been just a weekend. Anyway, one morning while having breakfast with my friends, a teacher came up to me and said I looked tired. I told her I was fine and she felt my forehead and said I didn’t look well and that I had to go home. I started to cry. I told her I felt fine. But it didn’t matter. Suddenly, I was being driven home by someone in charge. I cried the whole way. I told the man I wasn’t sick. He said he knew this, but that camp was too hard for me; that I was struggling too much. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t listen. When I got home I called my Mom and told her what happened. I can’t remember if it was the next day or later that afternoon, but that same guy came to take me back to camp. As it turns out, the morning I was sent home was the day my class was scheduled to participate on the ropes course.

In the end, my Dad and Stepmom came to the camp with me. They took me to the ropes while the other kids were at lunch. They went through every part of the course with me, while the people that sent me home watched. Later, with my whole class watching, I climbed the rock wall and rang the bell at the top while all my friends cheered for me.

That was discrimination. I knew it as a child. But I have experienced discrimination at other times as well. Sometimes the discrimination was obvious to me, like the time I was told at the county fair that I couldn’t ride the rides because of my “condition.” Other times, like when I was left at the bus stop in downtown Grand Rapids three days in a row, because “the bus was too full for the wheelchair,” the discrimination was not obvious to me at the time.

As a person with a disability, I am used to certain things. I am used to not being able to go into certain buildings. I am used to having to sit in certain places, and not being able to use the bathroom. I am used to hearing, “Our building is old so we’re not accessible.” None of these things sound any alarm bells in my head, because they are so common; because they are subtle. No one comes out and says “You can’t do/enter/use XYZ because you’re disabled.” Ultimately, I want to believe that no one would ever consciously discriminate against someone and then cover it up with some lie to make it seem like it is out of their control. Yes, I suppose that is a bit naïve.

These experiences are probably why I didn’t immediately think that not televising the Paralympics was discrimination. I know there are many times when athletes with disabilities (at all levels of competition) are told that they cannot compete because they are disabled. That, obviously, is discrimination. Not televising the Paralympics isn’t fair and it doesn’t seem right; but it wasn’t infringing on the rights of the athletes to compete was it?

Certainly, no one is saying, “we aren’t televising this because these athletes are disabled!” I don’t necessarily believe that is the reason either, not technically anyway. But even if media claims to have good reasons for not televising the Paralympics that does not mean it is not discrimination. There is another form of discrimination, one that is more subtle and unfortunately, more accepted in our society. It is called Microaggression.

To be fair, Microaggression is something I just learned about on Monday when this video about it was posted on facebook; but I did find it quite interesting. According to the video, Microaggression is the everyday slights, insults, indignities and putdowns that people who are marginalized experience in their day to day interactions with people. Microaggressions sometimes appear to be a compliment, and are outside the awareness of the perpetrator because they are part of an unconscious world view of inclusion and exclusion. This construct is still somewhat controversial but it immediately resonated with me.  

Picture this:

•  A person with a disability is at the mall. As a mother and child approach this person, the mother grabs the child by the arm, pulling them away from the person with the disability.
•  A person with a disability is approached by a stranger who smiles at them, pats them on the shoulder and says: “It’s so nice to see you out”.
•  A person with a disability is being stared at. When they say hello to the person staring, that person looks down and walks away.
•  A person with a disability is at a family outing with her sister when a distant relative comes up to them and asks the sister if the person with a disability needs any help, instead of asking the person with the disability.

These are all examples of Microaggression that happen to me at least once a week. They, like the issue of televising the Paralympics, are not as obvious as saying “You can’t come in here because you use a wheelchair!” but, they still imply that people with disabilities are separate from those without disabilities; that we are excluded. The video talks about ways the individuals can combat micro aggressions, but I am wondering how far that can go when we live in a society that has conditioned so many of us to just accept these instances as facts of life. How can we begin to change when our media will only celebrate the accomplishments of seemingly able-bodied people while the accomplishments of people with disabilities are usually categorized as nothing more than inspirational stories; stories of how they overcame, or succeeded in spite of their disabilities? My is hope that, in the next few years, the United States will televise the Paralympics and allow those athletes to be recognized for what they are: great athletes who work hard and are representing their country with pride.

I've taken a few days to write this post. In those few days I have had a number of conversations that have made me think a little more about this topic. In that time, my opinion has not changed, but it has adjusted slightly. As a result this post has been written three times. I would love to keep the conversation going! Please comment below and share your opinion. Just remember to be respectful of everyone.

What's Wrong with me? Nothing, I'm Awesome.

Language is dangerous. Writers have always known this. As Edward Bulwer-Lytton said, “The Pen is mightier than the sword.” All of us have heard the phrase, but I think few of us tend to give it much weight. Words, whether they are written are spoken, have a lot of power. They have the power to create change, to inspire, to empower; but they also have the power to destroy, to break down. 

In college, I began using the word cripple to describe myself, mostly for shock value. It was an ice breaker in a way. I thought that maybe by calling myself a cripple it might put others at ease, they wouldn’t be so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. But I also started doing it because I was sick of the word disabled. To me disabled is the nasty word, not because of its definition, but because the word disabled implies that there is something less about me, something I am not, or cannot. It compares me to everyone else, and with those odds stacked against me, I’ll never come out on top. 

The word cripple, though traditionally frowned upon by the politically correct, has a similar definition to the word disabled, but when I use it I don’t feel as though I am being compared to someone else, or judged by some ridiculous standard. Plus, it has the advantage of making people a little uncomfortable. This is only fair if people are going to ask me personal questions in public or tell me that if I pray hard enough or try hard enough I will be normal, because that makes me uncomfortable.

I am not the only person using this terminology to describe themselves. Some choose other words like Gimp, Crip and Spaz. I don’t think we do it for humor. I think it comes from two main places: the feeling of solidarity and the empowerment that it gives us, and secondly, it’s our way to fight back against the politically correct and the language that has been deemed acceptable when talking about “people like us”.

People without disabilities think that there is shame in being disabled. They try to lessen the blow by coming up with phrases like “handicapable”, “differently-abled” and “disABILITY”. They did it for us, the people with the disabilities, so that we wouldn’t feel left out or ashamed; but, I (and most of the other people I know who have disabilities) am proud to be a part of the disability culture. My Cerebral Palsy has never shamed me. What has shamed me is the way other people have reacted to it. When my principal and teachers decided I was "too sick" for the ropes course in 5th grade camp and sent me home, I was ashamed. When my teachers kept me inside at recess on field day, I was ashamed. When my mother, only one trying to be helpful, cleared a path for me in a crowded room by shouting, “She’s handicapped!” I was ashamed. My disability caused none of this shame, people did. Of course, it wasn't until I began to hear words like 'gimp' and 'cripple' and 'spaz' used by people with disabilities and began using them myself, that I realized it.

The funny thing is, as I have gotten older, I’ve noticed that even words you mean to use positively can turn against you. Ever since I was a teenager my other friends with CP and I have been using the word spaz with each other. It is a perfectly appropriate term considering how jumpy and spastic we all are.

But recently, I was with a friend looking at some pictures on her facebook page and I noticed that in her captions she often had written something like: “This is a great picture of all of us, except Liz, she looks like a spaz.” At first it didn’t bother me because in a few of the pictures, Liz did look like a spaz. But then I noticed that a perfectly lovely picture of Liz would have the same type of caption. My friend had sad Liz looked like a spaz in EVERY picture. So then I got a bit upset and asked my friend why she was being so mean, was she jealous? (because Liz is beautiful, there is no denying that.) My friend got upset and called me a hypocrite. And she was right.

The thing is, I didn’t feel like she was using the word in a positive way anymore. She had used it the way kids who weren't our friends had used on the playgrounds of our childhood, to make Liz separate, or less. Sure the rest of us could be pretty, but Liz, she was a Spaz.

Words are tricky bastards.

So maybe I don’t want to use any of them anymore. Maybe I will just take the disability out of the equation all together. It’s never been that important. Sure people will still compare my body to theirs, they might still want to know why, they might still think of me as less and they might use my differences is a reason to disregard me, and put me aside. That sucks for them, because I am Awesome. I really am, ask my friends. I can see them having this conversation from now on:

Poor Sap: So what’s up with that friend of yours anyway?
Friend: Which one?
Poor Sap: The one in the wheelchair
Friend: Oh Melissa? She’s Awesome.


So from now on let’s all just be Awesome. Mkay? 

No Wheelchair Allowed? Apparently Some People Still Haven't Heard of the ADA.

This whole wedding experience has been a bit of a surprise for me. I expected to come across a few more challenges as I progressed in planning my wedding. Does that make me cynical? As it turns out though, I have been pleasantly surprised by everyone’s excitement and willingness to help however they can and have had nothing but positive experiences, especially with my dress. I became even more grateful for this when I saw a post made by one of my friends on facebook. She had been shopping for her best friend’s wedding dress when she was told that she could not enter the store because of her wheelchair. The story was picked up quickly by the local television station.



Here is the full story.


I can’t believe it. I mean, first of all you can see from the photo that the front of Kim Kriner's Bridal Boutique  is barrier free, which means that a person in a wheelchair can, in fact, enter the store. But someone has set it up so that the aisles are narrow making it hard for people in wheelchairs to get around. Does this person make an attempt to fix this, since you know, it’s the law? No, he or she puts a sign on the door and has staff tell people in wheelchairs to leave when they try to enter.


The girls entered anyway, only to be told that Stephanie could not enter the dressing room because her wheels might dirty the dresses. The staff that told them this was actually surprised when the girls got angry. See they have a policy about no shoes in the dressing room and wheels and shoes are the same thing, right?


My question is this. What if Stephanie had been the bride?


Clearly this store has never even considered the fact that someone with a disability might need to use their services. Cleary, they had no intentions of even trying to make accommodations for this before today.
All I can say is thank you Stephanie for going in anyway, for making this story public and for not letting this happen to someone else; someone like me, whose biggest fear was being told that she could not try on dresses because of her wheelchair.


And thank you to Mimi's Bridal Boutique and David's Bridal in Ann Arbor for seeing a bride and not a wheelchair, for making me feel comfortable and for helping me find my dress.