In search of stories that include us
/Eight years old, all bony limbs and shockingly white hair. I pressed my hand against the grimy window of the school bus. Through the early spring drizzle and my blurry, extremely nearsighted vision, I could make out the shadow of the ridge line—gray and stark in the late afternoon. And on it one lone pine tree.
That was my pine tree, my sentinel. It stood on the windswept ridge to greet me each day, to signal sanctuary ahead.
For a kid with jittery, nystagmus-destabilized eyes, giant coke-bottle bottom glasses, and homemade hippie clothes, school was a gauntlet of bullying, mockery, and bruising isolation. There were a few other kids from our counterculture community in school and we all got it, but I got it worse, and I couldn’t see well enough to find them in the crowd at school. Understandably, no one, not even my friends and my brother, wanted to be connected with me, since I was a magnet for harassment and ostracism.
But at home life was quite different. On the ridge, in the woods and in the tree-planting camps our parents took us to in the summer, I was one of the pack, building stick forts in the scraggly woods of Eastern Oregon, hiking up mountain sides, and harvesting miner’s lettuce for lunch—sometimes a bit slower on rough terrain but tenacious and vocal about not being left behind.
I lived in two worlds and the lone pine was a sentry between them.
Image of stylized cursive text as in a historical document with a stone gaming piece placed on the close-up page. creative commons photo by brandi Redd.
***
“Why would blind people need to travel, if they can’t see the sights anyway?”
“We’re not going to need as many workers. We’re sure as heck not going to need disabled people.”
“Excuse me if I don’t want to be around people with handicaps. It’s gross. I don’t show my problems in public.”
“Can people like that have sex? I can’t imagine being romantic with someone disabled.”
These are all sentiments I’ve encountered in just the past week. Oh, the joys of an interconnected world.
But the truth is that this type of ableist thinking has been around for decades, in most of the world for centuries. The current climate has given a kind of permission for the worst impulses of humanity to spill out, especially in the U.S. but in some other places as well. And ableism is less underground than other forms of bias.
Harvard’s Project Implicit analyzed 7.1 million psychological tests administered online from 2007 to 2020, and learned some very interesting things about prejudice. Almost everyone is prejudiced subconsciously whether we like it or not in some way. People are often biased against groups they themselves belong to. Many Black people harbor subconscious anti-Black bias, though it isn’t nearly to the level of similar bias among white people. The same goes for disabled people and anti-disability bias.
I took the test and I am apparently biased against people with disabilities too, if only mildly so.
***
My fingers traced the stark black-and-white illustrations in the big Erik the Viking book that Pa read to us in the evenings. A monster reared out of a roiling North Atlantic sea, towering over tiny men with swords and shields in a fragile wooden boat. The beast’s eyes were large, bulbous and glowing off the page with an eerie light.
The image seared into my mind and woke me at night, but not with unreasoning terror. And I still wanted that book. I’d slide down the bed to Pa’s legs and cling on, so that I couldn’t see the image in the book clearly when he turned it my way. But I’d peek, just for a second, a shiver running through my body.
In another book of Norse myths, there was a dour line drawing of Odin, Father of the Gods, with his massive shield and helm. One side of his face was in deep shadow, while his one eye burned bright blue off of the otherwise colorless page.
I don’t know if I noticed that Odin was half blind, sort of like me. Except that my half blindness came from both eyes just being half functional, whereas he had one good eye and no eye on the other side. I knew, of course. That was part of the story. It was important, because it happened when he discovered the Runes. I just didn’t pay particular attention to his eyes.
And the Runes pervaded my consciousness in a way that I didn’t understand at that age. They were bright, sharp, singular voices, and yet they belonged together. They could tell any story and mirror whatever was happening in our days. When Mama pulled clay runestones from a cloth bag and read about the meanings in a worn little book she had, I listened and felt the connection.
Today, I see that much spiritual teaching in the world is like this. It is part of everything. It is how we teach children our values. And the values taught by the Runes were deeply connected to natural and inevitable cycles of growth and change, death and rebirth. The Runes taught the importance of interdependence and self-reliance at the same time, the stark hand of fate and the power of action, the power of truth and the truths in nuance.
When I see the Runes abused by white supremacists today, I am filled with a fury that feels like nothing so much as the berserker rage of Erik and his men.
***
The Harvard Implicit Bias Test tracks involuntary reactions. You can’t effectively fake the test. People often test as prejudiced against people with dark skin even when they vehemently and honestly believe they are anti-racist. That doesn’t mean they’re “racist.” It just means that their subconscious has been colonized by the negative stereotypes, fears and assumptions that are promulgated by a structurally racist society.
But while everything highlighted in those tests is important, the results about ableist bias are alarming. The test found that in 2007 bias against people with disabilities was twice as intense as racial bias. That means that it was harder for people to involuntarily associate positive attributes to pictures of people with disabilities or symbols of disability. And the words that people involuntarily associated most with people with disabilities conveyed assumptions of incompetence, dislike, disgust and avoidance.
But the truly interesting part came in the comparison of how these biases changed over time in our modern era. In a time when media and the professional world became markedly more diverse, from 2007 to 2020, racial bias decreased by 26 percent, and bias against LGBTQ+ people, which started fairly high, decreased by 65 percent. It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. Legal gains tend to come first, and social attitudes lag behind. The fruits of the Civil Rights Movement are starting to have lasting and deep psychological footprints.
But bias against people with disabilities, which started high, only dropped by 2 to 3 percent. Some are being left behind. And that bias is not without cost.
***
A pale, red-eyed monk moves through dim stone corridors, his skin almost luminous against the dark, while he carries out acts of gruesome violence with eerie calm. (The Da Vinci Code)
A woman in a porcelain mask drifts languidly through a war room. Her scarred face is briefly exposed, when the mask slips, and she coolly releases a cloud of lethal gas. (Wonder Woman)
In a murky, vine-choked attic of the Upside Down, a gaunt, twisted figure with elongated limbs steps forward, his skin cracked, bent on mindless evil. (Stranger Things)
In a sterile underground room, the man’s posture and voice shift mid-sentence, his body tightening as a new personality emerges—one that moves with predatory intent toward the girls watching him. (Split)
Disability is one of the easiest and commonest ways to signal inherent evil and deep unredeemable villainy in literature and film. Whether it’s the albino minor villains of The Da Vinci Code and The Princess Bride, or the mental illness portrayals in Split, Joker and too many horror/gothic books and movies, or disfigured bodies in Wonder Woman, Stranger Things and so many many narratives across genres, disabled bodies and neurodiversity tip off the reader/viewer that the character is untrustworthy, full of malice or intensely dangerous.
In other stories, a character is shown as broken and unable to carry out their purpose. The plot is based primarily around a cure or only begins once the character is cured. See Me Before You and Avatar. A few stories use disability as a cheap plot device to imply special powers or as a symbol. Brand in Game of Thrones and Doctor Strange are examples.
Not every story is like that, of course. Especially in the modern context, there are a fair number of “inspirational” disability stories:
A one-armed surfer plunges into the blue swell, straining upward with sheer force of will. The wave crests as she finally stands and rides it out. (Soul Surfer)
In a rehab room filled with metal bars and mirrors, a man grips the rails and forces himself upright on prosthetic legs, sweat and frustration giving way to a hard-won, trembling step. (Stronger)
Under the stadium lights, a blind football player crouches at the line, eyes unfocused beneath his helmet as the crowd hums around him; at the snap he lunges forward into the chaos, guided only by his determined Christian faith. (23 Blast)
In a makeshift ring by the water, a young man with Down Syndrome pulls on his wrestling gear with shaking hands, then charges forward with a yell, sand kicking up under his feet as he launches himself into a move he’s practiced over and over. (Peanut Butter Falcon)
Surely, I can have no quibble with these uplifting stories of triumph over adversity. After all, many of them are based on real people who overcame great odds to succeed, particularly in sports.
But I do quibble. The obstacles in these stories are always personal courage, mindset, or self-confidence. The point is never that the character’s attitude is fine and there are systemic barriers and social prejudices they must overcome.
These narratives offer inspiration at the cost of realism, suggesting that disability can be overcome through determination alone, while leaving unexamined the social and structural barriers that shape most disabled lives. Worse yet, they leave disabled readers and viewers with the clear message that moral worth comes with success. Failure is a personal deficiency. And that simply isn’t our reality in a world where Project Implicit shows that we face a massive wall of negativity, avoidance and denial from society.
***
While the Harvard Implicit Bias Test doesn’t predict whether or not individuals will behave negatively toward groups the individual may hold subconscious bias against, it does show that in aggregate, groups that hold deep biases tend to exclude and ostracize those their group has widespread biases against. When people with disabilities continue to face twice the level of psychological rejection among the general population that historically marginalized racial groups faced two decades ago, that has consequences.
This is how 90 percent of blind people end up being so socially ostracized that the level of isolation has health consequences, for instance. Disability and social exclusion are so intertwined, it is often hard to untangle what is a consequence of the actual physical or cognitive difficulty and what is a consequence of social exclusion. People with disabilities often find that only about 10 percent of the extra difficulties we encounter are due to the actual disability, while 90 percent of the issues are either purely social attitudes or matters of structural inaccessibility and exclusion.
So, those statements I listed earlier aren’t just some asshole going on a harmless rant. They are people saying out loud what a lot of people feel but don’t really want to admit.
***
Odin doesn’t overcome being half blind. He is still the All Father. He knows from the beginning that this state comes with difficulties and certain advantages. His society, unlike ours, seems to view his blinded eye as just one more physical characteristic, like his long beard.
And there are a surprising number of disabled characters in Norse lore—Tyr, the one-handed god, Höðr, the totally blind god. And if you delve even further into Icelandic sagas of mythical/historic heroes, there are more interesting examples. Ívarr the Boneless was a leader of the Great Heathen Army. Legendary accounts describe him as having no bones (possibly a condition like osteogenesis imperfecta). Yet, the warriors carried him with them on a shield because he was a brilliant military strategist. And in his old age, the famous poet and warrior of Egils saga is described as becoming blind and deaf. Struggling with the loss of his physical prowess, he reflected on his life through poetry.
These stories aren’t perfect, but it is interesting that they get a few things right that most modern narratives miss. The disability is just one part of each character, the disabled characters have agency and a vital function in their communities. They engage in battles and quests like anyone else and there is no implication that they just need to try harder to succeed. Success for all the protagonists (disabled and non-disabled) has to do with intelligence, savvy, strength, steadfast commitment, honor, and facing implacable foes. Disability mostly isn’t just a plot device. (You might argue about Höðr on that point, but there may well be more myths about him that have been obscured by time.)
Surely, these are only some of the options for telling better stories. But it is a place to start.
***
Psychological and sociological research demonstrates that cultural narratives—across literature, film, television, and other forms of storytelling—shape social attitudes toward marginalized groups.
There’s a concept called “parasocial contact,” which suggests that audiences can form meaningful, quasi-social relationships with fictional characters. A study by Tukachinsky, Mastro, and Yarchi (2015) showed that these relationships can function similarly to real-world connections (akin to having a good friend or close relative with a disability if exposure is intense and long-term), reducing prejudice and increasing empathy, particularly when characters are complex, relatable, and narratively central rather than tokenistic.
Have you ever felt like a fictional character was your friend? That’s parasocial contact. Having one Black friend doesn’t make you automatically anti-racist and having a friend with a disability doesn’t make you an expert on that disability. But having a lot of friends with a variety of backgrounds and characteristics will broaden your thinking and combat prejudice. Good storytelling can help, especially when real-world friendship isn’t available or accumulated biases make it an unpleasant chore for those who face marginalization.
There’s another theory called “narrative transportation,” which says when a person becomes deeply immersed in a story, they are more likely to adopt the perspectives and attitudes embedded within the narrative. If that sounds like mind control, it kind of is. You can resist it, but when the only kind of stories you hear or read are those with a particular perspective, very few people do resist. And unfortunately, at the moment most of the narratives we get in the English-speaking world confirm and deepen negative biases against people with disabilities.
Further research has shown that repeated exposure to affirming and humanizing portrayals (i.e. lots of stories building empathy and acceptance of a particular group) can shift not only individual attitudes but also perceived social norms. Researchers have documented how increased exposure to characters of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and to LGBTQ+ characters has correlated not only to better social attitudes but to more inclusive outcomes and less discrimination.
As audiences see diverse identities represented as ordinary and socially accepted, these stories contribute to a broader cultural understanding of what is considered “normal.” But—and this is important—the positive effects of inclusive stories only work if they are rendered in high quality and in an entertaining context. Those little educational booklets that try to force kids to think a certain way work no better on prejudice than they do on anything else.
Counter-stereotypical portrayals in books, movies, TV shows and even video games can reduce bias, but only when they are perceived as normal rather than exceptional. Overly idealized or one-dimensional depictions may limit generalization or even reinforce existing biases. That’s the problem we’ve run into with inspirational, unique individuals who manage to overcome their disability through sheer force of will.
***
I can be as guilty of “inspiration porn” as any high-achieving person with a disability who grew up gritting my teeth through barriers and struggles. As a legally blind kid, I wasn’t taught Braille and I mostly didn’t have audio versions of my schoolwork, like we have today. When I was “lucky,” I got large-print textbooks that were at least four times the weight of those carried by my classmates. I wore a huge yellow backpack. I read at a tenth the speed of other kids because of my vision impairment, and I just didn’t do anything but schoolwork a lot of the time. It wasn’t as if I had social distractions, after all.
As much as I am glad that I have that grit and determination, the story of me graduating at the top of my class back in the day only drives home the point that I was not totally blind. I could “see harder” in some circumstances. I could spend more time, endure headaches and just muscle through. Many people with disabilities can’t. It wasn’t my “attitude” or “willpower” that won the day in reality. It was that I wasn’t really as disabled as others.
I would rather focus on the people who put down their textbooks and challenged legal codes, went to court and demanded justice, occupied federal buildings and refused to move, so that now I don’t have to spend every waking hour struggling over inaccessible text to get my master’s degree.
I would rather look for stories that make disability just one more descriptor, and the story arc for disabled characters should include every kind of struggle that all kinds of characters face.
