Imagine a person with a disability. How would you draw them? Try it…"
"How many people with disabilities do you know? How many can you name?"
Two questions, posed in two different contexts, but both inviting us to think about how we imagine and speak of disability.
The first came up at a seminar last February organized by Redattore Sociale and the magazine Superabile-INAIL on the subject of responsible reporting about disability. The title said it all: Neither Victims Nor Heroes. The seminar was aimed especially at journalists, because truly respectful journalism needs to learn how to avoid the twin extremes of pitying sentimentality and celebratory heroism that tend to dominate disability coverage. The reasons are clear and unsparing: for a story to reach the public, it must stand out—either positively or negatively, in dramatic form. The result, though, is that it distorts the actual lives of real people, flattens complexity, and treats with careless brevity subjects that demand deeper understanding. One of the parent-panelists, journalist Nicoletti, noted the absence of representatives from major news outlets at the seminar—and indeed, most of the audience appeared to be specialists and professionals in the field. Others among the speakers and attendees remarked on how little coverage actually draws from reliable sources like Redattore Sociale, compared to the volume of disability stories circulating; and how disability organizations often find themselves contacted simply to present "a case." Breaking these vicious cycles of reporting—cycles that extend far beyond disability coverage—is no simple task. But the seminar insisted on one thing: we need to change the rhetoric around disability. That rhetoric in which a parent—as Gianluca Nicoletti, father of Tommy, and Gabriella La Rovere, mother of Benedetta (both very differently autistic), pointed out—risks being cast, against their will, as a hero in that situation, someone heroically pushing forward despite everything... and yet, in the end, doing it alone. Just as we readily draw that person with a disability—in a wheelchair, apparently normal—but almost never as someone embedded in genuine relationship. A rhetoric that insulates us from those who live with disability.
The second question comes from a survey designed by a Milan priest, Stefano Buttinoni (p. 13). Tasked by his bishop to address this very subject, he—as a brother to the community—decided to probe the ground through a questionnaire, perhaps not scientifically rigorous, but capable of prompting reflection and revealing how we actually engage with disability. Starting from something concrete: How many people with disabilities do you know? How many can you name?
I know I am speaking to readers who could fill pages with the names of people with disabilities—and who would likely include their own names among them. I believe those same readers know better than to settle for the incidents, the terminology, the oversimplified framings that the press so often recycles and that society absorbs; I also know that most of them work to draw near, to build relationships of real solidarity and genuine equality, even where equality is anything but obvious.
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Yet that rhetoric about disability emerges often without our even noticing it—as in certain statements within the Self-Evaluation Reports of some (fortunately few) prestigious Italian high schools, which seem to take pride in the fact that they have no students with disabilities, nor any from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, allowing their teaching to proceed smoothly without major obstacles. Perhaps it is nothing new... but we have to acknowledge—and educate the young (see pages 11, 15, and 17 - no. 141, 1/2018 - some initiatives in this direction)—that learning to navigate life's difficulties, which some people know more intimately, can only benefit individuals and society overall. Not by accepting superficial coverage or building more-or-less invisible walls to keep ourselves at a distance. No human being can escape their own fragility or treat as marginal every other form of humanity that they do not fully recognize in themselves. We cannot simply assign disability its proper definitions, circumscribe its terms and places, in a (more or less conscious) effort not to be touched by it.
Cristina Tersigni, 2018