Fake disabled children

A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how textbook publishers meet diversity quotas for the photos in their books. The article covers the lengths publishers go to in order to portray diversity in race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender and disability in textbook images so that their books will sell to diversity-sensitive school districts. But when it comes to portrayals of disabled people, nondisabled children are frequently placed in wheelchairs or given crutches to stand in for actual disabled models.

[Photographer] Ms. Coppola estimates that at least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren't. "It's extremely difficult to find a disabled kid who's willing and able to model," she says. Houghton Mifflin, which acknowledges the practice, says it doesn't keep such statistics.

Houghton Mifflin's little-known stratagem illustrates how a well-intentioned effort to make classroom textbooks more reflective of the country's diversity has led publishers to overcompensate and at times replace one artificial vision of reality with another.

Well, I don't know why disabled children would be less willing or able to model and make money. It's unlikely that the problem is caused by a particular minority group being unwilling to model and be represented. Much more likely, talent agencies are not interested in disabled children (and adults) and do not accept them as clients. That's no doubt a result of discrimination at talent agencies (which mirror the Hollywood/high fashion aesthetic) where the concept of diversity is not yet thought to include disabled persons, and disabled children that look like they have impairments would be unlikely to be hired unless the agencies completely change their aesthetic of who makes a good model. And, of course, the book publishers have decided that the appearance of diversity is a good enough representation of actual diversity.

This prejudice that manipulates the reality of what disabled children look like is just the tip of the iceberg. It goes without saying that children with hidden disabilities (that may nevertheless alter their appearance in subtle ways) are not represented in photos -- are they mentioned in the captions or text? Do the rented wheelchairs and other equipment look like what modern disabled children actually use? Do they rent, say, non-stereotypical equipment that disabled people regularly need, or just the easy symbols of disability -- crutches, wheelchairs, white canes? Are developmentally disabled children represented at all? Are the fake disabled children ever played by non-white boys and girls? What must black or hispanic or asian children look like to satisfy their diversity requirements? Does a blond hispanic girl qualify as hispanic or would she never be hired to represent her people either? How girlish does a girl have to be?

The WSJ article, headlined "Aiming for Diversity, Textbooks Overshoot: Publishers use quotas in images to win contracts in big states, but they may be creating new stereotypes," is mainly cast as a subtle critique of diversity and the standards educational systems have used to try and support diversity:

In 2004, according to federal estimates, non-Hispanic whites made up 67.4% of the U.S. population and 59.9% of the school-age population.

Under McGraw-Hill Co. guidelines for elementary and high school texts, 40% of people depicted should be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African-American, 7% Asian and 3% Native American, says Thomas Stanton, a spokesman for the publisher. Of the total, 5% should be disabled, and 5% over the age of 55. Elementary texts from the Harcourt Education unit of Reed Elsevier PLC should show about 50% whites, 22% African-Americans, 20% Hispanics, 5% Asians and 5% Native Americans. Of the total, 3% should be disabled, says Harcourt spokesman Richard Blake.

The publishers' guidelines are closer to the race statistics of California than the federal estimates, reflecting the markets for their sales, which are urban areas of big states like California, Texas and Florida. But the publishers' guidelines do not come close to accurately portraying the disabled as the estimated "one in 12 children" or 10% of all Americans that the 2000 Census indicated.

It's true that not all disabled children's traits identifying them as disabled can be captured in a picture. This is especially true for the various learning disabilities that have caused the number of children identified as disabled to climb in the past decade. Yet, the educational point of incorporating diversity into elementary school textbooks is to teach about the world as it exists for the children reading these books and to offer them images that look like them.

For disabled children, there is almost nowhere in mainstream public for them to see disabled folks portrayed as they actually exist. In Hollywood, the plum Oscar-contending roles for the highest-paid actors are for nondisabled actors, with portrayal of disability being part of what gets the applause. The "realism" of Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, for example, is what gets attention as being truthful about disability.

When was the last time you saw a disabled person on TV who drooled, or needed a personal attendant, or used a power wheelchair and had a schlumpy body because that's why people need power chairs? Perhaps in the inspirational story on the local news, but not with the diversity of regular characters slowly becoming otherwise more representative of our world on TV dramas like Grey's Anatomy or 24 or Lost.

With fake disabled children the accepted practice in textbook photos, another opportunity to show what we really look like is not only lost, but distorted. Real disabled people, when they do appear in public, become less attractive, abnormal versions of the disabled people we have learned to look at, in the same way that fat women have become the less attractive, abnormal versions of women because we've all seen the ideal skinny women everywhere so often she's become the accepted fake. It's little wonder the result of this switcheroo is the nondisabled stare all visibly disabled folks are familiar with as part of their public experiences. That stare is blatant curiosity and even astonishment, and efforts at diversity in textbooks will only reinforce it.

Crossposted at Alas, A Blog
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