(Thanks to Mike Reynolds for the “heads up” on this)
From Miss Crip Chick (“just your everyday southern, queer disabled woman of color):
Jerry Lewis is the host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Annual Telethon, a telethon that occurs every Labor Day to raise funds for cures by using disabled people as posterchildren. Disabled people protest the telethon because of its outdated, negative portrayal of disabilities. These images that the telethon promotes sticks in people’s minds and continually serve as a barrier for disabled people. Disability is not the problem, but rather the attitudes and barriers that society places on us.
What can we do? Protest. Write a Letter to the Editor. Tell people about the charity, medical, and social model of disability. Blog. Kara and I, along with the Disability Activist Collective (website coming soon) are organizing a campaign against the telethon and the charity model of disability. We need bloggers (not only disability bloggers but all! feminist, queer, woc, environmentalist, activists, great time to build alliances) who will agree to write about this! The campaign will work much like a blog carnival and will be heavily publicized in listservs and other sources of media. We encourage you to participate! To participate, please a comment or email us at consciouslycrip@gmail.com. We will be announcing the campaign on Thursday via media and will tell them to check the website postings on Monday. The campaign will be posted on Kara’s site.
I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging or not on the 3rd. I do my blogging from my office and I am not sure if I’ll be here then. But we support this effort. NDY founder Diane Coleman joined Jerry’s Orphans and started organizing local telethon protests when the group first formed in 1991.
A lot of visitors to this site are from outside the disability community and probably don’t have any idea why a group like Not Dead Yet would care about the telethon.
It’s a complex issue, but here it is as succinctly as I can put it:
There are powerful cultural stereotypes that promote the widespread belief that tragedy, grief, and suffering are inevitable aspects of disability; furthermore, those same stereotypes suggest that those emotions put the blame for those feelings on the disability itself, rather than any social factors such as segregation, isolation, or impoverishment. Thus, according to people who believe those stereotypes, the only “relief” a person with a disability can hope for is a “cure.”
The annual ritual of the telethon is a strong perpetuator of these stereotypes. And there’s a very real cost to the enduring nature of these stereotypes.
That’s where the connection between the “Blog Against the Telethon Day” and NDY come in. When disabled women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends, the public often jumps to the conclusion that she “asked for it” or that it was an act of kindness – rather than viewing as the act of violence it really was. You can read more about that dynamic in “Criste Reimer’s Death Not About Health Care Debt or Compassion.” It’s one reason that public (and press) responds with sympathy rather than outrage when a parent kills a child who has a disability.
And, of course, it impacts the public – which mostly supports the idea that suicide is an irrational act. An alarming portion of the public will set that assumption aside when a disabled person wants to kill him or herself. Then it tends to be seen as very rational – and even encouraged in some cases. The telethon helps to maintain this destructive mindset in public attitudes.
If you want graphic examples of just how the telethon and Jerry Lewis have pitched “pity” as the the appropriate response to people with disabilities, please visit Miss Crip Chick’s blog. She has shared some examples and links to a number of sites with still more.