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Disability Culture Rap

CHERYL MARIE WADE
Cheryl is the 1994 recipient
of a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theatre Fellowhip.
A no-apologies radical and gnarly-boned crone,
she's a firm believer
in "If you've got it, flaunt it!"

FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

Disability culture. Say what? Aren’t disabled people just isolated victims of nature or circumstance?

Yes and no. True, we are far too often isolated. Locked away in the pits, closets and institutions of enlightened societies everywhere. But there is a growing consciousness among us: "That is not acceptable." Because there is always an underground. Notes get passed among survivors. And the notes we’re passing these days say, "There’s power in difference. Power. Pass the word."

Culture. It’s about passing the word. And disability culture is passing the word that there’s a new definition of disability and it includes power.

Culture. New definitions, new inflections. No longer just "poor cripple." Now also "CRIPPLE" and, yes, just "cripple." A body happening. But on a real good day, why not C*R*I*P*P*L*E; a body, hap-pening. (Dig it or not.)

Culture. It’s finding a history, naming and claiming ancestors, heroes. As "invisibles," our history is hidden from us, our heroes buried in the pages, unnamed, unrecognized. Disability culture is about naming, about recognizing.

Naming and claiming our heroes. Like Helen Keller. Oh, not the miracle-worker version we’re all so familiar with, but the social reformer, the activist who tried so desperately to use her celebrity to tell the truth of disability: that it has far more to do with poverty, oppression and restriction of choices that it has to do with wilted muscles or milky eyes. And for her efforts to tell this truth, she was ridiculed, demeaned as revolutionaries often are. And because Helen Keller was a survivor, and that is the first thing any culture needs – survivors who live long enough so that some part of the truth makes it to the next generation.

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