Redefining differently-abled

Editor’s Note: When discussing topics related to disability, Annenberg Media generally follows the guidelines set forth by the National Center on Disability and Journalism. Their style guide recommends being sensitive when “using words like ‘disorder,’ ‘impairment,’ ‘abnormality’ and ‘special’ to describe the nature of a disability.” However, the NCDJ notes, “there is no universal agreement on the use of these terms — not even close.” In the context of this article, the word “special” is never intended to degrade or to make fun of people with disabilities. It puts the word special as a positive when describing people with disabilities. For Disability Awareness Month, we chose to hear from a variety of voices on disability — even those that argue for the use of words such as “special.”

March is Disability Awareness Month — when we honor the contributions of differently abled individuals in American society. Former president Ronald Reagan recognized Disability Awareness Month in 1987, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act being signed into law on July 26, 1990, which allowed people with disabilities full access to American society. However, in terms of physical access, we still have a long way to go in dealing with the societal misunderstandings and the stigma that comes along when you are a person with a disability.

I want to address one critical issue in the struggle to recognize individuals with disabilities as full members of society, where the research in disability studies must go to enhance the participation of people with disabilities in a global society. Instead, I argue that we need a better way to frame the words used by able-bodied individuals to describe their disabled counterparts. During this Disability Awareness Month, I hope and pray that my words affect the conversations around this campus and disability studies in general. Happy Disability Awareness Month.

When thinking about the phrase that I coined, “we are not disabled but living in a disabling world,” you have to think about how the word disability has a negative connotation and the mere fact that disability is just a label and a societal construct. That is the basis for this conversation. Looking at the phrase “differently abled,” a common term used in academia and other spaces, even that word has a negative connotation.

“Diff” implies different and differently-abled. It is equivalent to disabled because they both have a negative connotation. We should use “specially-abled” because that has no negative connotation.

Words can make such a big difference in how people perceive specially-abled individuals. If we use the word “specially-abled,” it implies that yes, these individuals have special needs, but they also have special gifts as well. For example, see Kodi Lee, the first contestant to win America’s Got Talent with a disability. He has severe blindness and severe autism. He also has savant syndrome, which allows him to play the piano exceptionally well. Despite his challenges, he has a special ability. So, the phrase “specially-abled” applies to him and can be used to describe anyone because all these individuals are unique, even in the most severe cases of disability.

Specially-abled individuals are significant to their families and can have a meaningful impact, no matter the severity of one’s special needs. This phrase would encompass all people with disabilities, from the neurodivergent to physical disabilities, learning disabilities and multi-disabled, to the blind and visually impaired, to the deaf and hard of hearing communities. This phrase is a positive spin on their different disorders and challenges. From a practical matter, it would make it easier for parents with non-disabled children to explain what is special about their siblings, friends or family members. Framing it this way does not imply that people with disabilities are not different; instead, it shifts the focus to something positive.

When I first began to research ableism as a construct and from a social model framework, I slowly began to understand that there is no way to eliminate the stigmas inherent when you come across somebody who looks different than the norm. Although other types of biases and stigmas are different in these marginalized groups, the experience of being “othered” is the same. There is a psychological component here that I found when taking Professor Roberto Suro’s Advocacy and Communications course. In this class, we discussed Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.” In it, he discusses an experiment by himself and his colleagues called the “bat-and-ball” experiment. This is the experiment and the analysis.

“...A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? A number came to your mind. The number, of course, is 10: 10¢. The distinctive mark of this easy puzzle is that it evokes an answer that is intuitive, appealing, and wrong. Do the math, and you will see. If the ball costs 10¢, then the total cost will be $1.20 (10¢ for the ball and $1.10 for the bat), not $1.10. The correct answer is 5¢. It is safe to assume that the intuitive answer also came to the mind of those who ended up with the correct number–they somehow managed to resist the intuition…More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive–incorrect–answer. At less selective universities, the rate of demonstrable failure to check was in excess of 80%. The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible…” (Kahneman 2011)

—  Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow”

His findings fascinate me because it shows that people are very gullible and very susceptible to their pattern of thinking. They don’t want to spend time thinking. Thus, this is why stigmas are so rampant in our global society because people have fixed ideologies about each other, especially about specially-abled individuals. In this framework of thinking, Kahneman proves that there isn’t a way to fix people’s ideologies or stigmas because they are hardwired into somebody’s brain, such as something as simple as language, just as an example. Even if we were to teach our children about specially-abled individuals, the social cues the youngsters receive from the adults around them might negatively influence them and expose them to unforeseen biases.

When talking about people’s stigma and the statement that I coined, “We are not disabled but living in a disabling world,” there is no way to fix that in a legal sense or from a political sense because specially-abled people cannot change the cards that they were dealt. Yet, non-disabled people cannot change how they think. That’s what Kahneman’s experiment proves: it’s human instincts, not a human desire. They don’t mean to stigmatize specially-abled individuals, but it’s human nature or, in other words, the cost of being human.

In the field of disability studies, a fundamental question has not been answered, which is: how do we frame disability as not necessarily a medical issue but as a societal construct? Currently, in the field of disability studies, they often look at disability from rehabilitation or an integration framework, as we see in Torn Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson’s “The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?” This pair of academics argue for integration principles, such as finding appropriate housing and suitable jobs, which allows disabled people to be integrated into society.

But the issue with integration principles is that we are trying to fit them into societal norms, and specially-abled people will not be able to fit into societal norms. But there becomes a more significant issue, as we see in Kahneman, that has to do with the rewiring of able-bodied individuals and their willingness to learn new thinking methodologies.

It all comes down to the desire to learn and compassion, which is a conversation that is not happening in the world of disability studies at present. If abled-bodied people want to achieve this utopian dream in which specially-abled people are integrated fully into society, reframing the terminology from “differently-abled” to “specially-abled” might bring us one step closer.