Britain's got disabled talent

As The Office for Disability Issues (ODI) is looking at how government can address negative attitudes towards disabled people, Andy Rickell has found a prime example of just such attitudes

I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent or anything like it, but I have just watched Susan Boyle’s first appearance on the show on YouTube because of what I heard happened. Her singing was magical
but the audience reaction to her before she sang was anything but. The audience was laughing at her because they doubted that anyone with such a stereotypically unattractive appearance could have any facet worthy of notice.

They were utterly shocked, as were the panel of Piers Morgan, Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell, that her talent vastly exceeded their expectations based on their judgment by appearances, and thankfully they were delighted for her.

This, though, exemplifies the battle that disabled people too often have to fight – the automatic presumption that disabled people are fundamentally incompetent and that therefore we are less valuable as human beings and not worthy of the resources and support to achieve equality of opportunity. It is this
deeply embedded public attitude that government must address.

In practice our attitudes about people work like this. A bit like Susan Boyle coming on to the stage, when we first see or meet people we make an initial assessment. If the person appears “normal” we assume they are capable of doing all the “normal” things, and only change our views if we find out there is something the person cannot do, and even then we usually assume they can still do everything else. If on the other hand the person is clearly impaired, the reverse applies. The disabled person is assumed to be incapable of doing anything until we can prove otherwise (like Susan did with her singing), but even then we, as disabled people, are still assumed to be incapable of other things, until again we can prove our ability. This puts disabled people at enormous disadvantage, as well as being extremely pressurising for the individual disabled person who has to prove themselves at everything.

It is entirely rational that some disabled people try to avoid disclosing their impairments – they just don’t need the extra barriers and hassle it will instantly create.

This “presumption of incompetence” (as I call it) becomes a particularly big issue when people are about to make a judgment about a disabled person’s competence that will have a major impact on our life chances – a work assessment, an application for an educational or training course, an interview for a job, a decision about life-enhancing medical intervention. To help those who judge us, we need to remind them of Susan. They need to allow us the support to get to the centre of the stage without making their minds up, and give us the space to demonstrate what we can do. It may be average, it may be spectacular, but it’s us!