Race, Disability and Denial
By A. Rahman Ford
Although I have been both black and disabled my entire life, for years I lied to myself about being disabled. I
could appreciate the pride that accompanied the black experience, the historic and perpetual triumphs and
tragedies that inspire the progress of a people. But disability was different. Disability was a curse much
worse than the curse of Ham, and instead of accepting it I fled into a lie of being someone I could never be
and should have never wanted to be. I became a victim of an able-bodied orthodoxy, one memorialized into
my memory, derived from the seeds of my lived experiences and the veil of myths through which those
experiences are strained. I believe we all succumb to societal orthodoxies in some way, because the
procurement of favor demands it and it allows us to live without troublesome confusion. But for many of us,
orthodoxies become a memorial, a shine at which we pray and to which we cling, all the while privately
acknowledging that the shrine is not of our making, not to our liking and that it segregates and kills us very
casually, very privately and very slowly. This photo helped free me from my denial.
Feeling starved, sunken, gaunt and untouchable, I long held certain conceptions of who or what I had and
wanted to be, but could not, and thus did my best to hide it from others and myself. For me, poverty is
fundamentally about not only the absence of choices, the impossibility of choices and the consequences of
that impossibility. I decided to take this photo as a challenge to myself to confront the poverty of my own
body and to better understand the costs of my negotiations with my own public and private identities. Many
of us fear how easily we parade and perpetuate our public selves, while at the same time fearing the
vulnerable, deviant and shameful self we can only be in private. When I saw the photo for the first time I was
both shocked and surprised because even though I had lived with that person my entire life, I could never
before accept how spent he was. Nothing had ever frightened me more than having to face the nakedness
of my own indigence.
The photo, titled “undesirable,” is essentially about me ultimately beginning the journey of accepting my
disability as I have my blackness. More broadly, it is to protest what I refer to as the negative fetishism of
poor bodies, bodies that are deemed broke and broken, crooked and criminal, dilapidated and degenerate,
ugly and useless. It was influenced in part by depictions of Holocaust victims – persons with disabilities
among them – determined by the Nazi regime to be “undesirable” and anathema to the Aryan archetype
because they did not and could not conform. “Undesirable” is also meant to invoke sexuality and how poor
male bodies navigate the difficulty of being sexually desirable because of the physical valuation males and
females deploy to determine sexual attraction. These are issues and feelings that I have dealt with and I
used the photo to embody both my struggle and progress.
For me, the photo represents a minimalist confrontation of the intersections of not only race and disability,
but also class and sexuality, as seen through my own experiences as a disabled Black man who at one point
earned a six-figure salary. At various times and places, one or some of these identities would protrude
publicly, others would recede into privacy, not always consciously and not always willingly. Sometimes,
however, protrusions and recessions were purposeful. In my own confusing quest for acceptance I could
fully embrace being Black, and to a lesser extent being formally educated, but to be disabled was to be
diminutive and I could not stand having to crane my neck upward and be forced to be jealous at how tall the
world is. I am now coming to realize that there is in fact a difference between being big and being tall. To
explore the heights of my own physical vulnerability, I took the photo to make all identities so collectively and
simultaneously prominent that I could no longer choose to focus on one and leave another peripheral. At
my request, the camera made the choice for me.
The “I AM A MAN” sign represents a protest of how labor, disability and masculinity had come to define my
own conception of manhood. It was borrowed from signs held by AFSCME workers at a 1968 Memphis
sanitation workers strike. Orthodoxy teaches us that muscles are the currency of masculinity, a constant
reproduced through labor, production and provision. Manhood is tightly rolled in wads beneath the skin,
casually inspected by others to estimate worth and value. Men work. And for those flimsy and flaccid males
who cannot, who cannot pronounce manhood loudly, highly and in concert, but are instead forced to be
mute, low and isolated, how are they to define their manhood? Cracked and splintered male bodies cannot
perform the masculine ethic, and this inability to perform an identity that is inculcated illegitimately and
relentlessly, can place a disabled male at the perilous risk of being emasculated at best and feminized at
worst. And for a man, or for a male who wants to be one, convention dictates that the only thing worse than
being a eunuch is being a woman because to be a woman is to be an expletive.