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A review by fern_mollett
A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen
3.0
2.5 really. This is gonna be a rant...
This is an OKAY primer for jumping into US disability history. It's about what you'd expect for hundreds of years' worth of nuanced history squashed into less than 190 pages (which includes a pretty long personal introduction), written by a non-disabled white woman.
As for the content, it was slim. Most of the history written about is through the lens of labor. Even though it's mentioned multiple times in the book that throughout history, disabled people have tried to convince society that they are more than their ability to produce labor, this book focused almost entirely on JOBS. Occasionally, the author would write about specific obstacles the disability community faces, but mostly, she talked about how the disability community banded together so we could get us jobs and prove to society that we weren't worthless.
I would have loved to have read more about social movements, about activists and communities, Crip camps, crawls, clubs, the social lives of historical disabled people and the political lives of those disabled people who fought for the skant few rights that we have today. If these things were mentioned, they were briefly mentioned as a segue to continue talking about our relationships with labor. Disappointing.
Occasionally, we spoke about the intersectionality of disability. How it affects people of color, poor people, people of different faiths, but it certainly didn't maintain that theme throughout, ya know? Like it was a paragraph or two thrown into a few chapters.
It was really disappointing that the only talk of Indigenous people's was of those of the pre-colonial past, not of the modern (and totally still alive and existing) Indigenous peoples. Not even mentioning that the modern disability rate of Indigenous peoples is higher than average. The same went for Black people, most of what is mentioned about them is talking about the enslaved! How they were worth less if they were disabled. Like, really? Like the only context she has for black and brown people is talking about them like theyre either ancient/extinct, or from when they were enslaved!? There is no mention of how disability DRASTICALLY affects Indigenous and Black folks different compared to white.
I think what really would have helped this book would be to organize it by topic rather than chronologically. That way multiple important themes could have been addressed. And to address those topics thru a lense of intersectionality.
- The legal definition of disabled and how it changed over time.
- Disability & labor (the industrial revolution & how it disabled people)
- How disabled war veterans were treated and how that changed over time and maybe why?
- Important laws.
- Popular activists and activist groups, and the mainstream activist groups that helped ours (like the Black Panthers).
- brief history of institutionalization & the effects of deinstitutionalization.
- accessibility and a brief history of assistive tech (prosthetics, wheelchairs, etc)
I think if the book was broken down in this way, we could have covered a lot more and as a reader learned a lot more about our disability history without reducing us the "the obstacles faced when it was time to prove we werent worthless in the eyes of capitalism".
This is an OKAY primer for jumping into US disability history. It's about what you'd expect for hundreds of years' worth of nuanced history squashed into less than 190 pages (which includes a pretty long personal introduction), written by a non-disabled white woman.
As for the content, it was slim. Most of the history written about is through the lens of labor. Even though it's mentioned multiple times in the book that throughout history, disabled people have tried to convince society that they are more than their ability to produce labor, this book focused almost entirely on JOBS. Occasionally, the author would write about specific obstacles the disability community faces, but mostly, she talked about how the disability community banded together so we could get us jobs and prove to society that we weren't worthless.
I would have loved to have read more about social movements, about activists and communities, Crip camps, crawls, clubs, the social lives of historical disabled people and the political lives of those disabled people who fought for the skant few rights that we have today. If these things were mentioned, they were briefly mentioned as a segue to continue talking about our relationships with labor. Disappointing.
Occasionally, we spoke about the intersectionality of disability. How it affects people of color, poor people, people of different faiths, but it certainly didn't maintain that theme throughout, ya know? Like it was a paragraph or two thrown into a few chapters.
It was really disappointing that the only talk of Indigenous people's was of those of the pre-colonial past, not of the modern (and totally still alive and existing) Indigenous peoples. Not even mentioning that the modern disability rate of Indigenous peoples is higher than average. The same went for Black people, most of what is mentioned about them is talking about the enslaved! How they were worth less if they were disabled. Like, really? Like the only context she has for black and brown people is talking about them like theyre either ancient/extinct, or from when they were enslaved!? There is no mention of how disability DRASTICALLY affects Indigenous and Black folks different compared to white.
I think what really would have helped this book would be to organize it by topic rather than chronologically. That way multiple important themes could have been addressed. And to address those topics thru a lense of intersectionality.
- The legal definition of disabled and how it changed over time.
- Disability & labor (the industrial revolution & how it disabled people)
- How disabled war veterans were treated and how that changed over time and maybe why?
- Important laws.
- Popular activists and activist groups, and the mainstream activist groups that helped ours (like the Black Panthers).
- brief history of institutionalization & the effects of deinstitutionalization.
- accessibility and a brief history of assistive tech (prosthetics, wheelchairs, etc)
I think if the book was broken down in this way, we could have covered a lot more and as a reader learned a lot more about our disability history without reducing us the "the obstacles faced when it was time to prove we werent worthless in the eyes of capitalism".