Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

Peter Singer (1946-) is an Australian moral philosopher and professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He is a highly decorated academic with dozens of publications and numerous awards. As recently as 2021, Singer received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture which came with a $1 million cash prize. He donated the majority of the prize to his own foundation, The Life You Can Save, which vets and recommends charities. Their pet causes include environmental reform, reducing global poverty, and reducing disabilities such as blindness. On his official website (https://petersinger.info/), he states that he is best known for his book Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement (1975) and his writings on global poverty. He is considered to be one of the most well-known contemporary philosophers.

Though he is a celebrated academic, Singer is also a controversial figure. International disability rights activists have been protesting his beliefs around euthanasia and infanticide since the 1980s. He was met with particularly harsh criticism in Germany, where his views on disability were compared directly to Nazism. Singer’s brand of utilitarianism argues that the lives of humans and animals are equal, at least theoretically. Critics of his philosophy around animal liberation argue that, in practice, he values the lives of animals above those of humans. Similar to Harriet McBryde Johnson’s critique of Singer’s preference for animal lives over those of disabled children (the first essay presented in this collection), anthropologist Xenia Cherkaev rejects his choice to equate the lives of “slum children” and the rats that bite them.

In [Animal Liberation], Singer argues […] that speciesism is no different than racism. Predictably, the essay alludes to Nazi extermination campaigns, claiming that the “typical consumer’s mixture of ignorance [about factory farming], reluctance to find out the truth, and vague belief that nothing really bad could be allowed seems analogous to the attitudes of ‘decent Germans’ to the death camps.” And it shows a curious disregard of vulnerable human life […] In 1973, the image of “rats biting slum children” was more than an idle abstraction. Poor American children were indeed being eaten by rats. Predominantly, those children were Black. (Cherkaev, Xenia. “Zoo-Fascism, Russia: To Hell with Equality and Ownerless Dogs.” Hot Spots, Fieldsights, 15 Apr 2021.)

In both Johnson’s essay and Disability Visibility as a whole, Singer’s values pose a serious, contemporary threat to disabled persons’ lives. Wong’s choice to open the collection with Johnson’s essay establishes the stakes for the collections’ writers; they are not fighting against abstract ableism but against the sorts of policies and ideas put forward by Singer and those who agree with him. Though Johnson finds him to be pleasant company on a personal basis, she couches his ethical values as genocidal. His interest in animal rights activism takes on an ironic quality in contrast with his support for euthanasia and selective infanticide.

Ricardo Thornton (1959-) is a survivor of Forest Haven Asylum, a state psychiatric facility that has since been closed and abandoned. In his lifetime, Thornton has participated in the Special Olympics as both an athlete and an international ambassador. Thornton placed 3rd in a national track event as recently as 2010. He has also spoken on behalf of Project ACTION!, a DC-based advocacy group for individuals with developmental disabilities. Thornton currently works as a clerk at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, a position he has held for 35 years.

Both Thornton and his wife of 38 years have mild intellectual disabilities. They met at Forest Haven. Upon their release in the 1980s, they fought for the right to marry. The birth of their son— Ricardo “Little Ricky” Thornton Jr.— was covered on 60 Minutes and in The Washington Post in 1986. To this day, intellectually disabled people’s rights to marry and have children are restricted in many states across the US. The Thorntons’ family history serves as a case study that directly contradicts these restrictions. In this article, Shirley Rees of the Bureau of Community Services argues in favor of the Thorntons’ right to marry and procreate: “There was no reason to believe the couple would have a mentally retarded child since, statistically, only between 10 to 15 percent of retardation is genetic.” (“Tiny Boy Is Born To Retarded Couple Seen on ‘60 Minutes.’” The Washington Post, 8 Dec. 1986.) Thornton’s life story is evidence that, even if his son were born with an intellectual disability, he could still live a happy, healthy, and productive life.

Thornton’s Disability Visibility essay, “We Can’t Go Back,” is an excerpt from his 2012 statement before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. His testimony provides a glimpse of the human rights abuses that took place in the 20th-century state asylum system. It also shares a success story: With support from others, the Thorntons were able to transition out of Forest Haven. They started a family, held steady jobs, and contributed to their community in meaningful ways. Thornton uses his life’s story as a powerful rhetorical tool. Legal discrimination against the intellectually disabled is largely justified by the belief that they are incapable of making their own choices and functioning on their own. The Thorntons mere existence refutes this belief. Since leaving Forest Haven, they have not merely survived; they have thrived.

Wanda Díaz-Merced is a Puerto Rican astronomer. She showed interest in and aptitude for the sciences from an early age and studied physics at the University of Puerto Rico. She went on to intern at NASA and later earned her doctorate in computer sciences at the University of Glasgow in 2013. Díaz-Merced became a post-doctorate fellow at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and worked at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town and other astronomical observatories around the world.

Today, Díaz-Merced is best known for her use of sonification in astronomy. Due to complications caused by degenerative diabetic retinopathy, Díaz-Merced lost her eyesight while completing her undergraduate degree. This impacted her ability to work with visually represented data, like graphs. Sonification allowed her to interact with data differently, allowing her to convert astronomical data into nonspeech audio. While sonification has existed since the early 1900s, her innovations have repurposed it to make astronomy a more accessible field for blind and vision-impaired scientists.

Díaz-Merced is a disabled person who achieved something remarkable because of it. Her work in sonification has altered astronomy as a field. Because of her innovations, courses on astrophysics and sonification are now available at the Athlone School for the Blind in South Africa. Blind students have an accessible point of entry into the field that was not available before her work. This is not only beneficial to blind students and scientists, but to the entire astronomical field.

In the context of Disability Visibility, Díaz-Merced’s work is emblematic of disabled excellence: She is not only surviving and thriving, but she is contributing to society in a unique way. This framing of her work lines up with the social model of disability, which argues that disabilities like blindness do not inherently limit a person’s capacity to function; rather, mainstream society’s infrastructure is not designed to accommodate disabled people. Díaz-Merced works in a field that did not accommodate blindness, so she innovated ways to make it more accessible. Now, she and other blind astronomers work at the same level as sighted astronomers.