A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how textbook publishers meet diversity quotas for the photos in their books. The article covers the lengths publishers go to in order to portray diversity in race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender and disability in textbook images so that their books will sell to diversity-sensitive school districts. But when it comes to portrayals of disabled people, nondisabled children are frequently placed in wheelchairs or given crutches to stand in for actual disabled models.
[Photographer] Ms. Coppola estimates that at least three-fourths of the children portrayed as disabled in Houghton Mifflin textbooks actually aren’t. “It’s extremely difficult to find a disabled kid who’s willing and able to model,” she says. Houghton Mifflin, which acknowledges the practice, says it doesn’t keep such statistics.
Houghton Mifflin’s little-known stratagem illustrates how a well-intentioned effort to make classroom textbooks more reflective of the country’s diversity has led publishers to overcompensate and at times replace one artificial vision of reality with another.
Well, I don’t know why disabled children would be less willing or able to model and make money. It’s unlikely that the problem is caused by a particular minority group being unwilling to model and be represented. Much more likely, talent agencies are not interested in disabled children (and adults) and do not accept them as clients. That’s no doubt a result of discrimination at talent agencies (which mirror the Hollywood/high fashion aesthetic) where the concept of diversity is not yet thought to include disabled persons, and disabled children that look like they have impairments would be unlikely to be hired unless the agencies completely change their aesthetic of who makes a good model. And, of course, the book publishers have decided that the appearance of diversity is a good enough representation of actual diversity.
This prejudice that manipulates the reality of what disabled children look like is just the tip of the iceberg. It goes without saying that children with hidden disabilities (that may nevertheless alter their appearance in subtle ways) are not represented in photos — are they mentioned in the captions or text? Do the rented wheelchairs and other equipment look like what modern disabled children actually use? Do they rent, say, non-stereotypical equipment that disabled people regularly need, or just the easy symbols of disability — crutches, wheelchairs, white canes? Are developmentally disabled children represented at all? Are the fake disabled children ever played by non-white boys and girls? What must black or hispanic or asian children look like to satisfy their diversity requirements? Does a blond hispanic girl qualify as hispanic or would she never be hired to represent her people either? How girlish does a girl have to be?
The WSJ article, headlined “Aiming for Diversity, Textbooks Overshoot: Publishers use quotas in images to win contracts in big states, but they may be creating new stereotypes,” is mainly cast as a subtle critique of diversity and the standards educational systems have used to try and support diversity:
In 2004, according to federal estimates, non-Hispanic whites made up 67.4% of the U.S. population and 59.9% of the school-age population.
Under McGraw-Hill Co. guidelines for elementary and high school texts, 40% of people depicted should be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African-American, 7% Asian and 3% Native American, says Thomas Stanton, a spokesman for the publisher. Of the total, 5% should be disabled, and 5% over the age of 55. Elementary texts from the Harcourt Education unit of Reed Elsevier PLC should show about 50% whites, 22% African-Americans, 20% Hispanics, 5% Asians and 5% Native Americans. Of the total, 3% should be disabled, says Harcourt spokesman Richard Blake.
The publishers’ guidelines are closer to the race statistics of California than the federal estimates, reflecting the markets for their sales, which are urban areas of big states like California, Texas and Florida. But the publishers’ guidelines do not come close to accurately portraying the disabled as the estimated “one in 12 children” or 10% of all Americans that the 2000 Census indicated.
It’s true that not all disabled children’s traits identifying them as disabled can be captured in a picture. This is especially true for the various learning disabilities that have caused the number of children identified as disabled to climb in the past decade. Yet, the educational point of incorporating diversity into elementary school textbooks is to teach about the world as it exists for the children reading these books and to offer them images that look like them.
For disabled children, there is almost nowhere in mainstream public for them to see disabled folks portrayed as they actually exist. In Hollywood, the plum Oscar-contending roles for the highest-paid actors are for nondisabled actors, with portrayal of disability being part of what gets the applause. The “realism” of Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, for example, is what gets attention as being truthful about disability.
When was the last time you saw a disabled person on TV who drooled, or needed a personal attendant, or used a power wheelchair and had a schlumpy body because that’s why people need power chairs? Perhaps in the inspirational story on the local news, but not with the diversity of regular characters slowly becoming otherwise more representative of our world on TV dramas like Grey’s Anatomy or 24 or Lost.
With fake disabled children the accepted practice in textbook photos, another opportunity to show what we really look like is not only lost, but distorted. Real disabled people, when they do appear in public, become less attractive, abnormal versions of the disabled people we have learned to look at, in the same way that fat women have become the less attractive, abnormal versions of women because we’ve all seen the ideal skinny women everywhere so often she’s become the accepted fake. It’s little wonder the result of this switcheroo is the nondisabled stare all visibly disabled folks are familiar with as part of their public experiences. That stare is blatant curiosity and even astonishment, and efforts at diversity in textbooks with only reinforce it.
Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
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Everyone in ALL publishing is more attractive than reality. I remember when I realized the reason for this with TV. It is the only way they can compete with having a real life.
I’m not sure what can be done about this, though it is true that white males do seem to be permitted to be less attractive than anyone else(and the leading(extremely attractive woman) always still dotes on him.
The textbooks are intended to change this situation and I think that it is unfair to jump down their throats about how they are trying to do it. Education (of the publishers) seems a more useful tack. Education would involve a pat on the back for what they are doing right.(trying to change in the first place).
My sister is disabled, and she used to model when she was in elementary school and high school. She made a decent chunk of change towards her college education, as her agency guaranteed her nearly three times as much per hour as a non-disabled child model was making at the time, two hours guaranteed per shoot. She worked a lot, too. If my sister’s experience is any indication, there is a demand for disabled child models, and catalogs, textbook companies and organizations are willing to pay more to hire them.
It was amazing, though, how often my sister was called out to photo shoots in completely inappropriate locations. She uses a hulking behemoth of an electric wheelchair, and yet she was called to shoots in a 7th floor walk-up, out in the woods at a summer camp, on a soft sandy beach and so on. I know that was a real eye-opener for a number of folks. Some people are honestly shocked when confronted with the reality that a disabled person who uses a wheelchair is not the same as an able-bodied person in a wheelchair. I expect a certain ignorance of what disability actually entails contributes to the hiring of fake disabled child models.
There were any number of photographers and stylists who seemed interested in a realistic depiction of disablity – for instance, posing my sister with a headset and laptop rather than pencil and paper, when she told them that, actually, she uses a voice dictation system for written assignments in class. This sort of thing required extra effort, though, and not everyone had the time or patience to put together a realistic setup.
Personally, I found the “and able to” part of the above quote to be sort of upsetting. Is the idea that it is “extremely difficult” to accomodate the needs of disabled kids so….they just don’t do it? My sister was definitely unable to participate in photo shoots that were in inaccessible locations…
Jane: What should the publishers be educated about? They’re attempting to achieve consumer-imposed standards of diversity without employing real diversity themselves. It’s a trick of the eye for their convenience.
If the problem was white children in blackface would you want to pat them on the back for making the effort? Even if the makeup was flawless? I propose this really isn’t any different.
I don’t have it with me now of course and it’s been a while since I read it, but Language Police is an interesting look at the publishing industry and how various interest groups have helped to ‘sanitize’ textbooks. (Thoughtful review of the book). There’s probably a interest group somewhere that said “we shouldn’t imply that there are disabled persons that cannot do everything an abled body person could do”.
In general, the textbook industry seems to be against showing reality , as it could offend someone. Various other media, well, when does TV ever show reality (dispite what reality TV claims to show)?
Dan Kennedy has also blogged on the matter, making a couple useful points:
You make some great points here, especially about all of the pseudo-diversity going on. I wonder, though, if one reason there aren’t more disabled models and especially disabled child models is that both caring for a disabled child and managing a child’s modeling career consume a lot of time and energy, and few parents are willing and able to do both. Another reason might be that relatively few parents want their kids to model, and relatively few have obviously disabled kids. And there is such a bias toward physically attractive models that even if a parent of a disabled child were willing to have him/her model, it might not occur to the parent as a possibility.
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Lu: It’s certainly possible that accommodation and access effect the participation of disabled children in modeling. The WSJ article doesn’t note how long the publishers have been doing it their way, but I’m willing to bet there’s been plenty of time to track down the requisite number of disabled children to model if they weren’t already happy with their own method.
I get catalogs all the time that feature “real” disabled children. There’s at least one agency for disabled actors, including child actors, here in LA. It really can’t be so hard to find disabled kids to model for print advertising or publications. Don’t believe that excuse for a minute.
Decisions like this are based on misconceptions and anxieties on the part of the photographers and their directors. They think disabled kids can’t take direction, or won’t be cute enough; or maybe they’re contagious, or smelly, or they’ll have scary tubes or braces or scars, or their parents will be nightmares to deal with, ready to sue if someone uses the wrong word. I’m sure there were photographers in the 1960s who couldn’t bring themselves to hire black children for editorial work, either, and who made similar excuses–wasn’t right then, isn’t right now.
Well, honestly now, where can we find real photos of people anywhere that are posing for magazines or textbooks, or tv or whatever. Like just last week a post on feministing was up about a new anchor who had about 6 inches trimmed off her waist during editing.
I’m sure you’re right, Blue, that publishers could find real disabled models if they really wanted to. As in any profit-making enterprise, cheap and easy trumps real every time.
I think Penny is right on with thinking that this is an issue of photographer’s prejudice. I’m sure many agencies just assume they can’t work with a disabled child and don’t. Just like an earlier generation just refused to work with black people. Having disabled people represent themselves in media and culture, though, is an important thing. It may not be the most important thing ever, but its still important that a group be allowed to define themselves. That’s clearly not happening with the disabled. I’m certainly willing to entertain the idea that a non-disabled person can’t really portray a disabled person with honest realism. I think most would think that of a white person playing a black person, and I think that’s the case of a thin person playing a fat person. Maybe it can be okay, but its not real and there is such a huge shortfall in real portrayals that we have to look at what is there as a problem. Maybe not in isolated cases, but as a whole, this is a problem.
As a mom of a disabled teen who wanted to model and had done some training who then became wheelchair bound, i want to know where are these agencies who take disabled models, we live in the metro dc area and i’m not sure where to go..can someone give me some info??
Wow,
This blog was most insightful to me. I am a parent of a four year old African American child with special needs. And she does do a little bit of modeling. I agree with one of the responders. It is quite hard to muster up the energy to raise a child wit special needs and try to manage a modeling career for your child. ( as well as take care of your other family work..and have a life) Now please note I am just in the process of doing this research and really trying to figure out if this is something I want my child to peruse in the long run.
See I have many reason for wanting her to be able to model. One reason is that I agree that children that are disabled are not represented fairly in our society. You see I am a mother that is very active in advocating in my local community of Metro Atlanta, GA. And I want my child and others like her to be represented fairly.
I find that many people in the community act like a child like mine do not exist or they are very weary of how to respond to them. I know if these children were more viewable this would not be as much as an issue. So everyone wish me luck because I am going to try to get my little one some modeling work. In fact I was on line researching and that is how I found this blog. Please check out the link below and see my precious angel.
Thanks
http://www.hyhonline.com/articles.aspx?DoAction=Print&ID=45&CatID=63&ListUnder=0