Protesting pity

So the MDA Telethon is tonight and tomorrow. I’ve written here and here about the reasons a charity telethon — particularly one that insists on using Jerry Lewis to evoke pity for disabled people — does not help the status of disabled folks. Or, more precisely, the Telethon and the money it raises are not worth the pity.

Harriet McBryde Johnson is spending Labor Day at the 16th annual Charleston, SC, MDA Telethon protest making this point. In a press release:

Calling for an end to pity based fundraising tactics, an ad hoc group will be picketing and distributing handbills to protest the “Jerry Lewis” telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association on Labor Day morning. The group will be in the area of King, Meeting, and Market Streets downtown. They will gather at approximately 10 AM and be available for interviews at 11:00 AM on September 4.

“We don’t want pity,” says Harriet McBryde Johnson, protest organizer who has one of the neuromuscular disabilities covered by MDA. “Pity sets people apart, divides the world between those labeled as helpless and their purported superiors. We see disability as a natural part of the human continuum and believe that people with and without disabilities can and should work together to solve problems that affect us all. We want solidarity, not pity.”

Among those who will attend in solidarity is Dorothy Scott, president of the Charleston Branch, NAACP. “I believe, as Martin Luther King told us, an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. When a nationally televised telethon promotes false stereotypes, that affects everyone, because it makes our world less fair.”

Street protests were galvanized by a 1990 article by telethon host Jerry Lewis that said, among other things, that if Lewis had muscular dystrophy he would have to learn how to be “half a person.” Lewis stood by his remarks and dished out more of the same in the years that followed. MDA stood by him until 2001, when Lewis told a CBS reporter, “You’re a cripple in the wheelchair and you don’t want pity? Stay in your house!” MDA finally apologized for that one, but activists said it was too little, too late. They say MDA should replace Lewis as telethon host, stop using children on the air, and provide a full and independent accounting of the telethon as a first step toward weaning itself from the fundraising vehicle.

For more information about the controversy, go to: Crip Commentary

“On a personal level,” Johnson says, “I am concerned that another generation of children should not hear the telethon message unchallenged. MDA still describes conditions like mine as ‘killers of children.’ I am now 49 years old, enjoying an active life I never imagined possible.” Johnson practices law in Charleston. She has organized a local telethon protest for 16 consecutive years. “They are still doing what they do,” she says, “so I’ll keep doing this.”

Mike Ervin, another protestor of the Telethon, speaks in a video clip from his half-hour documentary The Kids Are All Right about his growth from 1960s MDA poster child to disability activist. The clip requires Quicktime, which can be downloaded for free here.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade