global news makers and talk about the stories that matter to them just 0. am and you know in the stream today a respectful representation why disability and so destructive for the community let's take a look at a vital twist a thread that explores the impact that some of common tropes have people with disabilities and this is how important conversation we want to hear from you you can chat me in all tweet me at history i my name is malcolm smith and i want to stick to that media traps that affect me one i just think people are jerk wants is bad behavior is justified because there really isn't this trip you got to see people as untitled which makes it hard for us to get accommodations to just that people are always white male and young usually children this trial makes it harder for people of color when and adults to get diagnosed and also makes it difficult for translators that people like me to get care i just think people need respect where we're trained in the media at night is that basic need. disabled people are lazy and just need to get off this self-indulgent butts and do some hard work or anything is better than being disabled all your disability inspires me offensive absolutely and only just some of the most common ways the disability is used in media pop culture literature politics and so much more this is cindy ford when how low is cindy she is and also who wrote that thread you just saw that has been tweeted at like several 1000 times and if you haven't already yet you can bookmark it share it engage with your community on it city's latest book is where the watermelons grow also with us on the program and how gus the most at disability and diversity activist in monterrey mexico and founder of the mexican woman with disabilities movement happy to have you badly and hell and another friend of the stream lawrence carter long is the director of communications at the disability rights education and defense fund thank you all for being with us to be a certain way to start the conversation cindy i am looking at this thread i have read it several times just take a spot set the scene where were you what was your mood when he said when he sat down to write a side with 11 tropes and details teach outs in here something that i had actually been thinking about doing for a couple of weeks i am as you mentioned i'm an author i write books for children and so i end up reading a lot of books for children too and read fairly regularly all 3 books that have really hurtful portrayals of people with disabilities and this is something that i had been thinking about for a couple weeks and i had i had kind of have a dear that a lot of the problem with 'd media representations of disability is the fact that most people that we're all raised in such an able with the fighting that we don't actually recognize what good and bad ability rip. and he is and so i kind of had this idea that maybe if i broke down some of the common tropes and explained why they were hurtful then it might help and i didn't expect it to get much traction i was honestly really just hoping that like the library and then the kidlet world would read it or something like that and kind of help help to spread that message really take how did it get this just a humble brag how big did it get i think last time i checked it was like point 6000 like there's something about 5000 retreat i'm just sitting at one point here you say update i'm having to mute this thread for now thank you everyone in the shed and discuss these words so appreciate it like ok by. so much was happening you know as what was happening here that this particular threat at this particular moment really took off it really shows that cindy hit a nerve right there the problem with these troops there are reinforced over and over again people in the hear them over and over again they're not questioned they begin to believe them i think creatively the worst part about them is that they're lazy right they don't give us any new ground they don't give us any new insight so would cindy do which is very great is you pop the bubble so that people could expand their brains and maybe have a different view i love money and how cindy actually number so let's go to number 4 because number 4 is something that you find really upsetting inspirational porn let's to get into that why did you pick that one out of the 11 that cindy gave us and then the only thing because this thread was amazing because it also had in this respect of honoring it which i think made it very real and like coming from a very like honest place think is one particularly inspiration or bothers me a lot because. especially. that it has in the everything from college the. to our lives through everything because we. we're not seen as subject right and we're not given those rights but only when we become inspirational to others that's when we you know become alive. and also i think that when it comes to inspiration point it that like this and there are things about that very able as narrative about that we came obviously will live this you know who inspire us not the stable for i think was a very powerful one and to be described in this way disabled person inspires every one of them by dint of that very presence still lives cindy you work a lot with kids and you are saying that the stereotypes a harmful for children can explain why oh it hugely harmful for children i have like i mentioned i will periodically read a book that i took a library get sent to me that has a harmful portrayal of disability and often it's hard for me to read sometimes it's like almost physically hard for me to read because it's so invalidating of my existence and my realities and like i'm an adult you know i have my own kids i have a fairly like robust that's of contact but when i can it is reading things like that they don't have any of that framework built up and they themselves and the difficult kid in the usually still coming to understand what their disability means and how it's different from other people and i. am chronically ill and so help and illness has always been a big part of my life but when i was a teenager i became very very ill and i was i was almost completely bed bound for a year and kind of never the same after that and i struggled so much with these kind of disability tropes that we see in representation in media because i felt like there were all these things they had to do to be a good and valuable disabled person and like my life wasn't actually worth anything if. i wasn't kind of living up to that media narrative of what a good to fable person looked like and so that's something that's always on my mind that as a kid author like i feel like you have a sacred responsibility because people are reading this when they're still forming their understanding of themselves and the world and how they deserve to be treated and how they deserve to live their lives so that's something that's always on my and that was one of the points he picked up that anything is better than. and we share this with you this is mashal should michelle writes in and tweets that the strain often the only exposure people have to disabled people is file what they see in the media now much in the majority of stories about disabled people are written by a body people who are writing from a vinous discriminatory perspective it sounds outrageous but that happens all the time in movies it happens all the time you know we wouldn't we don't accept that anymore with gender we don't accept that anymore with that message the thing with disability is we've always had those stories told by other people right it's been the doctors it's been the social workers it's been the preachers the teachers and the parents i think what's unique about what's happening right now is we're 30 years past the time when the americans with disabilities act was passed and disabled people are speaking for themselves right they're tweeting for themselves and everybody else can read that so they're no longer saying the disability is a dirty word that it's got 8 donors right 9 letters it's not a 4 letter word it's not a curse word so we can say it right that it's not something that happens by incidents or accidents but it's something that we are a part of it's bigger than any one individual when we say that we are disabled we're part of a community we're part of $61000000.00 people in the united states billions of people around the world that's 26 percent of the population here in the u.s. so it's nothing to be ashamed of it's nothing to run away from we don't what i feel . to short too precious to pick up somebody else's shame disabled people aren't doing that anymore and we're not having it which is why i like these threads like these are popular and how go ahead i should also say that michelle isn't a well chosen as some think that cindy. said and i love this on her tweet she said shadow of the trunks of me show you of a stereotype to me i want to hear from you and then in parenthesis disabled people only full of this please so she didn't want people who didn't have disabilities to have an opinion in this particular topic way and hell go ahead and they think what lawrence was saying is also i think this transcends countries and language is bigger than spanish and in mexico we have the same you know we have the same issue in our cyprus simply we see people in a way less like the biggest pop coulter. thing that you see. every day every person with a disability that it's we're trained on it's like you know the poor person who can't be happy and they're not cured and it was a part of a part of the disability one of the disability troops that was under threat. so you know it was late in the end the bad guy you know dies the bad guy becomes blind for example and it's like it's kind of like this curse so the disability negative narrative has been internalized even by us the person with a disability and obviously it's a little able is. the only telling without having a disability it's very telling we're. unable to storytelling yeah and it's been like part of that and not only in the united states but i see it all around the world as well i know you took that's true yes. i was going to say i don't like. most people are born into disability community you can be born into an ethnicity you can be born into a religion you can be born into a poor. little party or affiliation but most people don't know other disabled folks from the time they're born and they're not encouraged to know other disabled folk so all of those negative means all of those negative attitudes all of those negative things that most non-disabled people never challenge get put upon that disabled kid so i think it's really important that as we're growing up as we're talking that we begin to stretch that in switch that what i think is really incredible about this is somebody is telling you that you're not defined by your disability or you shouldn't be defined by your disability what that tells you is that they're using an old definition if i if you go to the disabled people that i work with your address they're going to tell you if you ask what the word means to them they're going to say things like culture community constituency identity right it has nothing to do with diagnosis and so if you're so we thinking that this of disability is diagnosis you're signaling to everybody else that you quit the disability community that you're stuck in the past we need to move on lawrence i'm going to bring out cindy's trial number 7 cent and i want to share this with people because i feel this is where you've had to pay out into the open this kind of pretty face to face let's put his opinion out that number 7 for me and don't let your disability define you i get this comes from non-disabled people are trying real hard to make disabled people often seen as new wants people here and that's admirable but it's also a failing to cross an important fact many say for people to find something that's 70. yeah so this is something that has been kind of a long journey for me because like because my my illness was a part of me since i was born i have grown up with adults and authority figures around me saying oh you are defined by this this is just something that's you know a small part of your life it doesn't have to control you and i reached a certain point as a teenager where i was like that's completely not true this doesn't define my life there's no action that i do in my life that is not filtered through the lens of my disability because everything that i do i have to make sure you have enough energy i have to make sure that i'm not going to have physical joint issues or muscle issues that are going to physically prevent me from doing that i mean on and on and on and so it's something that i grew to be frustrated about but i also agree with what lawrence is saying because what i always say is that did my disability does define me but that's ok it's not necessarily a bad thing and i think usually it's only able people who see that idea of a disability to finding somebody who immediately jump to that being a bad or and negative thing because like there's a lot of things that define me i mean i'm lactose intolerant and so that defines like whether or not i can drink no but that's not something that i'm like oh my gosh i have to say that ad saying you know. go ahead i want to jump in and what did just said because i think it's so powerful that you as a woman with you know a disability have the voice to actually say i am not defined by my disability i mean i am do and i am defined by the lady because if not then you would be raising like this effort to go day to day but you don't see that i think i'm i think i i thought about this job a lot and i don't think that there are people who say that the disability doesn't the find them. i think it could also you know it could have a different also i think you know maybe positive vision about it about you know there are other things that i would. considered binding but as long as none of them are based on the fact that visibility is like this bad thing that we're like a broken negative not happy being then i think it's great that we can have our own versions up or not but not based on the you know negative. narrative about it ok i guess i'm going to guess let ourselves let me just say when 6 years of what. underlying assumption the underlying assumption when anybody says your disability doesn't define you is the disability beg i'm going to push back against that right to get the disability yes a nice just give it to me a little sliver of time because i want to share with your thoughts about a cow fan as she is a film and t.v. critic and she put somebody interesting point into our conversation here it is i think it's vital to have creators and storytellers who have disabilities or who know people with disabilities as well if there is family members organise friends involved in the portrayal of characters with disabilities otherwise you're only viewing one particular segment of their perspective and you're doing a disservice to this audience my 10 year old son has spinal bifida and i can tell you there's a huge difference between being born with a disability and developing later in life and it's important to show we all have things that make us different and make a special. while i have to so let me just show you what's happening here. where hell is says that one example of inclusion is a representation it's very important for people to see examples of people with disabilities in stillness the media not pull in the city this is some of the you mentioned much. particularly the kids and then in films and what happens to people with disabilities. that is my husband gets to hear my rant about this whenever watching t.v. i especially i'm certain types of a genre as there is a huge problem for disability in characters to be sort of a symbol of either weakness or 'd like ineffectiveness or evil and you see a lot in certain in certain kids' media we watched on netflix last year the series of unfortunate events which was really fun but one of the things that got me every single time is that one of the adults in the story is the ineffective guardian who's never able to save his charges from the evil character and he is his main character they ship is that he has a chronic car and and it's the car is used as a shorthand to show that he's weak and ineffective as a guardian and it just always got me because like i have cystic fibrosis i cough all the time and and you see that a lot you see another thing that drives me that a lot of times a character will have asthma and they'll have an inhaler but the inhaler is actually a symbol of their lack of confidence and then when they get confident at the end they throw away the inhaler and i'm like that's not how inhalers work that's not how i have no work or does it matter how much inner confidence you have are having oh you'll we need to find that awesome a kid over all of you or it just please rephrase if you are a moment's notice discussed. one of the jobs that you have an eye at this is a comment from amanda ross and what i love she said just to remind guys this thread is super helpful but the only way to get a better idea of if you disable it is helpful a stereotype is to pay all trade for sensitivity remind you what kind of that you are living in poverty meant that sensitive. for instance. turned a classic movie and you were looking for a representation of good disability to portray as a disability and then when we look to good we look to good bad and whack a doodle you know what we did finally look at you 137 movies from the same one era up through the time the 88 was passed in 1990 and we looked at everything that is at over those trends over those tropes that were shown during those times and how they echoed and how they changed throughout those times and all of these things that cindy shows in her thread kept coming up over and over again one of the things you never saw within those 78 decades of disability in film was disability and community what happens when disabled people come together when they've decided enough is enough and we're not going to take it anymore thankfully it was just at the sundance film festival a couple weeks ago saw the world premiere of a movie called grip camp by nicole newnam and jim brecht it's going to drop on that flicks that shows these people would do a summer camp they came out of the summer camp they realize i am not alone in this and people want to change the literal world they went and they fought for disability civil rights and laws came out of that had changes in attitudes came out of that people are going to be able to see maybe for the 1st time what happens when disability community comes together that is a great leap forward. this is politics because disability in politics is becoming more and more of a bigger topic not even if if policies may not be paying attention but certainly people with disabilities are making them pay attention i'm just looking here at some of the hash tags of pretty busy right now disability inclusion disability counts 2020 is a new another big one because there's a census in the united states and if you are not counted then there will not be policy that's built around you there will not be facilities and services that you need there will not be health have available and you need to be counted and counting people with disabilities is very important that right there may not be a specific question about disability on the 2020 census yet all of those things that people rely on to live independent lives things like medicare or health care coverage things like special education these like snap benefits or food stamps because people with disabilities are more likely to live in low poverty or low income or poverty than are non-di