From around the wilds. With updates about travel restrictions and how to protect yourself. Coronavirus primetime special coverage on aljazeera. A and you know in the stream today a respectful representation why disability cliche is so destructive to the Community Take a look at a viral twist a thread that explores the impact that some common tropes have on people with disabilities and this is how important conversation we want to hear from you you can chat me in all tweet me at a. J. Stray. My name is Malcolm Smith and i want to stick to that media trips that affect me one i just think people are jerk wants his bad behavior is justified because there really isnt this tropi its not just the 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 women 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 the way were trained in the media tonight is that these need. Disabled people are lazy and just need to get off this selfindulgent butts and do some hard work or anything is better than being disabled all you look disability inspires me offensive absolutely and only just some of the most common ways that disability 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 havent read it yet you can bookmark it share it engage with your community on it citys 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 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 you sit when you sat down to write. 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 im 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 had this idea that a lot of the problem with media representations of disability is the fact that most people that were all raised in such an able with the fighting that we dont 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 didnt 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 out how did it get this just. How big did it get i think last time i checked it was like. 6000 likes or something and about 5000 retreat im just. At one point here you say update im having to meet 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 thread at this particular moment really took off it really shows that cindy hit a nerve right there the problem with these tropes there are reinforced over and over again people in the hear them over and over again theyre not questioned they begin to believe them i think creatively the worst part about them is that theyre lazy right they dont give us any new ground they dont give us any new insight so would cindy dude which is very great is you pop the bubble so that people could expand their brains and maybe have a different view i love and how cindy actually number so lets go to number 4 because number 4 is something you find really upsetting inspirational porn lets to get into that why did you pick that one out of the 11 that cindy gave us. And then that was the only thing because this thread was amazing because it also had some disrespect of on it which i think made it very real and like coming from a very like honest place think this one particularly inspiration pour bothers me a lot because. Especially. That it has been the everything from politics to our lives to everything because we. Were not seen as a subject right and were not given those rights but only when we become inspirational to others thats when we you know become alive. And also i think that when it comes to Inspiration Point its that like theres narratives about that very able as narrative about that we came obviously will live this inspire us not the stable so i think that was a very powerful one and cindy describes it in this way disabled person in spies every one of them by dint of their very presence changing lives cindy you work a lot with kids and you were saying that these stereotypes are harmful for children can you explain why oh a 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 its hard for me to read sometimes its like almost physically hard for me to read because its so invalidating of my existence and my realities and like im an adult you know i have my own kids i have a fairly like robust of concept but when a kid is reading things like that they dont 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 its 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. That 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 and media because i felt like there were all these things they had to do to be a good and valuable the able to earth and like my life wasnt actually worth anything if i wasnt kind of living up to that media narrative of what a good to fable person looks like and so thats something thats always on my mind that as a kid author like i feel like you have a sacred responsibility because people are reading this when theyre 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 thats something thats always really and that was one of the points he picked up that anything is better than being disabled and we share this with you this is michelle she michelle writes in and tweets us often at the stream often the only exposure people have to disable people is file what they see in the media now much of the majority of stories about disabled people are written by body people who are writing it from even this discriminatory perspective it sounds outrageous lois but that happens all the time in movies it happens all the time you know we wouldnt we dont accept that anymore with gender we dont accept that anymore with that message the thing with disability is weve always had those stories told by other people right its been the doctors its been the social workers its been the preachers the teachers and the parents i think whats unique about whats happening right now is were 30 years past the time when the americans with disabilities act was passed and disabled people are speaking for themselves right theyre tweeting for themselves and everybody else can read that so theyre no longer saying the disability is a dirty word right there that its got 8 donors right 9 letters its not a 4 letter word its not a curse word so we can say it right that its not something that happens but you know. Students or accidents but its something that were a part of its bigger than any one individual when we say that were disabled were part of a community were part of 61000000 people in the United States billions of people around the world thats 26 percent of the population youre in the us so its nothing to be ashamed of its nothing the run away from we dont what it was too short too precious to pick up somebody elses shame disabled people arent doing that anymore and were not having it which is why we like these threads like these are popular and how go ahead i should also say that michelle isnt a well chosen as some think that cindy. Said and i love this on her tweet she said shag all of the chunks 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 didnt want people who didnt have to supply teeth 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 how we have the same issue in our cyprus simply we see the law in a way less like the biggest pop coulter. Thing that you see. Every day every person with a disability that its were trained on that its like you know the poor person who cant be happy and theyre 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 the bad guy becomes like for example and its like its kind of like this curse so the disability negative narrative has been internalized even by us person with a disability and obviously its a little able is. The only telling without having a disability is very telling way of. Unable to story building. Yeah and i mean 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 thats true yeah. I was going to say oh dyke there are plain already most people arent born into Disability Community you can be born into an ethnicity you can be born into a religion you can be born into a Political Party or affiliation but most people dont know other disabled folks from the time theyre born and theyre 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 nondisabled people never challenge get put upon that disabled kid so i think its really important that as were growing up as were talking that we begin to stretch that in switch that what i think is really incredible about this is somebody is telling you that youre not defined by your disability or you shouldnt be defined by your disability what that tells you is that theyre using an old definition if i if you go to the disabled people that i work with your address theyre going to tell you if you ask what the word means to them theyre going to say things like Culture Community and stitch wincey identity right it has nothing to do with diagnosis and so if youre soley thinking did this of disability is diagnosis youre signaling to everybody else that you quit the Disability Community that youre stuck in the past we need to move on lawrence im going to bring out cindys trial number 7 cindy and i want to share this with people because i feel this is where youve had to pay out into the open this kind of pretty face to face lets put his opinion out there number 7 for me and dont let your disability define you i guess where this comes from nondisabled people are trying real hard to make disabled people often seen as new wants people here and thats admirable but its also a failing to cross an important fact many say for people to find. Me yeah so this is something that has been kind of a long journey for me big. 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 arent defined by this this is just something that you know a small part of your life it doesnt have to control you and i reached a certain point as a teenager where i was like thats completely not true this doesnt define my life theres 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 im 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 its something that i grew to be frustrated about but i also agree with what lawrence is saying because what i always say is that my disability does define me but thats ok its not necessarily a bad thing and i think usually its only able people who see that idea of a disability to finding somebody who immediately jump to that being a bad or a negative thing because like theres a lot of things that define me i mean im lactose intolerant and so that defines like whether or not i can drink but thats not something that im like oh my gosh i have to say that ad saying you know. Go ahead i want to have been and what did just said because i think its 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 this disability because if not then you would be raising like this effort to go day to day but you dont see that i think im i think i i thought about this trope a lot and they also think that there are people who say that the disability doesnt the find them. I think it could also you know it could have a difference 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 were like a broken negative not happy being then i think its 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 yeah i guess let ourselves let me just say when 6 years of what. Underlying assumption the underlying assumption when anybody says your disability doesnt define you is a disability beg im going to push back against their right to get the disability s. And i was just giving it to my 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 puts a really interesting point into our conversation here it is i think its fatal to have creators and storytellers who have disabilities or who know people with disabilities well if there is family members or has friends involved in the portrayal of characters with disabilities otherwise youre viewing one particular segment of their perspective and youre doing a disservice to this audience my 10 year old son has spinal bifida and i can tell you theres a huge difference between being born with a disability and developing later in life and its important to show we all have things that make us different and make a special. While i have to slow let me just show you whats happening here on where hell is says that one example of inclusion is representation its very important for people to see examples of people with disabilities in sylmar the media not pull in the city this is some of the you mentioned much. Particularly the kids and then the films of what happens to people with disabilities. Yes my husband gets to hear my rant about this whenever watching t. V. I especially im 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 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 whos 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 its the car is used as a shorthand to show that hes 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 theyll 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 im like thats not how inhalers work thats not how i have no work it doesnt matter how much inner confidence you are having oh youll 1000 we need to find that awesome a kid over all of you or it just please rephrase if you are a moment this just. One of the jobs that you have of 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 sensitivity range lawrence for instance you. Turn a classic movies and you were looking full representation of good disability as a disability and then when we look to good we look to good bad and whack a doodle you know what we but if i do look at you 137 movies from the same one era up through the time the 88 was passed in 1990 and we looked it. Over those trends what were 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. 00 decades of disability in film was disability and community what happens when disabled people come together when theyve decided enough is enough and were not going to take it anymore thankfully i was just at the Sundance Film Festival a couple weeks ago saw the World Premiere of a movie called grip camp by Nicole Newton and jim brecht its 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. Politics because this of us here in pol