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Last week, I talked about my eyes being opened to the struggles of people of color. Even if race issues have been embedded into my society for as long as American history can tell, some concepts were unclear to me until I actually listened to the voices of people around me. Since then, I've been keeping my ears open around my campus. I want to observe where there still needs growth and education that can't be taught in a class room.
Now, I'm in the middle of a new impasse that I can't quite wrap my head around yet. It's related to the following:
Ever stopped listening to an artist because they we were accused of misconduct?
Have you unfollowed someone because of their miseducated claims about a group of people?
Up until recently, I would have only answered with, "Depends on the severity of the circumstances." Until this:
In one of my required humanities classes, our open unit is discussing the rights of people with disabilities. It's fascinating. Especially in our definition of disability: while impairment is a physical state of being, disability is what happens when the society and environment doesn't allow them to function in it. Disability is not set in stone wherever one goes. For example, in an environment where there are ramps and elevators verses on with rocky crevices and stairs, a person in a wheelchair has a different level of disability in those two environments, even if they have the same impairment.
Continually thought this unit, I absolutely loved watching my classmates discern how society is inclined to patronize the disabled, underestimate one's needs or hesitate to even communicate with an individual with a disability. Regardless of partisanship, my classmates agreed: disabled people have been consistently mistreated.
After a day of discussion and good feelings about research, my teacher stood up at the end of class with five minutes left in class. She first established that she doesn't usually preach from a soapbox. Most of the students would agree that she is a very respectable and reasonable individual. That's what made what she said all the more difficult to process.
"Let's talk about...the Greatest Showman."
The poor student that prematurely burst out saying, "Oh my God, I love the Greatest Showman!" before realizing that was probably not the most fitting thing to say. I knew just by word of mouth the P.T. Barnum, the subject of the movie, wasn't actually a good person, but I justified it by thinking about how much I don't like Alexander Hamilton as a politician but love the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda (thus the picture). Still, my professor continued to say something along the lines of this:
Do you know how P.T. Barnum first got into his career? He bought a severely disabled blind slave woman, presumably 60-70 years old–but she isn't on record because she was a slave. He displayed the woman to the public, falsely claiming she was 161-years-old and that she was George Washington's nursemaid. Not only did he pedal her around on the road for people to humiliate her and have people make fun of her. He sold tickets. To her autopsy.
I don't care about how great the music is. This movie knowingly depicted him as a champion of people with disabilities when he was the total fucking opposite. He normalized the notion of publicly humiliating disabled people in the media as well as in American society. I don't care if I ruined the movie for you. He ruined thousands of people's lives, and I'm not going to stand behind that.
(I looked this up, it's true. Her name was Joice Heth):
I know she wasn't necessarily calling us to action, to destroy every copy we can find and delete every single song off Spotify. But I didn't know what to do at that point. Up until that point, I had such respect for all that went into the movie. I adore Hugh Jackman and Keala Settle as performers. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of our generation. The movie has one of the most diverse casts in a modern movie. I'd like to say that it's a hiccup that can be forgone, and it can continue to be one of my favorite movie musicals.
But I can't. Because I as a special education student vividly remember being told on the playground,
"Abby, get up and dance!" There was no music, but I did it because I thought they would like me if I did.
"Abby, go give that guy a hug!" I didn't know why he ran away. Why was the teacher scolding me after I came to her crying that he pushed me away?
"Abby, I don't like Broadway." I was ready to go off. I would go into a screaming rant while people giggled along.
"Abby, she's mad at you, go hit her." Just to see what would happen.
My playground was a circus, and I wasn't the ringmaster–I was the freak show. I, as the person who actually really respected most everyone at my school for some reason, still have to bite my tongue whenever I talk to or about the girls who would do those things to me.
A bittersweet truth is that I'm not alone. I'm not the only person that's had this, "Kids can be cruel," experience. Referencing a few sermons that I've heard recently, I use perfectionism as a shield for the areas in which I find inadequacy. I keep people at an arms distance. The less they know me, the less they can humiliate me.
Now imagine people who were sold into dealing with this trauma for a living. That's the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
I haven't talked to my music-loving friends about this, and maybe it's better that I've talked about this openly without a prompt to call anyone out. I can't say that I'm calling anyone to action yet. But my heart has been stirred. Things will change going forward.
