AHA Session 78
Friday, January 6, 2023: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Washington Room C (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Steven G. Noll, University of Florida
Papers:
Comment:
Benjamin H. Irvin, Indiana University
Session Abstract
In 2011, the late Christopher Bell called on scholars in the multidisciplinary field of Disability Studies “to keep blackness and disability in conversation with one another.” Disability scholars in literature, sociology, law, education, and many other disciplines who adopt a social as opposed to a medical model of disability responded to Bell’s challenge. Historians, also, turned their attention toward the intersection of race and disability in the past. Yet as the social media campaign and blog #DisabilitySoWhite makes clear, much work remains to be done in reckoning with the ways that race and ethnicity complicate lived experiences of disability and responses to disability (in)justice. Intended for a broad audience of students, educators, and scholars, the three papers in this panel reflect the increasingly nuanced scholarship of historians who draw on disability as a critical category of analysis to ask new questions and shed new light on pivotal topics in African American history. Though they range across the histories of slavery, education, and medicine, the panelists collectively demonstrate how a critical disability lens challenges dominant historical narratives, troubles historiographical assumptions, and reveals implicit and explicit historical processes that deeply entangled anti/Blackness and disability. Jerrad Pacatte explores the way that eighteenth century understandings of disability in New England intersected with gender and labor, upending scholarly arguments about the value of enslaved women’s reproductive labor in American slavery. Jenifer Barclay’s paper continues to focus on the intersection of race and disability but shifts to the post-emancipation years, considering the doubly segregated spaces of southern schools for blind and deaf students of color that remain invisible in the history of American education and Jim Crow segregation. Finally, Kelsey Henry looks to the history of intellectual/developmental disability (IDD) in the early twentieth century to explore the racial parameters of “normal” development generated and promoted by the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and the Children’s Bureau that tacitly aligned blackness with developmental delay and whiteness with normality.
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