#RepresentationMatters part 2

Does the entertainment industry really care about inclusion? Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created an initiative to celebrate more of our country’s diversity in films. This initiative states that starting in 2024, for a movie to be nominated for Best Picture, it must meet a diversity threshold for two of the four following standard:

On-Screen representation, themes and narratives

Creative leadership and project team

Industry access and opportunities

Audience development

Although this is a valiant effort to be more inclusive on the part of the Academy, I personally think it is deeply flawed. This is because even if a movie has racial diversity in the senior executives on their marketing team and women getting industry access and opportunities Hollywood could still be exclusionary. Hollywood can still rely on the ableism that the entertainment industry has been built upon since its inception. From My Left Foot to Me Before You to The Upside, Hollywood has always made millions of dollars off of movies about people with disabilities without casting anyone disabled. 

One 2020 film that would fit the requirements of the new Oscars’ inclusion Initiative, but is not fully inclusive, is Prom. Prom is about a group of washed-up Broadway stars that want to create a prom for a young lesbian who has been bullied. Even though I hate to criticize a movie with such an incredible cast (especially Kerry Washington), I do see one major flaw. There are absolutely no people with visible disabilities in the entire ensemble. According to RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that fights stigmas and advances opportunities for people with disabilities, 1 in 4 Americans has a disability. This means that when movies like Prom and others choose not to include people with disabilities, they are also choosing not to be representative of the largest minority group in the United States. The entertainment industry should include people with disabilities and people who identify as members of other marginalized groups, not to be rewarded, but because it’s the right thing to do. 

https://time.com/5887344/oscars-diversity-rules-movies/

#RepresentationMatters

Advocating for more disability representation in the media is something I have been passionate about for the last 10 years. I have seen all of the errors that Hollywood has made related to portraying people with disabilities. The entertainment industry has messed up so many times: from Ryan Murphy playing into the stereotype of wheelchair users wishing to walk on a Christmas episode of Glee, to HBO Max’s film, The Witches’ decision to make Anne Hathaway’s character have a missing limb. Another recent example of disability drag is Sia casting a neurotypical actress to play an Autistic character in the movie Music. Yet recently, the media has thankfully upped its representation game.

For one, the Lifetime channel created a wonderful movie, Christmas Ever After. Christmas Ever After is the first romantic comedy to star an actress who uses a wheelchair. Ali Stroker, the star, is a world changer in her own right, being the first wheelchair user to win a Tony Award for her part in the Broadway musical, Oklahoma! Besides Christmas Ever After’s decision to cast a character with a disability authentically, the story also portrays a person with a disability in a more positive light than most films do. Instead of the director, Pat Kiely, reinforcing the stereotype that people should pity people with disabilities, she made Ali Stroker’s character, Izzi Simmons, a professional writer. Ali Stroker’s success absolutely should be celebrated. However, as one of my best friends, Andy Arias, an amazing, disabled, superstar advocate, pointed out, actresses with disabilities who are white, like Ali Stroker, are not necessarily paving the way for performers who are multiply marginalized.

Speaking of multiply marginalized people with disabilities, perhaps the most important accomplishment of 2020 in the disability community is the publication of Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, edited by Alice Wong. Alice Wong, who is a disability activist, curated this incredible anthology of stories by some of the greatest leaders in disability justice today. Patty Berne, the executive director of Sins Invalid, who is a queer, disabled, femme of color, writes one of the vignettes. She beautifully explains the importance of loving each other, even in the midst of the world maybe coming to an end. Another great contributor to Disability Visibility is Lateef McLeod, who is a Sins Invalid performer. He writes about how his augmentative communication device helps him create political and social change. Equally powerful was the story of Jeremy Woody, who recounted how he was denied access to an ASL interpreter while in prison. This story defines both the need for access everywhere and the need for story telling by people with disabilities for the disabled community. All three of these stories represent experiences we do not normally read about, but we need to. In my opinion, Disability Visibility shows us that the best disability representation in the media happens when people with disabilities create it authentically.