Last Thursday’s post looked at a couple recent instances where children with disabilities were cast as models in mainstream print advertisements. The story’s main focus was on Ryan Langston, who was part of a children’s clothing ad circular put out by Target Stores on New Year’s Day. We closed with the words of recognition uttered by the six-year-old boy when his father put the page in front of him: “That’s me.”
Langston’s comment was brought back to mind when reading Broadway World’s coverage of a video summit that took place last week among members of the media and entertainment industry in Los Angeles and New York. The BWW newsdesk referred to the event as the conclusion of a three-year campaign to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities, called I AM PWD, which was organized by three of mass media’s most powerful unions: Actor’s Equity Association, Screen Actor’s Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).
It was specifically this quote by Actor’s Equity Association Nick Wyman, which extrapolated Ryan’s experience to all people with disabilities:
… [E]veryone should be able to see themselves mirrored in media. Kids will grow up seeing and hearing themselves in the media and know that they are not alone.
The summit was entitled, “Disability IS Diversity: Reflecting the True American Scene,” and one of its main takeaways was the need to write more characters with disabilities into movie and television plots in ways that portray them as three-dimensional beings.
In September, the I AM PWD website reported on a study that indicated characters with disabilities comprised just 1% of all roles on network television shows. Cable television programming is doing a better job not only with portraying characters with disabilities, according to the study, but it still doesn’t come close to a true proportional representation of the 56 million citizens the U.S. Census reports are living with a disability.
It also doesn’t account for the lack of people with disabilities contracted to perform roles on stage or screen. I AM PWD lists its three goals as Access, Inclusion, and Accuracy, and the barriers for making this a reality are both physical and perceptual, as discussed in this I AM PWD video.
There is an especially powerful example given at the four-minute mark, when Steve Gladstone compares today’s barriers for employing people with disabilities to the era of theater when William Shakespeare was staging plays at the Globe theater, and men were cast to play women’s roles. The video is also a great example of how media can be produced to accommodate people with disabilities that affect their vision or hearing.
Do you watch shows that portray characters with disabilities? Do you think they do a good job giving these characters rich, multidimensional personalities? Share in the comments section.
Image provided by Bob Bekian, used under its Creative Commons license.