"Taking on" people with disabilities? A lesson from last week's DWTS
/My big girls love dancing. With six little ones, I can tend toward focusing on the littler ones, particularly since they have some special needs that require a little more attention. So...
We have special Dancing With the Stars time on Tuesday nights.
Yes, I know it airs on Mondays, but we watch it via Hulu Plus, which also allows me to check the interwebs on Tuesday so I know if I'll need to have fast-forward handy, like I did the first week to skip exposing my seven year old daughters to Jason Derulo's performance of Talk Dirty to Me.
{Catchy, yes. Appropriate, no.}
We fell behind last week, so this week found us finishing last week's show on Monday night.
If you're not a DWTS fan, which I haven't been before this season, let me fill you in on the disability element this time around: Amy Purdy is a double amputee, a bronze medalist in snowboarding in the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, an actress, a non-profit founder, and a reality TV star, including a stint on Amazing Grace and her role in this season's DWTS.
She's fantastic. She's open about her story and her amputations, including cracking jokes in Week 2 about the risk of her legs flying off during their swing dance and devoting her Week 3 dance to the way her father supported her through her bout with meningitis, including giving her a kidney as she recovered. I was a little worried, though.
When a person with a disability enters a competition full of people who are defined as "typical" by this world, one of two things tends to happen:
- the person is there as a filler for ratings/diversity/publicity with no intention of accommodating her in meaningful ways to allow her to compete (which, thankfully, has not happened), or
- the disability is presented so centrally that the person is secondary, either through explicit focus on the disability or implicit focus by constant discussion of how inspiring she is, bringing the focus to the disability, while the discussion about the other competitors is focused on their dancing, which is what the show is about.
While the inspiration storyline has definitely been there, the judges have been focusing - especially last week and this week - on Amy's dancing skills.
But.
One comment last week from Erin Andrews made me cringe in a big way, though.
At about 7:45 in the video below, the host Erin asked Mark, Amy's partner, "What kind of pressure was this for you, taking her on?"
I know what she meant. I do. The pro dancer has to choreograph the dance and train the star to do it, and Mark has never done either for a dancer with two prosthetic legs. And I love Erin, dating back to the days when I hung out with her little sister at their house in our hometown of Brandon, Florida.
And?
I love Mark's answer, the way he brings it back to Amy's skills and the competition rather than her disability.
But we can all learn from this, because most of the time in the church, we don't mean to offend. Erin didn't mean to offend. What she did, though, was reduce Amy to an object or at least a lesser competitor. Her words would have been called out if she talked about the pressure of "taking her on" as a partner for any other star competing on the show. But when it's someone with a disability, is it any more acceptable to minimize their personhood?
Nope.
When you interact with people with disabilities at your church, do they feel like equal members in the body of Christ or like a service project you're "taking on" out of pity or obligation or something other than friendship? When you talk with special needs parents, are you thinking about meaningfully including their child or "taking her on" as another task on your to do list? When you consider families like mine in which four of our children were adopted, some with special needs, do you see children we love or diagnoses we took on?
(I sure hope you see the children we love, first and foremost!)
I'm thankful for my role as a special needs ministry leader and a special needs mama. It's not something I take on.
It's something I'm blessed to get to do.