The Charity Model and its Problems

Charity as Objectification

Using the Withers chapter on the charity model and the Longmore essay, discuss the problems that were brought up about the charity model.

1. Do you agree with these concerns?

2. Do these readings change your opinion of charity or do they broaden them?

3. Do you consider charity in the same way after you read these sources?

Please follow the instructions and kindly read the lecture note and link below for better understanding.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving/giving-charity-information-donors.html

The Charity Model

I would first like to say that the readings I’ve assigned for this module seem to be against charity. However, it is not my intention to appear anti-charity; I believe that charity is extremely important and should be encouraged. The difficulty I have with charity and the difficulty that the sources I’ve assigned have with charity is when charity becomes objectification and when charity reinforces all of the social stereotypes of disability.

Paul Longmore offers the telethon as an example of charity. He gives a history of the modern telethon and what it means to a discussion of disability. He lists several telethons starting in 1949 and declining in popularity by the end of the twentieth century. He tells his reader: “The rise and decline of disability-related telethons warrants referring to late-twentieth-century disability history as, in one respect, the age of telethons” (2005: 502).

He elaborates on Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s idea of the stare and the exhibition of the disabled body. This display of the disabled body was seen in the freak shows of medieval kings and P T Barnum. In a more modern sense, medical theaters and clinical rooms can also be considered a variety of staring. These are modes of social display and collective scrutinizing of people with disabilities; the only difference is the individuals doing the staring. Another important difference between the individual staring and collective staring is that the collective staring carries social weight. It is produced and legitimized by social institutions and reflects the power dynamics between non-disabled and disabled people.

Telethons were a particular mode of staring. They offered no potential for connection or exchange, but display disabled people according to stylized and fixed conventions. He argues, however, that the formalized staring of telethons was intense. This intensity came from the fact that telethons were always live television events and the organized collective staring became a “powerful rhetorical device.” They were seen as reality. Longmore writes that “telethons reinforced conventional cultural ideas about philanthropy and America, about people with illnesses and disabilities, and about potential charity contributors themselves” (2005: 504).

History of Telethons

Importantly for our discussion here, “The broadcasts that defined telethons as a genre were produced by disability-related charities” (2005: 504). Telethons reinforced conventional cultural ideas about illness and disability as well as about charity and people who participate in charity. Telethons also reinforced ideas that the viewers had about themselves as people. Critics of the telethon felt that while their defenders were justified in asserting that they produced desirable results, these results were gained through disagreeable means. These defenders asserted that the telethon addressed issues of health and welfare and social, cultural, political, and moral concerns. And, Longmore writes, “many telethon watchers probably were made to think about what the charities wanted them to think about” (2005: 505).

While these telethons wanted viewers to give some thought to those considered less fortunate or afflicted, they also wanted to explain the social meaning of disability. Buttressing the medical model of disability, the charity model attributed the social marginalization of ill and disabled people to their actual physical conditions, avoiding any discussion of socially constructed barriers. These less-fortunates were constructed as being unable to perform socially accepted rolls and their only hope could come from cures or rehabilitation, both of which cost money which the altruistic viewer could help to remove.

The largest draw in these telethons was the pathetic, adorable child. Children became the representative disabled person and any adults who appeared during the telethons were, by virtue of a shared condition, infantilized. Longmore mentions Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Tim became the epitome of the disabled child. I would like to give students an important quotation from Tim that suggests the significance of the viewing of disabled people/children of the telethons. While Tim mentions God in the quotation, its importance is the staring that he expects and welcomes: “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” It is important for the “normal” person to see this disabled person. The disabled person is not an individual person, but an object for the “normal” to contemplate:

the disabled person as perpetual child, sweet, cheerful, and brave; the disabled person as invalid, helpless, dependent, and fundamentally different from “normal” people; the disabled person as object of charity, grateful but hopeless and doomed unless those who are healthy and normal “give”; the disabled person as vehicle of others’ redemption, existing not for himself or herself, not as a human being in her or his own right, but to provide the occasion for nondisabled people to renew their humanity; the disabled person as sentimental entertainment, a figure whose pathetic situation or heroic striving touches the hearts of readers and viewers. (Longmore, 2005: 506)

Formalized Staring of Telethons

While telethons could be seen as doing some good for the disability community, Longmore tells the reader the way in which telethons worked for the nondisabled community.  They did, in fact, as much, if not more, for the nondisabled community as they did for the disabled community. As they gave disabled persons the social identity of being helpless and always in need of assistance from “normal” people, they also gave nondisabled people a social identity, one characterized by a benevolent disableablism:

telethons ceaselessly, ritualistically reiterated that people with disabilities would not and could not “belong” unless their medical and social pathologies were cured or corrected. The shows pounded on the message that disabled people were not “like everyone else,” not like the supposedly normal people hosting the telethons or watching them at home. That dichotomy between normal and disabled, which was to say, between socially legitimate and socially invalidated, became a central feature and core message of the telethons. As a result, on telethons nondisabled people did almost all the talking. They did not talk to disabled people. They talked about them. (Longmore, 2005: 506)

The second reading for this module is the Withers chapter on the charity model. Withers writes that,

the charity model is based on the notion of inequality between those who are identified as disabled and those who are not. This framework accepts and reinforces the medical model (and, at times, the eugenic model), particularly, the notion that disability is located in individual minds and bodies and that it can and, where possible, should be cured. Like the previous models, the charity model is an understanding of disability developed by people who are not disabled themselves but have tremendous power and resources and act in their own interests when constructing and employing this model. (2011: 57)

Withers argues that the images used to depict disabilities today are based on the charity model and that it is implied that the bodies these images depict are innocent victims. Also, as I discuss below regarding the Canadian government’s policies for charitable donations, the “The charity paradigm constructs a notion of disability for the benefit of the giver, not for the disabled recipient” (2011: 58). Withers points out that charity can fail through an uneven distribution of resources and through a depiction of the lives of disabled persons as homogeneously tragic.

Just as telethons were big business, so are charities. Click on this link to discover the sheer magnitude of the list of charities recognized by the Canadian government. Charities, however, don’t advocate for change because the basis of their business is the status quo. Also like telethons, the intention of charities it is to either eliminate or reduce disabilities rather than to address social barriers. The funds raised by these charities rarely go toward affordable housing, food, or attendant care and, like telethons, these charities are usually run by nondisabled people. Furthermore, these charities function on the assumption that all disabled people want to be cured, which is not always the case.

The Construction of Disabled People as Helpless

Charities often function with both a Christian and eugenic lens. Education endeavors provide women of childbearing age with information on how to prevent defects and donation is framed as salvation for the disabled person and even for the donner. And corporations “(rather than disabled communities) benefit [. . .] substantially from charity donations” (2011: 62); the charity model seems more about the giver of charity than the receiver. Charitable donations also “act as public relations vehicles to soften corporations’ images to the public” (2011: 62) and some corporations spend more money on telling the public they have made a large donation to a charity than they spent on the actual donation because the PR pays off in new business.

Wither writes that “charities construct disabled people in three important ways: as children, as white and as objects to be pitied” (2011: 66). The viewer/donner is implored to help these “poster children” have a future. The only way they can have this future is through donations. These “poster children” are generally white kids because most charities feel that white people will be more apt to donate for a white disabled person.

“Supercrips” are inspirational because they do normal things. They work, finish a university degree, play sports, get married. I cringe every time a person with a disability is featured on a show like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol because the terms inspiration or inspiring will come out. Withers writes that there are certainly individuals that have earned that supercrip title such as Rick Hansen or Terry Fox,

while it would appear that supercrips are the only disabled people who do not evoke pity, this is not actually the case. The supercrip is constructed on top of pity. These “achievers” are useful not because they have achieved, but because they have done so in spite of their disabilities. Supercrips are not inherently inspirational; they are inspirational because they are objects of pity, though that pity is transformed into inspiration. (2011: 70)

I find, also, that this results in in people assuming that all people with one type of disability are the same. This leads to the ‘my brother’s friend’s cousin uses a wheelchair and she’s amazing. She pushes in races and gets gold medals. Why don’t you?’ Persons using wheelchairs now run the risk of being lumped into the same box with no recognition of differences in disabilities and differences in reasons for, for example, using a wheelchair.

This is very similar to the telethons to include all persons with the same diagnosis under the same umbrella and not recognize any differences in personalities or life stories. Wither argues that charities capitalize on the figure of the supercrip: “Charities help construct the supercrip to promise us what is possible if we simply make a donation. They show people overcoming their disabilities and send the message that disabled people can achieve with your donation” (2011: 71). I’ve included the Stella Young video in the readings for this module because I want students to see the relationship between charity and inspiration and the objectification inherent in both and how they are essentially the same.

While we no longer have telethons, we do see frequent commercials asking viewers to donate to a particular hospital or to by a blizzard to support the Children’s Miracle Foundation. These are not, essentially, bad endeavors, but I want students to see the evolution of the charity model and to consider how this model still operates today. While policies allow the donor even more distance from the disabled person or persons, the donation today is framed through policies as a benefit to the donor as well as the receiving charity. The Canadian government has ingrained the concept of charitable donations that they advise donors how to get the most tax benefit from the donations.

Just as the telethons gave the viewer and donor a feeling of benevolence toward disabled persons, one gets the benefits from their charitable donation in the form of tax benefit. Don’t get me wrong, my husband and I regularly donate to three specific charities and we’re pleased to get tax benefits, but I want students to be able to recognize how the Canadian government structures charitable donation through policies and what this means about the act of charity. I want you to think about how this way of donating to charity is similar or different from the telephones. Is this easier? Does it make the donor feel better because they feel divorced from their object(s) of charity? Were the telethons more useful in order to get donations? Or was the objectification of disabled people inherent in these telethons beyond justification.