Historical Perspectives on Disability and Slavery in the United States

Historical Perspectives on Disability and Slavery in the United States

Disability and Inequality

According to Douglas Baynton, historians and scholars mostly studied race, ethnicity, and gender to understand the justification for inequality in the United States. Historians did not focus on disability. Baynton argues that disability is used to justify discrimination against other groups by associating them with physical and mental incapacities (McGirr, 2018). In this light, opponents of social and political equality for women argued that women have poor reasoning and cited it as a disability. The disability featured intellectual, psychological, and physical incapacities, which were different from the men’s traits. Based on the opponents, women’s excessive emotionality and physical weakness stand as physical, emotional, and mental disabilities. Our assignment help will hone your writing prowess for papers that will awe your professors.

Down’s syndrome

In 1866, a British physician, John Langdon Down, highlighted Down syndrome as ‘Mongolism’. John Langdon, Down’s discovery, differentiated Down syndrome from a mental disability (Prater, 2016). The physician used the term Mongolism to describe Down syndrome since, according to him, children suffering from Down syndrome had similar physical features to the Blumenbach’s Mongolian people. The term Down syndrome was accepted in the early 1970s. In 1959, Jerome Lejeune, a French Pediatrician, shed more light on the condition after he realized that people with Down syndrome have more chromosomes (Prater, 2016). His discovery led to more studies on chromosomes to confirm the Down syndrome diagnosis.

Justifications for slavery

A significant argument supporting slavery stated that African Americans had impaired intelligence, making them inferior to Americans. Medical institutions argued that black people had less cerebral matter in the skull and excess nervous matter, causing an inferior mind that rendered African people incapable of caring for themselves (Daen, 2021). To promote slavery, supporters argued that education shortened African American’s existence since, due to education, their bodies withered or dwarfed.

Women’s suffrage opposition

To oppose women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century, opponents focused on women’s psychological, intellectual, and physical flaws. The opponents asserted that the women’s flaws made them unworthy of equality, and the flaws would result in more disability. The opponents cited the women’s high temperament as a disability, lack of nervous stability, and endurance to hardships. Due to the incapacities, the opponents argued that women’s political participation would result in hysteria. According to Charles Dana, a renowned neurophysiologist, engaging women in political activity would increase their insanity and destabilize the electorate mass. Edward Clarke opposed the involvement of women in political activity, arguing that due to the overuse of the woman’s brain, many women and girls were pale, hysterical, weak, and dyspeptic (Schalk, 2017). Opponents also argued that women could not handle motherhood due to education since their reproductive organs were weakened, deformed, and dwarfed. Educated women were deemed sick before marriage and physically disabled from maintaining psychological health.

Immigration laws

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, the laws on immigration used disability to exclude people. The 1882 Immigration Act outlawed the immigration of any idiot, lunatic, or person who could not maintain himself without becoming a public expense. Idiots and lunatics were automatically excluded, and the public charge element focused on disabled people in general. In 1907, the law excluded people with mental or physical defects that may affect the person’s ability to work and instructed inspectors to exclude people with any form of mental abnormality (Schalk, 2017). In 1917, the regulations cited asthma, flat feet, poor eyesight, spinal curvature, hernia, deformities, deafness, and heart disease as reasons for exclusion. The laws also focused on undesirable ethnic groups. A notion of defective races came up, claiming that some nationalities were more susceptible to congenital abnormalities deeming them inferior immigrants. For instance, Italians were deemed dwarfish, the Jews were dismissed for poor physiques, and the Greeks and Syrians were deemed undersized.

References

Daen, L. (2021). Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean.

McGirr, L. (2018). Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics. By Douglas C. Baynton.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Pp. 192. Cloth, $35.00. “Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.” Douglas Baynton’s observation about disability’s simultaneous ubiquity and scarcity in.

Prater, S. (2016). Hey, Bub!: Two brothers and a chromosome to spare. FriesenPress.

Schalk, S. (2017). Critical disability studies as methodology. Lateral, 6(1), 6-1.

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Answer the following questions based on the lecture and the readings. Submit your assignment as an attached Word document.
According to Douglass Baynton, what categories have historians and scholars most studied in their efforts to understand the justifications for inequality in the United States?

How was Down’s syndrome initially explained when it was first identified in 1866?
Identify two of the justifications for slavery that were based on disability arguments.
Describe the disability arguments used to oppose women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century.
How did the laws on immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use disability as a rationale for exclusion?