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by Staff Writer Dear Entertainment Industry, As people with disabilities, their friends, families, and supporters, we affirm the value, equality, and dignity of every member of the cross-disability community, including those of us, our family members, and peers with intellectual disabilities. We, like all Americans, connect with the humanity of TV and film characters to add levity to our lives. We talk about what they do with our friends and co-workers. We laugh with the characters, cry with the characters, imitate their fashions, their haircuts, and their words. While we enjoy sharing joys and bearing pains with them, we are stunned when they insult, disrespect, and misrepresent us. What constitutes hate speech can only be defined by the community it seeks to reference, and as a community of people with disabilities, we adamantly declare the "R-word" and its prolific use in the film "Tropic Thunder" a prime example of such hate speech. Derogatory words and depictions that perpetuate fears, myths, and stereotypes around disability, no matter the genre of film, legitimize the continued misunderstanding, pain, and exclusion of people with disabilities. People with disabilities and particularly people with intellectual disabilities have suffered egregious civil and human rights violations throughout our country's history, including institutionalization, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, abandonment by their families, state-sponsored forcible sterilizations, denial of education, employment, and healthcare, and targeted hate crimes. Unlike other minority groups, the disability community has almost no employment presence in Hollywood. While consulting with other groups about what is and isn't acceptable humor, dialogue, and depictions, the disability community is almost always an afterthought. There have been no checks, no balances - films about us, but without us (e.g. Mr. Magoo, 1997; Million Dollar Baby, 2004; Tropic Thunder, 2008). If "Tropic Thunder" did include us, self advocate Dustin Plunkett's reaction in response to the film's depictions of people with intellectual disabilities would have changed the final product. He said, "I cannot believe a writer could write something like that. It's the not the way that we want to be portrayed. We have feelings. We don't like the word retard. We are people..." We call on the entertainment industry to remedy the harm that is being done by "Tropic Thunder" and to model respect for people with disabilities through our inclusion in employment in the industry and in all aspects of the creative process that creates films and television shows we love so much. To sign the petition against this movie go to |
Original Post Date
2008-12-24 12:00 AM
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