Prize Year
2021
Document Type
Unrestricted
Abstract
This paper analyzes the way in which race and disability intersect in the trailer for the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020). The problematic disability-race analogy, created in this trailer through the use of Civil Rights imagery and iconography, serves as a tool to explore the ways in which such an analogy can obscure the existence of people of color with disabilities. This paper discusses the historical and contemporary usage of the race-disability analogy and its byproduct: the suggestion that the Civil Rights Movement has been an unmitigated success. The inspirational narrative arc of the trailer characterizes it as a form of inspiration porn, and excludes any intersectional evaluation of the Black disabled identity. Ultimately, the disability-race analogy created in the Crip Camp trailer creates a narrative which suggests that we have made more progress in regards to racial justice than we really have.
Recommended Citation
Coll, Lily, "“A Civil Rights Law of Our Own”: Intersectionality and The Disability-Race Analogy in the Trailer for the Documentary Crip Camp" (2021). Dean James E. McLeod Freshman Writing Prize. 12.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mcleod/12