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"Uncle Tom And Tiny Tim: Some Reflections On The Cripple As Negro"

Creator: Leonard Kriegel (author)
Date: 1969
Publication: The American Scholar
Publisher: United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa
Source: Available at selected libraries

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I can remember my neighbors, on my return home, praying for me, inquiring about my health, quoting for my benefit the words of Christ, St. Francis, Akiba and F. D. R.* I can remember their lecturing me, advising me, escorting me. Drunks voluntarily shared their wisdom with me. Almost everyone did things for me -- except, of course, to see me. For to have seen me would have entailed recognizing my existence as an individual me, that kind have of personal encounter that results in a stripping away of stereotype and symbol and a willingness to accept the humanity of the other, at whatever personal cost.

*Roosevelt's ability to "beat" polio was for me, as well as for most of the boys ward with me, what Kenneth Burke speaks of as a "symbolic action." Burke, of course, is dealing with literary criticism and his categories are derived from the study of literally and are all verbal. But an icon living within the boundaries of one's memory serve a similar function to that which Burke had in mind.
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One can object that this view simply distorts the problem of the cripple. It is not the black man and the cripple alone who suffer from invisibility in America. The proliferation of books on alienation and anxiety, the increasing sense of disaffiliation from which our younger people suffer, the seemingly endless number of fads, pseudo religions, life sciences, and spiritual hobbyhorses that clutter the landscape of life in these United States all testify to this. Ultimately, such an objection contains great validity. But one must first see it within the particular situation in which the cripple exists: the possibilities affording relief to others are not usually open to the cripple. There is no way, of course, to define degrees of alienation and invisibility with any sense of accuracy. But one can suggest that if most persons are only half-visible, then the cripple, like the black man until recently, is wholly invisible. Stereotypes persist long after reality fades away; for us, Uncle Tom still prays on bent knees while Tiny Tim hobbles through the world on huge gushes of sentiment and love. But let us see the world as it is, for the world itself has perfected the ability to see what it wishes to see and only what it wishes to see. Those stolid burghers who lived only a few miles from the death camps in Germany possessed a vague idea of what was taking place within those camps, but they never permitted the vagueness to make itself concrete, to push itself forward onto the individual consciousness.

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The community, then, makes certain assumptions about the cripple. Whether verifiable or not, it behaves on the basis of those assumptions. The cripple is judged (as are the members of his family in terms of their relation to him), but the judgments are rendered by those for whom neither the cripple nor his family possess any meaningful reality. His "condition" is an abstraction; he himself is not quite real. Who is going to recognize me? asks the cripple. But society has already called into question the very existence of that me for it refuses to look at that which makes it uncomfortable. And so it leaves the cripple, doubting his potency, not quite ready to face his primary obligation -- to extend understanding to himself, to accept the fact that his problems exist now, here. in this world, that they are problems for which relief must be sought, and that his "condition" is arbitrary but not absolute. Choices as well as obligations, exist within the boundaries of his possibilities.

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To strike out on his own in the face of a society whose smugness seems, at times, conspiratorial is difficult. As an attitude, smugness goes beyond indifference. And it is far more harmful. Smugness is the asset of the untouched, the virtue of the oblivious, and the badge of the unthreatened. It is the denial of the existence of that which threatens one's comfort, the right to judge whatever and whenever the smug believe judgment is called for. Smugness is the constant reminder of the line that exists between those who have not been touched by the world's terror and those who have. Smugness is a denial of the motion of the universe, an assumption that time stands still and that mortality itself can be conquered. The cripple knows better; for him, it is time and motion together that form the dialectic of rage.

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What the cripple must face is being pigeonholed by the smug. Once his behavior is assumed from the fact that he is a cripple, it doesn't matter whether he is viewed as holy or damned. Either assumption is made at the expense of his individuality, his ability to say "I." He is expected to behave in such-and-such a way; he is expected to react in the following manner to the following stimulus. And since that which expects such behavior is that which provides the stimulus, his behavior is all too often Pavlovian. He reacts as he is expected to react because he does really accept the idea that he can react in any other way. Once he accepts, however unconsciously, the images of self that his society presents him, then the guidelines for his behavior are clear and consistent.

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