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This is the black man's conflict, too. And it is exactly here black militancy has confronted the enmity of white society. White America is probably willing to absorb the black American; what it may not be willing to do is to permit the black American to absorb himself. Negro anxiety, rage and anger are seen only as threats to the primacy of white America when they probably should be seen as the black man's effort to rid himself of all sorts of imposed definitions of his proper social "role." The black view must be total. Given the experience of having been born black in a white world, it is difficult for the black man to think about his life in terms other than color or race. The totality of his experience gives him no edge. And what he witnesses is forced into the mold of what he has known. I once received an essay from a black student describing Canova's Perseus Holding the Head of Medusa in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a depiction of "the temporary black crisis." When I questioned what she had seen, I discovered that most of the other black students in the class believed that one had the right, perhaps even the obligation, to see that statue and everything else in terms of "the black crisis." If one calls this confusion, it is a confusion that the cripple shares. For one thing, the cripple is not sure of just who is and who isn't his enemy; for another, he must distrust the mask of language just as the black man does; for a third, he cannot help but see the world itself as the source of his humiliation. He is "different" at the very moment he desires to be created in another's image. And he must feel shame at the expression of such a desire. If anything, his situation is even more difficult than the black's, at least as far as his ability to find relief is concerned. If the black man's masculinity is mangled, he can still assert it in certain ways. Black actors assuage his hunger for a heroic identity; black athletes help him forget, however temporarily, the mutilation of his being; and a worldwide renascent political movement, convinced that it represents the wave of the future, teaches him that his blackness -- the very aspect of his existence that he has been taught to despise -- is "beautiful" and is to become the foundation of the new life he will create for himself.

Whether this assessment of his situation is accurate is of no immediate concern, for what we are interested in is its validity as an analogy for the life of the cripple. Black Americans now believe that they possess choices and that they need not live as victims. They are now engaged in the struggle to force society to accept, at the least to accommodate itself to, the black conception of how blacks are to live. The cripple's situation is more difficult. If it exists at all, his sense of community with his fellow sufferers is based upon shame rather than pride. Nor is there any political or social movement that will supply him with a sense of solidarity. If anything it is probably more difficult for the cripple to relate to his own than to the normals. Louis Battye, an English novelist born with muscular dystrophy, has graphically expressed how the cripple sees himself not merely as the symbol of what society thinks he is but of what he actually is.

Somewhere deep inside us is the almost unbearable knowledge that the way the able-bodied world regards us is as much as we have the right expect. We are not full members of that world, and the vast majority of us can never hope to be. If we think otherwise we are deluding ourselves. Like children and the insane, we inhabit a special sub-world, a world with its own unique set of referents.

Battye also speaks of the cripple's "irrelevance to the real business of living." His observations are acute and courageous. One suspects that most cripples feel this about themselves, although few have the courage to admit it. A cripple must see himself as an anachronism, for virtually everything his culture offers him is designed to reinforce his sense of inferiority, to point out to him that he is tolerated in spite of his stigma and that he had best keep his distance if he wishes society's approval. But Tiny Tim is, with whatever modern variations, still his image. He may insist that Tiny Tim is not his true self. But it frames society's picture of him. It is still the model for his behavior.

Self-hatred, then, must be the legacy he derives from his consciousness of what society thinks of him. With what else can he confront a society that values physical strength and physical beauty? (Regardless of how bizarre that sense of beauty may times seem, it remains outside the cripple's range of possibilities.) If growing old is a threat to modern Americans, how much greater a threat is physical deformity or mental retardation?

And what are the cripple's options? Most of the options traditionally available to the "gifted" or "exceptional" Negro are invariably not available to him, since his restrictions are almost invariably functional and rather severely limit the territory he can stake out as his own. He cannot become a movie idol; he cannot become an athlete; he cannot even become a soldier and risk his life in defense of that which has rejected him. His choices are simply more limited than are the choices of a black man.