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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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And so I learned that I existed for him as an abstraction, that he saw through me as if I, too, were smoke he was blowing through his nostrils. The cripple had been linked to the Negro. A new they had been born. As a man of the world, who did not need to move beyond abstraction, he assumed that he had every right in the world to decide what the cripple or the Negro wanted. He knew what I "should do" because he possessed two good legs and I didn't. Not being a cripple makes one an expert on the cripple, just as not being black makes one an expert on the Negro. It was another example of the normal deciding how that which dared not to be normal should live.

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In his conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon discovers that the final myth he must destroy is the myth of a "black world," for such a myth is ultimately dependent upon an equally inhuman a "white world." "There are," Fanon insists, "in every part of the world men who search." This seems to me one of the few workable reasons one can accept, despite the fact that I know that, for the cripple even the act of surrendering himself to the ranks of those who search is enveloped by potential disaster. The cripple must recognize this and he must face it. For no matter how limited his functioning in the society of normals may be, there are certain guidelines that he is offered. Once he has accepted being pigeonholed by society, he finds that he is safe as long as he is willing to live within the boundaries of his categorization. To break out of its confines calls for an act of will of which he may already be incapable. Should he choose to resist, he will probably discover that he has inflamed those who see themselves as kind and tolerant. My inability to tell that man to mind his own business was an act of spiritual acquiescence. Had I told him where to get off, I would have undoubtedly been guilty of an unpardonable sin in his eyes. But I would have moved an inch forward toward personal emancipation. Cripples, though, simply did not address normals in such a way. Tiny Tim was still my image of the cripple. And Tiny Tim had always been grateful for the attention conferred upon him by his betters -- any kind of attention. My inability to defy that man was more than a reflection of my weakness: it was also the embodiment of his success, the proof of the legitimacy of his assumption. On my next visit to the Joint Disease Hospital, I dropped in once again for another cup of coffee and another quick chat.

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And so the task of the cripple is to re-create a self, or rather to create a true self, one dependent upon neither fantasy nor false objectivity. To define one's own limitations is as close as one can come to meaningful independence. Not to serve is an act of courage in this world, but if it leaves one merely with the desire for defiance then it ultimately succumbs to a different form of madness. The black man who rejects white culture must inevitably reject his own humanity, for if all he can see in Bach or Einstein is skin color then he has become what his tormentors have made of him. The only true union remains with those who search. For the cripple, too, there are no others. To embrace one's braces and crutches would be an act of the grotesque; but to permit one's humanity to be defined by others because of those braces crutches is even more grotesque. Even in Dachau and Buchenwald, the human existed. It was left to the searchers to find it.

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