Black Disability Gone Viral: A Critical Race Approach to Inspiration Porn

On May 31, 2018, tattoo artist Milton Purnell of Tattoo Supreme in Raleigh, North Carolina posted a striking video on his Instagram and Face-book pages. The video shows Purnell presenting Michael Mack, Jr., a ten-year-old Black boy amputee, with a new prosthetic leg.¹ The leg features custom airbrush artwork, with white and silver flames around the name and image of the Black Panther, the Marvel superhero from the blockbuster film, Black Panther (2018). The video captures young Mack's eyes growing wide with excitement, as Purnell shows him the prosthetic, asking the boy what he thinks of it. Suddenly, Mack's jaw drops. He spins off the stool he is seated on and hops away briefly, with his hand over his mouth. He then returns to his seat, where he grasps the leg in his hands, admiring it. In the background, two voices, including Mack's mother, Sandra Mc-Neill, express awe and admiration for the custom artwork. In front of the camera, Purnell encourages Mack to try it on, stating "Put yo leg on man! Put yo leg on!" In the background, we hear McNeill saying that she forgot the "connecting part" for the new leg, but that Mack should still put it on for a picture. Mack puts on the prosthetic, stands up, and starts to dance. Within days, this video went viral, with hundreds of thousands of views, shares, likes, and comments across multiple social media platforms.

Whenever a video, image, or story of a disabled person goes viral, it most often occurs within the context of inspiration porn, a term popularized by the late Australian disability rights activist Stella Young.² Generally, inspiration porn refers to representations that "objectify disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people."³ The term, which has taken strong hold within disability and activist communities, is beginning to appear in academic scholarship, and was even featured in an episode of the ABC sitcom Speechless in 2017. Inspiration porn has strong similarities to the older concept of supercrip, a term used to describe narratives about disabled people who are represented as inspiring or extraordinary for performing both mundane and exceptional activities.

Inspiration porn and supercrip narratives are similar in several ways. Both concepts rely on certain affective registers, such as inspiration, awe, tragedy, triumph, and pity; they also presume a non-disabled audience and engage ableist concepts, such as overcoming or compensating for the perceived obstacle caused by disability. They are also both narrative frameworks.⁴ That is, the people represented in these images and stories are not themselves supercrips nor inspiration porn, but rather supercrip and inspiration porn frameworks are applied to represent people and their stories in this way. There are a few differences between inspiration porn and supercrip narratives, however. The main difference is that inspiration porn often includes representations of non-disabled people "helping" disabled people, an approach not typically considered part of supercrip narratives. Inspiration porn is also used primarily in reference to memes, photos, videos, and news stories that are shared on the internet, whereas the term supercrip has most often been applied to news stories and fictional representations.

Scholarly work on inspiration porn and supercrip narratives lacks engagement with race. In most cases, scholars never mention race and the objects of analysis represent white or non-racially identified subjects. With a few exceptions, scholars do allude to race, such as in Russell Meeuf's footnote acknowledging that his analysis of John Wayne as supercrip is specifically focused on white masculinity and my argument that Christopher Reeve's racial and class privilege is often overlooked in representations of him as supercrip.⁵ In both cases, racial privilege is acknowledged as a constitutive factor in supercrip narratives, but race is not a central analytic of the scholarship. Relatedly, only a few scholars have analyzed how audience identity impacts the reception and interpretation of representations of disabled people, while focusing primarily on how disabled people at large respond, as opposed to disabled people of color or people of color more generally.⁶

A major exception to...