Unlearning Ableism: Book Covers for All Children
Patty Cisneros Prevo showcases athletes with disabilities and their extraordinary sports successes through goal-driven tenacity.
According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s 2019 study, only 3-4% of children’s books have disabled main characters. Compare this statistic with the Center for Disease Control’s finding that 26% of Americans have disabilities, and the problem is easy to see. The children’s book industry fails to portray how bodies and people exist and interact with the world. These are the ways that many children experience themselves or will experience themselves in the future.
Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita at Ohio State University, has us consider:
When has a book been like a mirror reflecting an aspect of your identity or experience? How did you feel seeing yourself in the story?
When has a book been like a window offering you insight into someone else’s experience or world? What did you learn?
When has a book been like a sliding glass door allowing you to enter and engage with another world for a moment in time by realizing you had some connection?
Patty Cisneros Prevo wonders what it would have been like to see someone who looks like her in a book when she was 18 years old. She answered that question by publishing Tenacious: Fifteen Adventures Alongside Disabled Athletes, an illustrated children’s book that recounts the personal stories of individual athletes with disabilities. She focuses on sportspersons with disabilities and Paralympians but expands her focus to reflect the different identities within the disabled community.
“I did not overcome the loss of my limb. To overcome the loss would mean I’d have to grow it back. What I overcame were the limits I placed on myself and that others placed on me.”
In Tenacious, a refreshingly diverse “gang” of softball and basketball players, hand cyclists, wheelchair basketball, soccer players, and skiers navigate disabilities from limb difference, spina bifida, and visual impairment. Adults featured include Samoan adaptive surfing champion Meira Va’a Nelson, who was partially paralyzed at age 4. Children include Annabelle Geib, a middle schooler who has spastic diplegia cerebral palsy and dances tap and hip-hop using a walker and leg braces. The text portraits convey expressive, energetic portraits of athletes in motion. Each page provides biographical details and includes quotes from the subjects who share their daily joys and struggles.
“Whatever you can do, I can do,” says Annabelle Geib who performs, hip-hop and ballet in non-disabled dance classes and learns to adapt the moves with the use of her leg braces and walker.
Author Cisneros Prevo is a proud disabled Latina, parent and teacher. A car accident at age 18 left her with a spinal cord injury that made it necessary to use a wheelchair, and in 1998, she was introduced to the sport of wheelchair basketball. She played for multiple teams, including Team USA, for 10 years. She competed at three Paralympic Games, won back-to-back gold medals, and captained the 2008 Paralympic gold medal team. She also won five NWBA Championships, including two as head coach. She became the first head coach of a collegiate wheelchair basketball team at the University of Illinois,.
Cisneros Prevo saw an opportunity to provide a mirror, window, and sliding glass door to children reaching for a book. Tenacious was partly motivated by her work bringing light to “ablest language and culture.” She defines ableism as “a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on socially constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness.” Ableism is a system that discriminates or is prejudiced against disabled people.
One of the most common and harmful expressions of ableist culture is the “super-crip” idea, where disabled people are portrayed as “overcoming” or “fixing” their disability through a herculean effort or ability, and not because they are motivated, passionate, and tenacious people. This kind of portrayal of disabled athletes places great emphasis on the disability, usually intending to evoke an emotional response (such as pity) and thus reflecting and reinforcing the pervasive perception of disability as a personal tragedy. By taking such an approach, the media tends to trivialize the sporting aspect of the disabled individual, with any successes serving merely as the catalyst for a heart-warming “super-crip” story. Tenacious takes on this stereotype.
Tenacious provides mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.
Mirrors. We see disabled athletes as human beings with disabilities and extraordinary stories—people with likes, dislikes, and everyday challenges. We allow children with disabilities to see themselves.
Windows: We learn about disabled athletes’ accomplishments and extraordinary, tenacious drive to engage in their sport passionately and successfully. We learn that persons with disabilities play, enjoy, and excel at sports and whatever else they put their minds to.
Sliding Glass Doors: We connect with each disabled athlete because we all have challenges. Things are hard and often an uphill battle. We set goals for ourselves and then go after them. We reach our goals not through superhuman strength but with concentrated, hard-working, tenacious drive.
The word tenacious comes from the Latin root tenax, which means “holding fast.”
May all children see themselves in books, and may we hold fast to this pursuit, for always.
“As human beings our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has – or ever will have – something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”