When I got up and turned the news on earlier, I came across something which I found fairly problematic. At about quarter to eight, BBC Breakfast ran an interview with a man called Dave Steele, the self-named ‘Blind Poet’. Steele had apparently become blind (or, more accurately, partially sighted) ten or eleven years ago, and was now writing poetry and publishing books about his experiences. What irked me about this wasn’t so much the fact that he was articulating his experiences, which of course he had a right to do, but that he now seemed to be presuming to speak for all disabled people. That is to say, since he began to loose his sight, he had taken it upon himself to become some sort of disabled people’s champion, as if it was now up to him to inform the rest of the world what it is like to have a disability.

I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about this, but I am coming across it more and more these days: otherwise fairly socially privileged people who happen to get a relatively minor disability, but then framing being disabled as a core aspect of their identity and presuming they are a leader of the disabled community. From his description, it sounded like Steele’s eyesight was only marginally worse than mine; but whereas I just put my glasses on and get on with life, he opted to churn out books of poetry about it and appear on breakfast TV as some kind of disabled people’s champion. More to the point, as a (presumably) straight, white, otherwise able bodied man who only started to become disabled a decade or so ago, Steele will frankly know very little of what life is like for someone with a significant congenital disability, from being bussed away to special school, to being constantly spoken to like you’re a five year old, to being mocked and laughed at on an almost daily basis by schoolchildren.

Thus for people like him to adopt such sociocultural positions, even taking their disability as their pen name along with the prefix ‘the’, as though they are the only one, feels like an imposition or encroachment of the worst kind. I don’t want to sound melodramatic or over the top, but it is like a white person finding out they have black great-great-grandparents, and assuming that they can speak on behalf of all Afro-Caribbean people and claiming to have endured racial discrimination all their life. As I say, this cultural intrusion is something I’m coming across more and more these days, not just with respect to disability: the voices of the most marginalised people in society are increasingly being usurped and stolen by people who know nothing of their experience. Being straight, white and able-bodied is now no longer politically cool, so people will do anything to emphasise things that render them members of marginalised groups. The problem is, in doing so they usurp the voices and steel the often brutal experiences of the actual members of such groups.