Appearance and Expectation

by Dora Raymaker

categories: acceptance, art and music

Published June 04, 2009 @ 10:18AM PT

Popular culture and television not being within my sphere of Interest, I didn't manage to hear about Susan Boyle until just this week when stories about her hit my disability rights feeds. While most of you (unlike me) probably have known the story since it started, Susan Boyle is a middle aged woman from Scotland who has learning disabilities (hence the disability rights feeds) and also an incredible talent for singing (hence the popular culture). She was on a TV show called "Britain's Got Talent" which is one of those TV shows where people perform and are judged and I assume get some reward if they do well (I learned a bunch about Susan Boyle in the past few days--I still have zero interest in television shows!).

So I watched this video (Susan Boyle's opening performance--embedding is unavailable, you'll have to clicky to go to YouTube).

And I also read this article (an op ed in the New York Times called "Desperately Seeking Susan"), which discusses Susan Boyle, Matthias Buchinger, Thomas Quasthoff, and some similar others--people with exceptional talent who also happened to look pretty different from the mainstream. The meat of the article is how physical appearance, as well as socioeconomic factors, color the expectations that the public has of a person. From that article, "Because of their appearance, both Buchinger and Ms. Boyle were saddled with low expectations. This can work to the performer's advantage: lessened anticipation coupled with high ability can bring on an exponential acceptance."

Watching the audience at the start of the Susan Boyle performance was painful--the snickering, whispering, excluding faces are ones I know all too well. Many mainstream people tend to take delight in making people who aren't like them feel bad, and delight in seeing them fail, a cruel behavior that I am grateful my "social deficit" prevents me from comprehending or engaging in. That audience not only expected Susan Boyle to be a buffoon but wanted her to be.

But she wasn't.

And she isn't.

She's a human being who has a fantastic talent.

If Susan Boyle had looked like a model and acted like a socialite, no one would have been surprised by her talent. They wouldn't have snickered. They would have rooted for her from the start.

What's up with that? Why shouldn't any old arbitrary person, regardless of appearance, have a beautiful signing voice or otherwise be able to do something lovely? What does the low expectation of individuals who simply look or act different do the opportunities we are given and the ways we are treated by others--both before they know we can do something besides act weird and after they discover we have abilities beyond that?

Individuals may say they are not biased against people with disabilities, but large scale social behavior suggests otherwise. If there was no underlying negative bias, then people might expect just as much singing talent from the middle aged woman with learning disabilities as they do from the model who aced finishing school.

My judgement on the performance? Susan Boyle gets an A for her very real talent. Mainstream culture gets an F for disablist attitudes.