In July of 2024, I had the joy of reading a book and receiving an education on a topic I had never learned. The book is entitled, How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church by Lamar Hardwick, D.Min.

The word “ableism” had surely crossed my reading or hearing, but I had never connected it to something significant. Within the Indianapolis community, it's been my honor to work with a group of pastors and community leaders in promoting health and wellness. I serve with a health and wellness organization, produce a health and wellness podcast, and the church I pastor features a monthly health and wellness emphasis during a Sunday service.

With all of my focus on health and wellness, it is somewhat embarrassing that I had not understood ableism. I'm going to assume that many reading this article may confess to the same lack of knowledge. This also goes to the reality that I've learned from the book, that disability itself is something we tend to de-emphasize in our culture. One of the themes of this book by Dr. Hardwick is that our culture’s fascination with ideal physiques, and socially accepted, and superficial, standards of beauty have rendered disabled bodies as unacceptable, and therefore de-emphasized. This is not something explicitly stated by persons, but is demonstrated by the too often marginalization of people with disabilities in our society.

In the book. Dr. Hardwick expounds on ableism from all perspectives. One of the persons who offered an endorsement provides some insight on ableism at the beginning of the book:

“Ableism has been a fixture in our society for far too long, determining which bodies are deserving and which ones are not. It has also influenced architectural designs that dictate who can occupy public spaces—upholding views that trample on the dignity of the disabled community. Hardwick draws a connection between race and disability and what we must do to dismantle a hierarchy of bodies to achieve a more just society in our churches, communities, and the world. As he says, ‘disability is not a dirty word,’ and I join him in asserting that the time to resist believing this is now.” —Terence Lester, founder of Love Beyond Walls; author of All God’s Children, I See You, and When We Stand (Hardwick, 2024, p. i)

One definition of ableism from The Center for Disability Rights reads: “Ableism is a set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be ‘fixed’ in one form or the other.” (Retrieved from: https://cdrnys.org/blog/uncategorized/ableism/)

Dr. Hardwick’s book adds a layer of reality to this definition by considering the perceptions and cultural dynamics of being Black in America, and in other parts of the world. One more layer added to Hardwick’s personal story is his autism. Yet another layer is his battle with cancer and the physical limitations brought about by the disease, including the necessity of resigning from his lead pastoral ministry and losing employment income.

To his African American identity, he related an instance as a young man working as a manager for a retail store. After closing the store and going around to secure entrances, he spotted a suspicious car. Hardwick called the police, but when they arrived, he was misidentified as a suspect. Police vehicles surrounded his car, shining bright lights into his car, and yelling through their megaphone. His then undiagnosed autism contributed to behaviors of panic and fear that could have been misinterpreted by the police as threatening. Fortunately, the encounter did not end tragically, as some other instances in which the police have shot persons who called for help.

Hardwick also writes about the complexity of autism. It is not easily understood:

There’s a saying that if you’ve met one person with autism, then you’ve met one person with autism. Autism is truly a spectrum, not because we should view it as some linear scale that ranges from zero to ten or from not very autistic to extremely autistic. Autism is far too complex to simplify it in those terms. Instead, we should see autism as more like a color wheel in which, depending on factors such as environment, age, gender, and sociological circumstances, the common traits associated with autism are sometimes more pronounced in certain areas than in others. All the traits are there, but they may not be experienced equally by those who are observing. (Hardwick, 2024, p.17)

Hardwick’s understanding of ableism is informed by a number of factors, from disability, to ethnicity, to disorders like autism.

He defines ableism as: The practice of discriminating against people with disabilities based on the belief that “normal” bodies are superior to those that are not. (Hardwick, 2024, p.7)

This matter of bodies, which are deemed normal or abnormal is the basis of his book. He goes beyond conditions of disability to look at the whole spectrum of factors that drive perceptions of people with disabilities. One of the most insightful learning points of the book relates to circumstances, stemming from history, in which Black African bodies were perceived as disabled. From this notion came the belief that Africans were inherently disabled and needed to be enslaved in order to help them. Essentially, there was the belief that enslavement was good for black people because they were unable to live fruitful, productive lives without it.

Even prior to the transatlantic slave trade, we see early developments of an ableist system that ranked the value of the bodies brought to the new land. In one of the oldest historical references to Africans in North America, a settler named John Rolfe (ca. 1585–1622) referenced some twenty Africans as merchandise. It had not yet been determined if these Africans were indentured servants or if they were doomed to a lifetime of slavery; however, it is apparent that these Africans held a lower status than their White Virginian counterparts. This serves as evidence that even before racial slavery became the primary reason why Africans were brought to the West, their bodies were ranked as inherently inferior to White bodies. It appears that ableism was at work early in the development of American culture. This perception of inferiority based on race is at the heart of my argument that Black bodies were categorized as disabled bodies. (Hardwick, 2024, p.36)

Chapter Five, “Blackballed; Ableism and the Black Church” explores modern day habits in the Black church rooted in historical factors. The idea of “sheltering” disabled persons has contributed to a lack of focus on disability:

Disability ministry in the Black church context is often invisible because it stems from the days of slavery and the need to shelter those with disabilities from harm or violence. Slave owners saw Black bodies that were physically (or mentally) disabled as a monetary liability. They did not see them as people but as bodies born and bred to produce labor. If a person they saw as property became unable to meet the rigorous and debilitating physical demands placed on their bodies, they faced the possibility of death. This was true even though a large percentage of physical disabilities among enslaved Africans were due to harsh conditions and torture. When a child was born with a physical disability, communities would often conspire to lie to slave owners by telling them that the child did not survive birth in order to shield them from terrible forms of treatment, including being drowned so that slave owners would not have to feed and clothe someone who would not give them a sufficient return in the form of labor. What emerged because of this need to protect the disabled is what I call the “shadowing” of the disability community. We often see shadowing in the Black church and the Black community in the various ways that they shield the disabled from the harsh treatment of an ableist society. (Hardwick, 2024, p. 98)

Historical factors have influenced contemporary behaviors. This is one of the reasons why this book by Lamar Hardwick is vital for our learning, understanding, change of mindset, and development of better practices related to overcoming ableism in society as well as in the church.

In Chapter 8, Disability, the Cross, and Unraveling Shame Remembering Jesus and Reimagining Disability. Hardwick shares very personal experiences in dealing with stage four cancer and the treatments, especially chemotherapy, that ravaged and scarred his body. As a former athlete, this adversely affected his physical perception by others, and also himself. Autism compounded that perception.

Several months of chemotherapy caused significant damage to my feet. Most days, the pain is a nine on a scale of ten. The pain is an odd combination of feelings, including the type of numbness and tingling that you experience when your circulation is cut off. You know, the pins and needles feeling. It also feels like an intense burning, the likes of which most have never felt. This significant pain doesn’t just have an impact on my feet; it also impacts the way that my joints work because the pain has changed the way I walk.

Why am I sharing all of this? Because for years I have struggled with body image. Even when I was at the height of my physical fitness as a college football player, I was rarely satisfied with the way my body looked. Over the years, I’ve struggled with my appearance. I suppose a large part of my self-consciousness is due to social anxiety. I don’t like being the center of attention. I loathe being stared at and struggle with thoughts of how I am being perceived. Autism has obviously had a role in these feelings, (Hardwick, 2024, p. 138-139)

Hardwick relates physical struggles and feelings of shame (as well as of others), to the suffering and crucifixion of Christ and the compelling of an African man named Simon to help carry His cross.

For most Christians, the story of crucifixion is important because it is the story of one man who is crucified. That man was Jesus, and because of the Gospel narratives and their claims about the true identity of Jesus, Christians tend to place all of their attention on him. No doubt the story of Roman crucifixion is a fascinating one, but Christians are singularly focused on Jesus and his experience. McCaulley contends that based on a long-standing tradition of African American biblical interpretation, Black people in America have also made a profound connection to the story of Jesus being crucified because of the presence of an African man named Simon. According to the Gospel of Mark, Simon was from Cyrene, a city in North Africa in what is now modern-day Libya. It is without question that Simon was a dark-skinned African man who, Mark writes, was “forced…to carry Jesus’ cross” (Mark 15:21). Carrying crosses isn’t a new experience for Black and disabled bodies. Crosses have been forced upon them for centuries. Our culture and our churches continue to burden them with crosses of shame and stigma. (Hardwick, 2024, pp. 145-146).

The narrative and integration of the suffering of Christ to the historic suffering of black people because of ableist theology gave rise to “Black liberation theology” as an alternative reading and understanding of Scripture in contra-distinction to European theological images and perspectives of “ideal” bodies. More recently, “disability theology” provided Scriptural context to help people discover “dignity and honor."

Disability has long been seen as a celebration of different bodies—a vehicle for providing disabled people with dignity and honor within the Christian tradition and the broader society. Except disabled people are already worthy of dignity and honor. Disability theology is not just a celebration of difference; it is also an exploration of God’s embodied human experience while simultaneously interrogating and informing humanity’s experience with God. (Hardwick, 2024, p. 148).

In this article, I have offered extensive quotes from Dr. Hardwick to give examples of the profound and practical insights contained in this book.

In addition to extensive research and documentation, Lamar Hardwick’s personal story makes this book, How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church, all the more authentic, relevant, and even enjoyable to read.

~ Bryan Hudson, D.Min. August, 2024