I listened to teachers describe classroom encounters of such intimacy that I wondered how they could grade students afterwards. And I heard much passionate argument that only disabled people should teach disability studies. The question is actually an old one phrased in a new way. Disability-studies scholars are nearly unanimous on the point that the field should be seen as the newest variation on the model established by racial and ethnic studies, a model that derives its focus from looking at the history and culture of a minority group. Scholars such as the psychologist Simi Linton and the literary critic Rosemarie Garland Thomson have written persuasively on the similarities between disability studies and those fields, and have offered valuable insights into the American experience refracted through the perspective of disabled persons.
Disability studies does resemble African-American studies in crucial ways.
Like its older counterpart, for example, it houses an uneasy union between activists and scholars. Like African-American studies in its early days, disability studies seeks institutional recognition by establishing new academic programs. The field long ago became a kind of ghetto for the small number of African-American Ph.D.'s granted each year in the United States, McKay argued, and the blackness of most of its practitioners, coupled with the whiteness of the rest of academe, stigmatizes the field even today. She believes that doing so would disrupt the reader's assumption that most writers are not disabled. The danger of mandating self-identification centers on authority and credentials.