Keeping Up with the Downs

While the Trump family has temporarily captured national spotlight, one distinguished family has captured the hearts of Americans: the Kardashians. The Kardashians actually have more in common with other Americans than what one may think- they love to go on vacation, strive to meet their soulmates, and most likely have an appetite for pizza and McDonald's fries. They just happen to be richer and more dramatic than most American families (and star in their own reality show).

Keeping Up with the Kardashians, like many other reality shows, offers to capture the essence of day-to-day life for a unique group of people and to broadcast this unseen perspective. However, the mere creation of such a show establishes a separation between the Kardashians and common folk- a "kind of effacement or isolation" (Mairs 14). 

In the show Born This Way, people with Down Syndrome are displayed as doing "normal people" things like having fun with friends at a bowling alley, having passions for acting, or having crushes on other people. The show's trailer is even captioned with this: "meet the seven young adults with Down syndrome who are defying society's expectations every day." While the original intentions of the show may be to reveal the potential and capability of people with disability, presenting them doing day-to-day things as groundbreaking and defying work inadvertently progresses the negative stereotype that disabled people are definitely incapable.

Mairs asserts "that we insert disability daily into our field of vision" to achieve a quiet and natural normalization of disability (Mairs 15). A Kardashian-esque reality show does that no justice and neither does a President who mocked a disabled reporter. It's no wonder the Trump family has captured national spotlight: they unfortunately have captured our eyes and ears too.