Try This At Home

To learn how to do inclusion right, watch Jackass - the sequel. I'm not kidding. Johnny Knoxville and friends do some of the grossest and some of the funniest things I've seen on screen in a long time. We laughed until we hurt. This is a movie that I've heard has no redeeming social values. But I beg to differ. Quite a bit actually.

Jackass has a moment when one of the guys from Murderball (the documentary about wheelchair rugby) is shot at amazing speed into the air and plunges, chair and all into the lake. No comment is ever made about his disability, who he was (it was like the Jackass guys - who the truly informed will know appear on the Murderball DVD in the extras - just assumed that the whole audience was cool enough to know) or how he came to be a human rocket for the film. It just had him participate like anyone else. I'm not sure people in the audience really knew that he had a disability, they could have just been using a wheelchair like they used shopping carts - another mode of transportation to be made dangerous. It was about the stunt - not about the chair, or even really the guy in it.

The movie shows that it doesn't take work to be disability positive, it just takes a lack of negativity. Here a disabled guy isn't treated as fragile he was treated as a projectile.

But there was something else.

Something awesome.

There wasn't just a lack of negativity. There was something else missing. They didn't once say it - the 'r' word didn't make an appearance once. It was notable by it's absence. When Johnny Knoxville was in 'The Ringer' his character made a statement that he would never ever let anyone say 'Retard' again. I know that Knoxville was playing a character who learned something. But perhaps Knoxville, himself, learned something about sensitivity when he worked with actors with disabilities on 'The Ringer', perhaps he learned something about diversity when he agreed to do a bit for the Murderball CD.

Maybe Knoxville can make disphobia disappear (at least in his wake) just by refusing to use hateful language and by refusing to discriminate in casting.

Wouldn't it be nice if kindness became cool.

The movie asks the audience not to try any of the stunts (I can promise, here and now, never to eat the poo of any animal) but I hope that the audience noticed that the biggest stunt they pulled was inclusion - and done right, it will make a big splash.