Viola Philippe, the wife of the onetime auto parts tycoon of Louisiana, was something of an expert on motivation herself before she and Robert flew to South America. She had been born with albinism—her body did not produce the enzyme tyrosinase, critical in the production of melanin—and as a result, her skin, hair, and eyes contained no pigment, and her eyesight was poor. She was legally blind, and could read only by putting her face very close to a page and using a magnifying glass. “You have never met a more determined person, though,” her daughter, Roxann, told me. “She could do anything.”
Well some of this may be up to personal preference, I would contend that this person should not have had to go to such extremes to have agency in the world as a disabled person. When we valorize or fetishize success in light of an immutable characteristic, the person being valorized is reduced to an object, and their personhood is ignored. For the abled, this is a perverse sort of inspiration because they cannot fully connect with the approaches and effort required by a disabled person to complete tasks in able to person does with no tangible difficulty. Colloquially, we refer to this as inspiration porn in the disability community.
