Last Wednesday morning, it seemed as if notifications were clambering over each other to reach the screen of my phone. “Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, dead at 76.” Each obituary covered the same ground: “rare science celebrity,” “cultural icon,” “Star Trek Meets The Simpsons.” Then “severe physical impairment” and “debilitating disease.” In them Hawking is lauded, over and over, as an iconic thinker who spent his life “slumped in a wheelchair” but is blessedly now “free” from his suffering. Here’s a headline from The Washington Post that caught my eye as I scrolled: “Stephen Hawking was the ultimate image of mind over matter.”
How Stephen Hawking himself would laugh to hear such saccharine, clueless descriptions! His disabilities were neither an insurmountable barrier nor a mystical gateway to enlightenment. They were simply physical conditions. Dr. Hawking was not “confined” or “chained” to his wheelchair, nor was he “muzzled” by his augmented speech device, as various articles I have read described him. He was just a man who could not speak or move his legs.
Stephen Hawking did not “overcome” a disability to become a world-class physicist and beloved public figure. His trademark acerbic wit, his wildly innovative way of thinking about the universe, and his skill for swiftly transitioning between deep scientific analysis and a chaotic popular culture often undecided on its view toward hard data—all depended upon the freedom to see the world in a different manner from his peers. “My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field,” he said in 1984 (long enough ago that one might be tempted to think we would have learned better by now.) “Indeed,” he continued, “they have helped me in a way by shielding me from the lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in.” In his 2013 memoir, Hawking wrote: “I felt [my disease] was very unfair–why should this happen to me…now 50 years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life.” A few years ago, Intel offered to give Hawking a new communication software, a less robotic voice. He turned them down. That was his voice.
How wholly unsettling—yet also entirely unsurprising—that most scientists and writers who composed obituaries are blind to the significance of stories like these. Mere sentences after describing Hawking as a “crumpled figure of a man,” the author of the aforementioned Washington Post article admits: “Partly because of his physical difficulty in working with equations as most theoretical physicists do, Hawking developed new graphical methods that allowed him to visualize….the convulsions of the universe as a whole.”
What, then, sets Dr. Hawking apart from the average person with disabilities? The fact that, unlike so many others, the world chose to accommodate his needs. Where Hawking succeeded, millions of others are left to fail. Hawking understood all too well that, apart from his disability, he was perfectly situated for success in the world of physics. He was painfully aware of his own privilege as a white English man with access to a whole range of support and assistance.
In a letter to the World Health Organization in 2011, Hawking explicitly called for the United Nations to fund health, rehabilitation, educational, and employment opportunities for disabled people. “We have a moral duty to remove the barriers to participation,” he wrote, “and to invest sufficient finding and expertise to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities.” And while genius in the hard sciences does not necessarily guarantee political or sociological aptitude, this sensitivity to his own luck is one of the reasons why Hawking maintained a fierce advocate for the rights of people across the world, arguing to maintain comprehensive NHS services in his native U.K. and pushing back against U.S. politicians’ attempts to impoverish the Affordable Care Act and neuter the Americans With Disabilities Act.
We take comfort in believing that disabled people struggle because their canes and hearing aids “hold them back,” perhaps because it is too painful to acknowledge that our own communities have failed to accommodate their needs. If we continue to insist that physical and mental disabilities are the problem—rather than our own lethargic, stubborn refusal to create a more accessible world—then we’re just trying to let ourselves off the hook. Disabilities don’t let people down. We do.
Stephen Hawking wasn’t a “mind over matter” superhero. He showed us just how much our matter can, well, matter. If you truly want to honor Hawking’s legacy, value people for what they can do, rather than pitying them for what they cannot. Stop being amazed that people with disabilities can make amazing discoveries. Start asking why more of them don’t.
Carina is a senior majoring in writing and communication.