What Du Bois and I Know About Dignity of Risk

This article uses multiple interwoven personal narratives to explicate the relationships among several concepts crucial to bioethics brought into focus by Robert Perske's 1972 article on "The Dignity of Risk," including dignity, risk, paradox, disability, autonomy, uncertainty, diagnosis, and prognosis. The use of personal narrative as a form of evidence and a knowledge-making method allows for the exploration of the meaning-making work of language and story and the introduction of humanities and social science concepts such as stigma management and dignity maintenance into Perske's concept of the dignity of risk. The personal narratives the article draws include Mark, a character in Perske's article; W. E. B. Du Bois; Frantz Fanon; and myself. Finally, the article calls for humility in medical science's predictive narratives for all patients, but particularly for people with disabilities.