How old were you when you found out that there’s a conspiracy theory about Helen Keller circulating on TikTok? For many olds, this terrible news hit them this week, when Twitter user @jamie2181 shared a TikTok video made by a middle school history teacher, who recorded himself talking to his students off camera. In it, you can hear a
student saying: “Helen Keller is the Nazi guy. … She’s a terrorist. … Helen Keller was the blind and deaf person who was fake, she didn’t exist, but everyone believes she was deaf and blind.” The revelation that Kids Today “don’t know” enough about history is one that’s
been had by generations of Americans, and part of the popularity of this teacher video is just about that—they’ve never heard of D-Day either! (Or so the students
say—I’d never count out a troll.) But the Helen Keller angle is something new. “Not believing in Helen Keller’s story” is not a deficit of knowledge, but an active contestation of it.
The Daily Dot’s Audra Schroeder
tracked the trend to May 2020, when a TikTok user first posted a video using the hashtag #HelenKellerWasntReal. The idea crossed over to Twitter in early January, with a tweet from screenwriter Daniel Kunka, who reported that his teenage relatives had argued to him over text that Helen Keller “was a fraud who didn’t exist.” If you visit the
#HelenKeller hashtag on TikTok now, videos are split between Helen Keller jokes (a very
popular one has Keller saying “hello” to a gardener by mistake and being busted for not really being blind) and others just advancing the conspiracy theory.
The comment sections underneath the conspiracy videos take predictable shape and showcase
a cycle of madness: Somebody takes the video to task for ableism; somebody else says, “Go away, boomer, leave us alone”; somebody else says, “But for real. She didn’t do all that.” Sometimes users chime in describing fights with teachers on the matter, reporting being disciplined for holding fast to their beliefs that Helen Keller could not have written books, or
flown a plane. “Suspicion stalks fame; incredulity stalks great fame,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in a 2003 New Yorker piece
about Helen Keller’s lifetime of facing down critics. Ozick was wrong about one thing: She wrote, only 18 years ago, that such critiques were now unthinkable. “In an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge [Keller] with faking her experience?”
As with many memes, the “Helen Keller Isn’t Real” theory has a heavy dose of irony, laid on to lend the videos’ makers some plausible deniability. That doesn’t absolve them of ableism. “The videos may have started as jokes, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are harming disabled people,” Haben Girma, a Deafblind human rights lawyer who
wrote a Twitter thread on the TikTokers in January, said in an email to me. “Nearly every disabled person has been told, at one time or another, ‘You’re faking it.’ ”