Zach Anner breaks down barriers in interfaith, disability

Students listen to Zach Anner speak at the SDRP Ikenberry Commons on Friday.

By Reema Abi-Akar

Zach Anner likes to look at his disability through the lens of comedy.

He is the type of person who makes an entire YouTube miniseries called Workout Wednesdays despite the fact that he is in a wheelchair.

One YouTube commenter named Dane suggested, jokingly, that Anner film a video about working out on a treadmill.

“Well, I don’ t know if you noticed this about me, Dane,” Anner responded on video, “But I live in an apartment complex with a treadmill in it — so we’re totally gonna do it!”

Anner doesn’t like to take himself too seriously. While he has cerebral palsy, the most memorable thing is his striking sense of humor and his effortless ways of connecting with people, not his disability.

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“Never let somebody’s expectations of you define where you think you can go,” he said. “We all have our wheelchairs—whether it’s school or we don’t like the way we look or we’re just not where we want to be in life—and mine just happens to be an actual, physical, manifested wheelchair.”

He brought his charisma, speaking skills and diverse experiences in comedy and interfaith topics to campus at two talks at the SDRP Ikenberry Commons on Friday Feb. 27.

The first lecture, at noon, focused on his comedy, disability and how his experiences have shaped his attitude. The second talk served as the keynote speech for the Illinois Interfaith Conference, where he highlighted the work he has done with his YouTube series on the SoulPancake channel, “Have a Little Faith.”

“Everything that I go through, every struggle, when I have a sense of humor about it, it makes it a story worth telling, as opposed to a hurdle to get over,” Anner said in the first discussion.

Between showing clips of his various videos, YouTube series and comedy sketches, Anner spoke about growing up with a physical disability in the 1980s in Buffalo, New York.

While his cerebral palsy affects his mobility, it does not affect his mental functioning — yet it was difficult for his parents to convince teachers to let him into non-special education classes at school.

“Both my parents made sure that they let me be who I was as a person rather than what my physical impairments were,” Anner said in the talk. “My disability and expectation that comes with it is actually a tool that I can use to my favor to disarm people.”

By speaking frankly about his wheelchair and making jokes about it in context, he effectively opens up the floor to a comfortable dialogue about disability.

“When you realize that it’s OK to laugh and it’s OK to say things that are funny, it breaks down a lot of barriers, and it makes people more comfortable approaching us,” said Kathleen Downes, senior in AHS who uses a wheelchair.

Downes, who also has cerebral palsy, was especially gratified to see Anner speak about religion in the interfaith conference.

“I think that one of the things that we can learn from his work is that people with disabilities don’t necessarily have to be shown in disability-specific contexts,” she said. “His (interfaith) work isn’t explicitly centered on a disability-specific thing.”

Anner’s “Have a Little Faith” series was intended to inform people about different religions from the eye of someone with “no faith,” as Anner confesses in the very first installment.

“I didn’t really have a religion growing up,” he said. “I didn’t understand what it meant to have faith.”

Alluding to the stereotypes, misinformation and lack of composed conversation in the news media, Anner wanted to try to set the record straight.

He said his intention with a YouTube series was to “humanize faith in a way that makes it more accessible” to the public. He and his producers decided to go with the “listen, don’t lead” mantra, with a focus on informing the public.

With that in mind, Anner and his crew set out to find one or two people to profile in a handful of different religions. He then interviewed them about what they personally believe, how they feel about their faith and how they connect with it on a deeper level in their lives.

“My goal with this show is to be an interfaith Mr. Rogers,” he said jokingly.

Mudassir Ali, sophomore in LAS, had previously never heard of Anner, but the more he learned about him, especially the “Have a Little Faith” series, the more he became interested in hearing Anner talk about his connections with interfaith and disability.

“I love the fact that … he has a very open mind to like, everything,” Ali said. “I feel like his need to do (interfaith work) is not more so to try and look for anything in particular, but just to talk — just to have a conversation.”

Ali has been working with the interfaith group on campus this year, spurring from his involvement in the Muslim Student Association as the group’s Knowledge Chair. He says he values the idea of open conversations to build on his own personal “search for truth.”

The truth can be a tricky subject for many people, whether it is religious truth or truth about marginalized populations like people with disabilities.

“I think unfortunately we spend a lot more time avoiding what we are really thinking … especially when we talk about issues of Islamophobia or racism or sexism,” said Ross Wantland, director of the Diversity and Social Justice Education department. “We work hard to not look racist, but then we miss out on having some really honest learning moments.”

Wantland said that Anner’s use of humor can give people different perspectives about tough topics like religion, ability, race and gender issues. It also may allow people to reshape past insecurities about those who are different from them and shed these topics into a more personal light.

“Zach is one voice to provide some humanizing narrative,” Wantland said. “And I feel that Zach’s message will create a space where we can have some of the dialogues that we need to be having with each other, and … create communities of compassion and fairness.”

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