PhilosopherCrip

In Michigan, it snows in the winter. I knew this when I moved, but didn’t think it could be any worse than CT’s “Nor’easters”. This week, it dropped to negative teens at night (negative 20’s with windchill) and snowed at least a few centimeters every single day. This is all a round about way of saying that I did something kind of rare and took the time to watch a DVD today because I was snowed in at my girlfriend’s apartment. We watched Last King of Scotland, which is hardly a date movie with its very graphic violence. However, we aren’t exactly like many couples and so it fit our tastes.

It is the true story of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s brutal regime that caused the deaths of over 300,000 of his own people. One of the striking parts of the story was that these deaths were not a part of a systematic racial cleansing per se, but were the killings of the factions of his political opponents. Amin’s warped psychology justified this violence in the name of stability, because his was one of the first African governments that were completely independent of colonial rule. His was a message of black power, unity, independence, and pride. The unified stability he sought was a response to hundreds of years of racist colonial oppression and exploitation. These ends were not themselves horrifying and could, in fact, be seen as a very good consequence for the people of that nation. After all, independence from colonial power is the same end that our country’s founders were aiming for during the war that created our nation.

Of course, the scope and nature of the violence visited upon his people was outrageous and not at all justifiable by this end. As the movie portrays, many of the killings were the executions of unarmed civilians, not war casualties. Amin was no patriot but a brutal murderer who was drunk with his own power. His absolute commitment to an ends that was not altogether morally bankrupt brought him to the use of means that are among some of the most horrific in history.

Also, Amin is not alone in his brutalities. History is ripe with examples of governments bringing about unthinkable tragedy in these ways. We are often quick to point at the Nazis or the Communists, but even our own government used such logic as it stood alone as the only entity to ever unleash the devastation of a nuclear weapon. Perhaps we may even look to the contemporary torture of terrorism suspects at Gitmo as an example of justifying violence and ignoring basic human rights in the name of a seemingly beneficial ends.

Perhaps I should start using this pattern of thinking as an explanation when I find myself discussing Jerry Lewis and his many offenses. One of the stock responses I get is “i understand why YOU don’t want to be pitied, but he has raised a lot of money to conduct research that will cure people who don’t want to suffer with MD.” Of course, I could and probably should challenge the notion that a medical cure is more desirable than a social one. However, this may be a much harder line of reasoning for someone to follow who has been so deeply socialized to believe that pity is an appropriate and virtuous response to disability. Instead, it may be better to really latch on to the deeply bigoted statements Lewis has made, and point out that the ends of funding for research cannot possibly justify the harms he visits upon the crip community with his very public words and attitudes.

Now, this is not to say that Lewis can be justifiably compared to a murderer like Amin in every way.  Surely, the harm Lewis does can not compare in scope.  Arguably, bigoted attitudes like his lead to the incarceration, abuse, and untimely death of thousands of people with disabilities in nursing homes, institutions, and the like.  Yet, he cannot be held directly responsible as the primary cause of this outrage, because he is a washed up comic, not the head of a government.

However, the means-ends reasoning that people use to defend this hack is quite similar:  “But what does the money go toward?” . . . “Doesn’t the money he raises help children?” . . . etc. etc.   My question is, what ends are good enough that the disability community should be asked to tolerate this man when he says in an article he wrote for Parade magazine that wheelchair users “just have to learn to try to be good at being a half a person?”  What amount of money is worth awarding a humanitarian award to someone who says on national TV, immediately after the passage of the ADA making employment discrimination against crips illegal, that people with disabilities “cannot go into the workplace. There’s nothing they can do?”  He may not be a dictator, but millions of people watch Jerry and are “touched” by his words and cannot understand why we can’t look past his old fashioned views because he has done so much good.  These supposedly good ends cannot be justified by the means of promoting the most basic element of ableism that keeps us as second class citizens almost 2 decades after the passage of ADA, pity.  I couldn’t possibly come up with the words that link pity with our oppression and marginalization better than Jerry did himself in a TV interview in 2001: “Pity? You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!”

Not satisfied with handing out Best Picture Awards to deceptive and small minded films like Million Dollar Baby, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences intends to give Jerry Lewis its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscar Awards ceremony on February 22, 2009.

Many people with Muscular Dystrophy and other disabilities strongly object to the way Lewis uses dramatic images of helplessness and pity to beg for money. There is an entire organization called “Jerry’s Orphans” that is made up of former Telethon poster kids who have grown into adults that understand how pity obscures and thwarts demands for justice, respect, and civil rights.

How many of us cringe when someone feels “terrible” that we are LPs/deaf/chair users/learning disabled/autistic/etc? That cringe is what this petition is giving voice to. The Academy Awards plan to present Lewis with their Humanitarian Award for his work with the telethon. The petition describes in more detail why this is problematic and was written by one of Jerry’s Orphans, Laura Hershey. I can say for sure that everything in it is factually accurate. I know the author personally and have researched all of the cases she describes in the petition (I am thinking about writing a dissertation about how pity harms folks with disabilities, so Mr. Lewis provides me with a lot of material).

Jerry Lewis, looking dismayed and surprised...

Anyway the petition against presenting Lewis with the award can be found at: http://www.petitiononline.com/jlno2009/petition.html

The full text of the petition is:

To:  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

This petition has been launched to object to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ announcement that it will give Jerry Lewis its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscar Awards ceremony on February 22, 2009.

During his decades of hosting the Labor Day Telethon, Jerry Lewis has helped to perpetuate negative, stereotypical attitudes toward people with muscular dystrophy and other disabilities. Jerry Lewis and the Telethon actively promote pity as a fundraising strategy. Disabled people want RESPECT and RIGHTS, not pity and charity.

In 1990, Lewis wrote that if he had muscular dystrophy and had to use a wheelchair, he would “just have to learn to try to be good at being a half a person.” During the 1992 Telethon, he said that people with MD, whom he always insists on calling “my kids,” “cannot go into the workplace. There’s nothing they can do.” Comments like these have led disability activists and our allies to protest against Jerry Lewis. We’ve argued that he uses the Telethon to promote pity, a counterproductive emotion which undermines our social equality. Here’s how Lewis responded to the Telethon protesters during a 2001 television interview: “Pity? You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!”

Jerry Lewis has also made derogatory comments about women and gay men. His outdated attitudes and crude remarks are dehumanizing, not humanitarian.

Therefore, we the undersigned support the actions and arguments of the coalition group The Trouble with Jerry. We protest the Academy’s characterization of Jerry Lewis as a “humanitarian.” And we ask that the Academy cancel its plans to give Lewis the Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

It seems only appropriate that I am incredibly ambivalent about Peter Singer’s recent obituary for Harriet McBryde Johnson in the New York Times.  After all, her writing reveals that she herself was ambivalent toward the man, who lays out philosophical arguments for why parents should have the option to kill infants with certain kinds of disabilities.  Many in the disability rights movement are outraged that he was asked to write the piece because he has openly acknowledged that her parents should have had the right to kill her as an infant, if they so chose.  It does seem counter-intuitive to ask a person who publicly puts forth some of the most deeply abelist views possible to tell the story of a vitally important leader in the disability community.  However, if we take Harriet’s description of her own life’s work seriously, we see that she has come to terms with Singer as a human being and not a monster, so why should we close ourselves off from her understanding of the man and continue to demonize him?

In her book chapter about her arguments with Singer - Unspeakable Conversations, her journey toward seeing him as a human and not a monster is a central theme.  Surely, his philosophical views are not something we should stop resisting in every way we can at every opportunity, but can we afford to ignore the lessons she has to teach crip activists about focusing our outrage on systems of oppression and ideologies rather than individual people?  That is a central point of her reflections on her relationship with Singer.

RIP Harriet

She hesitates to even shake his hand upon their first meeting, but after genuinely trying to understand his ideas and how they were developed Harriet concludes: “If I define Singer’s kind of disability prejudice as an ultimate evil, and him as a monster, then I must so define all who believe disabled lives are inherently likely to be less happy, or that a life without a certain kind of consciousness lacks value.  That would make monsters of many of the people with whom I move on the sidewalks, do business, break bread, swap stories, and share the grunt work of politics.  The definition would reach some of my family and most of my nondisabled friends, people who show me enormous kindness and who somehow, sometimes manage to love me through their ignorance.  I can’t live with a definition of ultimate evil that encompasses all of them.  I can’t refuse the monster-majority basic courtesy, respect, and human sympathy.  It’s not in my heart to deny every single one of them, categorically, my affection and love” (227-8).

Key lesson: don’t demonize people for being honest about opinions that most people hold silently.  This is simply a way of scapegoating.  I do think that Harriet is completely right in this regard.  Singer and other bioethicists have become the whipping boys of many within the disability movement.  Surely, his biases are tremendously harmful to us and his arguments must be refuted.  However, these arguments are grounded in the same biases that we encounter every day of lives, even with those we hold closest to us.  Demonizing Singer does not help our cause, but makes us look irrational.

So, if Harriet is right and we cannot reject Singer as “categorically evil,” does this mean that we should uncritically accept him as a spokesman for telling the final chapter of her story in the New York Times?  One objection that I think needs to be raised is the notion that she should be defined only in contrast to him.  That is, Harriet’s life and work were important in their own right and should be remembered as such.  It seems wrong to characterize this leader within our community as only an opponent of Singer’s positions who happened to once allow herself to be tokenized and invited to Princeton (note: Harriet herself describes this experience as a tokenization).  It seems to me, her work to resist the telethon, at the very least, deserves equal air time when publicly summarizing her life. The offense is not THAT Peter Singer wrote the article, but that it did not do her justice as a force unto herself.

So, my objection to Singer’s obituary is not offense at him being some kind of monster.  This would be counter-productive to our cause in that he and others clearly responded better to Harriet’s measured argument than Not Dead Yet style civil disobedience.  This is true for philosophers as a general rule, I’d say.  If we are to silence dangerous opinions, we must do it with arguments of our own that show the opinion holders and the public at large why we are right.  Sometimes, when we are silenced we must use our collective action to get the attention of powers that be with tactics like civil disobedience.  But, once we are taken seriously by our opponents in the public sphere, it is time to move past the chanting and the arrests and address our opponents how we wish to be addressed, as fellow human beings.

Not that he or anyone remotely close to him will read this obscure web-log post, but I wanted my first post since going into the “hibernation” of finals season to be in honor of the Honorable David Paterson, governor of New York.  Recently, SNL did a sketch with Paterson as its subject.  I was busy frantically writing a seminar paper last Saturday and missed the show’s live airing, but caught it on youtube more recently.  Admittedly, parts of the sketch are quite funny, particularly the parts where their portrayal of Paterson “craps on New Jersey.” 

However, the sketch was quite upsetting in their caricature of this articulate, politically savvy leader as a bumbling idiot, merely because he happens to be blind. Typically, SNL is funny in its mockery of politicians because it picks up on personality quirks and contextual absurdity to poke fun at them. For example, Will Ferrell’s famous southern drawl, silly smirk, and ill-imagined SAT words made “strategery” a favorite of my generation. More recently, Tina Fey’s spot on impersonation of Sarah Palin in several opening sketches, with her winking, apparent ignorance public policy, and outright annoying “folksy” demeanor surely had a much bigger influence on people’s political sensibilities than a short spot on Weekend Update, after the show is half over.

Governor David Paterson of New York

So, why would Palin and others keep silent, while Paterson risks the appearance of being an oversensitive, bitter blow hard? The answer is simple, this SNL was not about Governor David Paterson, it was about disability. The sketch does not pick up on any personality quirk of Paterson’s as an individual, but stereotypes him as a blind man. Holding charts upside down, wandering about in front of the camera, and generally appearing confused, these jokes were not about Paterson but about blindness. It is as egregious as if SNL decided to mock Barack Obama, not for being a media darling, as they did, but for being a black man, complete with those stereotypes. I am not trying to engage in the “oppression olympics” here, but mean to point out that this sketch spent a good deal of time mocking a stereotype of disability, not a particular political figure.

Paterson’s response was simply heroic. It is unquestionable that speaking out against the SNL sketch was against his political interest. The associated press reports that Lee Miringoff, an expert pollster that gauges public reaction to politicians, said that the reaction against the skit was “unwise” and explained “I can’t recall the last time a politician has reacted negatively to being lampooned on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ . . . It humanizes them. At least your name is on the marquee.” What this Miringoff doesn’t get is that Paterson was not trying to react in a way that would serve his political interests. What is “unwise” politically can be straight-up valiant when you look beyond the narrow political picture. For once, a politician was not thinking just of himself, but of his community.

Governor Paterson took a strong stance in support of the disability community, showing his moral medal as far as I am concerned:

“Now that [Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin’s not around, they seem to have run out of material . . . The idea of a person rolling around the stage in a chair, being disoriented, can’t find anything, bumbling, in a sense looking like a clown is a way disabled people are portrayed all the time. . . . The perception that disability equals inability to be responsible is totally wrong . . . There is only one way that people could have an unemployment rate that’s six times the national average — it’s attitude . . . And I’m afraid that the kind of third-grade depiction of individuals and the way they look and the way they move add to that negative environment . . . I don’t mind that they make fun of me, but I thought it was important to speak up for those who don’t have a voice and don’t have a job.”

These, my friends, are the words of a true hero of Crip Town. He is not merely a politician who happens to have a disability. He is one of us.

Thank you David.

Recently, there has been a court case in the news about Jarek Molski.  He is a Californian that has recently been told he can no longer bring lawsuits against public businesses that are in violation of the ADA by not allowing for access to their services by wheelchair users.  These violations are of the sort where businesses do not have wheelchair ramps or accessible parking.  The US Supreme court upheld the decision to ban Molski from filing any more law suits — by refusing to hear his most recent case — because he has filed more than 400 of them.

I have no legal training, so my analysis and opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.  However, strangely enough, I agree with the US Supreme court on this one, not because of the NUMBER of cases but because of the OUTCOME of many of these 400 cases.  The LA Times reports, “Fear of adverse judgments compelled many to settle out of court, earning the Polish-born plaintiff hundreds of thousands of dollars in less than two years.”  That is, these businesses were not becoming accessible as a result of these law suits, but paying this man settlements instead.

To me, this is completely absurd.  In fact, I don’t think personal payments should even be allowed in these kinds of ADA cases.  I don’t have a law degree, but it seems to me that these kinds of cases involving access to public space (as opposed to cases that have to do with something like employment discrimination) have very little to do with harms to an individual, but rather harm an entire community or class of people.  It makes absolutely no sense for a harm being visited upon a large group of people to be “settled” by a payment to an individual.

I find the notion that any one individual should have personal gain from these kinds of cases completely and utterly despicable.  This is because he is essentially making a profit of off our community’s marginalization and oppression.  In my opinion, he is no better than a nursing home industry lobbyist that makes a profit off of the isolation and incarceration of our people, who want to live in the community but are stopped by his work manipulating health care benefit laws to exclude community choice.  Somehow, it feels even more repugnant because Molski is supposedly “one of us.”  He knows what it feels like to be excluded from a restaurant or a bar or a barber shop or a book store or any number of places, but chooses to line his pockets and preserve that feeling for others.  This is the ultimate act of selfishness and exploitation.

Perhaps, in the most egregious of cases, it would make sense to award punitive damages to punish the offending business (especially when that business has very deep pockets and could have easily been accessible).  Even then, I feel uncomfortable at the idea of making a payment to an individual as a way of mitigating a harm suffered by an entire community.  I wonder if it would be possible to pay such fines to non-profit organizations that fight for the good of people with disabilities as a whole, like Centers for Independent Living.  Perhaps payments could be made to a scholarship fund for students with disabilities who want to attend college or a fund that helps individuals with disabilities to afford modifications to their living space or transportation to make it accessible?  Maybe these are all pipe dreams, but the thought of paying a single person money to somehow make up for the marginalization of an entire people turns my stomach.  This is NOT what Justin Dart had in mind when he devoted his life to freeing our people with the passage of the ADA.

This term, I am taking a seminar that examines the key writing of German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  Like all of the German philosophy I have read so far, his style of writing is nearly incomprehensible.  Hopefully, I can boil one of his key ideas down into something that can help us understand the way disability was addressed during the most recent Presidential Debate, without being as unreadable as he is.

Heidegger’s idea that I think may be useful to us is “the They.”  The They is - in simplest terms - the unexamined set of boundaries that mark off the limits of what we can think and how we can act as social creatures.  Heidegger argues that, because we always exist in relation to other persons, the possibilities of our existence are constrained by those relationships.  If we all exist in relation to some community and never in true isolation (even if we are rejected by a particular community, our existence is still along side it and relating to it in various ways) then the different possibilities for how we live are limited by our relationship to this community.  Heidegger writes: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking.”

At first, it is tempting to understand this They as a type of conformity or group think.  Maybe Heidegger is arguing that there is something about being human that makes us want to conform to the broader social opinion?  This doesn’t quite seem to get the notion quite right though because the They is not the social community itself or the standards we conform to.  Rather, it is our human way of existing as the type of creature that thinks and acts in relation to a social environment.

McCain and Obama at the 3rd Presidential Debate

While watching the most recent presidential debate, I think I may have stumbled upon an example of how the They works to limit how we act and react in a social environment. A question came up about the qualifications of the vice-presidential candidates, and John McCain took the opportunity to mention his running mate’s supposed expert knowledge about and passion for the benefit of “special needs families” because she has a newborn son with Down syndrome - the adorable and semi-famous Trig that acted as prelude to my last blog post. Specifically McCain grumbled in his mavericky way: “by the way, she also understands special-needs families. She understands that autism is on the rise, that we’ve got to find out what’s causing it, and we’ve got to reach out to these families, and help them, and give them the help they need as they raise these very special needs children. She understands that better than almost any American that I know. I’m proud of her.” Amidst Obama’s response to McCain’s general claims about Palin, Obama countered with “And I think it’s very commendable the work she’s done on behalf of special needs. I agree with that, John.”

This entire exchange from both candidates is fraught with what I would see as a false understanding of the reality of disability. It is tempting to believe that they have merely conformed to a bad way of thinking about and acting toward our crip community.  One such false understanding is that the implicit, unquestioned premise of both candidates’ description of disability is that it is a biological harm that needs to be cured with medicine rather than a social harm that should be mitigated through the restructuring of society. Another, related premise is that the needs of people with disabilities are somehow “special” or different than those of your average human being – access to transportation and housing and education and the basic necessities of life. Another premise that may not come through as clearly to the reader of the text rather than a viewer of the televised debate was the notion that people, especially children, with disabilities are deserving of our pity. The candidates screwed up their faces into soft frowns to show how much the situation of these poor souls troubled them, and Obama quickly agreed that Palin had done “good work” in this area, the possibility of questioning her credentials in disability policy never crossing his mind – despite that fact that she has no leadership experience within the disability rights movement and no demonstrated knowledge of the major contemporary policy issues facing this generation of Americans with disabilities (see my last post).

I would argue that this is a clear example of the They constraining the possibilities of how these candidates exist in relation to disability. To mimic Heidegger’s style: we think, act, and emote toward disability as they think, act, and emote toward disability. Not even considering their status as candidates for the most powerful job in the world, the McCain and Obama sitting on that stage as average Americans moving through this social world did not even have the possibility of relating to disability in a more appropriate way because of the relationship of the They that had controlled them. If my story stopped here, it would seem as if I, as a person with a disability who has experience with the disability activism, culture, and theory, had managed to find a new way of thinking and acting that authentically defined my own possibilities in this area. I had a grasp on the proper way of thinking, acting, and emoting about disability because I came from a purer, advantaged viewpoint. I may have had these thoughts cross my mind for a moment before my phone began to buzz with text messages from friends who were reacting to the ableist rhetoric of the candidates in the exact same way.  That is, they were upset that the candidates were heaping pitty upon these faceless, nameless “special needs children” with the same words and mannerisms that the average American uses when they encounter us and react.  Surely, this was the They at work, defining how these candidates could think, act, and feel about disability.  Of course, a careful observer would realize that, as my friends and I echod each others’ outrage in a predictable way, we had our own They that was setting the boundaries of how we confront these situations. My possibilities were still constrained by the They and I was shrinking back from the ‘great mass’ as they were shrinking back.

So my question is: how do we know when what moves us is not this invisible tyrant of the They, but a genuine personal thought, action, or emotion.  As crip activists, how do we get beyond preaching to the choir and begin to clear new ground?

Yesterday, NY congressman Chuck Rangel referred to Sarah Palin as “disabled” during a news interview. His point was to highlight Palin’s gross inexperience and inadequacey when it comes to foreign policy. Later, he tried to backpedal and claimed that he meant to say Palin was “disadvantaged” and “is an obviously healthy person who in no way fits the description of disabled.”

I agree with Rangel that Palin isn’t qualified to be vice president and has been tokenized by the Republican party in a not-so-subtle attempt to appeal to the white, suburban, female demographic. What I have a hard time with is the notion that someone who DOES “fit the description of disabled” is somehow unworthy of our respect and lacking authority. Rangel’s comment — and pathetic attempt at retraction — was deeply ableist in that it hinged on the premise that people with disabilities deserve our pity and charity, but not our respect and obedience. We must be “kind” to someone who is disabled, but we should not take them seriously if they are in a position of authority. I would challenge Rangel to share what exactly he means by “the description of disabled.”

I have returned now to the “real world” and am coming down off of the natural high of the ADAPT action. The adrenaline of that 5 days was pretty extraordinary. I heard several stories explaining why and how the arrests went down at Dodd’s office — and several other offices of members of congress, apparently. Rather than relate them here, with the inaccuracies of sleep deprived memory, let me point you to ADAPT’s press releases: http://duhcity.org/duhpress.html. They are all informative, but the first on the list — http://duhcity.org/press/duh004.html — is the most relevant to the action that happened on Tuesday on Capitol Hill.

One thing of note that you won’t find on the press release pages is a description of how I spent my Tuesday night.

DUH City was erected as a political statement of solidarity with folks with disabilities who are, in essence, homeless because of the lack of availability of affordable, accessible, integrated housing. Many folks with disabilities are either homeless in the traditional sense of lacking shelter or homeless in the sense that they do not have a home, but are warehoused in institutions and nursing homes. While such arrangements meet the minimal requirements of permanent shelter from the elements, it is argued that they are not homes because the people living their do not have the security and freedom that is essential to calling something a home. That is, a home is not a place where every moment of your day is controlled by someone else’s regimental routine. So it is that ADAPT tried to call attention to these unacknowledged homeless by living as close to homeless as we could for a few days on the front patio of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

ADAPT button with our standard slogan!

In a personal statement of solidarity with people with disabilities who are homeless, I chose to tweak this idea slightly and sleep in a cardboard box on Tuesday night, at the fringes of DUH City. This was intended to be both a political statement, contributing to the overall message of DUH City and an attempt at an exercise in empathy. Since doing this, I have decided these are separable ideas and that I may have succeeded in the one and failed in the other.

As a statement of political solidarity, it probably went mostly unnoticed, but was genuine. However, I don’t think it really worked as a way of building any kind of real personal empathy for those who face this kind of situation as a crisis. As my friend Dominic pointed out in a comment on my post “That could have been me…,” it may be impossible for genuine empathy to be developed between folks who are embedded in systems of drastically disparate power relations. His basic idea was that true empathy — rather than pity — could not exist between able bodied people and folks with a disability because the power differential is too permanent and too absolute for anyone to be capable of truly thinking outside of it.

I am starting to understand Dom’s point here. Like disability, class is a system of power relations. While I can sleep in a cardboard box for a few hours, this will not be a genuine understanding of an impoverished person with a disability’s experience of the world. Firstly, I had a CHOICE of where to sleep. This in itself means that I can not understand the most important aspect of the oppression of poverty and homelessness, power relations. I cannot get outside the fact that I could have gone back to my 200 a night hotel room at any time. How can I understand homeless on anything but the most superficial of levels while retaining this position in society’s power structure? In addition, I had the luxury of a sleeping bag and plenty to eat and plenty of hope for my future. This cannot be a genuine exercise in empathy.

A fellow ADAPTer and I spent all of yesterday traveling.  Fortunately, our chairs made the flight without severe damage, which is pretty common and one of the many ways ableism plays out in a tangible way, as baggage handlers are not well trained or well equipped to deal with the equipent used by folks with disabilities.  However, because our chairs took so long to load, thus slightly delaying the flight, one of the crew felt the need to announce on the loud speaker as we were roaling up to our gate at our destination: “we ask that the handicapped passengers remain in there seats and wait for the rest of the plane to unload.”  Annoyed and already fired up from preparing for the ADAPT action, I said very loudly in response, “Stay in our seats? Oh darn, we were planning to run a footrace up and down the aisle!”  I’m not sure this was heard by the man with the speaker mic, but it definitely earned a few chuckles from those sitting nearest to me.

Now, clearly he was saying this for the benefit of the able bodied passengers who had to wait back in Detroit as our chairs were loaded by people who had no concept of what they were doing and took much longer than they should.  Of course, I understand that it is easiest for us to offload last, so that there is more space to manuever the isle chairs and the many do not have to wait for the few.  That is the typical procedure.  However, I was annoyed that the crew member had to announce this to the rest of flight, implying that somehow the time of the able bodied passengers was so very valuable and they needed to be soothed. 

Today, I have spent most of my time in trainings and meetings, semi-randomly meeting folks in the lobby and passages of the hotel during the down times.  I love this city and I love my people.  My biological family could never be replaced in how deeply I love them and the thankfulness I have for the sacrifices they have made for my benefit.  At the same time, when I spending time with other crip activists, I feel an almost familial relationship to them that is unlike other gatherings.  I certainly haven’t ever felt this unconditionally loved and accepted at a philosophy conference.  Crip culture and community is never as real to me as it is when I am in the physical presence of large numbers of my people.  This has a lot to do with my passion for this work.  I feel a connection to the other activists and know that same connection exists between me and the unseen and the unheard that are the most marginalized.  They are the reason we are here.  To bring them justice and welcome them to the beautiful world we know and love.

FREE OUR PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.adapt.org/

Many of my friends, colleagues, and family members have heard me rant about pity on many occasions. I am very proud of a recent seminar paper I am preparing for future presentation and publication (hopefully) that is titled “Why We Want to ‘Piss On Pity, or How The Ideology of Pity Is a Social Harm to People with Disabilities.” Surely, this blog will serve as a way to test drive many of my ideas about pity, as I try to sharpen them and work them out more fully. One of the main challenges raised every time I mention pity as a harm is the idea that there is something very positive that is closely related to and sometimes confused with pity. This “something” is sometimes called compassion or empathy or sympathy.

While I agree that this something is sometimes linked to pity in our thoughts somehow, I want to argue that this something goes so far beyond mere pity that it becomes its opposite. For the sake of this essay, I will call this something empathy.

While I am not going to take the time to completely lay out my argument for why pity is a harm, let’s start by saying that pity depends on the existence of a harmful power relation and serves as a way of preserving that power relation. For pity to exist, there must be a power inequality between the pitier and the pitiful. Someone must be better off than someone else and look down upon them from a perch of privilege. Pity preserves this set of pre-conditions because it does not acknowledge or work to change this power relation. In fact, pity treats this power relation as inevitable and natural. Responding to someone’s suffering with an act of pity obscures the fact that the root causes of their suffering could be changed. For example, let us say that someone responded with pity to a person with a mobility disability who could not access a restaurant because of a staircase. That able bodied person may express their pity with words of sorrow at the chair user’s horrid predicament at not being able to walk up the stairs. Perhaps, the able bodied person may offer to get a take out order for the chair user. However, these responses do not at all respond to the fact that the chair user could enter the restaurant if it was ramped. Once you make the move to thinking about the problem in this way, you move away from a response of pity and toward a response of justice. A ramped doorway is not an act of pity, but an act that equalizes people’s power status and contributes to considerations of justice.

However, just as an unequal power relation is a pre-condition for the existence of pity, it seems to me that empathy is a pre-condition to the existence of justice. The “golden rule” or the ability to place yourself in the situation of the suffering other in a genuine way (aka empathy) dismantles this power relation. When we are able to authentically imagine ourselves in the situation of the person who is suffering, we recognize that mere pity is harmful and that we must address the power relation itself that has created this suffering.

While talking to a friend who also has dwarfism a few days ago, she told me a story about the first time she meant someone that was homeless and had dwarfism. She was struck by their suffering, gave them a hug, and bought them lunch. The fact that she hugged this man speaks to me that this was an act of empathy and not mere pity. That is, she treated him as a respected friend rather than an other she was looking down upon. Without any prompting, she explained her actions as motivated by a sense that “that could have been me…” She recognized that the injustices in our society create a system where folks with disabilities like dwarfism (and every other kind of difference that would be characterized as disabling) face huge challenges of bigotry that severely limit their flourishing. With these words of “that could have been me…” she recognized that it was a matter of chance that she was born into a family that had the disposition and the means to not turn her over to the state for a life of institutionalization. The chance of her circumstances allowed her to join Little People of America and gain access to a network of support and eventually get a college degree so that she would not face the same suffering of this man on the street. My friend recognized that it was an accident of fate that positioned her to help this man in the way that she could and that this was a matter of injustice. This friend has developed a perceptive empathy for these kinds of situations and these experiences have moved her to become involved in the disability movement and pursue a law degree so she can address these matters of injustice head on. I think her desire to fight for and with the most marginalized folks with disabilities all comes back to her ability to say “that could have been me…”