PhilosopherCrip

I’ve been kind of vague with most of my teachers and colleagues about how I am spending next week. I’m never exactly sure how folks will react to the idea of non-violent direct action civil disobedience. Sometimes, I get an amused chuckle when I explain to someone what ADAPT does. Other times, I get a reaction of disbelief, people thinking that oppression and the non-violent resistance that opposes it are historic relics. Another common response is condescending advice like “You can’t expect to get anywhere if you’re so angry like that. Why don’t you just ask them nicely for what you want?” Some of the people that are closest to me understand my motivations, but worry that my history of direct action activities may harm me or my career later down the line. The best explanation I know of what non-violent direct action is, how it works, and why marginalized groups use it is MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Of course our situations are not exactly analogous, but there are many similarities in the systems of our oppression and how they are sustained by privaleged classes. One similarity is that we are often - condescendingly - told that we should tolerate our marginalization with a pleasant disposition and not rock the boat. The fact is, ADAPT is trying to address the fact that thousands upon thousands of people with disabilities are incarcerated in nursing homes against there will across the US because of the way benefit programs are set up. This situation is sustained by the deep pockets of the nursing home lobby, combined with the cultural bigotry and social ignorance of our country that says people with disabilities are not capable of integration and are better off segregated out of view. This combination means that negotiation with the power structure controlling this issue is an impossibility.

Martin Luther King's Mug Shot

The full text of MLK’s illuminating letter can be found at: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

In the meantime, this will get you started with an understanding of the reasoning behind why non-violent direct action is an essential tool: “You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.”

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…”

As someone involved in community organizing/direct action activism, I was enraged at the dismissive, elitist words and tone used by Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin during their convention speeches this week. How can a party talk about “country first” while mocking the efforts of ordinary folks to bring their communities out of despair? Apparently, according to the Republicans, the only way one can put their “country first” is by killing people. Apparently dropping napalm is a more valuable service to America than I thought?

One of my favorite CNN.com columnists, Roland Martin hits the nail right on the head with this piece where he says “So when Rudy Giuliani and Palin mock community organizers, they don’t just toss a barb at Sen. Barack Obama . . . they degrade the women who fought for their rights. They disrespect the labor activists and immigrant worker activists like Cesar Chavez. They dismiss those in the civil rights movement — folks from small town America who were sick and tired of being sick and tired. They thumb their noses at the Nelson Mandelas of the world who want a better life for their children. It would have been perfectly fine for Giuliani and Palin to say that Obama’s community organizing days didn’t amount to enough experience to be president. But when you openly laugh and mock those hard-working Americans who are in the trenches every day, then you really don’t care about “Country First” or service.”

So who is elitist now, John McCain, with your $500 Italian leather loafers and more houses than you can even count? You came from privalege and you still serve privalege and no amount of flag waving is going to change that fact.

The human mind must categorize the objects it comes into contact with, thus developing expectations about this kind of object should it be encountered again. Arguably, this is the essence of any kind of learning we do as human beings. We could not function in the world if we could not recognize types of things and then act accordingly. Some of our categories and expectations were learned at a very young age, like not to touch a hot stove. It is useful to sometimes categorize people as well as objects and develop expectations of interaction with them. A very basic example would be the expectation that a member of the category “police officer” will pull you over for speeding.

Of course, this process of categorization and expectation can also be quite harmful when someone bases their expectations on flawed information about the thing they are categorizing. If someone’s only knowledge of polar bears came from Coca Cola ads, they would be in for some serious consequences if they jumped into a zoo exhibit in the hope of getting a cuddle. Of course, in this case, the only consequence experienced by the polar bear is that he gets an exotic lunch. Categories of THINGS are generally not harmed by flawed information that leads to false expectations. The reverse is true when folks develop flawed expectations about entire categories of PEOPLE because the members of that category are typically the ones that are harmed by individualized and institutionalized bigotry. The flawed categorization and expectation of people is perhaps even the definition of prejudice.

Just as Coca Cola commercials feed us false images of polar bears, many different cultural sources represent people with disabilities in inaccurate and harmful ways. People with dwarfism are often portrayed as comical, infantile, or even malicious. My friend Gary over at the blog Common Ground wrote a recent piece describing a situation where a modeling agency contacted the support/advocacy group Little People of America (LPA) to try and recruit 50 people with dwarfism to dress up as the character Chuckie from the Child’s Play film series and run around Manhattan to promote a new DVD release. It never occurred to this modeling agency rep that LPA was something more than a “talent pool” for her exploitation. This is one of many expressions of people’s expectations about dwarfism that have been tainted by bad information about us as a category of people.

Such mistakes in categorization and expectation are everyday occurrences in the lives of people with disabilities and their affects can range from annoying to tragic. Last week, I had just left the building I live in and was headed across campus for a meeting when a man on a bicycle stopped and asked if I was OK or if I needed any help. After checking to make sure that my fly was zipped and that I hadn’t dropped all of the papers out of my notebook, I told him that I was doing just fine. I don’t think I looked any more confused than usual, but this gentleman had some bad information about the category of person with disability and assumed that I must need help, just by virtue of the fact that I was traveling across campus in my power chair alone on a Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps he assumed I had wandered away from my caretakers at the nursing home. Joking aside, these kinds of expectations of dependence and helplessness are exactly what keep people with disabilities from being full members of society. The idea that our category is defined as helpless in the minds of the public places us in a subordinate role in society. We are not the category of person that is a business person or a teacher or a politician or a husband or an engineer or a mother or… a grad student on the way to a meeting with the prof he is TAing for this term.

Sometimes, such expectations are self fulfilling prophecies when a system is set up according to those expectations. For example, last week, I arrived to teach the afternoon discussion sections of the class I am TAing, only to find that the only way to reach the front of the lecture hall was down a flight of stairs. There were accessible seats in the back for students, but the expectation was not that the teacher would have a mobility disability. This case shows how the physically built environment itself can express the ignorant construction of categories and flawed expectations, making it much harder for members of that category to get away from those expectations. Because of the way the room was built, it was impossible for me to take on the traditional perch of the teacher. Such expectations are fulfilled every time a person with a disability is forced into a nursing home because their Medicaid refuses to pay for community attendant support or in the fact that Michigan Rehab Services will pay for someone’s re-training after they acquire a disability, as long as that re-training doesn’t include the pursuit of a college degree. It is expected that people with disabilities would be segregated in nursing homes or incapable of going to college, and so the systems are set up according to that expectation.

How do we resist these flawed category definitions and change people’s expectations of us? Employment law or Medicaid reform can only do so much. We need to redefine some categories if the apparatus of ableism is going to come tumbling down.

With the fierce primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and today’s announcement of McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, this presidential election has been and will continue to be thick with identity politics. That is, individual members of historically marginalized groups are finally at the point of sharing real power in our country and other members of those same groups are taking notice and often voting according to that shared identity. Being a member of a marginalized group, I can appreciate the desire to vote according to that identity.

I absolutely believe that other folks with highly visible physical differences (like my dwarfism) and mobility disabilities (like my use of a power chair) understand a part of “what it’s like to be me” in ways that an able bodied person never could. Close friends and family have a strong sense of empathy and do feel my outrage or pain when they are present as I am being marginalized or ridiculed, but they do not know what it’s like to live every moment of your life with such marginalization or ridicule right around the corner. For those that are close to me, their empathetic suffering is a temporary condition.

So it is that I understand that even complete strangers who are genuine members of a marginalized group can profoundly and uniquely understand each other’s lived experience in some ways (but CERTAINLY not all ways). Because of this feeling that other members of our group “get it” just because they share this identity, it’s easy to want to support them in their political ambitions. We trust people like ourselves more easily and we see their success as intimately bound up with our success. That is why people of color and women came out in droves this year to support Barack and Hillary, respectively.

However, if we were to practice identity politics in a completely uncritical way, we run the risk of tokenizing ourselves. In fact, I believe this trap is what John McCain is betting on in choosing a female Veep today.

When someone is tokenized, they are deliberately placed in a social or political position that gives the appearance of inclusiveness. In other words, it is a dominant group’s attempt to satiate a subjugated group by throwing them a bone. A tokenized person with a disability in a mainstream classroom provides ammunition for a school board to claim that they are not discriminatory by segregating everyone else in a “special” education back room, “But look! We are inclusive where that kind of thing is appropriate!”

As voters, if we vote for someone just because they superficially share our marginalized identity, even if they support policies that strike directly against our interests, we tokenize that candidate. Sarah Palin has the biology of a woman, but the troubling brand of fiercely conservative politics that she shares with John McCain does nothing to help the ordinary working class American woman, who is trying to make good amidst a foreign and domestic crisis. Conservatism does nothing but preserve the status quo, which is largely a system of oppression for everyday women.

It’s curious that MCain is not willing to tokenize himself by talking publically about his disability. Perhaps the stigma of disability is too strong and too internalized for him to come to terms with the idea that he himself is disabled – he sustained permanent injuries from his time as a prisoner of war and collects a disability pension from the Navy. Or, it’s likely that he (rightly) believes that disability is not as unified an identity as gender or race and so most people with a disability would not vote for him based on that identity. One thing is certain, as long as John McCain opposes policies that would free our people (like the Community Choice Act or universal health care), I won’t vote for him no matter how cripped out he is.