PhilosopherCrip

I often use the word “crip” to refer to disability on this site and with those I am comfortable with, who I think can handle it.  I don’t often use it in professional settings, but even then it occasionally slips out.  Many times, I find myself having to explain how and why I am using the word.  Both temporarily non-disabled folks and people with disabilities express curiosity, amusement, horror, or some combination of these emotions in varying ratios.  I then attempt to educate and sooth them with an explanation about reclaiming language and how many marginalized groups have done and continue to do this with words that have traditionally marked them as “less than.”

When I use the term with other crip activists, I operate on the assumption that we are using the term in the same way with the same meaning.  Over this winter break, I have finally gotten around to finishing the very compelling autobiography of Harriet McBryde Johnson (started it last Spring), who also uses it as a word of choice when referring to people with disabilities.  It was this reading that made me question whether this term is used with a consistent meaning in the disability movement.

While describing her trip to Cuba, Harriet writes about the structure of their disability movement and the different organizations that have formalized it “One is comprised of people who are deaf and hard of hearing, one is of blind and visually impaired people, and the third, ACLIFIM, Asociacion Cubano de Limitados Fisico-motores, is made up of people with “physical-motor” disabilities, what we call crips” (156).  This definition of the word crip shocked me and seriously undercut the assumption that everyone in the disability world used the word in the same way.  Here I was two-thirds of the way through a book that I think has become an instant classic of crip culture, realizing that this luminary was using the term in a very different way.  What was even more disturbing is that I think Harriet, who has taught me a great deal with her writing, is using the term in a way that is not quite right somehow.  I’m not sure if I can argue that my use of crip is objectively and absolutely correct, but I do want to say that it has some important advantages.

My new vanity plate! Crip Power Baby!

First, let’s make the distinction.  The difference in usage is subtle, but it seems like Harriet wants to attach the term to a particular biological category, whereas my use is broader and more grounded in a social or political identity.  I have had discussions with many friends in the disability community that run the gambit of diagnosis and our usage does not distinguish between biological types of disabilities.  I have friends who are Deaf that identify as crips and use the word to describe themselves as part of a community and a social movement.  Unlike Harriet’s usage, you do not have to have a mobility disability to qualify, but rather a particular worldview.  To me, crips are people that have disabilities and that recognize the stigma and marginalization they experience in their daily lives for what it is, and choose to defy it.  So, more people can fall under the category than just those described by Johnson.  I think this is a better way of defining the term because it allows for a greater solidarity across disability types.  It focuses on the common experience of marginalization and common interest of liberation, rather than differences that have segregated us in the medical-human services complex.

Further, my usage of the word may be broader in its biology, but it is more narrow in its politics.  In her chapter about her MDA telethon protests, Harriet refers to a man that acts as her foil on a televised talk-show about the telethon as an “establishment crip.”  Clearly, this is a jab at his authenticity as a real member of the crip community, and so there must be something political about the term for her too.  However, the fact that she can identify him as a crip of any variety tells me that, for her, the term is more about biology than ideology.  I don’t think a person deserves to weild the title until they have seriously considered disability as a social system of oppression and begun to work toward the good of the crip community, as such.  It would be a stretch for an MDA Telethon defender to qualify.  Again, I prefer this usage because it emphasizes our community as it defines itself in its defiance of oppression, rather than is defined by the medical establishment, which is the lynchpin of the system of that oppression.

This is not to deny that crippiness in particular and disability identity in general is bound up closely with biological difference.  I don’t think that my use of the word crip could apply to a person that didn’t have some kind of physical, sensory, cognitive, or emotional difference of some kind, even if it wasn’t formally diagnosed by a physician.  I guess my point is just that our use of the term should move away from the biology as much as possible so that we can truly reclaim it on our own terms.

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.

I don’t have a great deal of time to write this afternoon, but wanted to weigh in on Obama’s speech last night.  A lot of my friends were very pleased he mentioned disability as a difference that, while relevant and important, cannot stop us from uniting as one people.  He said, “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.”  Of course, in a world where disability is so often swept under the rug as an issue that is not as “sexy” as the others — it’s sad when the tax code is perceived as more interesting — it was encouraging to hear our next president call out to us with his message of unity and hope.  Let’s look at it a bit more carefully.

Obama delivers his victory speech on on November 4, 2008 in Chicago before an estimated 200,000 people

First and foremost, disability was listed among a series of human traits that have historically been separated out and marginalized as the “Other.”  That is, Obama’s message of unity is closely bound up with a message of justice.  Unity cannot merely be a sweeping under the rug of oppressions and marginalizations.  We cannot IGNORE how folks are treated differently in the name of “unity.”  Sometimes, unity must be sacrificed in order to deal with injustice (like the civil war or the civil rights movement).  However, at the end of the day, true unity CAN be achieved if we address these differences head on and right the wrongs that have divided us.  For me, the reason Obama’s mention of my community brought up a swell of emotion has to do with this recognition of injustice and his call to achieve unity through its demolition.  Unity should not be achieved by excercizing top down power that ignores or suppresses difference and forces conformity, but through grassroots change that renders such differences as close to harmless as possible.

Closely tied to this recognition of a need for justice to achieve unity was an implicit call to action.  He was saying that these marginalized groups have the power to address their own oppression, take back what is rightly theirs as Americans (civil rights), and unify our nation as one people.  If the key to unity is to address injustice, we ourselves as marginalized, divided people must take action to do just this.  While John McCain enjoyed talking about HIS personal responsibility and HIS record of putting country first, Obama called upon an entire people to, themselves, take responsibility for our nation’s fate.  The difference here is key to why Obama was able to win in such a big way.  It is the key to his political genius.  John McCain talked about “the government” as if it was some hulking, mysterious force that acted upon our lives while Barack Obama called us to be involved in understanding and shaping how this force affected our country.  He called us to remember that the government is not some great evil, but rather a creation of the people, for the people, and by the people.

The rhetoric that surrounded disability was no exception.  McCain wanted to talk about how his government would help children “with special needs.”  Obama, on the other hand, called our entire community to his side, recognizing our collective voice and our power to ourselves create change.  As evidenced by his very informed, thoughtful disability policy platform and his recognition of us on his diversity “short list” last night, Obama did not set us apart as an other to be pitied, but asked for our help to change the social landscape of a nation.

At the end of the day, Barack Obama’s electoral college landslide was nothing short of the greatest COMMUNITY ORGANIZING effort ever to be conceived and executed.  YES WE CAN!!!!

I’m not sure if the government “officially” designated October as Disability History Month, but it is widely celebrated as such in the disability activist community.  In some states (like NC and soon to be MI if all goes well), the public schools even teach a disability history curriculum during the month of October by mandate of state legislation.

If you have time, this is a good time to pick up a book about the history of the disability rights movement.  The industry standard is No Pity by Joseph Shapiro.  A more focused, but still fascinating and important book is activist and attorney Harriet McBride Johnson’s biography Too Late to Die Young. I was very lucky to be able to see Harriet speak and have her sign my copy a few years ago and am sad that I will not get to see her speak again now that I have read her book — she passed over the summer.

I can’t figure out how to embed a google video right into my page like I can youtube, but here is a link to a VERY well made short film about some major figures in the history of disability activism.  It summarizes the stories of Ed Roberts (visionary founder of the Independent Living movement), Wade Blank (original organizer of ADAPT, which uses grassroots non-violent direct action activism), and Justin Dart (my favorite Republican - except my dad - who is responsible for educating the entire country, from the grassroots to the president, about his vision for the inclusion of crips in mainstream society, which eventually became the ADA).  These are the heros of “crip town” and some of the patriots we should aspire to emulate.

My last post highlighted the idea that we, as human beings, belong to certain communities and play certain roles that limit or determine the possibilities of how we can respond to certain issues. That is, our social position and the relationships we have with others shapes how we think and act. However, I don’t want readers to think that I am some kind of moral relativist who believes that one way of thinking and acting is no better or worse than another. Philosophers may sometimes hold this view, but activists, surely, do not.

So, I’d invite you to watch the above youtube video that outlines McCain’s response to the Community Choice Act, which is perhaps the most important crip legislation to face the nation since the Americans with Disabilities Act. It calls into question Palin’s claims about her knowledge of and loyalty to disability politics by linking her to McCain’s hard line stance against this bill. I thought it was well made and summarizes a lot of what has happened with disability politics in recent history.

Also, look for my friend Amber being arrested at McCain’s office last spring (whose blog called this video to my attention at http://ambertracker.blogspot.com/) .

Recently, my very good friend Amber took a trip to South Korea to understand how their disability movement in general and their feminist disability movement in particular have developed (http://ambertracker.blogspot.com/). This has gotten me thinking about how culture and political history have shaped our movement in the US. Typically, I tend to be as ethnocentric as the next American and my judgments are certainly still biased by my privilege as a US citizen. However, I have been on a kick the last few days, thinking about how American liberalism shapes our ideas about what it means to resist the oppressive structures that have marginalized us.

When I refer to liberalism, I am not talking about the “liberal left” but rather the political philosophy that tells us that the purpose of government is to preserve our individual freedoms. This is the notion that laws are in place to ensure that our freedoms do not infringe upon the freedoms of others.

Laws like the ADA seem to be directly connected to this notion. Access to public space and employment anti-discrimination are justified by their effects on individuals. Like the romanticized settlers of the western frontier, folks with disabilities are blazing a trail into a new territory, as rugged individuals. Relying on their own mettle, they take risks and reap rewards accordingly.

Of course, this is also somewhat problematic. This emphasis on the value of the individual is a double edge sword as it largely contributes to the very core of the bigotry of ableism. Interconnectedness and interdependence are the values that will free our people, not individualistic, libertarian ideology. In fact, these values are realities for all Americans that are often ignored. American culture tells us there is shame in having someone help you dress if you need it, but having someone else cut your hair is par for the course. We have this mythology that we are individuals that survive in a harsh world on our own. When folks with physical and cognitive differences need help in different ways, their lives are disvalued as having less quality or dignity.

While our freedoms have a uniquely American flavor, so do some of our oppressions. We need to look elsewhere if we are to understand how we can think outside of this box and move away from this kind of marginalization.

First, let me apologize for any grammatical/spelling mistakes of these “on site” posts. I don’t have much down time for rest and so I need to squeeze some writing in as I go along. There certainly isn’t time for editing, if I want to have the opportunity to sleep at all.

Today started early. That is, we wanted to surprise our target (National Headquarters of HUD) an so we got there before any of the staff or administration. I went to bed at around 10:30pm Sunday night, and was up at 2:15am Monday morning, so the march from the hotel could begin at 4am sharp! Many of my friends and family who mock me for not being an early riser will find that amusing. We arrived at HUD and began to erect tents on their patio, labeling it DUHCity (get it, HUD and DUH?). Security guards scrambled around, and there is even a rumor that we woke one up with our 4am chanting, but we weren’t there to “take” HUD. We were merely using it as a staging ground for other actions throughout the city.

At around 6am, my friend Amber, in charge of media relations asked me to help make calls to newspaper/radio/tv stations and invite them to our tent speckled DUH City. I was a telemarketer throughout my high school and college summer vacations and so I was ready and willing to deploy these skills under a streetlamp in the service of ADAPT. Surprised that so many news types don’t come in until 9am or so, I ended up leaving quite a few messages on voice mail. We hadn’t seen any major news outlets poking around at the time that I left DUH City about an hour ago, but we are in it for the long hall and so it’s possible they will show up, enticed by my salesmanship.

Talking about the long hall, it should be noted that DUHCity is a 24 hour operation. It should also be noted that I have been assigned to the overnight group responsible for making sure that it stays in tact until the daylight returns. I am naturally a pretty nocturnal person, so this won’t be too bad. I am about to take a 5 or so hour nap and I will buy some of my famous sugar free red bull being heading back out this evening. I need to be ready for an eventful night though, because it’s possible that the police, seeing that we are not leaving, may try to sweep through and remove us overnight. I know this is not what my family wants to hear, btu I knew about this risk going into non-violent direct action organizing. I have thought about this a lot. I have read about it and discussed it with a wide range of folks (see earlier post “Why non-violent direct action?”). It has been over 3 years since when I first heard about what ADAPT does and now made this decision to be involved in a direct and meaningful way.

I have some pics from my camera phone that I may post later, but I just don’t have it in me right now. I need to find my bed and rest before I need to shower and get ready for tonight’s possible test of will.

For more info about the action, including our platform, see www.DUHCity.org.

FREE OUR PEOPLE!!!!!!!!