PhilosopherCrip

While we were ultimately successful at Senator Debbie Stabenow’s Lansing office this week, we definitely rocked the boat quite a bit, thus really upsetting some of the crew.  In fact, the Lansing contingent of MI-ADAPT’s bad behavior even earned us a phone call the next day to our state organizer from one of the senior staffers.  It felt something like when you get in trouble at school and get a phone call to your parents that evening.  Except, in this case, we could count on the recipient of the call to be in on the act instead of ready to send us to our rooms with no dinner.  For the moment, I’m going to put aside how absurd it is for a government official to call and chastise a direct action activism group (she works for the people and should be the one afraid of displeasing us).  Rather, I’m going to write a few quick words about why it is non-violent, direct action, civil disobedience is necessary in American politics and how it is so very effective.  That is, this blog will be aimed at readers who are confused or upset by the notion that someone might use civil disobedience to “strong arm” others in negotiations amidst a democratic society.  I will do this in the context of other struggles for liberation, partially as a tribute to Black History Month.

Let’s start by pointing out some big differences between the context of our use of civil disobedience and the more familiar and more widely accepted usages of it by 1960s era civil rights leaders.  At the most obvious level, there is a difference in who is committing the civil disobedience. This is nothing more than the simple observation that crips are not a racial minority.  Moreover, we do not have the same history as black Americans and the nature of our oppression, while sharing some structural similarities, is not the same.  While we are also fighting for the end to institutionalized segregation (in nursing homes) and violence (physical and emotional abuse, and killing, that happens in these places), there are many differences between these experiences, most of which I can not even fully see or understand as a white male.

Black activists are met with violence in Birmingham, AL 1963

There is also a substantive difference in how the civil disobedience is carried out.  The famous actions of MLK highlighted the injustice of segregationist laws by breaking those very same laws.  The idea was, if it’s illegal for people of color to sit at the same lunch counter as everyone else, we are going to clog the lunch counters and make them lose business or have us arrested so that the world sees how wrong this is.  In the case of ADAPT’s actions, the laws we are resisting are not as straightforward and not as easily broken.  Medicaid regulations aren’t the type of things you can directly flout en mass to raise public outcry at their injustice.  I can’t even imagine what this would even look like.  How might we break the unjust laws of the institutional bias that incarcerates our people in nursing homes in a way that would be public and raise the tension around this issue to the surface of public consciousness where it can be seen by everyone and not just those that are suffering and dominated?

I don’t think that because we can not directly break the unjust laws with our actions it means that our civil disobedience is somehow unjustified.  It seems that the balance of power between the powerful and the marginalized is as scewed as ever and non-violent, civil disobedience is a viable tactic.

First, and most obviously, it raises the issue to public consciousness.  The drama of sit ins and arrests makes people talk.  What are these people doing?  What issue is so important to them that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies in this way?  Even the most negative response of “that’s not the way democracy works” at least gets people to acknowledge the issue at hand, which is difficult for a marginalized group that is so often swept aside for “sexier” political issues.

This week, MI-ADAPT’s action didn’t get to the point of police and TV crews, but it functioned as a negotiation tactic.  No one explains how civil disobedience is PART of the negotiation process better than the man himself, MLK, in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” after he was imprisoned during the Birmingham lunch counter sit ins, “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.”  When there is such an imbalance of power that a marginalized group is not even allowed the common courtesy of serious consideration and negotiation, that is when non-violence must come in to play to put the negotiations back into balance.

This is exactly what happened at the Senator’s office last Tuesday.  Let me back up.  Over the past 2 years, MI-ADAPT had sent emails requesting co-sponsorship of the CCA that were responded to with form letters.  We had requested formal meetings to talk about our issue with the Senator and were told to wait and that they would “get back to us.” Once, some of our members showed up in the Senator’s DC office to see if she was there and might at least say a quick hello.  He caught her in the hall and was told she had already intended to sign on to the CCA and it must have been a staff oversight.  Clearly, this is a pattern of people with disabilities being swept aside and told to wait.  It was not an outright hostility, but it was a clear message that we are not a priority and our lives and liberty don’t matter as much as the issues she was dealing with.  This message came through loud and clear in Stabenow’s Lansing office this week.  Again, we were told they would pass along the message, but we would have to wait.  They could not guarantee support, they could not even guarantee a meeting about the substance of the issue.  That is, we were being told that THEY have the power and were not letting go of it.  THEY controlled if negotiations even would happen and were not about to give any ground.

ADAPTers getting arrested at national action in Nashville, TN 2006 (photo by Tom Olin)

It was only after we realized that we were not being negotiated with in a serious way because we were perceived as powerless that we moved to take back the power we needed in order to get the attention our brothers and sisters dieing in institutions deserve.  The chanting and blocking of the office exits was not a move at coercion, but a move to get their attention and become an urgent priority rather than a marginalized group that could be ignored.

This is the state of American politics.  It is built around a system in which big campaign contributors have access to the law makers and the rest of us are told to stand in line indefinitely.  When we do not have deep pockets, we need to find other ways of becoming a priority for our “public servants.”  Even those who are not directly hostile to our cause, like Debbie Stabenow who HAS supported de-institutionalization in the past, serve the whims of the already powerful.  The issues that have her attention — and the attention of every other legislator — are those that serve the interests of the wealthy and the connected.  To become a priority and to get her attention as a group deserving negotiation, we could not use our bank accounts, so, in the tradition of other marginalized groups, we used our bodies and our voices.

To supplement my last post encouraging readers to track the adventures of MI-ADAPT via twitter.com, I thought I’d add a few words about what ADAPT is exactly.  I lifted the various pieces this description off of the national org’s website, but feel it accurately describes the MI chapter as well.

The Main Issue at Hand: For decades, people with disabilities, both old and young, have wanted alternatives to nursing homes and other institutions when they need long term services. Our long term care system has a heavy institutional bias. Every state that receives Medicaid MUST provide nursing home services, but community based services are optional. Sixty seven (67%) percent of Medicaid long term care dollars pay for institutional services, while the remaining thirty three (33%) must cover all the community based waivers, optional programs, etc.  Families are in crisis. When support services are needed there are no real choices in the community. Whether a child is born with a disability, an adult has a traumatic injury or a person becomes disabled through the aging process, they overwhelmingly wan t their attendant services provided in their own homes, not nursing homes or other large institutions. People with disabilities and their families will no longer tolerate being forced into selecting institutions. It’s time for Real Choice.  The Community Choice Act provides an alternative and will fundamentally change our long term care system and the institutional bias that now exists. Building on the Money Follows the Person concept, the two million Americans currently residing in nursing homes and other institutions would have a choice.

History: ADAPT has a long history of organizing in the disability community and using civil disobedience and similar non-violent direct action tactics to achieve its goals. In 1983, as a project of the Atlantis Community in Denver, ADAPT began its national campaign for lifts on buses and access to public transit for people with disabilities. ADAPT started as American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit. For seven years ADAPT blocked buses in cities across the US to demonstrate the need for access to public transit. Many went to jail for the right to ride. In the early 1990s the County and City of Denver and Denver RTD placed a plaque at the intersection on Colfax where the Atlantis Community held the first inaccessible bus and this was one of the first historic markers in the struggle for disability rights. Wade Blank, a founder of Atlantis and ADAPT, used to take all visitors to see it, and always brought a bottle of Fantastic to clean it up. ADAPT played a major role in gaining passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, particularly in ADA’s stringent requirements relating to accessible transit, and its being seen as a civil rights law. Passage of this bill has meant victory for ADAPT in our struggle for lifts on buses. Once the transit issue was won and access was begun to be guaranteed, ADAPT felt it was clear attendant services must be our next issue. In a national planning meeting July 1990, ADAPT targeted the reallocation of one quarter of the federal and state Medicaid dollars from institutional programs to consumer controlled community based programs. ADAPT now also stands for American Disabled For Attendant Programs Today. Since then, ADAPT has decided our name will no longer be an acronym (it’s hard to fit all the issues into those letters) so we are simply ADAPT, but we are still fighting for community services and supports for people with disabilities of all ages.

This will be a quick post in which I try to check my own privilege.  My last few posts have torn into Jerry Lewis pretty hard, while an earlier one warns against demonizing public figures who have bad, yet common opinions about disability.  While I don’t agree with Peter Singer’s reasoning or conclusions regarding disability policy, I quote Harriet McBride Johnson’s line of thought that we ought to not demonize people like Singer for holding the opinions he does because they are common opinions.  That is, his philosophy is based in a social ignorance about disability and so it wrong to use him as a whipping boy or symbol of our opposition.  He is a human being that is just as flawed as the man on the street (or post office, or kitchen table, etc.) that, more silently, concurs with his opinions.  For more on this, see below.

So, why is it that I am so quick to agree with Harriet about Peter while being so quick to condemn Jerry?  Ought we not grant the same benefit of the doubt to Jerry?  Is this a failure to treat likes alike?  Harriet does the same thing in her book, Too Late to Die Young.  Jerry’s condemnation is so fundamental to her story that she named the entire thing in honor of her realization that his bigotry was grounded in ignorance (she believed for many years that she would die young because of the tragic imagery of the MDA Telethon).  Yet, as I argue below, the major point of Unspeakable Conversations is that we need to rage against ideologies and systems of oppression without demonizing individuals.

Have Harriet and I both got it wrong?  Do we extend our common courtesy to Singer because he speaks our language?  He has very dangerous opinions, but he dresses them up in the language of measured, rational argument and so they are somehow more worthy of our respect?  Lewis is a bloated, aging comic with a hot temper who supplies us with an abundance of sound bites.  Singer is much more palatable with his gentle mannerisms and endowed chair at Princeton.  At the end of the day, their basic beliefs about disability are STRIKINGLY similar.  Jerry thinks chair users need to become good at “being a half a person” and Singer believes we have less opportunity to satisfy our preferences and enjoy life.  Isn’t this almost EXACTLY the same thing?  Surely, both men influence public opinion in a big way, one with a telethon being beamed into millions of households and the other by teaching the ruling elite at Princeton.   Why then, do Harriet and I respond so differently to these two men?

It’s possible that it is just a matter of privilege.  That is, I have my own biases about social class, age, and education that make me more likely to have respect and perhaps empathy for Singer but not Lewis.

Maybe, for Harriet it was a strategic move rather than a matter of prejudice?  I think in Singer’s case we may have hope of having a measured debate with him, changing his mind and the mind of his followers with our superior arguments.  For Lewis, with his crude words, we may have a better chance of taking him on with protests, petitions, and perhaps an arrest action or 2.  I obviously have no idea whether Harriet ever considered this conundrum she has set up, but do see how Singer would appear at least on the surface as more persuadable.  Lewis responds to criticism with anger and threats that we need to stay out of public view, while Singer invites his opponent to have a public dialogue.  So perhaps it is not the difference between demonizing one man while defending the other but rather reacting with a style that is strategically the most likely to work?  Or, am I again just justifying my privilege in a new way?

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.

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/) .