PhilosopherCrip

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.

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.”

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…”

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.