PhilosopherCrip

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!!!!

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/) .

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?

After tonight’s debate, I am brewing a post about the rhetoric of pity that has framed the public discussion of disability this presidential cycle.  It seemed to really come to a head tonight (and was deployed by BOTH candidates).  I need to get my paws on a transcript of the debate so I can accurately critique what was said.  It seems to me that poor Trig Palin’s mom has tokenized him from birth, but more on that later.

Until then (hopefully I’ll have time this weekend), I thought I’d share an email my sister forwarded to me that was written by a special education attorney in my home state of Connecticut.  I found it to be a thoughtful and illuminating analysis of Palin’s repeated claim to expertise about “special needs kids” because she happens to be the mother of an infant with Down Syndrome.  I think it does a good job of getting at some of the core issues at stake in this election, rather than getting hung up on the hollow sound bytes.

Trig Palin, the most famous (and most exploited) crip kid since Ashley X!

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Dear clients, friends, colleagues, and all of the above,

As we near the Presidential election in just three weeks, I have been asked by many of you to comment on my thoughts on Gov. Palin and what she can and will do for special education students. As an attorney whose practice focuses exclusively on the representation of children with disabilities, I always investigate candidates’ positions and records on this very critical moral and financial issue. One of my clients recently suggested that I share with others what I have learned, and so here it is.

When Gov. Palin first came to my attention, I was, as I am sure all of you who care about this issue, intrigued to have someone on the national platform who talks about children with special needs. Since hearing her say this repeatedly in speeches, I have been waiting, and waiting, to hear some specifics on special education reform. Most of all, I want to know what her stance is on the IDEA, the federal statute that governs special education. The IDEA is up for reauthorization by Congress in 2010, and it is crucial that it reflect the policies and funding structure necessary to protect and appropriately educate our children with disabilities. I needed to know what Gov. Palin thinks about the future of special education legislation in this country.

I know where the other three on the tickets stand; Senators Obama and Biden have issued position statements on the IDEA to various parent groups, strongly supporting full funding for the IDEA and the rights of children with disabilities and their parents. The Obama-Biden website has a direct link to the ticket’s position on disabilities. Senator McCain’s website does not have such a link and neither he nor Palin have provided those positions on the IDEA to parent advocacy groups. Senator McCain does have a supportive position on the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) which has been published. I was, however, extremely disappointed in his discussion on the Senate floor regarding the Reauthorization of the IDEA 2004, in which he expressed his concerns that parents of children with disabilities who have to sue to secure appropriate services for their children under the Statute and win against districts shouldn’t have their attorneys’ fees covered. This is not just a matter of self-interest for me;=2 0it is the difference between families, especially poor families, being able to vindicate their civil rights or not. But I knew those things, I did not know where Palin stood, and I wanted to find out.

Having waited for some specifics from her on just how she is going to be an advocate for children with special needs in the White House, I finally got close. In her recent interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, she was asked what her position is. While never mentioning the IDEA at all or what needs to be changed, kept, or fixed in it, she stated that the issue that needs to be addressed is “equal access” for children with special needs.

EQUAL ACCESS? Seriously? We HAVE equal access, that is what the original version of the Statute fought for in the early 70s, when children with disabilities were literally prohibited from attending our public schools. Equal access is so far in the minority of what needs to be addressed in special education I hardly know where to begin. Our problems are not that children with disabilities aren’t allowed into the buildings; our problem is what happens when they get there! What about a Free and Appropriate Public Education? What about “meaningful educational benefit?” What about giving children with special needs the tools to thrive and prosper and be fully independent adults, which is what the IDEA now stands for? We are decades fro m equal access being the key question, and apparently Gov. Palin is not aware of that fact.

Now, you might say “well, Jen, I am a parent of a child with special needs and I didn’t know that either.” Okay, my response: “are you running for Vice President of the United States? Are you telling the nation that you would see yourself as the voice for those children within the federal government? If you were, do you think you might have looked into it a little bit?”

It is not terribly surprising to me that Gov. Palin’s views on this are so far outdated. I have traveled to Alaska to give a speech to parents and professionals on the subject of the rights of children with special needs, in particular children with autism spectrum disorders. I was stunned by how far behind the State was from the vast majority of the rest of the country on the education of children with disabilities. Perhaps, for Alaskans, “equal access” IS the problem, but it is certainly not the case in Connecticut or most of the rest of the country. I am in regular contact with a colleague of mine who is a Parents’ attorney in Alaska, who has had to fight tooth and nail for children with special needs in Alaska simply to secure them the most basic of services that we take for granted here. I for one do not want the rest of the country to use Alaska’s system of educating our most vulnerable children as20a paradigm.

Okay, yes, you all know I’m a liberal…but that’s one of the reasons that I chose to get into the field of representing children with special needs, because I believe in my heart that this last bastion of civil rights is absolutely critical to fight. We need major fixes in our special education system, and if you think that who is in the White House does not effect you on this issue, you couldn’t be more wrong. IT MATTERS. It matters in terms of funding and at least as, if not more, importantly, enforcement. Our IDEA enforcement, even in States like CT where we have zealous advocacy, is woefully inadequate. School districts routinely violate the procedural and substantive rights of children and parents and only in a small fraction of cases are they taken to task for it. It also matters because the next President will have at least a few Supreme Court appointments to make. We have had more decisions from the United States Supreme Court in the area of special education law in the last few years than we had for decades. Those decisions have tremendous impact on whether parents have the right to have proper evaluations done for their children, how and when parents can exercise their rights under the IDEA, who has the burden of proof in Due Process Hearings, and a myriad of other issues which directly impact our children with special needs.

Whether we properly educate and embrace our children w ith disabilities is crucial to the future of this country, as the cost of NOT doing so will be far larger than the cost of doing so…leaving out the fact that it happens to also be the right thing to do in a great society. This issue should be front and center for any candidate for the White House, and I write to let you know that, at least as far as Gov. Palin is concerned, it has been an opportunity not only missed, but frighteningly misunderstood. It does not bode well for her, for us, or most importantly, for the children we love who need and deserve better in an “advocate in the White House.”

I will be casting my vote on November 4th for Obama-Biden, and I hope you will join me. They and their party have been on the side of children with special needs historically, and they will be on their side in the future. As our economy implodes and State and local educational budgets tighten, if we do not turn this around now, I fear that we will, once again, be fighting only for “equal access” for our kids. That is unacceptable to me.

Finally, for any of our more conservative clients who I may have offended, my apologies; I respect your views even if I disagree with them. However, to calm your concerns, Attorney Dana Jonson and I have convened a Personnel Board consisting of the two of us, which has investigated the matter and determined that you continue to have excellent legal representation.0

Thanks for reading, please feel free to forward this email to any and all people you know who care about the future of special education in this country.

Best, Jennifer Laviano
The Law Offices of Jennifer Laviano, LLC
Sherman, CT

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.”

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.

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.