PhilosopherCrip

I haven’t had time, with the beginning of a very frantic semester, to write a new blog in a while.  While this isn’t really an original essay, I think readers will take away something from the video below where I and others are interviewed by the Michigan Disability Rights Coalition about the meaning of Disability Pride (turn on captioning by clicking the arrow button on the bottom right of the viewer).  The video is followed up by a paste of an email dialogue between myself and a friend who identifies as person with a disability and just began law school at MSU.  I think it gets at the heart of why pride is so central to our movement.

It’s been a week since I returned from Little People of America’s (LPA) national conference in Brooklyn, NY.   Anyone who has been to an LPA conference knows that it takes at least that long to recover.  As expected, the days were spent in workshops and boardrooms and restaurants, while the evenings were spent out in the city or at the dance until the wee hours.  What was different this year was a drastic shift in how LPA presented the event and our organization to the public at large.  I think most members felt this sea change.  For the first time, we took our “culture war” to the front lines rather than simply reacting to the media and it’s chronic offenses.  That is, LPA has finally started to push back against the centuries of mockery.

I would like to respectfully disagree with the claim made by the editors of lpaonline.org that “Similar to past conferences, LPA used the opportunity to deliver a message to the general population that people of short stature, like other groups, strive for equal access to education, employment and social opportunities for the chance to live fulfilling and productive lives.”  It was not mere coincidence that our message took hold this year, as opposed to other years.  Rather, it was that we have finally come together in consensus around the “M-Word” (midget), passing an official resolution that it is an unacceptable way to describe folks with dwarfism.  In addition, we made the unprecedented move of filing an official FCC complaint against a troubling episode of Celebrety Apprentice, in which the M-Word is dropped 12 times and Joan Rivers offers “Well…I have a terrace. We can hang them [midgets] out on my terrace” during a discussion of how best to objectify LPs for marketing/advertising purposes.  [See the above link to LPA's hyper-link to download the complaint form and help out!]

For a detailed discussion of why the M-Word is troubling to our community and the complexities of the LP community’s relationship with the entertainment industry, check out this Salon.com article.  I won’t retread the ground it covers, but have been thinking about how I can personally reconcile my desire to see the M-Word go with my strong commitment to free-speech, which is one of the few negative responses to LPA’s campaign that I think warrants serious consideration.

The always classy Donald Trump...

Theoretically, a commitment to free speech protects those who are fewer in number and/or lesser in power.  That is, free speech protections are not needed to preserve the right of the powerful to express their ideas in any way they find suitable.  Rather, free speech is what preserves the dissenter’s right to speak his mind.  It does not exist to preserve the rights of the major network news anchor to report on the “swine flu,” but the disabled, poor, war-veteran-turned-protester to burn a flag in the street to express his angst at an unjust war.  Because we supposedly cannot predict which opinions will become popular among the powerful, we must protect everyone’s ability to express themselves, in the hope that the “market of ideas” will ensure that the truth prevails.

So, what do we do when, in practice, the protection of free speech is used to condone actions of oppression by the powerful?  For instance, when it is used to protect celebrities on Donald Trump’s TV show and their disparaging remarks about a group that is taken as culturally acceptable to ridicule and mock in mainstream media?  Doesn’t this seem counterproductive to the goal of protecting the vulnerable?  Too often, it seems, “free expression” is used to justify the powerful’s refusal to accept limits on how they exert their cultural dominance over the powerless.  Surely, this is not just true for LPs and others with disabilities, but has also been historically (and still is) the case for women, queer folks, people of color, and the rest of the “laundry list of oppression.”  How many times have we heard “Political correctness is such bull shit! These fuckin’ [insert favorite slur here] can’t tell me what to say, this is America and I have free speech!”?

What is the upshot of this disconnect between theory and practice?  How do we protect the freedom to dissent while not also exacerbating the suffering of those who are oppressed?  Surely, we cannot make objective distinctions between these two kinds cases without having those judgments infected by our own biases.

I think, whether we intended to or not, LPA has stumbled upon a practical solution to this problem, at least in our case.  While it has been described in the media as a “ban” on the M Word, the action LPA is actually taking is to file a series of complaints with the FCC about a particular show.  How we define success here is important.   If our FCC campaign is aiming to add the word “Midget” to the 7 that you get fined for saying on the air, then perhaps we haven’t made much headway on the free-speech vs. ridicule issue.  However, it seems that a more realistic, and perhaps more favorable, outcome would be to use this as a way to raise the profile of our repeated objections to the public ridicule of people with dwarfism.  The FCC campaign has earned slots on cable news shows and an AP article that has run in hundreds of outlets, while our earlier attempts have been a mere whisper in the storm.  I am hopeful that this will, at least, raise awareness among those who want to avoid ridicule and keep LPA from being somewhat complicit in a form of cultural oppression through inaction.

Sure, even a ban won’t keep Howard Stern from dropping the M Bomb (he’s on Satellite now apparently, anyway), but this level of media coverage SHOULD help ignorant, but otherwise well meaning folks to gain exposure to the dwarfism community beyond what is portrayed by the Stern types.

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.