This is a repost from June 27, 2013.
Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman
There's
case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against
race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding
disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons
Needed:
- A landmark disability discrimination civil rights case. ACLU, where are you? Ada.gov, where are you?
- Anti-defamation campaign (Time.com, take note!).
- A civil rights act for the disabled, since the disabled were omitted from the Civil Rights Act.
- A
disability ombudsman in each state and each school district to which
any adult, and any student, respectively, can go when disability
discrimination occurs.
- The addition of specific disability harassment language to the existing anti-harassment guidelines.
- For Shame! campaign.
- Ad showing a minority being bullied beside one showing disabled being bullied, saying one is just as wrong as the other.
- Spots showing celebrities saying “I'm against disability discrimination, are you?”
- Ad showing teacher rebuking student for slighting disabled classmate.
- A speech by a national leader citing instances of disability discrimination and calling for change.
- National leader describing incidents such as Ivins' remark as the product of irrational animus and calling for change.
- Counseling for the disabled, to deal with the pressure to feel shame, guilt, social inadequacy, etc.
- Proactive response training, such as how to respond if someone says, “How nice you're in the choir—it must help with your speech.”
- The
addition of ethical training to the training of physicians and other
medical staff, to remind them that it is unprofessional to treat
disability as a social sin rather than a morally neutral medical
condition.
- Institutions
(meeting places, organizations, "meet people like you" events, etc.) to
counteract the social isolation of many disabled people.
Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman
It
seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best
be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the
dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii
In our earlier post In the News: Disability Discrimination we neglected to note that the author of one of the selections, Elliot Hannon, titled it "Disney No Longer Lets Disabled Kids Cut the Line for Rides Because Some People Have No Soul." The soulless were "Families,
fully capable of waiting in line like everyone else, ... scamming
their way to the front of the line by, wait for it, hiring disabled–or
perhaps more appropriately "disabled”–tour guides."
The National Review describes soullessness which ignores moral wrong taking place in front of one: "the averted gaze and a smothering of empathy."
WXYZ reported:
A Michigan teacher is under fire after one of her autistic students got his head stuck in a chair.
Instead of helping, she recorded it and seemed to mock the boy while he was trapped.
Fifth grade teacher Nicole McVey is accused of taunting the 11-year-old at Oaktree Elementary School in Goodrich.
At one point on the tape, she even asks the boy if he wants to be tasered.
The New York Daily News reported the same incident:
Michigan fifth-grade teacher Nicole McVey used a cellphone to record a 10-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome who had gotten stuck in a chair at Oaktree Elementary School in Goodrich. The teacher and the school's principal seemingly teased the child and asked him if he wanted to be 'tasered' before the video was replayed in class and forwarded to other staff. ...
A Michigan teacher is under fire after she filmed herself and a school principal teasing a young autistic student who got stuck in a chair.
Nicole McVey is facing calls to quit Oaktree Elementary School, in Goodrich, after she stupidly recorded herself and boss Michael Ellis taunting the 10-year-old boy who has Asperger's syndrome.
The video shows the pupil struggling to free himself from the furniture.
In the background, fifth-grade teacher McVey is heard mocking the youngster before Ellis chips in and starts to do the same.
Comment: Teacher education curricula are supposed to be training those in the classroom to faithfully exercise the responsibilities of a public service profession. How do such heartless people escape their scrutiny?
The Christian Science Monitor notes:
Disability rights advocates say harassment of disabled students goes underreported, along with even more extreme practices, such as secluding and isolating students. It indicates a troubling lack of knowledge on the part of some educators about how to handle the behaviors of students with special needs, they say. ...
“We don’t often see schools take that kind of action,” [Attorney Mark] McWilliams says about the swift moves [requested resignation] against the principal and the teacher. “They don’t do it lightly … [but] there should be a significant response to civil rights violations and mistreatment in schools.”
The Huffington Post reports:
Police officers in Southern California are under fire for allegations that they beat, shocked and arrested a deaf man who was trying to use sign language to communicate with them. ...
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, contains a harrowing account of what happened on the night in question. According to the complaint, Meister was retrieving his personal belongings from the back porch of a home from which he had just moved when he was approached by two police officers who had been alerted by neighbors about "suspicious" activity.
Meister began signing from the home's backyard, and the officers gestured for him to join them on the other side of the fence. Meister "trusted" that the officers could see he was deaf and began walking toward them, signing to tell them about how he had permission to retrieve his own belongings from a friends' house, says the suit. But as soon as Meister was at an arms' length, the officers grabbed Meister's wrists and spun him around to face the other way. Because arms, hands and facial expression are the primary means of communication in American Sign Language, Meister then pulled his hands away from the officers and hopped back over the fence, to give himself another chance to explain what he was doing at the home. That's when things got violent.
The suit claims that police pushed Meister up against the wall, put him in a choke hold and then kneed him twice in the abdomen. One officer then punched him in the face repeatedly, while another officer shot Meister with Taser darts. Once he was on the ground, says the suit, officers kicked and elbowed Meister repeatedly while another officer shocked him a second time with the Taser. After a second choke hold and third Taser shock, Meister was finally unconscious and officers handcuffed and arrested him.
Although the Hawthorne PD initially arrested Meister for assaulting police officers, the charges were eventually dismissed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
I was talking to Eric J. Miller, a law professor at Loyola Law School, for a magazine piece the other day. He made the point that ... providing correct information ... helps us understand what ideal policy might look like -- even if we don't get there:
The political sphere is where you engage with your humanity. You have not merely a right, you have an obligation to participate, to make sure the people, as a whole, are able to make good decisions, and pass good laws and treat you as a human. And if one group subjugates another, if it says 'You can talk about anything you want, except everything that matters to you,' then you are not a full member of the polity.
In Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That, we wrote:
"Normal,"
"decent" society tacitly admits that the disability cohort are a
targeted minority (as in the quote by the late "liberal" columnist Ms.
Ivins which begins this post), but has failed to provide the civil
rights remedies enacted for other persecuted groups. "There's
case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against
race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding
disabilities." - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons
If you struggle with disability prejudice against autism, deafness, cleft palate, developmental disability, or other conditions, "you can talk [with your friends] about anything you want, except everything that matters to you." That is one of the ways normal decent society keeps you in your place.
