Today's Invisible Man: The Powerless, Outsider Disabled

I'd like to be assured that if I stand up for myself against an aggressor, I'm going to be supported, not judged. - Sarah Neilson, below

Kenji Yoshino last week in Slate:

The Supreme Court has deemed “political powerlessness” to be a factor in determining whether a group could receive the heightened judicial protection that women or racial minorities currently receive. ...

The paradox of political power is that a group usually must have a massive amount of political power before it can be deemed politically powerless by the Supreme Court. Groups that are truly politically powerless usually cannot garner the attention of any branch of government, including the judiciary.

Professor Yoshino was talking about gay marriage jurisprudence, not the litigative status of the stigmatized disabled, but the situation he describes applies to us: we are not even powerful enough to be considered worthy of care as politically powerless. "A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," said the Supreme Court in Romer V. Evans, but in the current situation discrimination against the disabled is largely beyond legal regard*.

Being Invisible: When the Disabled Are Not In “A State of Society” - In Pauline Maier's American Scripture we find:

In June 1776 the Virginia Convention ... amended the ... draft so it said that "all men are by nature equally free and independent" and had "certain inherent rights" ... "when they enter into a state of society." The statement ... freed the state of Virginia from an obligation to recognize and protect the inherent rights of slaves since ... slaves had never entered Virginia's society, which was confined to whites. - Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, p. 193 (Emphasis added)

The disabled are also largely beyond social moral regard*: Society, instead of objecting to public discrimination against the disabled, pretends that discriminatory conduct is normal social action. Sarah Neilson, in The Stranger, described incidents she experienced:

When I remarked to a bookstore owner about the proliferation of memoirs in this age, she told me she had tired of, in particular, cancer memoirs. "Cancer is a reality," she said. Then she looked at me with sad eyes. "But cerebral palsy is a reality, too." I said, "Uh, yeah, and I don't write about it," and left the place in a daze. I've never had anyone assume I was sick, so at first I didn't even realize that she was comparing cerebral palsy to cancer. I've never felt comfortable going back in; I'm a little uneasy walking by. The worst part is knowing that she thought she was being nice.

So did the spandex-wearing passerby who told me on a steep street, "You are so brave." I told him I was offended; he said, "I wish I could help you." He didn't take in a word I said. ...

One night, after a beautiful day of hiking, we passed a guy on the way home who hassled my boyfriend for money. I was prepared to ignore the question. But when I walked by, he didn't ask me for money. He shouted, "WHO DID THIS TO YOU?! WHO DID THIS TO YOU?!"

I kept walking. Then he shouted, "WAS IT HIM?!"

That scared the shit out of me. He'd accused my boyfriend of violence and looked quite ready to commit some himself. From all my fear, and my anger, and the burning insult of the accusation, I yelled back:

"BIRTH! I WAS BORN TWO AND A HALF MONTHS EARLY, YOU FUCKER!"

He ran.

I was relieved. Then I noticed several people across the street, all staring at me. Were they on his side? Did no one see the potential danger of the situation? Remember the crutches? If someone goes after me, I'm fucked, y'all. I'd like to be assured that if I stand up for myself against an aggressor, I'm going to be supported, not judged.

It's no better, though, to be simply ignored. A Sea-Tac Airport TSA agent fixed his eyes on my boyfriend while asking for my boarding pass. When I asked him to address me directly, he said, "Oh!" and apologized. "I'm used to talking to... you know," he said, gesturing in inscrutable circles.

"To what?" I asked.

"Talking to people and... talking to their caretakers."

Helplessness is an offensive assumption, but one I can swiftly disprove. How, though, can I convince people that there is nothing tragic about the way I walk? I ran into a pair of sweet parents with three adorable children, and the youngest child said, "She has a owie," so I explained that I was born this way and didn't get hurt.

"Some people need tools to help them," added the mother. "It'll heal."

"No," I said lightly, "it won't heal, but that's okay." I don't get a body other than this one, so it has to be okay. Why can't we tell our children, and each other, that all bodies are different, that some need more help with certain things than others, and that's fine?

Is it because it's not?

A comment to Ms. Neilson's article scolded her for objecting to this sort of disability discrimination:

So you reject:

empathy
normal Seattle passive-aggressiveness
an obviously crazy homeless person
someone who mistakenly talks to your boyfriend instead of you
a mother who was caught in a sudden confrontation
Honey, those are all things we all deal with. It's called the real world.

No, these are things which, in the context of the person who is different, are intended to marginalize them. "Being treated as different" is a recognized indicator in anti-harassment guidelines. Remarks and actions which would be innocuous in ordinary circumstances are instantly recognized as singling out the disabled person. They are not part of the ordinary rough-and-tumble of social interaction. They are intended to demean and degrade the disabled.

Ms. Neilson was not being overly sensitive in calling out disguised discrimination. She was subverting a smelly little orthodoxy which says the disabled are not supposed to stand up for themselves against an aggressor.

Some of the epigraphs to an earlier post, Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That:

And my feeling wasn’t righteousness or pride in having told the truth, it was horror that I had committed such a faux pas, and that if things like that happened you just weren’t supposed to talk about them. And you certainly weren’t supposed to announce it at a dinner party. - Kate Christensen

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. - Eric J. Miller (Emphasis Added)

The averted gaze and a smothering of empathy - Matthew Scully

The just-world hypothesis works, in part, by blaming the stigmatized disabled for the pervasive social targeting which marginalizes and disenfranchises them. A familiar experience of our people is the case where our family, friends, or co-workers imply that we should have done better, considering our background; and completely ignore the crucial fact of our lives: Discriminatory social attitudes reduce our life chances. It is considered divisive and socially unacceptable to speak out about our situation.
 
We who write this remember that most of our lives we ourselves kept silent. And there is an internal struggle against convention every time we add another post to this weblog. A struggle against the tendency to feel guilty about having been honest about a situation which is widely covered up.


 (*) In Age of Ambition Evan Osnos speaks of "a deeper problem underlying China's rise: pervasive corruption and a moral disregard that had already led to milk tainted by chemicals reaching the market." (Emphasis added)

The Largest Minority

The US Office of Disability Employment Policy states:

Although the term is most often used to refer to differences among individuals such as ethnicity, gender, age and religion, diversity actually encompasses the infinite range of individuals' unique attributes and experiences. As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50 million individuals — people with disabilities contribute to diversity, and businesses can enhance their competitive edge by taking steps to ensure they are integrated into their workforce and customer base. (Emphasis added)

Comment: You'd never know it. The nation implements justice for minorities by several means: Protected class. Affirmative action. Heightened scrutiny concerning the effect of presumably neutral laws. Lawsuits concerning harassment, defamation, bullying, unequal pay, inequity in hiring practices, social exclusion. It is not that all these things necessarily belong in a liberal democratic society. In some cases they are inferior substitutes for justice. Protected class and heightened scrutiny look suspiciously like privilege.* Affirmative action, with its relationship to quotas and its adverse effect on merit hire and promotion, looks like favoritism.

But these are the currently operative ad hoc substitutes for actual justice. It is telling that people with disabilities are excluded. A news article from late 2012 concerning a child with cerebral palsy noted:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Jennifer Fitzsimmons, the chief assistant city prosecutor in a rare case where legal action was taken

A year ago a courageous young woman with cerebral palsy wrote about the discriminatory reaction she often experiences in a supposedly progressive city:

I was born with cerebral palsy, and though I'm 30 years old, I didn't really accept that until I moved to Seattle last June. It was something I hid from, something I denied, and it was relatively easy to do so, because a lot of people seemed to notice other things about me before they noticed that. ... In Seattle, though, a lot of people seem to be a little unnerved by my disability, ... But I was caught entirely off guard by this sudden understanding that being alive in the only body I've got apparently makes some people uncomfortable in 2014, in one of America's most progressive cities. I moved here for books, coffee, writing, nature, food, even rain—not a daily crusade.

If she had been a member of the recognized minorities—a protected ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation—the response would have included a lot of people saying, in effect, Yes, we still need to do more about the civil rights of minorities. Instead, there was a lot of backlash.

Many of those who quickly object to minority discrimination deny disability discrimination even as it is happening right in front of them. As commenter jacalope observes "The prevailing attitude seems to be that":

1. My disability isn't real
2. My disability is my own fault
3. If I tried harder I could just get over it
4. I'd magically get over it if I only tried my new acquaintance's latest diet/supplement/acupuncturist/exercise regimen

Why are these discriminatory attitudes alive and well in what Sarah Nielson called a "progressive city?" Because, since the civil rights revolution, discrimination against the minorities addressed by that revolution is subject to punishment under the laws. Social attitudes followed. "No colored need apply" notices were replaced by affirmative action. Society got the message. No one would think of telling a person of color, who described a discriminatory incident or attitude, to "just get over it."

Who is covered and who isn't covered sends a message. There's no affirmative action for cerebral palsy, for cleft palate, for little people, or for all those who are born different (unless the difference is race or gender). "There's nothing out there regarding disabilities," said Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons, above. That is, there has apparently never been a landmark civil rights case regarding a disabled person.

Again, society got the message. anonymous:

So you reject:

empathy
normal Seattle passive-aggressiveness
an obviously crazy homeless person
someone who mistakenly talks to your boyfriend instead of you
a mother who was caught in a sudden confrontation

Honey, those are all things we all deal with. It's called the real world.

An article defaming those with birth defects has resided on the Time.com website for over a decade:

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Again, the double standard is evident. Would the public have stood for the above remark if Ms. Ivins had used the n-word instead of the h-word? For that matter, would Time have published the article unedited with the n-word?

It's unthinkable. But in the case of the largest minority, it attracts no attention.
 
 (*) "Privilege": "Private Law"