Other Discrimination Also Masquerades as Normal Social Interaction Ctd.

Virtually everything in the following description of routine (and "socially" legitimized) sexual harassment  is also typical of disability discrimination.

As the United States moves toward its four-year presidential election, routine social abuse of a vulnerable segment of the population has become an issue in the candidacy of one of the abusers, Republican candidate Donald Trump. A recent article by Michelle Goldberg calls him A Human Trigger. Mr. Trump uses the Big Lie technique; projects his bigotry onto his victims; leverages Conventional Wisdom's denial of the reality of gender marginalization; and often leaves his victims' disoriented and doubting the reality of their own experience:

Like many abusers, Trump is so shamelessly, fluently dishonest that listening to him can be disorienting. “One of the hallmarks of an abusive person is that they do not ever take responsibility for their behavior, ever,” [Kristen] Slesar says. “It is always the other person’s fault, or it never happened.” Abusers, she says, can crowd out their victims’ sense of reality: “In conversation and arguments with this person who is so able to change reality or deny reality and shift blame and responsibility, the victim ends up doubting [herself], getting really confused, feeling really unstable.

The Big Lie deserves its own examination, because the phrase originates with another authoritarian who understood that routine bigoted error of conventional social thought can be used to corrupt the political instincts of a large segment of the public. Wikipedia explained:

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

The following selection from Mein Kampf describes techniques familiar to those who have followed the rhetoric of the Republican candidate's campaign—appeal to emotion in defiance of evidence and reason; belief that no one could be so shameless as to perpetrate such fraudulent claims; and "sensible" recourse to the opinion that there must be "some other explanation":

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

What women experience in the Trumpian abusive subculture parallels what the disabled experience — particularly the denial — but nobody is quoting us. As the previous article in this series argued:

This is all too familiar to those of us who are disabled. We wonder why "funny things" keep happening to us. We feel vaguely guilty—that we must have done something wrong. Eventually, we reluctantly come to realize that it isn't us. The problem is "normal" social attitudes toward those who bear stigma. But when we attempt to talk this over with our "friends" and family, they pooh-pooh our concerns ... It is all in our heads. We are only imagining that we are the target of unjustified social disapproval. To think that way is to be disloyal to the community. Our attitude is antisocial—no wonder those around us disapprove of us (this is the stigma Catch-22).

Ms. Goldberg continues:

Marie, a 30-year-old massage therapist in Virginia [says] "The truths that we experience as women are denied. It really brings out the victim mindset: These things keep happening, but nobody will actually say that they’re happening, nobody will acknowledge anything is happening ..."

Three years ago, in Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That, this was the 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 [feel we ought to speak out]. A struggle, ... against the tendency to feel guilty about having been honest about a situation which is widely covered up.

As the emergence of a 2005 tape revealed that a major political party's presidential candidate treats half the population as a group of people who may readily be subjugated, demeaned, degraded, and abused, what On Liberty calls "social tyranny" (approximately page 3) is still alive and well.

 

For women, and for the disabled.

Other Discrimination Also Masquerades as Normal Social Interaction

A few days ago Vince Grzegorek wrote about discrimination in university astronomy research which is happening right now.:

Katherine Alatalo, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California–Berkeley, spent months wondering what was wrong with her. Why did she feel anxious and unfocused? Why couldn’t she get any work done? And then, a late-night G-chat conversation with a fellow student made her realize what was causing her such distress: Her friend relayed a conversation she’d had with other students and a professor, where they had discussed a different professor and how he had a “fascination with” Alatalo’s breasts. That the professor mentioned his colleague’s “obsession” at all, let alone in casual conversation, made Alatalo’s friend furious—“it was totally inappropriate,” Alatalo’s friend wrote. It was then—with the help of her friend’s outrage—that she realized the problem: She was being sexually harassed.

This is all too familiar to those of us who are disabled. We wonder why "funny things" keep happening to us. We feel vaguely guilty—that we must have done something wrong. Eventually, we reluctantly come to realize that it isn't us. The problem is "normal" social attitudes toward those who bear stigma. But when we attempt to talk this over with our "friends" and family, they pooh-pooh our concerns (Alatalo’s friend above being a welcome exception). It is all in our heads. We are only imagining that we are the target of unjustified social disapproval. To think that way is to be disloyal to the community. Our attitude is antisocial—no wonder those around us disapprove of us (this is the stigma Catch-22).

Virtually everything in the following description of routine (and "socially" legitimized) sexual harassment  is also typical of disability discrimination:

• Life of fear: "She felt belittled in their professional interactions, hopeless and trapped as goals and directions shifted, seemingly out of nowhere. “The meaner he is, the less I resist,” she noted in a running diary of sorts she kept at the time. She told him she felt she couldn’t speak up or disagree with him out of fear."
• Discrimination is invisible: “Instead of feeling like my concerns were being heard and considered, I was a liability that they were trying to figure out how to address.”
• The community is complacent: "The people in power have no interest in addressing the problem"
• "Institutional betrayal"—denial of the concept that experiencing harassment from a faculty or staff member could “create a pervasive sense of vulnerability extending beyond one specific classroom or carrel in the library.” "The researchers found that for female students, harassment perpetrated by a faculty or staff member was significantly associated with experiences of institutional betrayal. “For female participants, faculty/staff sexual harassment was the sole significant predictor of institutional betrayal when accounting for all other traumatic experiences measured,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “This finding is consistent with Freyd’s (1994) betrayal trauma theory, which holds that abuse is more harmful when perpetrated by people one is close to or depends upon for survival.”" (Emphasis added)
• Discrimination by those one should be able to trust: "Abuse is more harmful when perpetrated by people one is close to or depends upon for survival"
• The effect of the "spoiled identity"(1) of stigma means that the social system militates against the stigmatized: "Dependent on access to resources that are levied by just a few in power"
• Be humble and submissive: "Be quiet and behave or else"
• Pressure to accept workplace discrimination: "it “got so bad I didn’t care about keeping my career, because it was so miserable.”"
• Fear of retaliation: "Contributors to the blog and friends warned her she could still be sued by the person she was describing, or the institution, despite the fact that she did not name names."
• Defamation of character/witchhunt: "One of her harassers began to badmouth her abilities to others in her department—and down the line. “For someone in the position of decision-maker in a small town, if they think ill of you, they can do some serious and real harm by saying a word or not saying a word,”"
• Not much like this for the disabled: "Astronomy Allies, a group that provides judgment-free resources and assistance to victims and anyone else who inquires looking for help" ... "The members of the group are trusted ears, confidants for anyone who wants to discuss her experience with bullying or harassment, and they help navigate the oftentimes complex process of filing formal complaints."
• Ditto: "“It was something that left me with the ability to deal with my harassment that didn’t leave me feeling sick to my stomach,” [Alitalo] says."
• The invalidity of "social justice": "“Frankly, it is not worth the social happiness of a majority if just one of our attendees is made to feel uncomfortable, under pressure, or damaged enough to leave our profession or to attend future conferences in a fearful state,” [Kevin Marvel] wrote." (Emphasis added)

Note that this analysis proceeds from the standards of Enlightenment liberalism: Human equality, universal ethical standards, equal rights and equal protection under the law, and the rejection of the majoritarian doctrine that the community, rather than universal justice, is the final arbiter of moral behavior. It upholds liberalism, which is public and civil, against left ideologies which assert that the merely social should hold supremacy. New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, for example draws this distinction in speaking of "the illiberal left."(2)

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(1) Spoiled identity: In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

(2) Jonathan Chait:

It is the expression of a backlash on the left against liberalism — with all its maddening compromises and deference to the rights of the enemy — which fetishizes success as the by-product of cataclysmic struggle. ...
Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights. ...
Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting. ...
But the campus was merely the staging ground for most displays of left-wing ideological repression because it is one of the few places the illiberal left has the power to block speakers and writers deemed oppressive. (Emphasis added)

Sometimes Disability Discrimination is Extreme

Four years ago The New York Times reported:

In January, the actor Peter Dinklage surprised himself during his own Golden Globe acceptance speech. Dinklage had won the award for best supporting actor in a TV series for his portrayal of the complex, sharp-tongued Tyrion Lannister, who’s the closest thing to a hero in HBO’s epic swords-and-sex hit “Game of Thrones,” which returns for its second season on April 1. As he took the statue from the presenter, Piper Perabo, the onstage microphone stand quietly lowered into the floor to accommodate the 4-foot-5 actor.

Dinklage thanked the people he needed to thank — the author George R. R. Martin, who wrote the novels on which “Game of Thrones” is based; his mother in New Jersey; the cast and crew. As the wrap-it-up music began to swell, Dinklage thought about what his wife had been telling him all night at their table: “Let people know. It isn’t right.” He hesitated a moment, then thought, I’m just gonna do it. “I want to mention a gentleman I’ve been thinking about, in England,” he said quickly. “His name is Martin Henderson. Google him.”

What was Martin Henderson's story? The Telegraph reports:

Martin Henderson - celebrating his 37th birthday with friends - was thrown into the air by a hooded thug in a copycat of the shamed England rugby star Mike Tindall's behaviour in the summer.

Tindall was kicked out of the Elite Player Squad squad and fined £25,000 after a Rugby Football Union investigation into his drunken night in a dwarf-themed Queenstown bar.

In the copycat incident a month later, Mr Henderson suffered damage to nerve tissue in his spine causing his legs to go numb after landing on his back on the pavement.

Officers have now launched an investigation into the incident.

Mr Henderson condemned the hooded stranger yesterday (Thurs) after the cruel prank left him confined to a wheelchair.

He said: "From what I remember, there was only one person involved but it was very scary as I didn't know what was going on.
"I guess I was an easy target and the only reason I was picked on was because I am small.
"People's attitudes to me when I go out can be pretty cruel. Most are OK but you get the odd idiot who will make fun and start laughing at me.
"You just have to ignore it but this is the first time I have been picked up and thrown about."
Mr Henderson, who has dwarfism, was celebrating his birthday at the White Horse pub in Wincanton, Somerset, on October 7 when the prankster struck.
It came one month after England rugby players were caught 'dwarf throwing' at a bar during a drunken night out.

Boys will be boys, won't they?

Dwarfaware:

I have a son who is funny, adorable, smart and just happens to be a Little Person. He was born with Achondroplasia; it is the leading cause of dwarfism. Thanks to many hard-working and talented people, the public at large has become more familiar with persons of short stature. Still, there are many misconceptions, misunderstandings and questions that average stature people have. I’d like to answer some of them.

• Around 80% of babies born with dwarfism come from average stature parents.
• They are of the same intelligence as the more general public.
• They are surgeons, lawyers, teachers, athletes, artists, journalists, and almost every other profession you can think of.
• The unemployment rate is higher than any other able-bodied group of people.
• The “M” word, or “midget”, is offensive to most little people. It does not refer to any one type of dwarfism. It is just a bad word.
• My son has a disproportionate type of dwarfism, that means his upper arms and legs, for instance, are shorter than average. He is perfectly proportioned for who he is, but is not the same, proportion-wise as taller folks.
• Persons with Achondroplasia, (Achons), compare equally in intelligence, talent, and ability to get the job done.
• Achons have medical issues, but rarely ask for assistance. They do have the same life expectancy as anyone else.

Those are the some of the facts.

Here are some myths:

• Little people love poking fun at how they appear to others.
• Little people only date other little people.
• They must agree with being called a midget or treated as one because they are always on t.v. dressed up as funny characters.
• Dwarfs cannot handle themselves in the workplace; they scare clients away and are always absent. They need too much special equipment.

The Telegraph article continues:

Mr Henderson has also suffered a broken wrist since the attack after he fell over when his legs gave way.
A spokesman from Avon and Somerset Police said: "Officers investigating would like to speak to anyone who may have been in the pub on the night of October 7.
"It follows an incident in which a small person was picked up by an unknown person in the bar and dropped."
The man was described as being of a slim build, dark hair, around 5 ft 8 inches tall and wearing a hooded top and baseball cap.

From our blog post of July 6, 2014:

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

An entry by Deborah Fallows in James Fallows' column three years ago illustrates this:

The real story here is about the situation of dwarves in China. Airen, 矮人, or small people. When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm. (Emphasis added)

The rules of behavior in middle class America tend to prevent such openly discriminatory behavior on the street. But as many of the previous posts on this weblog demonstrate, disability discrimination—a violation of our own professed values—is prevalent throughout our society. The sociologist notes that the effect is reduced "life chances": 

Goffman [says] “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to ... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). [1] Observing that “the person with stigma is not quite human” (3), Goffman explains that the our unconscious assumptions lead us to “exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.”

Our society is becoming more identity-conscious, not less; to the detriment of universal justice. Identity-on-the-right characterizes the current presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who makes political hay out of prejudice against Muslim, Mexican, female, and disabled identities.

Last August, it was reported that the illiberal campus left imposed self-censorship rules on students deemed to have spoken in the wrong way about selected identities:

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” "male," and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students.

According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.”

"Students will come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

The punishment for repeatedly using the banned words, Breikss warns, includes “but [is] not limited to removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for the semester.”

Breikss is not the only WSU faculty member implementing such policies.

Much like in Selena Breikss’s classroom, students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.

According to her syllabus, students will lose one point every time they use the words “illegal alien” or “illegals” rather than the preferred terms of “‘undocumented’ migrants/immigrants/persons.” Throughout the course, Fowler says, students will “come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

For disabled people the problem with this is that neither right identity politics nor left identity politics is concerned with impartial justice. Universal justice protects everybody from civil rights violations: it is about what, not who. Martin Henderson was permanently injured, and the dwarf in China subject to open public mockery, because disability stigma is a "spoiled identity" in a world which valorizes or punishes based on identity rather than a sense of justice.

As Martin Luther King said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The Stigmatized Disabled and Medical Discrimination

Among the conditions which the medical profession treats are the various disabilities. The lay public sometimes makes moral judgments or otherwise discriminates against such medical conditions (see a previous article's mention of cerebral palsy), but health care professionals should be above such prejudices.

In reality, disabled people need to realize that disability discrimination in medical care often happens, and that the disabled need to take measures to prevent this from impacting the care they receive.

Mention of the problem is readily found online: A Wikipedia entry notes:

The disabled remain at a disadvantage with respect to health and health care.

An article last September in The New England Journal of Medicine by Georgina Peacock, M.D., M.P.H., Lisa I. Iezzoni, M.D., and Thomas R. Harkin, J.D. observes:

Many factors may contribute to these disparities, including physical barriers to care (e.g., inaccessible medical diagnostic equipment such as examination tables, weight scales, and imaging technologies); noninclusive health or wellness programs designed for people without disabilities; transportation problems, especially in areas with poor public transportation; inaccurate or inadequate knowledge or stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions; competing priorities in the health care system; prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care; and communication barriers, such as failure to accommodate deaf patients who require sign-language interpreters.  (Emphasis added)

A Disability Rights Washington staff bio includes:

[David Carlson] was ... awarded the TASC Excellence in Advocacy Award from the National Disability Rights Network. This in response to the first of two reports addressing discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability, for which he was the lead author. (Emphasis added)

When the disabled go to the doctor they need to

• Select their personal physician carefully. Some are equitable and professional. Others may condescend, talk down, assume the patient should be humble and apologetic, expect the patient not to question the doctor's decision, treat the patient as mentally limited or uncooperative, or assume the patient is an ideal candidate for experimental procedures.
• If necessary, include a friend or family member in contacts with medical staff, so that they understand they are not dealing solely with a person they may consider to be at a disadvantage.
• Make sure no medical treatment is undertaken without informed consent. (What are the alternatives to the proposed treatment? What outcome can be expected in each case, and what are the tradeoffs?)
• Be willing to ask for a second opinion.
• Ask for complete information after a procedure has been completed. (What did the physician encounter when s/he began the procedure? How well did it go? What can the patient expect during the recovery period? What medications or self-care procedures will the patient be responsible for? How long will these be in effect?)
• Expect to be treated with consideration and respect. Contact the facility's patient relations staff (whatever the facility calls them) if necessary.
• Contact disability rights resources in your community or state if necessary.

The "stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions" and the "discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability" have been publicly documented in the above cites, which also note that the disabled often have "prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care." This is the reality of being disabled in our society, and you who are disabled need to be prepared.

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A previous post, What Others are Saying, contains links to Independence Chick's blog and other online resources for dealing with disability discrimination.