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)
(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)
