In a current post on Slate.com, Julia Bascom notes that the emerging humanitarian safety net policies of the president-elect do not augur well for the disabled, particularly disabled people of color. Our previous blog post noted an "incident in which Trump mocked a disabled reporter." Ms. Bascom describes this and other adverse actions:
Our president-elect famously mocked a disabled journalist at a rally (and, implausibly, continues to deny what we all saw happen).
But that moment isn’t what keeps me up at night. What renders me
sleepless is the fear of his proposed policies: repealing the Affordable
Care Act; shuttering the Department of Education; appointing a Cabinet
with no regard for civil rights, safety nets, or inclusion, to be
overseen by a vice president who gutted Medicaid in his state and a speaker of the House who wants to gut Medicare.
Bascom lists ways in which the current Obama administration has worked to improve the situation of the disabled:
The DOJ also
clarified that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to people
with disabilities in the criminal justice system, including in the
contexts of policing, prison, and re-entry into society after
incarceration—badly needed guidance, given that more than 50 percent of
the victims of police violence are people with disabilities,
particularly disabled people of color.
and
[The Department of
Education] urged schools to move away from restraint, seclusion,
corporal punishment, and other forms of discipline that
disproportionately target students with disabilities (particularly
disabled students of color). In 2014, the department clarified that bullying can be considered a violation of a student’s civil rights, including the right to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.
The marginalizing and disenfranchising of the disabled, as noted in previous posts here and here, stems in part from the social tendency to regard those who are different as somehow less than fully human. As Julia Bascom remarks, respecting the disabled involves "recognizing our humanity, our dignity, and our fundamental rights." She adds, "Trump ... sees [the disabled] as damaged goods."
Apologies for the long absence. A move took up much of the staff's time for a couple of months.
The following, from a recent article by Laura Wagner, may indicate that a new discriminatory climate may be in effect which affects not only minorities, women, minority religions and various gender identifications, but also America's largest minority, the disabled:
[Meryl] Streep specifically mentioned the incident in which Trump mocked a disabled reporter.
She said: “This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in
the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into
everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people
to do the same thing.” . . . The National Review ran a column that called Streep
a “moralizing hypocrite,” accusing her of choosing the “lazy method of
showing empathy only for someone who shared her own ideals.”
The issue is not "empathy," it is the universal ethical standards of civility, decency, and toleration. To paraphrase "The Newsroom," how many kinds of disgusting do you have to be to mock someone of limited mobility?
