“Check your white privilege” prescribes what shall be orthodox, demands a _Mea Culpa_, and violates _Texas v. Johnson_

“No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” - The United States Supreme Court, Texas v. Johnson

From Twitter:

_____ Superintendent

Democracy Prep Public Schools …

Las Vegas, Nevada 

Re: Your Mandatory “Critical Race Theory” Class, “The Sociology of Change” 

To Whom It May Concern:

I am an attorney and representative of the ___ Family. W. is a student at your DPAC public school and G. is his mother. … [They] objected on conscience to the content … of your “Sociology of Change” class. … 

[They] repeatedly objected to the discriminatory content of [this] class that served no apparent pedagogical purpose beyond ideological thought reform. …

[This biracial family] objects to the glib racism of your course materials … which includes … “Racism is what white people do to people of color,” repeated ad infinitum. This and statements like it are patently racist, create a hostile and divisive educational environment, and violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act … which you must follow. …

Mandatory participation … requires … affirming a … politically loaded worldview which W. and G. cannot in good conscience abide. … The teacher … explicitly discouraged disagreement. … [Students were required] to publicly profess their sexual, racial, and religious identities [for scrutiny] … in a derogatory manner. … [This exercise] amounts to compelled speech. …

W. [was threatened with] non-graduation … if he … did not participate fully. …

The purported goal of the “Sociology of Change” class is to change students' fundamental personal convictions. Your behavior implicates the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments. …

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” _Texas v. Johnson_. …

Burns O'Brien Law

[twitter.com/sullydish?prefetchtimestamp=1607371720159]

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“Check your white privilege” also demands compelled speech and prescribes “what shall be orthodox” in a matter of opinion.

The sad fact that I have objected to “check your privilege” arguments several times already here [on social media], and always gotten a hostile, condemning response, means either that the public schools of our democracy no longer have Civics courses, or that the Civics courses are intellectually and morally incompetent.

A corollary is that sometimes being a responsible citizen of a liberal democracy may require publicly disagreeing with the community. Moral responsibility can’t be evaded by going along with social opinion. Sometimes, as Mill’s On Liberty states, society practices “social tyranny.”

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John Stuart Mill: “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

[On Liberty can easily be pulled up in any browser. The above passage is about Page 3.]

Disabled people and the Politics of Identity

I put the article below on social media. Here I would add that for those who practice the Politics of Identity, the purpose, as I understand it, is to support identities under which people are targeted, which is not necessarily their biological race. The identity of people who worship in synagogues, for example, is not their race (biologically Caucasian) but the characteristic which causes them to be targeted by anti-semites.

The identity of the little girl who was targeted in Introduction: Social Attitudes was not her race but the cerebral palsy which caused the commenting and gesturing.

And my identity, although I have Caucasian parents, is not white, but the disability which has its own derogatory catch-phrase, “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” I feel free to oppose the current tendency of anti-racist ideology to imply that white people are bad (“white privilege,” “white guilt,” “white culture” as below). As Andrew Sullivan has written, people should not be condemned for “immutable conditions.” To put it bluntly, I oppose the “whiteness” concepticle because it is a double standard, because it is inherently wrong, not out of “white fragility,” and because as a member of one of the most targeted minorities of all, cleft palate, I have a heightened passion for justice.

The social media article: “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

Johann N. Neem [immigrated at 3 from India] to Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic: “You probably saw the controversy over the table put out by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It called things like rationality, hard work, the scientific method, and planning for the future “white culture.”(1) The fact that we’re now in a world were intelligent, educated, well-meaning people see that as a plausible thing to think scares me.”

Neem said the things he wanted to participate in as a naturalized American citizen are now being condemned by anti-racists:

“It was when some scholars on the academic left decided that the primary story to tell about America … was ‘whiteness’ that I first started feeling myself unbecoming American,” he lamented in his Hedgehog Review essay. “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

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(1)[The National Museum of African American History and Culture is part of The Smithsonian, a Federal agency paid for by our taxes. The “white culture” assertions caused an uproar and were quickly removed.]

Here is a critique from a conservative publication: 

“Look at this stunning exhibition from the website of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is from its web page about the menace of “Whiteness”. Aside from the anti-white stereotypes here, notice the inadvertently anti-black insanity: things like hard work, being on time, cause and effect, “rational thinking,” respect for authority, politeness — all these things, according 

to the museum, are manifestations of “whiteness.” Did David Duke write this stuff? It’s crazy! If a white man said that black people are lazy, can’t keep to a schedule, have no respect for authority, can’t think straight, are rude, etc. — he would be rightly criticized as racist.”

Left out of the civil rights revolution: Blatant vs. subtle disability discrimination

 Civil rights discrimination against people having disabilities is made more difficult because in America disabled people were left out of the civil rights revolution. We aren’t, for practical purposes, in a protected class. There’s no landmark civil rights case such as Brown vs. Board of Education, for disabled people. And there’s seldom any social penalty for verbal abuse.

The San Diego Union Tribune on blatant vs. subtle disability discrimination:

Discrimination should be viewed as two types: the blatant and the subtle. The blatant discrimination are the types when it is very clear that a person with a disability is being denied their rights due to their disability. For example, a school that fails to provide a sign language interpreter requested by a Deaf student, or a wheelchair user who is told they are not “capable” of doing a job. There’s clear evidence and a paper trail to show the discrimination.

The subtle discrimination is exactly that, subtle, so that even a person with a disability is not entirely sure if they were discriminated against based on their disability. For example, a person with a disability who applies for a job but does not receive an interview because human resources do not look at resumes of someone who has a disability. They can always say that the candidate was simply not qualified for the job, but are careful to avoid mentioning disability as a reason.

Another instance of this subtle discrimination is how unprepared hospitals and health care were in addressing care for people with disabilities during the pandemic. Every health care system needs to have a plan in place for disasters that also includes how to provide care for people with disabilities in emergency situations, such as natural disasters, man-made disasters, terrorism, or a pandemic. Because of the subtle discrimination, a lot of outright discrimination has happened, such as people who are Deaf, who rightfully assumed that the hospital would not have access to a sign language interpreter on-site, who would try to bring a family member or a friend as an alternate to support communication, but were told that they were not allowed to bring anyone in, even someone who would enable their rights.

Disability prejudice in intellectual history

In the mid-Nineties, the USENET forum Rec.Arts.Books was dominated by hardcore Decon/Pomo people who talked about Theory as the goal toward which all intellectual history had been striving. Among their gods, besides Plato, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was openly bigoted against people having disabilities:

“The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state
  it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on ... after
  ... the right to life has been lost ought to entail the
  profound contempt of society.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Twilight of the Idols

"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish, first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so." - Nietzsche, The Antichrist

The academic humanities today still seem to be illiberal. “No platforming” is content-based censorship violating liberal principles of the First Amendment, for example.

In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, Andre Comte-Sponville finds Nietzsche illiberal:

  “Justification of slavery: "Every enhancement of the type 'man' has
  so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and it will be so
  again and again: a society that believes in the long ladder of an
  order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and
  that needs slavery in some sense or other." ... Advocacy of
  oppression: "The essential characteristic of a good and healthy
  aristocracy . . . is that it . . . accepts with a good conscience
  the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be
  reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to
  instruments.”

Nor is it only Nietzsche. Plato discusses five types of regimes (Republic, Book VIII). They are Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny. Democracy is next to last.

Plato’s illiberalism comes from his concept of reality. The underlying Forms of what we think is real - chairs, tables - are what is truly real. What we can see and touch belongs to the realm of appearances. Because only philosophers can perceive the Forms, Plato said, a Philosopher King should rule. Because the working material of scientists - real physical systems - belongs to the realm of appearances, Plato questioned their validity.

The first academic lived in the first culture to have democracy and science, but was opposed to both, bequeathing a strain of illiberalism whose effects can still be detected in the academic humanities today.

We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that.

Huffington Post: ““It’s natural to wish for life ‘to just get back to normal’ as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us,” Obama said. “But we have to remember that for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.””

Also, “for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of disability is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’.”

If I were to meet former President Obama, whom I whole-heartedly support, I would suggest that people having disabilities should also be part of the narrative.

I recently posted the following comment to a much-lauded anodyne article on a disability forum:

I see the [Forum] addressing access issues but not civil rights issues: The right of disabled people not to be demeaned, degraded and marginalized. The same people who wouldn’t think of commenting and gesturing about minorities, women and LGBTQ people often have no scruples about regarding disabled people as stigmatized and risible.
The narrative needs to be changed, something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing. A landmark civil rights case such as Brown v. Board of Education or Obergefell v. Hodges would help to raise consciousness.
We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that. Ask the ACLU if sometime it might think of making this an issue.
It is just as wrong to look cross-eyed at someone for being disabled as it is to give someone static for being a person of color.
So far as I know, the public does not know this. It’s time to change that.

Probably, “something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing” pissed them off.

Well, their trivializing, faux-activism pisses me off.

In the current narrative of “progressives,” people who look funny or move funny (the CPs, Cerebral Palsy, Cleft Palate) offend the Community, and under the rubric of Social Justice, the Community has the right to punish and expel those who offend it, unless they are part of progressivism’s favored classes.

But under Enlightenment liberalism, people who look funny or move funny are still part of The People, and as entitled to The Rights of Man as progressivism’s favored classes: minorities,(1) women, LGBTQ.

Justice Harlan’s Plessy dissent said that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

The Fourteenth Amendment says everybody is entitled to “the equal protection of the laws.”

Even those the Community considers misfits.

Reciprocity Principle, from the first post on this blog:

A reciprocity principle: If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for us. We have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if we do.

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(1) People having a disability are America’s largest minority, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Department of Labor, and the Centers for Disease Control, among others:

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
“One in four people in United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control.”
http://www.adainfo.org/sites/default/files/Leadership-Network/Modules-1-5/5a-America-largMinorityFINAL.pdf
“America‘s largest minority”
http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/diverse.htm
“As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50 million individuals”

An overwhelmed health care system’s triage may discriminate against people with disabilities

The Atlantic states that people with disabilities may face not only “overt discrimination” in hospitals, but “implicit bias” from a prejudice about their quality of life.

As the philosopher Nietzsche remarks below, in times of stress, an eliminationist attitude residing in some of the mainstream rises to the surface.

Elaine Godfrey:

Daniel Florio … was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that makes him unable to walk or use his arms. His disability makes him more vulnerable to the virus than most people, and he’s afraid of what will happen if he ends up in the hospital with a serious case. Intubated people cannot speak, and Florio would not be able to use gestures or otherwise communicate with his doctors. Given infection-prevention rules, his caregivers would likely not be allowed to accompany him.

She adds:

But Florio is afraid of something else too: the possibility that, if he contracts the virus, he could be denied lifesaving treatment because of his disability. And like other Americans with disabilities, he worries that could happen not just because of overt discrimination in hospitals, but also because of implicit bias. “People overwhelmingly believe that being disabled implies a worse quality of life than it does,” Florio said. If doctors act on those beliefs—wittingly or not—“what that means in practical terms is that people like us will die.”

In some states’ policies it appears that people with disabilities do not have an equal right to life in comparison with the mainstream:

Washington’s guidelines include considerations about a patient’s “baseline functional status,” which involves factors such as physical ability and cognition. … The Washington health department told me it’s updating its guidelines to make sure “its original intent of nondiscrimination” is “unequivocally clear.”

This bears uneasy resemblance to the presuppositions of eugenics advocates, and of proponents of the Will to Power who said that “in a certain state it is indecent to go on living.” The Antichrist declares, “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.”

Under the pandemic, a re-evaluation of “disability”

A Facebook post:
Things Covid has proved:

1. The job you were told couldn’t be done remotely can be done remotely 
2. Many disabled workers could have been working from home, but corporations just didn’t want them to 
3. Internet is a utility, not a luxury 
4. Universal healthcare is necessary 
5. Homelessness can be solved when it can affect the rich 
6. Childcare isn’t “doing nothing all day.”
7. Universal Credit is not enough to live on 
8. Wages have nothing to do with skills or value from fruit picker to nurse

Note No. 3

“Thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity”

I once went to a local comedy act and the comedian referred to me in front of the audience. I waved him off, feeling very uncomfortable, and the woman with me said, “Don’t be hostile.”

Here’s possibly a better response.

The disabled person could stand up, and say, “I’m glad you called on me, because I’m an advocate for the civil rights of the disabled. We were left out of the civil rights revolution. Hardly anyone thinks we are in a protected class, although we get targeted all the time.

“There’s even a special derogatory catch-phrase for people like me: ‘I don’t care if it harelips the Governor.’ So please remember, we have exactly the same rights as everyone else, even if social events like this don’t act like we do. Sir, thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity.”

Was the greatest play of the classical era about a disabled person?

“Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet …” - Sir Francis Bacon, referring to Oedipous (“Swollen Foot”) and the Sphinx.

Oidipous Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) can reasonably be translated, from Bacon’s perspective, as Clubfoot the Ruler. It then joins such dramas as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Beauty and the Beast, in which a titular character may be expected to wrestle with their disability in the plot.

Disabled people, as we know, are often treated badly. Oidipous’ parents arranged to have him “exposed,” to die.

A disabled Prince so mistreated might, in royal wrath, take gruesome retribution on those who wronged him. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oidipous kills his father and entangles his mother in incest.

Aristotle’s pioneering work of literary criticism, The Poetics, treats Oidipous as Everyman, arguing that we undergo his extreme experiences vicariously, as “fear and pity.” We return to our everyday lives purged, a “catharsis” in which our spirits are temporarily uplifted out of their dreary banality.

In this disability tale, things are made better; that which was lost is found.

Sadly, two millennia of mainstream lit crit fail to deal with the great moral fact of the play: Oidipous’ parents tried to kill him when he was a helpless baby.

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A dramatization of this theme, This is the Son of Kings, was published in this blog in 2013.

Two boys with the same disability tried to get help. The rich student got it quickly. The poor student did not.

For many people having disabilities, inaccessibility to necessary services is denial of service. The 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides for placement at a private school at public expense if public schools can’t address a learning disability. But obstacles often limit this to wealthy families having above-average resources.

Mike Elsen-Rooney, The Teacher Project: “Two boys with learning disabilities grew up just blocks apart in New York City. Public schools couldn't teach them. So their parents battled to place them in private schools, on the taxpayers' dime.”

For the two dyslexic students below, receiving the revised education they need would enable them to make the contribution to society they were capable of.

For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade.
Isaac Rosenthal was a fast talker with a big vocabulary. But when it came time to read, he couldn’t keep up with his classmates. He didn’t pick up on the rhyme scheme in Dr. Seuss books, and often mispronounced words whose meaning he knew (like “Pacific,” for which he’d substitute “the other ocean”).
Landon Rodriguez, four years younger than Isaac, was energetic and talkative at home but quiet and withdrawn at school. When he brought home reading assignments, Landon often confused Bs and Ds, and he labored through even short passages.
By the end of that seminal school year, both of their parents knew that something was wrong. In  second grade, each boy was diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability and started receiving special education services at their public schools. “The teachers had no clue how to teach him,” said Debbie Meyer, Isaac’s mother.
Both families ultimately realized their sons needed support the public schools could not provide, particularly when it came to the all-important task of teaching them to read.

“Who gets private placement? White, wealthy families.”

When Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with learning disabilities a “free and appropriate education” for the first time, it built in the private placement safety net for parents. In some cases, public school officials acknowledge they can’t accommodate a student and agree to pay tuition at a private school. But sometimes families must sue the school district in order to get the tuition covered.

The situation in New York: “Thirty percent of the almost 3,000 students the city recommended for state-approved private schools last year were white, even though white students make up less than 15% of the city’s special education enrollment, state data show.”

Disability forms may not state correctly what qualifies as disability

I have been asked to fill out a “Disability Status Certification” by the 55+ apartment complex where I live. It says “‘Disability’ is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of an individual, such as not being able to care for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, or learning.”

I added, “or a person who is perceived by others as having such impairment.” HUD.gov*

At the bottom of the one-page form I wrote:
(*) “This document stresses access disability. FHA.gov links to HUD.gov, which includes negative perception — stigma/social bias, which is the operative factor in my case.”

Last September, in Your landlord may not realize that the Fair Housing Act applies to such disabilities as cleft palate, the post notes that the person interviewing candidates for the housing complex appeared not to be aware that supervising Federal agencies such as FHA, HUD, ADA, and DOL regard physical conditions which affect appearance as qualifying disabilities.

Policy towards the stigmatized disabled such as those with Cerebral Palsy or Cleft Palate

[This is an unfinished draft of an email to an official of the 55+ apartment complex where I live, concerning disability discrimination that masquerades as normal social interaction. (As discussed previously in TPOCP, the civil rights revolution has not yet happened for disabled people; mainstream society usually turns a blind eye to disability discrimination; and many in the mainstream are often clever at contriving subtle forms of discrimination that appear to be deniable.)]

Manager:

I am a recent new resident of [your 55+ apartment complex] who has a cleft palate. While you were helping me fill out the application forms I answered the question, Are you disabled according to FHA criteria. An FHA website said people impaired in a major life function, one of which was ’speaking,’ are considered disabled, so I checked ‘disabled.’

A related HUD site used criteria similar to those at ADA.GOV, ‘impaired in a major life function, … or perceived as such,’ (emphasis added) thus including the stigma or prejudice of being perceived as disabled or defective (as in ‘birth defect’) among the criteria.

In order to participate in the life of the [apartment complex] community, I participated in a small group which plays Scrabble in the Community Room on Thursdays. Another group, which as I recall plays Pinochle, also uses the CR at the same time. In one of the games after Thanksgiving, I remarked on a couple of Scrabble linguistic peculiarities, something like ‘gript’ for ‘gripped,’ and not allowing other common inflections such as ’ing’ or ‘ed.’ The game finished. Suddenly the person who sets up the board and and puts it away left, saying they would come back after checking their pet, and close up.

Everyone else left, so I stayed, covering for the leader. After waiting quite a while I asked the Pinochle people, who were still playing, if the Scrabble game went on a certain shelf. By this time I was feeling embarrassed. Obviously something unusual had happened, and it focused negative attention on a resident who has a stigmatizing disability.

Before the next scheduled game I realized that it looked like I had been discredited and probably couldn’t continue participating in the game, so I haven’t.

My disability has its own defamatory tag line, ‘I don’t care if it [h-words] the governor.’ If the governor, after a lifetime in the mainstream, improbably woke up one morning with a cleft palate, they would find that repeatedly, what masquerades as normal social action turns out to marginalize, exclude, and disenfranchise them from the social groups that constitute our lives: the family, the classroom, the workplace, and the diversions of retirement.