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.