A preliminary note on the particular characteristics of the cleft palate disability

The author of the IndependenceChick blog refers to the mainstream as temporarily abled. Doesn’t really fit those who have a cleft. Personal example: I’m a high school and college letterman in the distance events (admittedly in small schools); climbed Mt. Hood a couple times (requires crampons and ice axe); ran marathons.

The nub of the story could be detected in the situation at the undergraduate school I attended. The three other clefted people there did not have a cleft lip. They could pass. They were not treated as disabled.

Our disability consists in the pervasive social attitude of those who can see us. Our disability is social.

It would help if the civil rights revolution was popularly understood as including us. It would help if we were popularly understood as being in a protected class, since the formal mechanisms of “civil rights” unfortunately leverage identity.(1)

Another topic, as things are, and particularly in the holiday season, gift-giving-and-the-outsider seems to be an undiscussed aspect of cleft prejudice. The person we give a gift to uneasily feels that we are presuming that we are their equal in doing so. But not giving the gift violates a social norm. It’s a cleft Catch-22. The existing social system’s neglect of people having a cleft here, as in many places, lacks:

1. A social standard for required social gift-giving
2. A social language or mode of discourse for us is missing. If the issue is race, one can say “racist,” “racism.” The proposed equivalent, “ableist,” “ableism” is feeble. (Would “cleftphobic” serve as “transphobic” does?)
3. In any case, we’re not supposed to talk about it. (I remember the feeling of struggling against a taboo when starting this blog years ago.)
4. The last post observed that cleft people can’t use the communitarian solution because their 1-in-700 status effectively means that the average cleft person doesn’t have a community
5. Political action is hindered by the same factor: 1-in-700
6. Democratic public-spiritedness should help the clefted population, but again as the last post implies, this is now much more the era of power, not ethics/civic virtue

A personal experience with institutions, which may be more than anecdotal: In the fall of the year I graduated from college, I entered a midwestern university English Department’s Ph.D program, having a national scholastic fellowship. At the department’s welcoming party, when the department’s representative saw me, he got a look of unbelieving disgust. In the classes, it was clear that I was not welcome.

At a left coast university, in encounters as a graduate student (I entered on an M.A. from a city university just starting its graduate program), as an auditor, and in an adult education class, an attitude having nothing to do with scholastic ability prevailed.

My impression, which you may not agree with, is that where the stigmatized disabled are concerned, some public higher education institutions care more about their impression than about their education responsibilities to their students.

Concluding notes: A google search on “cleft palate” still

1. Produces entries about us, not by us
2. Helps the parents of children having a cleft (who certainly need it) by providing corrective surgery and other needed services during the growing years but
3. Does not discover entries:
4. By us
5. About local, state, or federal programs or funds after age 18, to deal with widespread discriminatory attitudes and practices; severe isolation and unavailability of social contact and community; lack of political influence; and concealed exclusion from institutions which fear they will be tarnished by association with someone who has a cleft

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(1) The Founding, in beginning the Preamble with “We the People,” implied that identity was not supposed to matter. In the same spirit, Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy: The Constitution knows nothing of class and regards man as man where his civil rights under the Constitution are concerned (quoted from memory) prefigured MLK’s own anti-identitarian content-of-their-character, not color-of-their-skin formula.

Unfortunately, since the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause seems to be currently instituted as protected class, it would really help if the American public came to believe we are in a protected class.

Cancel culture and the pervasive social discrimination against the stigmatized disable.

This is the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The America of that time, up until around 1980, had characteristics that were more friendly to those who are different. Those who opposed McCarthyism during the Eisenhower administration, for example, supported the individualism of the right to march to the sound of a different drummer. The same respect for the right to be different made them oppose “guilt by association.” They opposed groupthink, which is now valorized as “solidarity.” They opposed “end justifies the means” rationalization in the name of principled argument, representing individual values rather than group aggrandizement. The chief characteristic of the America of the Great Generation was friendship. The chief characteristic of what America has become is enmity.

This is particularly disastrous for people who are thought to “offend” because of birth defects.

Sociologist Erving Goffman noted that disabled and other stigmatized people have a “spoiled identity.” 

Christophe Van Eecke on “Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture” in Quillette: “Nevertheless, a very similar effect is obtained by destroying the victim’s social world. This explains why it is important  for shaming and cancellation to be public events—they are meant to isolate the accused from the community. This isolation is experienced as physical as much as spiritual. The destruction of the world that is achieved in torture by the destruction of the body and its relationship to its immediate physical surroundings is achieved in cancel culture by the infliction of an abject state of loneliness, which equally cuts the victim off from the world.” (Emphasis added)

Unlike other targeted minorities, the clefted, being a minuscule population (1 in 700), and having no governmental or other societal programs once they become adults, do not have a community. We can be, as previous posts have noted, attacked on the grounds of “What’s a misfit doing at a party?” without fear that anyone will come to our support.

Van Eecke continues: “This experience has been most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argues that inducing a state of loneliness in people has the effect of destroying all sense of community, reducing individuals to isolated atoms, and thereby preparing them, through abject fear, for totalitarian rule. As Arendt explains, “Totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As Arendt points out, “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.” A lonely man “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.” Solitude can be enjoyed—it is often even a luxury—whereas loneliness is terror.” (Emphasis added)

The disabled “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.”

Van Eecke: “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, which ensures that this person will lose his job, his livelihood, his social circle, and will almost certainly not find another job in the foreseeable future. In close analogy to physical torture, where everyday objects (a chair, the food one eats) and even the body itself are turned into hostile weapons, the shared world is turned into a hostile environment for the publicly shamed person, who is now shunned by everyone. The very people who were only recently friends and colleagues are now the weapons that inflict pain through their absence, confirming the victim’s isolation.”

We know that sooner or later you will be humiliated. “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, … ”

Van Eecke: “In this way, the security a person feels within the human community is destroyed and the world is made hostile. It effectively reduces the limits of one’s being to the limits of the body. Any person who has ever suffered severe public shame will acknowledge that the limits of one’s body are a thin shell between oneself and a hostile environment.”

Sooner or later you will be humiliated. Suffer “severe public shame … ”

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The language of the new regrettable enmity society, and its cancel culture, map a great increase in the already discriminatory tendency of the mainstream toward those born having a birth defect.

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - The Scarlet Letter of the CPs: “You’re Guilty”

Yours truly is fortunate that his formative era was the Truman - Eisenhower - Kennedy years. At the time of its Army-McCarthy row, the left rejected:

• End justifies the means rationalization
• Groupthink
• Extrajudicial determination of guilt
• Guilt by association
• Conformism

Nearly a decade ago Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom proclaimed a “mission to civilize” in the face of social tendencies which make us “meaner and less civilized.” In an episode highly criticized by the left media, Thomas Sadoski’s character Don Keefer prevents the airing, by a student who has been raped, of a precursor of the Shitty Media Men phenomenon. Shitty Media Men was an online spreadsheet which allowed  public rape accusation without due process. A writer who objected was “excused from the room” by Sorkin. Sorkin/Keefer took the position that this sort of extrajudicial determination of guilt without due process could damage the reputations of innocent people.

This new righteous attack culture in the name of social justice makes this era worse for people having a spoiled identity because of birth defect stigma. Sorkin was socially punished for predicting that anonymous accusation having the ostensible purpose of countering rape could derail innocent people’s lives.(1) This same new climate of punishment, which rejects the law’s sacred presumption of innocence, means American culture has gotten worse for disabled people, particularly if they have stigmatizing afflictions. (“You’re guilty!” a City of Seattle co-worker once greeted me, apropos of nothing whatever.)

The new, righteous social justice presumption of guilt actually has an ancient pedigree. John 9:2 “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

A current The Atlantic article by Anne Applebaum says we have entered a new Scarlet Letter era. “The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her [Hester Prynne] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”” (Emphasis added)

“We live in a land governed by the rule of law,” she adds, “we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.”

And some Cerebral Palsy people, some Cleft Palate people, and others who look different, are “out of the ordinary relations with humanity” in an unrecognized shadow world. Where it is impossible to live a normal life. The Scarlet Letter of disability stigma means they lose everything — “jobs, money, friends, colleagues” — after violating no laws … 

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(1) Stephen Elliott: “How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed my Life”

“The Paris Review decided not to run an interview they had already completed with me for their web site. I was disinvited from several events, including a panel at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Someone even called a bookstore in New York where I was scheduled to do a reading and urged them to cancel their event. …

Then my television agent stopped returning my calls. Was this just business as usual, or had she found out about the list? I didn’t know. If she did know about the list, she certainly wouldn’t be sending me to any meetings. Hollywood doesn’t care if you’re innocent or guilty; they just don’t want to be anywhere near that kind of controversy. Friends who knew I had been named stopped inviting me out. I started to get depressed, because I was walking around with this awful secret. I’d look someone in the eye and I wouldn’t know what they knew about me. I couldn’t talk about what was happening without revealing that I had been accused of rape. …

Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused. We don’t talk to one another. We assume that if someone else has been accused, there must be a good reason. We’re afraid of guilt by association.”

“People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether.”

 Sarah Katz: “People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether. “These types of laws are written without even thinking about how they’re going to impact people with disabilities—until we come forth and start talking about our experiences and how legislation like this is going to impact us,” Michelle Bishop, the manager of voter access and engagement at the National Disability Rights Network, told me. “People with disabilities are very often collateral damage in these conversations.””

Reflections on Canellos’ _The Great Dissenter_

In view of Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy, saying “the Constitution neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” what is the status of “protected class” at law?

If the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is today being implemented as protected class, should the stigmatized disabled, the CPs (Cerebral Palsy and Cleft Palate) for example, be in a protected class, in view of the pervasive social prejudice against them?

We seem to have two things going on. Protected Class as a term of art under a Constitution, not of classes, but of “all men,” according to the ringing phrase in the Declaration. And an obvious population at need, the demeaned, degraded, and marginalized disabled, rendered second class citizens and denied Equal Protection, because the public believes them not to have been included in that dodgy workaround, “Protected Class.”

Justice is universal, after all. No need to question where equal protection applies. No need to name who gets it and who doesn’t. No need to specify maligned disabled people so they won’t be left out. That’s the beauty of universalism. Martin Luther King recognized the inherent universalism of justice when he proclaimed one of what Milton called, “the known rules of ancient liberty”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

But protected class is particularist. It is crosswise to true justice. It is Whac A Mole. It leaves as many out as it includes.

That’s one of the reasons there’s no Brown v Board, no Obergefell, no landmark civil rights case, for us. Nor the small routine defenses granted minorities: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

No wonder the public attacks at will. Creates an uproar at parties, the subtext of which is, What’s a misfit doing at a party? Springs subtly crafted, socially deniable, public humiliations. Feels free to be openly scornful of us in our university classrooms, and in community housing. All of this imposing what Goffman called a “spoiled identity” without the countervailing influence of civil rights law.

Canellos begins The Great Dissenter, “The narrative turned … ruthlessly extinguished … a slow, menacing starvation. The ingredients for success … gradually withdrawn. … There was no recognition of their struggles, their accomplishments, or the tragedy of their lost hopes. There was only silence.”

He was talking about the the people the Civil War was fought to liberate, as a reactionary social movement determinedly dismantled the postwar Constitutional amendments.

Another deeply entrenched social attitude treats us as having a spoiled social identity and makes it impossible for many of us to live normal lives.

One of the recourses for those whom society will not accept is just law. But we were left out of the civil rights revolution. There is only silence.

A Preliminary Note on Sources

For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It states: “All members of society have the same human rights – they include civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.” In other words, if an action, policy, or attitude would be wrong for minorities, women, or LGBTQ people, it is wrong for disabled people or people with birth defects. If the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws is implemented as protected class, then disabled people or people with birth defects should be clearly identified as being in a protected class; and they should be as highly ranked in the politics of identity as, for example, people of color.

Why is it necessary to have a Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities?: “The Convention is necessary in order to have a clear reaffirmation that the rights of persons with disabilities are human rights and to strengthen respect for these rights.  Although existing human rights conventions offer considerable potential to promote and protect the rights of persons with disabilities, it became clear that this potential was not being tapped.  Indeed, persons with disabilities continued being denied their human rights and were kept on the margins of society in all parts of the world.   This continued discrimination against persons with disabilities highlighted the need to adopt a legally binding instrument which set out the legal obligations on States to promote and protect the rights of persons with disabilities.” (Emphasis added)

Note: America has done well concerning disability access, as What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement - Fred Pelka, 2012, documents. However, the civil rights of disabled people — protection against comments and gesturing intended to demean, degrade, marginalize, and disenfranchise disabled people — have been neglected. Where needed American civil rights law is lacking, there may be recourse to standards documented by the United Nations.

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“A University of Windsor law professor could become the first person to represent Canada on the United Nations' Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The federal government announced last week that Canada has nominated disability advocate and legal scholar Laverne Jacobs as a candidate to serve on the committee.

The 18-person committee features experts from all over the world. If Jacobs is elected at a conference in June of next year, she would serve a four-year term.

Jacobs, who joined CBC Radio's Windsor Morning on Monday, said she was "honoured and humbled" to have been selected.

UN Disability Nominee: One of Windsor's most respected university professors has been nominated for a prestigious United Nations post. Laverne Jacobs is Canada's nominee to join the UN's Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She speaks with Tony Doucette about what it means, and what she hopes to accomplish, if elected.

The committee plays an important role in implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Jacobs explained. It reviews reports on different countries and provides recommendations on the convention, and it also receives complaints and conducts inquiries related to allegations of human rights abuses.”

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Podcast: How Cleft Lips and Palates Work
Stuff You Should Know

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-cleft-lips-and-palates-work/id278981407?i=1000523019928

In the podcast “Stuff you should know,” accessible in any podcast app

After Ira Glasser retired in 2001, the liberal ACLU was transformed into a left organization, “undemocratic and unaccountable”

How the ACLU ceased defending the Bill of Rights and, concerned with winning popularity contests, became an antiliberal progressive organization owing more to Marx than the Magna Carta. “Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, [as in no-platforming] and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.”

James Kirchick: Adopting a scrupulously content-neutral approach to the defense of free speech is guaranteed to upset people across the political spectrum, but it was a price [ACLU head Ira] Glasser and his colleagues were willing to pay. Religious conservatives like Buckley fumed at the ACLU for arguing on behalf of flag-burners and blasphemous artists, while [progressives] were confounded by its insistence that neo-Nazis had the right to goose-step past the homes of Holocaust survivors. But the defense of the First Amendment was far too important to leave to those concerned with winning popularity contests. …

[Their] commitment to civil liberties [is now] primarily if not exclusively a function of partisan politics. …

Then as now, Glasser was at pains to remind the ACLU’s critics that it was not “defending Nazis” in the Skokie affair. It was defending the First Amendment, which remains valid independent of whomever exercises it. Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.

Almost immediately following Glasser’s July 2001 retirement, however, the organization started to slip. … Unlike the 1970s, when the ACLU was run by stubbornly principled people who refused to buckle under the weight of fashionable opinion or donor pressure, the new generation of leaders prioritized conformism over intellectual consistency.

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive … organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero,(1) an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable  behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit).

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Meghan Daum, in The Problem with Everything:

The American Civil Liberties Union, apparently confused about its purported mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens, unleashed a tweet thread denouncing the rollback because “it promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused . . . We will continue to support survivors.”

Nonetheless, to hear the ACLU talking about “inappropriately favoring the accused,” even on a platform like Twitter, was nothing short of remarkable. To me, the nagging question was … why so many people and organizations were willing to override fundamental democratic principles in order to show that they were on the “right side” of an issue …

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(1) Apparently Leader for Life, as the autocratic Romero’s rule commenced twenty years ago.

Hat tip to the IndependenceChick blog’s well written articles concerning the rights of people having disabilities

 The author of the IndependenceChick blog writes, “critical race theory, with its Marxist roots and simplistic narrative of “you are either the oppressed or the oppressor.””

She asks, “how can I live in a society that says, “Because you are disabled, you are a perpetual victim and everyone else is oppressing you–except, of course, that you are also a white American, so you’re an oppressor–so everywhere you turn, you are basically a worthless piece of humanity?””

Neither the left nor the right serve disabled people well. The left’s “check your white privilege,” as IndependenceChick suggests, contains a hidden implied argument, Original Sin, and is thus incompatible with the presumption of innocence of liberal justice. Both left and right, it seems to me, assume that human life is a war of all against all.

Liberalism, exemplified in the Declaration and Constitution, by contrast, assumes that the human being is a rights-bearing creature entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Citizens can make a social contract and work together toward that end.

A current theme of the IndependenceChick blog is mainstream society’s tendency to impose gratuitous restraints on people having disabilities.

In an issue between a person having a cleft palate and _anyone_, the disabled person is almost certainly at a major disadvantage.

 A corollary of “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor”: I take it that the fact that the h-word was chosen over the n-word means that the general public considers the pervasively stigmatized birth defect to be a worse identity than the nation’s most targeted race. Other factors:

1. There are virtually no governmental or social institutions for adult people having a cleft.
2. Absence of legal prior art: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”
3. Either actually, or publicly regarded as, not in a protected class. Few or no cases at law concerning our civil rights.
4. Roughly one in seven hundred. Not enough to have any influence on politics.
5. Related absence of community. If I am typical, many clefted people don’t know anyone like them. And the mainstream people they know may be less than reliable friends.
6. Little or no social or legal cost to slighting us, abusing us, or having an attitude of disrespect toward us.
7. Some, perhaps most, of us have families that simply will not talk about cleft palate. That, in itself, is probably a civil rights violation. Such families have a significant tendency to turn a blind eye when bigoted people get on our case. Families should be part of the solution. Often they are instead part of the problem.
8. People having a cleft are often blamed and scapegoated. Sometimes they even considered guilty for the way they were born.
9. If a person of color targets a clefted person of a different race, the person being targeted may be accused of racism if they defend themselves.
10. An example of some of these things: I was in a state office having my drivers license picture taken. The state employee said, “Cheese, whiskey, [h-word].” I know a person of color my age. If the state representative had done the same thing, substituting the [n-word], he could have gone home and talked to a bunch of people who were in the same boat. The situation of us clefted ones is utterly different - anyone we might mention it to would probably get a pained expression, as if we’d violated a social rule.

Summary: In an issue between a person having a cleft palate and anyone, the disabled person is almost certainly at a major disadvantage.

A quiet, preliminary, J’accuse

1. You are a person having cerebral palsy being bullied for offending the community, but the ALLU (American Legal Liberties Union) refuses to take your case. Domingo Piteco Cabrón, ALLU director since 2001, observed that your appearance actually does offend the community.

2. You are a person having cleft palate being bullied for offending the community, but the ALLU (American Legal Liberties Union) refuses to take your case. Domingo Piteco Cabrón, ALLU director since 2001, observed that your appearance actually does offend the community.

“Not a protected class,” he pointed out.

Thinking out loud about civil rights assistance the stigmatized disabled need

 Recently I brainstormed thoughts on initiating a public program to assist cleft palate people after the K-12 year existing programs, which basically help parents of babies born with a cleft get the needed corrective surgery. (I may post the initial rough draft of those ideas soon.)

Those existing programs are vital, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to help us after we reach adulthood, and find ourselves dealing with a mainstream society which doesn’t treat us very well at all, while generally pretending we don’t exist. There’s not much thinking about cleft palate around to go on. Earlier posts on this blog have referenced Sociologist Erving Goffman’s applicable reflections on stigma, the “spoiled identity,” which results in “reduced life chances.” (1)

Example, from Wikipedia: “Goffman's book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) examines how, to protect their identities when they depart from approved standards of behavior or appearance, people manage impressions of themselves, mainly through concealment. Stigma pertains to the shame a person may feel when he or she fails to meet other people's standards, and to the fear of being discredited—which causes the person not to reveal his or her shortcomings. Thus a person with a criminal record may simply withhold that information for fear of judgment by whomever that person happens to encounter.” (There’s a big difference between people having a cleft palate which doesn’t affect the lip, nose and face, who can “pass” and live more or less normal lives, and those who have a visible birth defect and encounter social obstruction at every turn.)

Reasons a program needs to be initiated:

1. There don’t seem to be any programs now

2. Identifying and establishing means of contacting members of the local population of cleft palate people (so those who want to can form a community, for example)

3. Setting up and publishing gatherings for CP people, so they can socialize, share information, advocate for their cause, compare strategies for dealing with disability discrimination, contact their legislator, etc.

4. Contacting candidate foundations for financial support for the various aspects of this trial program, including: 1) A counseling program; 2) Legal assistance (example: At a party a community college instructor who was a person of color got on my case, called me “funny looking” and generally degraded me and caused the other partiers to back away from me. An attorney on retainer could advise if a civil right had been violated, if the instructor had violated educational institution policy, etc.) 3) A possible ombudsman program that could assist CP people being bullied in the public schools; 4) Publications, such as How to deal with fear, anxiety, bewilderment, depression caused by pervasive social abuse; 5) Identifying or initiating relevant sociological studies (for example, Is there statistical data concerning discrimination cost - Has a relative income level comparison for CP/mainstream people in comparable populations been done? If not, finance the institution of one.)

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(1) Previous post Reduced Life Chances: “Goffman [says] (1). “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to ... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). 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.”

Goffman also echoes Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, noting that stigma reduces a person in the mind from being a “whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” ... stigmatized people are vulnerable to invasions of privacy, with perfect strangers feeling comfortable starting personal conversations.”

I responded to an old roommate, not in acceptable social language, but in the language of what’s actually going on

A mutual friend put me in touch with a guy who was my college roommate for one semester, apparently to research “my case.” Below is an anonymized version of what I said to him, basically that I’m not the humble and apologetic guy-with-a-cleft-palate he knew.

I probably won’t hear back from him:

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Hi, “Peter”, long time, etc. I saw your call on the iPhone, didn’t find a message, however.

[Email omitted]

Prefer written contact. Your Facebook wall doesn’t list Bucolic College …

I think you wrote about cleft palate when you were my roommate (“your case”, you remarked to me).

And when you stopped by my [Left Coast] home, possibly you were following up.

I write a blog about CP and the stigmatized disabled under an anonymity name. Friends and family anonymized there who might be exposed if connected to my name, but you can have the URL if you respect its privacy.

I’d like to see your Bucolic College report if possible. I expect it’s condescending, but I’ve factored that in.

My Facebook wall has some good historical material on 50s Alaskan Island village life - Our mutual friend just remarked on that - can pull up more articles if either of you are interested.

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How do we respond to the constant discrimination.

 It was a hot day in August, 1975. A bunch of us backpackers in an unaffiliated youth hostel in Athens, a big Dutch guy got on my case - President Ford had taken action about some boat in another country, as I recall. “It makes me mad,” he tells me. It was hot and muggy and I blew up at him: “I. Am. Not. My. Country!,” I said. “Calm down!” he ordered. “I WILL NOT CALM DOWN,” I yelled. It felt very satisfying.

Unexpectedly, the Empire types - the Limeys, the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Canucks - seemed to respect that. Maybe they’d never seen a person with a cleft palate defend himself before.

Certainly most of the time we don’t. A year or so back, on the Rapid Transit from downtown to Linden, there was a scrawny middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. I relaxed the Basic Rule - Don’t make eye contact with the crazies. Before long she’d produced a dollar bottle of gin and was trying to get passengers to help her open it.

When she came to me I smiled and shook my head regretfully (I’m a former employee of the bus company), and she starts this verbal abuse: “You are weak. YOU ARE WEAK.” We’re right up behind the bus driver, he must be hearing. I considered standing up for disability rights - when we don’t it just encourages the pervasive abuse of our society - but let it go.

Maybe there’ll be a right time …

 

The identity game and life with a cleft palate.

I was working at a suburban Toys“R”Us in 1998 when a woman and her son came through my check stand. The boy saw the scar on my lip and immediately said, “evil.”

This is sometimes a factor that can cause a majority of Americans having a cleft to be assumed racist on sight. People see the birth defect, and like this boy, think, “bad person.” For people of color, this can turn out, “bad white person” - “racist” if the disabled person is Caucasian.

The pervasive social prejudice against people having a cleft palate or other stigmatized disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, in these cases is compounded by an immediate condemnation: “racist.”

The politics of identity is about status rankings - “victim status” in popular parlance - based on relative levels of discriminatory treatment received, with the people of color Martin Luther King campaigned for at the forefront. Yet the symbolic worst identity isn’t “African American.” We have a familiar catchphrase for the worst identity that could happen to anyone: “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” It isn’t “I don’t care if it [n-words] the Governor.”

Not all people who are biologically Caucasian have a “white” identity. The six million Caucasians slaughtered in the Holocaust were murdered because of their identity, but it wasn’t “white.” The Caucasians who worship in mosques have an identity which brings the targeting of Islamophobia down on them, but it isn’t “white.” And the Caucasians whose lives are altered beyond all recognition by the community’s pervasive birth defect prejudice aren’t “white.”

The politics of identity isn’t in liberalism. It’s in the ideology of the antiliberal left. (The three most famous words of liberalism, “We the People,” are an opening salvo against identity.) Unfortunately, the left’s inconsistency in applying its identity doctrine leads to the left being bigoted in practice against people having disabilities. Nominally, your left identity is your “oppression” identity. If the main factor in your life is some characteristic you have that causes society to attack you, that, in theory, is your left identity. (One way to identify a recognized oppression identity is is that it is accorded “protected class” in society and at law.)

Not only cleft palate, not only birth defect, but disability in general has been left out of the civil rights revolution. As an assistant city prosecutor noted a few years ago, “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.” No case law against disabled people being publicly demeaned, degraded, humiliated, and disenfranchised by anyone looking for someone whose civil rights you may violate with impunity.

It is implicit in left thought that there is something basically wrong with white people, and men, and white males particularly (examples: “Check your white privilege”; “All men rape”). Obviously, this can’t be applied all the time. But the “disabled white person = ‘racist’” syndrome described above - that is another story. Example: I was at the “welcome new graduate students” party of a city university when a person of color walked up to me and accused me of white privilege, despite the presence of many other white males there. He had used “white males evil” as an excuse to vent a prejudice against people afflicted with birth defects. The hypocritical logic of left thought not only allows this, it may actually foster disability discrimination.

On another occasion, an East Asian instructor at a gathering featuring community college staff deliberately misinterpreted my statement that I had attended there as a false claim that I had been employed there. Then she began derogatory rhetorical questions that had people backing away from me. Decent people should have objected to this ugly travesty. They didn’t because it fit bigoted left identity logic: “In a debate between a minority woman and a white male, he is a dominant person and she is a victim getting her own back. (Besides, his birth defect offends the community).”

If you have a cleft palate, the public is on record as thinking you have the worst, most oppressed, identity there is. By the logic of left thought, the progressive community should be demanding recognition of your civil rights at every turn. Instead, they cloak their bigotry against us in the mantle of “anti-racism.” As that hoary old left polemicist Noam Chomsky would say, “I note this, and I draw certain conclusions.”

Universities putting the prestige of the institution ahead of the cause they profess and the students they’re supposed to serve in the case of disabled applicants

The stigmatized disabled, (please see two cites below) such as the CPs (Cerebral Palsy, Cleft Palate, subjects of previous posts), may find that public institutions of higher education, funded by their taxes, do not want them because they would not want a graduate having a socially targeted disability, particularly a birth defect, out in the world with a degree from them. Whereas these universities might be afraid to be caught discriminating against minorities who are in a protected class and part of the civil rights revolution, there is no social pressure or legal sanction against schools marginalizing members of what dol.gov, ada.gov, and other Federal websites describe as “America’s largest minority.”

I speak from personal experience. In the fall of the year I graduated from college, I entered a prestigious midwestern university on a national scholastic fellowship. At the university’s welcoming event for PhD candidates in my department, the official conducting the event, seeing that I have a cleft palate, gave me a look of unbelieving disgust. In none of the classes was I made to feel welcome.

Many of us who have birth defects are conditioned not to speak out about the bigotry of the mainstream toward us, or even to recognize that it is happening. In my case, it was years before I realized that this devastating rejection wasn’t my fault. After a few years I obtained a graduate degree from a western city’s commuter university which was just starting its graduate program, a credential which gained me admission to a state university on the left coast. There were various harassments, such intentionally mispronouncing my name. Years later, participating in a senior citizen audit program at the same institution, when the professor administered an exam which auditors do not take, he openly discriminated by glaring at me as I sat quietly waiting.

In another course, the professor made no effort to conceal his prejudice. Whenever I asked a question or attempted to make a comment, he adopted a demeanor of ridicule or disgust.

This speaks to the situation generally for people having birth defects. It’s socially acceptable to be abusive. This sometimes makes it dangerous to go to parties. Someone, feigning legitimate interest, starts asking questions. They turn out to be rhetorical questions - the subtext is “What’s an [h-word] doing at a party?” - and nobody objects, instead everyone starts edging away.

It’s not just the state university that discriminates openly. At the state employment department, an employee near the desk where I was being assisted loudly teased a co-worker with a mustache about his “hairlip.” Subtle. When I was posing for a driver’s license photo, the state photographer said, “Cheese, whiskey, [h-word.]”

The sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a “spoiled identity.” For people having birth defects, this means that we, not having a social identity, are not part of society, and can’t have a normal life (many of us live in reclusive seclusion, because even as adults, going out in public incurs the danger of getting bullied).

The catchphrase everyone (unfortunately) knows - “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor,” means that this once-illustrious personage will find that life as he once knew it is over.

Nobody cares (that’s why parties - Parties! - are hazardous for us).

What would happen if we went to our Representative or Senator and asked if something could be done about the civil rights of people having birth defects and any other disabled people who are getting targeted?

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Doha Madani, NBC: “John Manly, one of the lead attorneys who helped represent more than 700 women in the settlement, characterized the idea that the university was not aware of the allegations, which spanned decades, as "a damn lie."

"There are many in the administration and the board of trustees who don't belong at that university," Manly said Thursday after the announcement of the settlement. "Not all, but some. ... They put the prestige, fundraising and the university brand ahead of the well-being of students for 30 years."”

/***   ***/

Jamie Yuccas, CBS News: “Hundreds of former patients have accused Tyndall of sexually abusing them during examinations. The lawsuit claims the university knew about the complaints against him, yet did nothing to protect students. …

"I knew there was something wrong with the way he talked to me and the filthy disgusting stories he told me, but when he was taking pictures under the guise of treatment... I didn't know those things were wrong." said Audry Nafzinger, now a sex crimes prosecutor. "They are very powerful institution, USC, and the fact that they just didn't care and threw us to the wolves is so disgusting."”

“America’s largest minority” and the continuing normalization of a familiar derogatory catchphrase

I hope sometime, once the coronavirus emergency has abated somewhat, to contact such entities as my legislative representative, or the ACLU, concerning the continuing civil rights issues of the stigmatized disabled. One approach could be to present the well-known catchphrase, “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor,” and note the response.

If the response is along the lines of, “Yes, that indicates that there is unfinished business concerning the social status of people having disabilities in our communities,” that would be something to work with.

But if there isn’t much of a response, that also could be a point in argument. “The phrase indicates pervasive social prejudice. What action has your agency taken concerning this issue so far?”

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Many of the early articles in this blog noted that a Molly Ivins article on the Time website used the catchphrase as if it wasn’t derogatory toward a vulnerable targeted minority (the title of the article is something like “The Chattering Class Should Just Let Go,” and it’s apparently archived behind a paywall now). CNN reprints it: https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/09/14/chattering.html , again apparently without any awareness that it might be problematic. Would they have printed “I don’t care if it [n-words] the Governor?”

The civil rights revolution will remain in an unfinished state until the habit of casual disrespect for America’s largest minority is addressed.

If you are one of the stigmatized disabled, what can you do about the bullying?

The public discrimination against the CPs, cerebral palsy and cleft palate, is fairly well known. In 2013, a post quoted  an ABC News/Yahoo article concerning “teasing and taunting a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy”:

An Ohio man faces one month of jail time for teasing and taunting a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy after a video of the incident went viral.

On Nov. 27, Judge John A. Poulos of the Canton Municipal Court sentenced 43-year-old William Bailey to 29 days in jail. ...

William Bailey "was dragging his leg and patting his arm across his chest to pick his son Joseph up," said [Tricia] Knight. "I asked him to please stop doing this. 'My daughter can see you.' He then told his son to walk like the R-word." ...

The next day Knight posted the video on her Facebook page while [Knight's mother-in-law, Marie] Prince uploaded the video they called "Bus Stop Ignorance" to YouTube. Within days, the video went viral. ...

"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But when there's nothing out there regarding disabilities, it took me a little bit longer to come to a decision." ...

As for whether this case presents a new precedent in Ohio is another debate.

"I don't know if it sets a precedent so much maybe as it begins a conversation between people," said [Jennifer] Fitzsimmons [the chief assistant city prosecutor for this case]. "I think conversation starts progress, and I think if it can bring something else to light, it would be good."

The other CP, cleft palate, has its own derogatory catch-phrase: “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” Other people having a disability at times encounter pariah affect, being treated as not part of the community, or being subject to slurs such as “crip,” “retard,” or the all-purpose “misfit.” To be stigmatized, as the sociologist Erving Goffman noted, is to have “a spoiled identity.”

“Social justice,” offered as a remedy by the left but not by liberalism, tends not to work for people having disabilities because the politics of identity doesn’t work for spoiled identities (this is why liberalism does not practice politics of identity, or extrajudicial “social justice”).

Another problem disabled people have in America is that, perhaps beginning with the Civil Rights Act of the mid-sixties, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws has been increasingly implemented as protected class, despite Justice Harlan’s assertion, in Plessy, that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Although the Department of Labor and other Federal websites observe that the disabled are America’s largest minority, the mainstream public thinks that “minorities” - people of color, women, and LGBTQ - are in a protected class, and not to be messed with; and that people having disabilities are not in this sense off limits if you’re looking for someone you can be mean to. The neighbor of the little girl with cerebral palsy, above, thought he could verbally abuse her with impunity.

The mainstream public’s belief that, for example, doing a number on someone having a disability is not as serious as doing the same thing to a racial minority is reflected in the “benign neglect” of the formal justice system. Above, Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Fitzsimmons noted that there was “case law regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But … there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

Not in a protected class. Little or no social pressure against attempting to demean, degrade, or humiliate. Doors slammed in our faces by normal, decent people. The Social Blind Eye that ignores when this happens. And at law, “there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

A powerful voice can change the narrative concerning injustice. Martin Luther King accomplished this concerning the major injustice of his time. At present we have a spoiled identity and are outside of society and outside the law. The narrative can be changed. It needs to be.

What is the solution to the problem of people who target the disabled because it’s easy and there are seldom the consequences attendant on targeting minorities?

 A sentence from an IndependenceChick post:

“This shouldn’t have happened, and because you did it to this type of person, you revealed you have to get your kicks from mistreating someone we already think of as defenseless or weak or low.”

Commendably, much has been done by our society to assist what IndependenceChick calls those who are not TAB (Temporarily Able Bodied) with things like access (see the book, What We Have Done). But little has been done about discriminatory attitudes, commenting and gesturing, verbal abuse, and treating the person having a disability as an outsider. In some cases — those with cleft palate, and many of the non-neurotypical — those perceived by the community as “disabled” are able-bodied. They earn varsity letters in school, climb mountains, run marathons. But they don’t get an IEP, they aren’t part of an assistance  program, and as far as the disability discrimination of mainstream society is concerned, many are on their own.

If you Google “cleft palate,” for example, everything on the internet is about helping their parents (who certainly need the help). And there is nothing whatsoever for the clefted after they become adults.

There are social strictures for those who abuse people of color, women, and LGBTQ people. But concerning the stigma of disability, the civil rights revolution has not happened. Our society has, rightly, changed the narrative for the minorities in the first sentence of this paragraph, but for the disabled, America’s largest minority, a pervasive public prejudice often still prevents them from being able to enjoy normal lives.

IndependenceChick note evidence that America’s largest minority is still left out of the civil rights revolution

“The reality that disability is not yet part of diversity. Again, it’s the difference between disability and skin color, disability and orientation, disability and religion, disability and national origin. If all those other things are good, then why is my “difference” still seen as unfortunate, inspirational, or some strange mix of both? Why is my worthiness tied to how much I “don’t let disability stop me?””

https://independencechick.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/disability-pride-in-the-new-year-can-we-have-it-can-we-do-it/

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Federal websites for Department of Labor, FHA/HUD, and ADA, for example, describe people having disabilities as “America’s largest minority”