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.”
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