A day in the life: Bullied at the grocery store

 A couple months ago the chain grocer where I shop mispriced the hummus I bought. When I brought it to the attention of the employee who oversees the self-checkout area, he said I’d have to go talk to the deli, which sold it. He suggested I might have looked at the price of a different brand of hummus.

I ate the overcharge.

A couple weeks ago I bought six containers of hummus. It rang up at a total of $9.00 more than the advertised price,“Tell me what I have to do to fix this,” I told him. “What do I have to do?”

He told I’d have to go work it out with the deli.

“Do I leave my (mostly rung up) cart here while I do this?” The employee ok’d that.

So I went to the deli and told them this particular brand was deceptively priced. “Come around out here and look at the label in front of it. It’s not the same as what you have in the machine that rings it up.”

They authorized the guy in the self checkout to correct the price, which he did.

The whole process had taken over half an hour and involved two sections of the chain store’s operation. Presumably the chain is now aware that one of its sections is involved in deceptive pricing, and another section has been stonewalling customers who bring it to the store’s attention. They may even be aware that, in addition to violating state law (RCW 19.94.230) regarding “deceptive pricing,” this unethical employee, in bullying an elderly, disabled customer, could have exposed the chain to a civil rights liability.

Clefted people, according to FHA/HUD, which oversees the over-55 apartments where I live, are impaired in “a major life function” in four ways: Appearance, eating, speaking, or considered as such.

The last covers disability stigma, the public prejudice which can cause even elderly, handicapped citizens to be bullied in the course of daily life.

What you can do when targeted by someone who thinks you aren’t in a protected class

 In June, 2013, this blog posted (Imagine That America Had Its Consciousness Raised), about What We Can Do.

Today, if someone gets on your case: HUD/FHA oversees the 55+ place I live. The application asked if I was disabled. Their sites say that disabled, “impaired in a major life function,” includes:

1. Speech
2. Eating
3. Appearance 
4. And considered to be disabled, which addresses prejudice and stigma.

So, if you don’t want to just let it go - sometimes the politic solution - you can point out that the United States Government considers you disabled, and frowns on targeting disabled people. Such targeting is discriminatory and could be a civil rights violation.

If others are standing by doing nothing, ask if they would let race, gender, or religious discrimination happen without objecting.

Andrew Sullivan’s view of gay stigma often resonates for cleft stigma

 Andrew Sullivan’s Out on a Limb:, Chapter The Politics of Homosexuality:

“There is no common discourse in which he can now speak, …” A beginning: If someone is getting on our case, and pretending that it isn’t because we are different, we can ask, “Are you being cleft-phobic?”

The mainstream, despite the civil rights revolution, still “pursues the logic of repression.”

Like homosexuality, cleft palate “does in fact exist as an identifiable and involuntary characteristic of some people, and that these people do not as a matter of course suffer from moral or psychological dysfunction,” nor are we guilty because of our difference.

One reason a “common discourse” is lacking is because of  “a politics of denial or repression. Faced with a sizable and inextinguishable part of society, it can only pretend that it does not exist, or needn’t be addressed, or can somehow be dismissed.” Ok, just 1 in 700. But name a program anywhere in the United States for adults with cleft palate.

Sullivan describes a gay politics of “theater and rhetoric”; we clefted sit abashed, humble and apologetic, and don’t do anything. “Acquiescence in repression,” Sullivan notes. “A psychological dynamic of supplication that too often only perpetuates cycles of inadequacy and self-doubt. … the notion that [our] equality is dependent on the goodwill of [our] betters. … A clear and overwhelming history of accumulated discrimination and a social ghetto that seemed impossible to breach.” (I don’t care if it h-words the Governor.)

“Facing their families and colleagues with integrity.” Yes. We should. Cleft Pride. “Full civic equality.” Shout out our “existence, equality, integrity.”

“America’s inherent hostility to gay people.” And to us, still: half a century after the civil rights revolution.

“Liberalism properly restricts itself to law—not culture—in addressing social problems.” And since the Equal Protection clause has been implemented as protected class, we must be in a protected class, even if the public doesn’t think so. Make that clear whenever someone insults or bullies you.

We don’t have a community: “A young heterosexual black or Latino girl invariably has an existing network of people like her to interpret, support, and explain the emotions she feels when confronting racial prejudice for the first time. But a gay child generally has no one. The very people she would most naturally turn to—the family—may be the very people she is most ashamed in front of.” Our small numbers - 1 in 700 - make us very alone. One of the first things the so far nonexistent program for adult clefted people should be a clearinghouse to put us in contact with each other.

“The country [should be] forced to debate a subject honestly—even calmly—in a way it never has before.”