What someone targeted for being Muslim can teach those targeted for disability: The silence of the witnesses.

Tarunjit Singh Butalia on being harassed in the name of Christianity at a DMV office: “Despite being in a crowded room and others being able to hear this man harass me, no one intervened.”

“I privately spoke with a supervisor at the agency about the harassment I experienced — in what should have been a safe space open to everyone.

People of marginalized identities frequently experience hurtful and harmful situations when we’re merely trying to live our everyday lives.

I’ve learned from experience that teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation does not work.”

“I still worry that my DMV experience happened in public and around dozens of people. No one intervened, no one comforted me, no one confronted the aggressor who was screaming at me. I know these situations can be uncomfortable and, in the moment, sometimes people don’t know how to respond.

But what can you do when you encounter someone being harassed?”

“First, the person under attack needs solidarity. You can stand up and, instead of confronting the bigot, go to the person under duress, face them and block the sight of the bigot spewing hate. You can also offer words of support and ask if there’s anything you can do that would help them in the moment. None of this happened in my case.

Even after I completed my license renewal and walked across the waiting room to the door, not one person stepped up to say “I am sorry for what you went through.” That doesn’t mean folks in the room necessarily agreed with the screaming man. They just didn’t know what to do and how to react.” (Emphasis added)

“Unfortunately, inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others. Next time you see this happen before you, step up and be an ally of the victim. The world runs because goodness exceeds evil.

Silence is complicity and feeds the normalization of hate. As is commonly said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good people do nothing.” So please don’t be a part of the silent majority — instead, stand up, speak up and be an ally for those marginalized in our communities.” (Emphasis added)

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I recently asked an in-law who works in higher education but keeps their law license current via pro bono cases if clefted people are in a protected class. To my surprise, they indicated that we are. “Sometimes people don’t know how to respond” to cleft phobia - or other disability discrimination - because they don’t realize that people having a disability have the same civil rights as women, minorities, and LGBTQ people.

“Inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others.” There are powerful taboos against our speaking up for ourselves (I felt them when starting this blog years ago). We are supposed to be humble and apologetic. Sometimes “teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation” does not work. And sometimes they’re just messing with you because they think you’re afraid to violate the taboo, and it works to come back at them in no uncertain terms. Certainly bigots deserve to be surprised. (Emphasis added)

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.

A day in the life

 Experiences I’ve had that maybe you have too.

One gets hired for a position, and does well in it. Sooner or later there’s an office shuffle, and there’s a new supervisor. They’re cleft phobic, and make life hell - but nobody seems to notice.(1)

A simple ride on the city bus system goes south. I once took a seat near the front of the bus opposite a scrawny woman in a wheelchair. As the bus got rolling, she got out one of those little dollar bottles of gin and commenced trying to open it. She asked passengers to help. When she asked me, I smiled and demurred. No drinking on Metro Transit. “You are weak!” she said, and started repeating it in a loud voice, verbal abuse that surely the driver could hear. (I wondered if I should suggest to the driver that the civil rights of a disabled person were being violated on government property - but decided not to bother.)

You go to a party, and someone asks you what seems to be a friendly question. This turns into derogatory rhetorical questions, and instead of a happy occasion, you find yourself on the hot seat - people backing away. Presumably this doesn’t happen with minorities, women, or LGBTQ people - people in a protected class.

A stranger remarks, “I knew a guy like you” - another person who was “different” - clefted.

Even government offices aren’t safe. I was meeting with an employment counselor when their co-worker nearby loudly joked about a moustached employee’s “hair lip.” A State Driver’s License photographer said, “Cheese, whiskey, harelip.”

You are admitted to the graduate school of a public university, and as soon as they see you there’s a chill. I experienced this in both a Midwestern and a West Coast university. (A city university just starting its graduate program acted the way higher education ought to act, and I had no difficulty getting a graduate degree there.) Are universities in the performative era afraid that having certain kinds of disabled people bearing their credentials out into the world would harm their reputations? 

These things add up. They constitute stigma, and result in what Sociologist Erving Goffman called “reduced life chances.”

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(1) When I was working for the City Comptroller’s Office, I once came back from a week’s vacation to find co-workers acting a little strange. Finally, someone took me aside and said one of our people from across the hall had gone to my supervisor’s supervisor (a CPA, one of the ethical occupations) and complained about the way I was constantly being dressed down in front of everybody. The CPA said, “That’s a serious charge. It would need to be documented,” - and she pulled out a list of times and what was said.

What is the policy toward cleft palate people where you live? Who created it? Who administers it?

This morning, it occurs that this fundamental question hasn’t been answered in my city, my county, my state, my country. Are the clefted an interest group, a needs group, an identity, a resource, a “problem?”

A possible starting point. In my Pacific Northwest city, if you go to a dentist needing an upper plate, they direct you to the Faculty Prosthodontics center of the medical division of the state university. Parents having a newborn with a cleft are directed to Children’s Hospital in this city.

By contrast, the Disability Rights Washington website, according to a Google Site Search, does not mention “cleft,” “palate,” “hare,” “lip,” or any combination of these terms.

The United States has public programs structured for needs groups, such as the elderly; and members of an identity having perceived needs, such as minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. The first is general, public, and neutral, such as the statement beginning the Constitution: “We the People.” Social Security and Medicare do not suggest that elderly people are more worthy than the young; only that their reduced earning capacity and increased medical expenses need the general solution government can provide.

The second solution, in terms of identity, is less desirable from the standpoint of democracy.

The first problem for clefted people is that there is little or no unified social or governmental response to our civil rights needs, or our economic needs. By contrast, the civil rights needs of minorities are addressed, for example, by the Civil Rights Act of the sixties, by directed court attention, and by minority assistance programs. Do Faculty Prosthodontics, Children’s Hospital, and Disability Rights Washington coordinate? It is left up to the clefted person to figure out where to go.

Cleft people’s civil rights problems are suggested by the public attitude of the familiar “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor”(1) slur. I asked an attorney who specializes in “disability discrimination cases in higher education” if she knew of any cases where the courts had addressed the pervasive public discrimination against clefted people. Her emailed response evaded the issue. A 2013 post in this blog cited an ADA: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

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Initial thoughts concerning what an initial program for the one in seven hundred who have a cleft might address:

1. Provide a clearinghouse where people having a cleft can contact each other

2. Provide someone clefted people can contact to evaluate incidents which may be discriminatory

3. Provide a resource for determining if effective action can be taken to counteract discrimination

4. Resources who can intercede for targeted disabled people. Could pro bono legal assistance be leveraged when civil rights may be being infringed?

5. Counteract the pressure clefted people are under to keep silent

6. Develop a cleft discourse (example: Should pervasive negative reaction to clefted people, where found, be described as “cleftphobic?”)

7. Promote public awareness that cleft people have exactly the same rights as minorities, women, and LGBTQ people

8. Determine what legal precedent exists where cleft civil rights may have been violated

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(1) In this slur, the American public doesn’t imply that the worst fate for the Governor would be to wake up as a person of color, but to wake disfigured by a cleft.

In the politics of identity, victim status is what counts. The public seems to regard disfigurement as a greater disadvantage than race.