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.