"It is for us the living to pick up the burdens"

In 2015 we posted A Writer on Living with Depression, an eloquent article on mental illness by a disabled person. Following is a eulogy written about his mother, Adeline Williams (not her real name) by a man who, still in his teens, was serving in the Navy at Pearl Harbor when Japan attacked on December 7, 1941. He was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent most of the rest of his life institutionalized. Later in life Mrs. Williams cared for him; and as she approached her nineties, he cared for her. Lincoln advised using "the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language." This is how it's done:

We are gathered here to bury the earthly remains of Adeline Williams.

In life she was a pillar of strength to all who knew her.

Twice widowed she passed on at the age of 92.

In life she was mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.

We can do no more than thank God for her life and for many of us the life she and her husbands in sequence of life gave to us.

Her life was not easy. She worked much of her life and in so doing inspired others to be creative like her.

For that we thank God for her. That she fulfilled the needs of life and gave love at the same time we are grateful to her and thankful to God who caused her to be.

We in tribute to her can do no more than treasure the memory of her and her philosophy of love.

Now we place her body in burial.

It is for us the living to pick up the burdens she in infirmity of old age and transition to spiritual existence lay down.

May God give us wisdom in so doing.

Amen

 The relative who supplied this passage wrote, "__________ as I knew him was always a kind, decent man. Schizophrenia robbed him of love, friends, marriage, children, and a career. He didn't deserve the half-life of institutionalization it condemned him to.

The eulogy he wrote showed that his spirit survived the terrible tribulations of his life. We should all honor his courage in the face of adversity."

Disability Prejudice is Often Exacerbated by Other Prejudices, Such as Race

In a current post on Slate.com, Julia Bascom notes that the emerging humanitarian safety net policies of the president-elect do not augur well for the disabled, particularly disabled people of color. Our previous blog post noted an "incident in which Trump mocked a disabled reporter." Ms. Bascom describes this and other adverse actions:

Our president-elect famously mocked a disabled journalist at a rally (and, implausibly, continues to deny what we all saw happen). But that moment isn’t what keeps me up at night. What renders me sleepless is the fear of his proposed policies: repealing the Affordable Care Act; shuttering the Department of Education; appointing a Cabinet with no regard for civil rights, safety nets, or inclusion, to be overseen by a vice president who gutted Medicaid in his state and a speaker of the House who wants to gut Medicare.

Bascom lists ways in which the current Obama administration has worked to improve the situation of the disabled:

The DOJ also clarified that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to people with disabilities in the criminal justice system, including in the contexts of policing, prison, and re-entry into society after incarceration—badly needed guidance, given that more than 50 percent of the victims of police violence are people with disabilities, particularly disabled people of color.

and

[The Department of Education] urged schools to move away from restraint, seclusion, corporal punishment, and other forms of discipline that disproportionately target students with disabilities (particularly disabled students of color). In 2014, the department clarified that bullying can be considered a violation of a student’s civil rights, including the right to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.

The marginalizing and disenfranchising of the disabled, as noted in previous posts here and here, stems in part from the social tendency to regard those who are different as somehow less than fully human. As Julia Bascom remarks, respecting the disabled involves "recognizing our humanity, our dignity, and our fundamental rights." She adds, "Trump ... sees [the disabled] as damaged goods."

Is There a New, and Worse, Climate for All Disadvantaged People?

Apologies for the long absence. A move took up much of the staff's time for a couple of months.

The following, from a recent article by Laura Wagner, may indicate that a new discriminatory climate may be in effect which affects not only minorities, women, minority religions and various gender identifications, but also America's largest minority, the disabled:

[Meryl] Streep specifically mentioned the incident in which Trump mocked a disabled reporter. She said: “This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.” . . . The National Review ran a column that called Streep a “moralizing hypocrite,” accusing her of choosing the “lazy method of showing empathy only for someone who shared her own ideals.”

The issue is not "empathy," it is the universal ethical standards of civility, decency, and toleration. To paraphrase "The Newsroom," how many kinds of disgusting do you have to be to mock someone of limited mobility?

Other Discrimination Also Masquerades as Normal Social Interaction Ctd.

Virtually everything in the following description of routine (and "socially" legitimized) sexual harassment  is also typical of disability discrimination.

As the United States moves toward its four-year presidential election, routine social abuse of a vulnerable segment of the population has become an issue in the candidacy of one of the abusers, Republican candidate Donald Trump. A recent article by Michelle Goldberg calls him A Human Trigger. Mr. Trump uses the Big Lie technique; projects his bigotry onto his victims; leverages Conventional Wisdom's denial of the reality of gender marginalization; and often leaves his victims' disoriented and doubting the reality of their own experience:

Like many abusers, Trump is so shamelessly, fluently dishonest that listening to him can be disorienting. “One of the hallmarks of an abusive person is that they do not ever take responsibility for their behavior, ever,” [Kristen] Slesar says. “It is always the other person’s fault, or it never happened.” Abusers, she says, can crowd out their victims’ sense of reality: “In conversation and arguments with this person who is so able to change reality or deny reality and shift blame and responsibility, the victim ends up doubting [herself], getting really confused, feeling really unstable.

The Big Lie deserves its own examination, because the phrase originates with another authoritarian who understood that routine bigoted error of conventional social thought can be used to corrupt the political instincts of a large segment of the public. Wikipedia explained:

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

The following selection from Mein Kampf describes techniques familiar to those who have followed the rhetoric of the Republican candidate's campaign—appeal to emotion in defiance of evidence and reason; belief that no one could be so shameless as to perpetrate such fraudulent claims; and "sensible" recourse to the opinion that there must be "some other explanation":

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

What women experience in the Trumpian abusive subculture parallels what the disabled experience — particularly the denial — but nobody is quoting us. As the previous article in this series argued:

This is all too familiar to those of us who are disabled. We wonder why "funny things" keep happening to us. We feel vaguely guilty—that we must have done something wrong. Eventually, we reluctantly come to realize that it isn't us. The problem is "normal" social attitudes toward those who bear stigma. But when we attempt to talk this over with our "friends" and family, they pooh-pooh our concerns ... It is all in our heads. We are only imagining that we are the target of unjustified social disapproval. To think that way is to be disloyal to the community. Our attitude is antisocial—no wonder those around us disapprove of us (this is the stigma Catch-22).

Ms. Goldberg continues:

Marie, a 30-year-old massage therapist in Virginia [says] "The truths that we experience as women are denied. It really brings out the victim mindset: These things keep happening, but nobody will actually say that they’re happening, nobody will acknowledge anything is happening ..."

Three years ago, in Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That, this was the situation:

We who write this remember that most of our lives we ourselves kept silent. And there is an internal struggle against convention every time we [feel we ought to speak out]. A struggle, ... against the tendency to feel guilty about having been honest about a situation which is widely covered up.

As the emergence of a 2005 tape revealed that a major political party's presidential candidate treats half the population as a group of people who may readily be subjugated, demeaned, degraded, and abused, what On Liberty calls "social tyranny" (approximately page 3) is still alive and well.

 

For women, and for the disabled.

Other Discrimination Also Masquerades as Normal Social Interaction

A few days ago Vince Grzegorek wrote about discrimination in university astronomy research which is happening right now.:

Katherine Alatalo, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California–Berkeley, spent months wondering what was wrong with her. Why did she feel anxious and unfocused? Why couldn’t she get any work done? And then, a late-night G-chat conversation with a fellow student made her realize what was causing her such distress: Her friend relayed a conversation she’d had with other students and a professor, where they had discussed a different professor and how he had a “fascination with” Alatalo’s breasts. That the professor mentioned his colleague’s “obsession” at all, let alone in casual conversation, made Alatalo’s friend furious—“it was totally inappropriate,” Alatalo’s friend wrote. It was then—with the help of her friend’s outrage—that she realized the problem: She was being sexually harassed.

This is all too familiar to those of us who are disabled. We wonder why "funny things" keep happening to us. We feel vaguely guilty—that we must have done something wrong. Eventually, we reluctantly come to realize that it isn't us. The problem is "normal" social attitudes toward those who bear stigma. But when we attempt to talk this over with our "friends" and family, they pooh-pooh our concerns (Alatalo’s friend above being a welcome exception). It is all in our heads. We are only imagining that we are the target of unjustified social disapproval. To think that way is to be disloyal to the community. Our attitude is antisocial—no wonder those around us disapprove of us (this is the stigma Catch-22).

Virtually everything in the following description of routine (and "socially" legitimized) sexual harassment  is also typical of disability discrimination:

• Life of fear: "She felt belittled in their professional interactions, hopeless and trapped as goals and directions shifted, seemingly out of nowhere. “The meaner he is, the less I resist,” she noted in a running diary of sorts she kept at the time. She told him she felt she couldn’t speak up or disagree with him out of fear."
• Discrimination is invisible: “Instead of feeling like my concerns were being heard and considered, I was a liability that they were trying to figure out how to address.”
• The community is complacent: "The people in power have no interest in addressing the problem"
• "Institutional betrayal"—denial of the concept that experiencing harassment from a faculty or staff member could “create a pervasive sense of vulnerability extending beyond one specific classroom or carrel in the library.” "The researchers found that for female students, harassment perpetrated by a faculty or staff member was significantly associated with experiences of institutional betrayal. “For female participants, faculty/staff sexual harassment was the sole significant predictor of institutional betrayal when accounting for all other traumatic experiences measured,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “This finding is consistent with Freyd’s (1994) betrayal trauma theory, which holds that abuse is more harmful when perpetrated by people one is close to or depends upon for survival.”" (Emphasis added)
• Discrimination by those one should be able to trust: "Abuse is more harmful when perpetrated by people one is close to or depends upon for survival"
• The effect of the "spoiled identity"(1) of stigma means that the social system militates against the stigmatized: "Dependent on access to resources that are levied by just a few in power"
• Be humble and submissive: "Be quiet and behave or else"
• Pressure to accept workplace discrimination: "it “got so bad I didn’t care about keeping my career, because it was so miserable.”"
• Fear of retaliation: "Contributors to the blog and friends warned her she could still be sued by the person she was describing, or the institution, despite the fact that she did not name names."
• Defamation of character/witchhunt: "One of her harassers began to badmouth her abilities to others in her department—and down the line. “For someone in the position of decision-maker in a small town, if they think ill of you, they can do some serious and real harm by saying a word or not saying a word,”"
• Not much like this for the disabled: "Astronomy Allies, a group that provides judgment-free resources and assistance to victims and anyone else who inquires looking for help" ... "The members of the group are trusted ears, confidants for anyone who wants to discuss her experience with bullying or harassment, and they help navigate the oftentimes complex process of filing formal complaints."
• Ditto: "“It was something that left me with the ability to deal with my harassment that didn’t leave me feeling sick to my stomach,” [Alitalo] says."
• The invalidity of "social justice": "“Frankly, it is not worth the social happiness of a majority if just one of our attendees is made to feel uncomfortable, under pressure, or damaged enough to leave our profession or to attend future conferences in a fearful state,” [Kevin Marvel] wrote." (Emphasis added)

Note that this analysis proceeds from the standards of Enlightenment liberalism: Human equality, universal ethical standards, equal rights and equal protection under the law, and the rejection of the majoritarian doctrine that the community, rather than universal justice, is the final arbiter of moral behavior. It upholds liberalism, which is public and civil, against left ideologies which assert that the merely social should hold supremacy. New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, for example draws this distinction in speaking of "the illiberal left."(2)

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(1) Spoiled identity: In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

(2) Jonathan Chait:

It is the expression of a backlash on the left against liberalism — with all its maddening compromises and deference to the rights of the enemy — which fetishizes success as the by-product of cataclysmic struggle. ...
Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights. ...
Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting. ...
But the campus was merely the staging ground for most displays of left-wing ideological repression because it is one of the few places the illiberal left has the power to block speakers and writers deemed oppressive. (Emphasis added)

Sometimes Disability Discrimination is Extreme

Four years ago The New York Times reported:

In January, the actor Peter Dinklage surprised himself during his own Golden Globe acceptance speech. Dinklage had won the award for best supporting actor in a TV series for his portrayal of the complex, sharp-tongued Tyrion Lannister, who’s the closest thing to a hero in HBO’s epic swords-and-sex hit “Game of Thrones,” which returns for its second season on April 1. As he took the statue from the presenter, Piper Perabo, the onstage microphone stand quietly lowered into the floor to accommodate the 4-foot-5 actor.

Dinklage thanked the people he needed to thank — the author George R. R. Martin, who wrote the novels on which “Game of Thrones” is based; his mother in New Jersey; the cast and crew. As the wrap-it-up music began to swell, Dinklage thought about what his wife had been telling him all night at their table: “Let people know. It isn’t right.” He hesitated a moment, then thought, I’m just gonna do it. “I want to mention a gentleman I’ve been thinking about, in England,” he said quickly. “His name is Martin Henderson. Google him.”

What was Martin Henderson's story? The Telegraph reports:

Martin Henderson - celebrating his 37th birthday with friends - was thrown into the air by a hooded thug in a copycat of the shamed England rugby star Mike Tindall's behaviour in the summer.

Tindall was kicked out of the Elite Player Squad squad and fined £25,000 after a Rugby Football Union investigation into his drunken night in a dwarf-themed Queenstown bar.

In the copycat incident a month later, Mr Henderson suffered damage to nerve tissue in his spine causing his legs to go numb after landing on his back on the pavement.

Officers have now launched an investigation into the incident.

Mr Henderson condemned the hooded stranger yesterday (Thurs) after the cruel prank left him confined to a wheelchair.

He said: "From what I remember, there was only one person involved but it was very scary as I didn't know what was going on.
"I guess I was an easy target and the only reason I was picked on was because I am small.
"People's attitudes to me when I go out can be pretty cruel. Most are OK but you get the odd idiot who will make fun and start laughing at me.
"You just have to ignore it but this is the first time I have been picked up and thrown about."
Mr Henderson, who has dwarfism, was celebrating his birthday at the White Horse pub in Wincanton, Somerset, on October 7 when the prankster struck.
It came one month after England rugby players were caught 'dwarf throwing' at a bar during a drunken night out.

Boys will be boys, won't they?

Dwarfaware:

I have a son who is funny, adorable, smart and just happens to be a Little Person. He was born with Achondroplasia; it is the leading cause of dwarfism. Thanks to many hard-working and talented people, the public at large has become more familiar with persons of short stature. Still, there are many misconceptions, misunderstandings and questions that average stature people have. I’d like to answer some of them.

• Around 80% of babies born with dwarfism come from average stature parents.
• They are of the same intelligence as the more general public.
• They are surgeons, lawyers, teachers, athletes, artists, journalists, and almost every other profession you can think of.
• The unemployment rate is higher than any other able-bodied group of people.
• The “M” word, or “midget”, is offensive to most little people. It does not refer to any one type of dwarfism. It is just a bad word.
• My son has a disproportionate type of dwarfism, that means his upper arms and legs, for instance, are shorter than average. He is perfectly proportioned for who he is, but is not the same, proportion-wise as taller folks.
• Persons with Achondroplasia, (Achons), compare equally in intelligence, talent, and ability to get the job done.
• Achons have medical issues, but rarely ask for assistance. They do have the same life expectancy as anyone else.

Those are the some of the facts.

Here are some myths:

• Little people love poking fun at how they appear to others.
• Little people only date other little people.
• They must agree with being called a midget or treated as one because they are always on t.v. dressed up as funny characters.
• Dwarfs cannot handle themselves in the workplace; they scare clients away and are always absent. They need too much special equipment.

The Telegraph article continues:

Mr Henderson has also suffered a broken wrist since the attack after he fell over when his legs gave way.
A spokesman from Avon and Somerset Police said: "Officers investigating would like to speak to anyone who may have been in the pub on the night of October 7.
"It follows an incident in which a small person was picked up by an unknown person in the bar and dropped."
The man was described as being of a slim build, dark hair, around 5 ft 8 inches tall and wearing a hooded top and baseball cap.

From our blog post of July 6, 2014:

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

An entry by Deborah Fallows in James Fallows' column three years ago illustrates this:

The real story here is about the situation of dwarves in China. Airen, 矮人, or small people. When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm. (Emphasis added)

The rules of behavior in middle class America tend to prevent such openly discriminatory behavior on the street. But as many of the previous posts on this weblog demonstrate, disability discrimination—a violation of our own professed values—is prevalent throughout our society. The sociologist notes that the effect is reduced "life chances": 

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

Our society is becoming more identity-conscious, not less; to the detriment of universal justice. Identity-on-the-right characterizes the current presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who makes political hay out of prejudice against Muslim, Mexican, female, and disabled identities.

Last August, it was reported that the illiberal campus left imposed self-censorship rules on students deemed to have spoken in the wrong way about selected identities:

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” "male," and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students.

According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.”

"Students will come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

The punishment for repeatedly using the banned words, Breikss warns, includes “but [is] not limited to removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for the semester.”

Breikss is not the only WSU faculty member implementing such policies.

Much like in Selena Breikss’s classroom, students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.

According to her syllabus, students will lose one point every time they use the words “illegal alien” or “illegals” rather than the preferred terms of “‘undocumented’ migrants/immigrants/persons.” Throughout the course, Fowler says, students will “come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

For disabled people the problem with this is that neither right identity politics nor left identity politics is concerned with impartial justice. Universal justice protects everybody from civil rights violations: it is about what, not who. Martin Henderson was permanently injured, and the dwarf in China subject to open public mockery, because disability stigma is a "spoiled identity" in a world which valorizes or punishes based on identity rather than a sense of justice.

As Martin Luther King said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The Stigmatized Disabled and Medical Discrimination

Among the conditions which the medical profession treats are the various disabilities. The lay public sometimes makes moral judgments or otherwise discriminates against such medical conditions (see a previous article's mention of cerebral palsy), but health care professionals should be above such prejudices.

In reality, disabled people need to realize that disability discrimination in medical care often happens, and that the disabled need to take measures to prevent this from impacting the care they receive.

Mention of the problem is readily found online: A Wikipedia entry notes:

The disabled remain at a disadvantage with respect to health and health care.

An article last September in The New England Journal of Medicine by Georgina Peacock, M.D., M.P.H., Lisa I. Iezzoni, M.D., and Thomas R. Harkin, J.D. observes:

Many factors may contribute to these disparities, including physical barriers to care (e.g., inaccessible medical diagnostic equipment such as examination tables, weight scales, and imaging technologies); noninclusive health or wellness programs designed for people without disabilities; transportation problems, especially in areas with poor public transportation; inaccurate or inadequate knowledge or stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions; competing priorities in the health care system; prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care; and communication barriers, such as failure to accommodate deaf patients who require sign-language interpreters.  (Emphasis added)

A Disability Rights Washington staff bio includes:

[David Carlson] was ... awarded the TASC Excellence in Advocacy Award from the National Disability Rights Network. This in response to the first of two reports addressing discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability, for which he was the lead author. (Emphasis added)

When the disabled go to the doctor they need to

• Select their personal physician carefully. Some are equitable and professional. Others may condescend, talk down, assume the patient should be humble and apologetic, expect the patient not to question the doctor's decision, treat the patient as mentally limited or uncooperative, or assume the patient is an ideal candidate for experimental procedures.
• If necessary, include a friend or family member in contacts with medical staff, so that they understand they are not dealing solely with a person they may consider to be at a disadvantage.
• Make sure no medical treatment is undertaken without informed consent. (What are the alternatives to the proposed treatment? What outcome can be expected in each case, and what are the tradeoffs?)
• Be willing to ask for a second opinion.
• Ask for complete information after a procedure has been completed. (What did the physician encounter when s/he began the procedure? How well did it go? What can the patient expect during the recovery period? What medications or self-care procedures will the patient be responsible for? How long will these be in effect?)
• Expect to be treated with consideration and respect. Contact the facility's patient relations staff (whatever the facility calls them) if necessary.
• Contact disability rights resources in your community or state if necessary.

The "stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions" and the "discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability" have been publicly documented in the above cites, which also note that the disabled often have "prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care." This is the reality of being disabled in our society, and you who are disabled need to be prepared.

-*--

A previous post, What Others are Saying, contains links to Independence Chick's blog and other online resources for dealing with disability discrimination.

A Shadow Existence

Imagine that you are an African American posing for your driver's license renewal photo and the photographer, a state employee, paid by your taxes, says, "Cheese, Whiskey, [n-word]." Would it be a civil rights violation?

This actually happened: A person with a cleft palate had the state photographer, in the same situation, say, "Cheese, Whiskey, Harelip." Was that a civil rights violation?

This actually happened: A pwacp was starting to cross a city street when he heard a voice talking. The voice was saying, "Nobody likes you, nobody wants you, go away." It was a guy leaning his head out the window of his van, which he had stopped in the middle of the intersection. Was that a civil rights violation?

Just this last Christmas: A pwacp was waiting in the lobby of his apartment building for his ride to a family celebration. Another tenant went through the lobby on an errand; the same tenant came through on another errand a few minutes later. Then the apartment manager came out, and said "Oh, you're waiting for your ride." The tenant had reported the disabled person (who is elderly) as "suspicious." Was that a civil rights violation?

When it comes to civil rights, the disabled often lead a shadow existence. What would almost certainly be treated as a civil rights violation if it happened to a "minority" becomes a different matter, somehow, when it happens to disabled people, as if justice has two different ways of looking at discrimination, depending on who you are.

Two years ago this blog recounted a case of discrimination against a little 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. ...

A local assistant city prosecutor observed:

"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities ...." [What charge did the prosecutor use? "Menacing." Apparently no civil rights charge applies.]

The law has always been about what happens (i.e., was it a crime?), not who it happens to. Burglary is burglary, for example; and it's not supposed to matter if you're rich or poor, ethnic or "mainstream," able or disabled, a "person of faith" or otherwise.

But the Civil Rights Act (1) was implemented as protected class. It is not a law for everybody. It is a private law (literally, "privilege")(2) for those to whom it applies. Case in point, as reported in an earlier post:

Would the court system of a liberal society, sidestepping universal justice, treat "protected class" as a term at law? One has only to read the news:

Publication: The Spokesman Review - Publish date: March 2, 1996

A state judge supports an earlier court ruling giving Spokane restaurants the right to refuse service to Hells Angels wearing their club insignia.
Spokane County Superior Court Judge Neal Rielly, in a written ruling released Friday, says members of the biker gang aren't a "protected class" under state or federal discrimination laws.

 The enshrining of "protected class" in the law of the land (despite the first Justice Harlan's objection "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens") has had sinister consequences for the disabled. The state driver's license photographer, above, probably wouldn't have used the n-word with an African American applicant. He did use the h-word with a disabled applicant.

The authors of the Civil Rights act probably never dreamed that exclusion from protected class would be taken by many as rendering a certain group of people "a stranger to [our] laws."(3) As Romer v. Evans later went on to suggest, such jurisdictive tactics can tend to "make them unequal to everyone else."

Welcome to civil rights American style. If you're disabled, you're not in the class protected from slurs and slights, "commenting and gesturing," bullying and menacing, and profiling. You're a second class citizen, and the mean and the bigoted (see above) have figured this out. Welcome to constant and pervasive marginalization. Welcome to "life" in the shadows.



(1) The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. - http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-act [Note that disability is left out.]
(2) The Google search for "privilege," under Word Origins, notes the word's roots as privus, "private," and lex, "law."
(3) We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, ... - Romer v. Evans [Note that deeming "a class of persons a stranger to its laws" is thought to "make them unequal to everyone else".]

A Writer on Living with Depression

It boiled down to this: I decided that my life, as I had known it, was over. I was never going to get back to the job I had when I was 25 years old, making $65,000. I was never going to get married and father children. It was time to put a fork in those dreams—I couldn't reclaim them. That me was dead and done, and I was reconciled to that. - Philip Dawdy, on his mental illness

A decade back, Philip Dawdy wrote an article for the Seattle Weekly about Rodney Plamondon's mental illness, and his own.

We post portions of his article in case they may provide perspective for people with disabilities related to his. Note that Dawdy finally resorted to a solution which went against much of the medical advice for people with his condition. While he claims that this worked for him, what he did was risky, and may well be the wrong approach for most others in a similar situation.

Dawdy begins:

He was in the hospital the day he learned he had been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rodney Plamondon looked for a while at the letter that told him this. He was pleased. He was the 22-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver. Rodney's future wouldn't involve driving a Kenworth.

This was good. He had dreams. He had aspirations of doing graduate work in the classics at an Ivy League school, of teaching after that. Or entering the Foreign Service. Getting into that honorary society wouldn't hurt his chances at either.

Rodney put the letter away. He had more pressing concerns.

He was, on this July 1984 day, in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Boise, Idaho, his hometown. He was newly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Rodney hadn't the slightest idea what this diagnosis meant for his world, but he knew that his life had changed dramatically.

Dawdy goes on to describe the effects of orthodox [drug] treatment on Rodney:

Rodney is still staring at the dark walls of the tunnel. In the past year, he's been in and out of psych units in Seattle eight times. He's lost pretty much everything—his furniture, his computer, his cat, and every scrap of fiction and poetry he had written over the past 20 years. He takes Haldol and Clozaril twice a day—powerful antipsychotics. Rodney sleeps 12 hours a day on average, sometimes 15. On his left cheek, there are flakes of skin where the pillowcase has rubbed him.

Some days, when he leaves the building, he looks as though he's been mugged and beaten. Those are his good days. Other times, the bad days, he's too paranoid to step outside.

"It happened to me that way, too," Dawdy wrote,

a psychotic break out of the blue during a twentysomething life that had been shaping up quite nicely. It was difficult to build a new life out of that. There were many, many setbacks. That's the absurd deal of mental illness: You get taken most commonly in your youth, when life is just beginning to gel. You get an illness that, in many cases, is so disabling that it strips you of the psychological and practical goods essential to a decent existence. Often you get kicked right out of the mainstream, no matter how solid a citizen you were before it all went bad.

What are you going to do about that?

You have three choices: kill yourself, lead a featureless existence, or fight back and extract some measure of revenge on that which laid you low. Rodney and I rejected options one and two. Option three is no cakewalk. It takes years of determined effort before you see light at the end of the tunnel, and as you feel your way along, you've got to do it all on blind faith that something good might happen. After 15 years, I'm finally beginning to see a faint glow.

Dawdy describes his eventual realization dramatically:

You will stay awake at night and gnaw on that problem, probably for years. You'll likely struggle with some level of suicidal tendency. You're broke, mentally, physically, and financially. Some in your family and circle of friends have cut off contact. Rodney hears from his father perhaps once a year, usually by letter (his mother died in 1987). You wind up hating yourself because these consequences seem thoroughly logical.

What makes things dicey is that what you've got is episodic. You can take your meds and keep appointments with every doctor and social worker under the sun and yet, nine months later, bam, here comes another round of mania. Hello, locked psych unit. Goodbye, job and apartment. Stabilize. Repeat.

I was beset by the same cycles during my 20s and 30s. Meds followed meds, 16 in all. Breakdowns followed breakdowns. Nothing seemed to work for very long. I lost jobs at a healthy clip.

Amidst this whirl of disorder, I learned three crucial things. One, I wasn't going to kill myself. Second, I had far more power over my fate than any doctor ever let on. Third, the existentialists weren't joking: The world is truly absurd.

I'd like to claim that one night I was visited with a revelation about how to grapple with this. It was a far lengthier process.

It boiled down to this: I decided that my life, as I had known it, was over. I was never going to get back to the job I had when I was 25 years old, making $65,000. I was never going to get married and father children. It was time to put a fork in those dreams—I couldn't reclaim them. That me was dead and done, and I was reconciled to that.

That kind of truth will set you free. It will free you to take the kind of risks you'd never take if you were trying to realign yourself with the life you once lived and the goals that once got you out of bed each morning.

Also, it freed me to be pushier with my doctors about what meds and how many of them I would take. I couldn't, for example, tolerate the amount of sleeping caused by antidepressants. My doctor reacted as if no patient had ever bossed him around before.

Dawdy's decision was to endure bouts of depression instead of taking antidepressants at the recommended level. "I can't approve of this, of course," his doctor said.

Here's what he lives with:

When I get my semiannual visits of depression, I can't leave my apartment for days at a time. I can't listen to music of any kind. It all becomes grating and metallic—not even Mozart can punch through that mental pea soup.

Dawdy reflects on our society's treatment of the mentally ill:

As a country, we've spent the past 40 years trying to figure out what to do with people like Rodney, for our sake as well as theirs.

In the 1960s, he'd have been confined at a state mental hospital. That isn't too humane and costs a fortune, so we've mostly backed off that reflexive reaction to the chronically mentally ill. By the mid-1980s, people like Rodney were being pushed onto the streets. We tried to de-institutionalize them on the cheap and failed to provide housing. Oops.

But soon after, all the Prozacs and Risperdals came onto the market. They were a better deal than restraints in a state hospital or the old psych meds like Thorazine or the hazards of the streets.

And that was that, we figured. The meds are a cure, and we're saving money by not hospitalizing these folks. Let them live among the rest of us and go to work in the morning and pay bills in the evening. Let's get as many of them as we can off the public dime.

So what's next for someone like Rodney, assuming he's reasonably lucky and stabilizes? The way things are now, probably not much.

Are you going to hire him? He's barely worked in the past five years, and frankly, the man is too smart to find much satisfaction in pushing a broom in an office building. Will your family take him in? His own family has spent the past 20 years spurning him. Want to marry him?

You know the answers.

I once worked with a nice guy who had Tourette's Syndrome. I was sitting in the break room with him when he suddenly said, "Hey [n-word] fat [n-word]." "Huh?" I said. He looked at me in surprise. Touretters are often unaware of their involuntary outbursts.

I ran into him in a Toys'R'Us years later. It was explained to the other customers that he wasn't in control of what he said. Many of them refused to accept this. They thought it was just an excuse to get away with unacceptable conduct.

What would it be like to have your id broadcasting to the world without your control?

Philip Dawdy's solution to his mental illness, if it actually was as he describes, is anecdotal. He does not, for instance, seem to imply that it would work for Rodney.

But public understanding and acceptance toward the afflicted can make life workable for many. The customers who took a moralistic approach to the guy with Tourette's weren't making anything better for anyone.

Access Has Been Improved; Social Attitudes Lag Behind

In A Recent Book on the Civil Rights of the Disabled, the "recent book," What We Have Done, documented the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act as a nationwide campaign for better access for people with mobility problems and other physical disabilities. That is one of the nation's great achievements. The United States has become one of the most advanced nations in, for example, providing wheelchair access in architecture and transportation.

Yet stigma and social discrimination still keep millions of disabled people on the margins. For example, previous posts have discussed news articles on the discrimination against people with cerebral palsy here, here, here, and here, among others. The pervasive discrimination against people with cleft palate is discussed in many posts.

Randy Rutta observes that as the 25th anniversary of the ADA approaches, disabled people still suffer from significantly higher unemployment rates compared to the rest of the population:

The unacceptable unemployment situation for adults with disabilities is a troubling irony as the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The landmark civil rights legislation, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, outlawed discrimination on the basis of disability.

He describes the areas in which the disabled were marginalized and disenfranchised at the time of the law's enactment:

The text of the law laid bare the hurdles that people with disabilities faced at the time. "Discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services," the law said.

The ADA established the nation's goals for individuals with disabilities "to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals."

And Rutta notes that not just access, but "discrimination and prejudice" present barriers to equality for the disabled:

The law affirmed that discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete. But it also recognized the huge societal downside of keeping people with disabilities on the margins — workplace discrimination costs the country billions of dollars resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.

It is significant that in What We Have Done there are dozens of examples of ways in which the ADA has improved physical access, but the book does not mention people with cleft palate, whose primary problem is discriminatory social attitudes, not access.

Your Rights under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act

If you work for any entity which receives funds from the federal government, the following would seem to imply that disability discrimination by your employer violates federal law:

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973:

No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, as defined in section 7(6), shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. (Cited in What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement - Fred Pelka, 2012)

Wikipedia's article on Section 504 adds:

Codified as 29 U.S.C. 794.
According to this law, Individuals with Disabilities are:
"persons with a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities."

 where

"Major life activities include caring for one's self, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, working, performing manual tasks, and learning."

In a previous post we noted cases "where the august Court cruelly denied protection to disabled individuals even though the intent of the Americans With Disabilities Act should have been clear. As the Times noted, The court went wrong by “eliminating protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect” under the 1990 law." The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund website notes another case where Congress found it necessary to pass a law undoing unreasonably restrictive Supreme Court interpretation of Section 504 and other disability rights legislation:

The longest legislative battle was fought over the Civil Rights Restoration Act (CRRA), first introduced in 1984 and finally passed in 1988. The CRRA sought to overturn Grove City College v Bell, a Supreme Court decision that had significantly restricted the reach of all the statutes prohibiting race, ethnic origin, sex or disability discrimination by recipients of federal funds.

An important decision overturned was a case where the Court interpreted Section 504 as meaning that only clients of the departments of an entity which actually received federal funds had protection from disability discrimination. Under current law, because of the CRRA, protection applies to the entire agency. If a college's engineering department receives federal funds, students in the English department are also protected.

There was also foot-dragging on implementing Section 504:

Section 504 was the last sentence in the 1973 Act. However, initially Joseph Califano, U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, refused to sign meaningful regulations for Section 504. After an ultimatum and deadline, demonstrations took place in ten U.S. cities on April 5, 1977. The sit-in at the San Francisco Office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, led by Judith Heumann and organized by Kitty Cone, lasted until May 4, 1977, a total of 28 days. More than 150 demonstrators refused to disband. This action is the longest sit-in at a federal building to date. Joseph Califano signed the regulations on April 28, 1977.

The Reagan administration, in addition to attempting to weaken the Voting Rights Act, attempted to undermine Section 504 when it came into power:

Over the next several years, Section 504 was somewhat controversial because it afforded people with disabilities many rights similar to those for other minority groups in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Throughout the Reagan administration, efforts were made to weaken Section 504. Patrisha Wright and Evan Kemp, Jr. (of the Disability Rights Center) led a grassroots and lobbying campaign against this that generated more than 40,000 cards and letters. In 1984, the administration dropped its attempts to weaken Section 504.

When any governmental agency's employees discriminate against the disabled, they are acting in the name of the taxpayers who fund them. For example, public transit organizations receive substantial federal assistance. So does every state. We know of a case where a disabled person, having his driver's license renewed, heard the state photographer say, "Whiskey, cheese, harelip." That bigoted employee was acting as a proxy for the public. When he attempted to demean, degrade and intimidate a citizen making a required license application, he represented you and me.

Whether the license applicant could have sought redress under Section 504 is unknown. Public action under Americans with Disabilities legislation and Section 504, to date, has been entirely about access, with notable success. Protection from discriminatory attitudes and acts designed to humiliate, marginalize, and disenfranchise the stigmatized disabled, hasn't even begun. As an earlier post cited:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons

My dream is an American dream, that one day America will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed, that all are created equal.