If you are one of the stigmatized disabled, what can you do about the bullying?

The public discrimination against the CPs, cerebral palsy and cleft palate, is fairly well known. In 2013, a post quoted  an ABC News/Yahoo article concerning “teasing and taunting a 10-year-old 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. ...

"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But when there's nothing out there regarding disabilities, it took me a little bit longer to come to a decision." ...

As for whether this case presents a new precedent in Ohio is another debate.

"I don't know if it sets a precedent so much maybe as it begins a conversation between people," said [Jennifer] Fitzsimmons [the chief assistant city prosecutor for this case]. "I think conversation starts progress, and I think if it can bring something else to light, it would be good."

The other CP, cleft palate, has its own derogatory catch-phrase: “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” Other people having a disability at times encounter pariah affect, being treated as not part of the community, or being subject to slurs such as “crip,” “retard,” or the all-purpose “misfit.” To be stigmatized, as the sociologist Erving Goffman noted, is to have “a spoiled identity.”

“Social justice,” offered as a remedy by the left but not by liberalism, tends not to work for people having disabilities because the politics of identity doesn’t work for spoiled identities (this is why liberalism does not practice politics of identity, or extrajudicial “social justice”).

Another problem disabled people have in America is that, perhaps beginning with the Civil Rights Act of the mid-sixties, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws has been increasingly implemented as protected class, despite Justice Harlan’s assertion, in Plessy, that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Although the Department of Labor and other Federal websites observe that the disabled are America’s largest minority, the mainstream public thinks that “minorities” - people of color, women, and LGBTQ - are in a protected class, and not to be messed with; and that people having disabilities are not in this sense off limits if you’re looking for someone you can be mean to. The neighbor of the little girl with cerebral palsy, above, thought he could verbally abuse her with impunity.

The mainstream public’s belief that, for example, doing a number on someone having a disability is not as serious as doing the same thing to a racial minority is reflected in the “benign neglect” of the formal justice system. Above, Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Fitzsimmons noted that there was “case law regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But … there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

Not in a protected class. Little or no social pressure against attempting to demean, degrade, or humiliate. Doors slammed in our faces by normal, decent people. The Social Blind Eye that ignores when this happens. And at law, “there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

A powerful voice can change the narrative concerning injustice. Martin Luther King accomplished this concerning the major injustice of his time. At present we have a spoiled identity and are outside of society and outside the law. The narrative can be changed. It needs to be.

What is the solution to the problem of people who target the disabled because it’s easy and there are seldom the consequences attendant on targeting minorities?

 A sentence from an IndependenceChick post:

“This shouldn’t have happened, and because you did it to this type of person, you revealed you have to get your kicks from mistreating someone we already think of as defenseless or weak or low.”

Commendably, much has been done by our society to assist what IndependenceChick calls those who are not TAB (Temporarily Able Bodied) with things like access (see the book, What We Have Done). But little has been done about discriminatory attitudes, commenting and gesturing, verbal abuse, and treating the person having a disability as an outsider. In some cases — those with cleft palate, and many of the non-neurotypical — those perceived by the community as “disabled” are able-bodied. They earn varsity letters in school, climb mountains, run marathons. But they don’t get an IEP, they aren’t part of an assistance  program, and as far as the disability discrimination of mainstream society is concerned, many are on their own.

If you Google “cleft palate,” for example, everything on the internet is about helping their parents (who certainly need the help). And there is nothing whatsoever for the clefted after they become adults.

There are social strictures for those who abuse people of color, women, and LGBTQ people. But concerning the stigma of disability, the civil rights revolution has not happened. Our society has, rightly, changed the narrative for the minorities in the first sentence of this paragraph, but for the disabled, America’s largest minority, a pervasive public prejudice often still prevents them from being able to enjoy normal lives.

IndependenceChick note evidence that America’s largest minority is still left out of the civil rights revolution

“The reality that disability is not yet part of diversity. Again, it’s the difference between disability and skin color, disability and orientation, disability and religion, disability and national origin. If all those other things are good, then why is my “difference” still seen as unfortunate, inspirational, or some strange mix of both? Why is my worthiness tied to how much I “don’t let disability stop me?””

https://independencechick.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/disability-pride-in-the-new-year-can-we-have-it-can-we-do-it/

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Federal websites for Department of Labor, FHA/HUD, and ADA, for example, describe people having disabilities as “America’s largest minority”

“Check your white privilege” prescribes what shall be orthodox, demands a _Mea Culpa_, and violates _Texas v. Johnson_

“No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” - The United States Supreme Court, Texas v. Johnson

From Twitter:

_____ Superintendent

Democracy Prep Public Schools …

Las Vegas, Nevada 

Re: Your Mandatory “Critical Race Theory” Class, “The Sociology of Change” 

To Whom It May Concern:

I am an attorney and representative of the ___ Family. W. is a student at your DPAC public school and G. is his mother. … [They] objected on conscience to the content … of your “Sociology of Change” class. … 

[They] repeatedly objected to the discriminatory content of [this] class that served no apparent pedagogical purpose beyond ideological thought reform. …

[This biracial family] objects to the glib racism of your course materials … which includes … “Racism is what white people do to people of color,” repeated ad infinitum. This and statements like it are patently racist, create a hostile and divisive educational environment, and violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act … which you must follow. …

Mandatory participation … requires … affirming a … politically loaded worldview which W. and G. cannot in good conscience abide. … The teacher … explicitly discouraged disagreement. … [Students were required] to publicly profess their sexual, racial, and religious identities [for scrutiny] … in a derogatory manner. … [This exercise] amounts to compelled speech. …

W. [was threatened with] non-graduation … if he … did not participate fully. …

The purported goal of the “Sociology of Change” class is to change students' fundamental personal convictions. Your behavior implicates the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments. …

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” _Texas v. Johnson_. …

Burns O'Brien Law

[twitter.com/sullydish?prefetchtimestamp=1607371720159]

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“Check your white privilege” also demands compelled speech and prescribes “what shall be orthodox” in a matter of opinion.

The sad fact that I have objected to “check your privilege” arguments several times already here [on social media], and always gotten a hostile, condemning response, means either that the public schools of our democracy no longer have Civics courses, or that the Civics courses are intellectually and morally incompetent.

A corollary is that sometimes being a responsible citizen of a liberal democracy may require publicly disagreeing with the community. Moral responsibility can’t be evaded by going along with social opinion. Sometimes, as Mill’s On Liberty states, society practices “social tyranny.”

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John Stuart Mill: “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

[On Liberty can easily be pulled up in any browser. The above passage is about Page 3.]

Disabled people and the Politics of Identity

I put the article below on social media. Here I would add that for those who practice the Politics of Identity, the purpose, as I understand it, is to support identities under which people are targeted, which is not necessarily their biological race. The identity of people who worship in synagogues, for example, is not their race (biologically Caucasian) but the characteristic which causes them to be targeted by anti-semites.

The identity of the little girl who was targeted in Introduction: Social Attitudes was not her race but the cerebral palsy which caused the commenting and gesturing.

And my identity, although I have Caucasian parents, is not white, but the disability which has its own derogatory catch-phrase, “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” I feel free to oppose the current tendency of anti-racist ideology to imply that white people are bad (“white privilege,” “white guilt,” “white culture” as below). As Andrew Sullivan has written, people should not be condemned for “immutable conditions.” To put it bluntly, I oppose the “whiteness” concepticle because it is a double standard, because it is inherently wrong, not out of “white fragility,” and because as a member of one of the most targeted minorities of all, cleft palate, I have a heightened passion for justice.

The social media article: “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

Johann N. Neem [immigrated at 3 from India] to Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic: “You probably saw the controversy over the table put out by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It called things like rationality, hard work, the scientific method, and planning for the future “white culture.”(1) The fact that we’re now in a world were intelligent, educated, well-meaning people see that as a plausible thing to think scares me.”

Neem said the things he wanted to participate in as a naturalized American citizen are now being condemned by anti-racists:

“It was when some scholars on the academic left decided that the primary story to tell about America … was ‘whiteness’ that I first started feeling myself unbecoming American,” he lamented in his Hedgehog Review essay. “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

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(1)[The National Museum of African American History and Culture is part of The Smithsonian, a Federal agency paid for by our taxes. The “white culture” assertions caused an uproar and were quickly removed.]

Here is a critique from a conservative publication: 

“Look at this stunning exhibition from the website of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is from its web page about the menace of “Whiteness”. Aside from the anti-white stereotypes here, notice the inadvertently anti-black insanity: things like hard work, being on time, cause and effect, “rational thinking,” respect for authority, politeness — all these things, according 

to the museum, are manifestations of “whiteness.” Did David Duke write this stuff? It’s crazy! If a white man said that black people are lazy, can’t keep to a schedule, have no respect for authority, can’t think straight, are rude, etc. — he would be rightly criticized as racist.”

Left out of the civil rights revolution: Blatant vs. subtle disability discrimination

 Civil rights discrimination against people having disabilities is made more difficult because in America disabled people were left out of the civil rights revolution. We aren’t, for practical purposes, in a protected class. There’s no landmark civil rights case such as Brown vs. Board of Education, for disabled people. And there’s seldom any social penalty for verbal abuse.

The San Diego Union Tribune on blatant vs. subtle disability discrimination:

Discrimination should be viewed as two types: the blatant and the subtle. The blatant discrimination are the types when it is very clear that a person with a disability is being denied their rights due to their disability. For example, a school that fails to provide a sign language interpreter requested by a Deaf student, or a wheelchair user who is told they are not “capable” of doing a job. There’s clear evidence and a paper trail to show the discrimination.

The subtle discrimination is exactly that, subtle, so that even a person with a disability is not entirely sure if they were discriminated against based on their disability. For example, a person with a disability who applies for a job but does not receive an interview because human resources do not look at resumes of someone who has a disability. They can always say that the candidate was simply not qualified for the job, but are careful to avoid mentioning disability as a reason.

Another instance of this subtle discrimination is how unprepared hospitals and health care were in addressing care for people with disabilities during the pandemic. Every health care system needs to have a plan in place for disasters that also includes how to provide care for people with disabilities in emergency situations, such as natural disasters, man-made disasters, terrorism, or a pandemic. Because of the subtle discrimination, a lot of outright discrimination has happened, such as people who are Deaf, who rightfully assumed that the hospital would not have access to a sign language interpreter on-site, who would try to bring a family member or a friend as an alternate to support communication, but were told that they were not allowed to bring anyone in, even someone who would enable their rights.

Disability prejudice in intellectual history

In the mid-Nineties, the USENET forum Rec.Arts.Books was dominated by hardcore Decon/Pomo people who talked about Theory as the goal toward which all intellectual history had been striving. Among their gods, besides Plato, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was openly bigoted against people having disabilities:

“The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state
  it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on ... after
  ... the right to life has been lost ought to entail the
  profound contempt of society.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Twilight of the Idols

"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish, first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so." - Nietzsche, The Antichrist

The academic humanities today still seem to be illiberal. “No platforming” is content-based censorship violating liberal principles of the First Amendment, for example.

In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, Andre Comte-Sponville finds Nietzsche illiberal:

  “Justification of slavery: "Every enhancement of the type 'man' has
  so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and it will be so
  again and again: a society that believes in the long ladder of an
  order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and
  that needs slavery in some sense or other." ... Advocacy of
  oppression: "The essential characteristic of a good and healthy
  aristocracy . . . is that it . . . accepts with a good conscience
  the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be
  reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to
  instruments.”

Nor is it only Nietzsche. Plato discusses five types of regimes (Republic, Book VIII). They are Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny. Democracy is next to last.

Plato’s illiberalism comes from his concept of reality. The underlying Forms of what we think is real - chairs, tables - are what is truly real. What we can see and touch belongs to the realm of appearances. Because only philosophers can perceive the Forms, Plato said, a Philosopher King should rule. Because the working material of scientists - real physical systems - belongs to the realm of appearances, Plato questioned their validity.

The first academic lived in the first culture to have democracy and science, but was opposed to both, bequeathing a strain of illiberalism whose effects can still be detected in the academic humanities today.

We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that.

Huffington Post: ““It’s natural to wish for life ‘to just get back to normal’ as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us,” Obama said. “But we have to remember that for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.””

Also, “for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of disability is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’.”

If I were to meet former President Obama, whom I whole-heartedly support, I would suggest that people having disabilities should also be part of the narrative.

I recently posted the following comment to a much-lauded anodyne article on a disability forum:

I see the [Forum] addressing access issues but not civil rights issues: The right of disabled people not to be demeaned, degraded and marginalized. The same people who wouldn’t think of commenting and gesturing about minorities, women and LGBTQ people often have no scruples about regarding disabled people as stigmatized and risible.
The narrative needs to be changed, something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing. A landmark civil rights case such as Brown v. Board of Education or Obergefell v. Hodges would help to raise consciousness.
We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that. Ask the ACLU if sometime it might think of making this an issue.
It is just as wrong to look cross-eyed at someone for being disabled as it is to give someone static for being a person of color.
So far as I know, the public does not know this. It’s time to change that.

Probably, “something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing” pissed them off.

Well, their trivializing, faux-activism pisses me off.

In the current narrative of “progressives,” people who look funny or move funny (the CPs, Cerebral Palsy, Cleft Palate) offend the Community, and under the rubric of Social Justice, the Community has the right to punish and expel those who offend it, unless they are part of progressivism’s favored classes.

But under Enlightenment liberalism, people who look funny or move funny are still part of The People, and as entitled to The Rights of Man as progressivism’s favored classes: minorities,(1) women, LGBTQ.

Justice Harlan’s Plessy dissent said that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

The Fourteenth Amendment says everybody is entitled to “the equal protection of the laws.”

Even those the Community considers misfits.

Reciprocity Principle, from the first post on this blog:

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.

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(1) People having a disability are America’s largest minority, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Department of Labor, and the Centers for Disease Control, among others:

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
“One in four people in United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control.”
http://www.adainfo.org/sites/default/files/Leadership-Network/Modules-1-5/5a-America-largMinorityFINAL.pdf
“America‘s largest minority”
http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/diverse.htm
“As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50 million individuals”

An overwhelmed health care system’s triage may discriminate against people with disabilities

The Atlantic states that people with disabilities may face not only “overt discrimination” in hospitals, but “implicit bias” from a prejudice about their quality of life.

As the philosopher Nietzsche remarks below, in times of stress, an eliminationist attitude residing in some of the mainstream rises to the surface.

Elaine Godfrey:

Daniel Florio … was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that makes him unable to walk or use his arms. His disability makes him more vulnerable to the virus than most people, and he’s afraid of what will happen if he ends up in the hospital with a serious case. Intubated people cannot speak, and Florio would not be able to use gestures or otherwise communicate with his doctors. Given infection-prevention rules, his caregivers would likely not be allowed to accompany him.

She adds:

But Florio is afraid of something else too: the possibility that, if he contracts the virus, he could be denied lifesaving treatment because of his disability. And like other Americans with disabilities, he worries that could happen not just because of overt discrimination in hospitals, but also because of implicit bias. “People overwhelmingly believe that being disabled implies a worse quality of life than it does,” Florio said. If doctors act on those beliefs—wittingly or not—“what that means in practical terms is that people like us will die.”

In some states’ policies it appears that people with disabilities do not have an equal right to life in comparison with the mainstream:

Washington’s guidelines include considerations about a patient’s “baseline functional status,” which involves factors such as physical ability and cognition. … The Washington health department told me it’s updating its guidelines to make sure “its original intent of nondiscrimination” is “unequivocally clear.”

This bears uneasy resemblance to the presuppositions of eugenics advocates, and of proponents of the Will to Power who said that “in a certain state it is indecent to go on living.” The Antichrist declares, “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.”

Under the pandemic, a re-evaluation of “disability”

A Facebook post:
Things Covid has proved:

1. The job you were told couldn’t be done remotely can be done remotely 
2. Many disabled workers could have been working from home, but corporations just didn’t want them to 
3. Internet is a utility, not a luxury 
4. Universal healthcare is necessary 
5. Homelessness can be solved when it can affect the rich 
6. Childcare isn’t “doing nothing all day.”
7. Universal Credit is not enough to live on 
8. Wages have nothing to do with skills or value from fruit picker to nurse

Note No. 3

“Thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity”

I once went to a local comedy act and the comedian referred to me in front of the audience. I waved him off, feeling very uncomfortable, and the woman with me said, “Don’t be hostile.”

Here’s possibly a better response.

The disabled person could stand up, and say, “I’m glad you called on me, because I’m an advocate for the civil rights of the disabled. We were left out of the civil rights revolution. Hardly anyone thinks we are in a protected class, although we get targeted all the time.

“There’s even a special derogatory catch-phrase for people like me: ‘I don’t care if it harelips the Governor.’ So please remember, we have exactly the same rights as everyone else, even if social events like this don’t act like we do. Sir, thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity.”

Was the greatest play of the classical era about a disabled person?

“Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet …” - Sir Francis Bacon, referring to Oedipous (“Swollen Foot”) and the Sphinx.

Oidipous Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) can reasonably be translated, from Bacon’s perspective, as Clubfoot the Ruler. It then joins such dramas as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Beauty and the Beast, in which a titular character may be expected to wrestle with their disability in the plot.

Disabled people, as we know, are often treated badly. Oidipous’ parents arranged to have him “exposed,” to die.

A disabled Prince so mistreated might, in royal wrath, take gruesome retribution on those who wronged him. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oidipous kills his father and entangles his mother in incest.

Aristotle’s pioneering work of literary criticism, The Poetics, treats Oidipous as Everyman, arguing that we undergo his extreme experiences vicariously, as “fear and pity.” We return to our everyday lives purged, a “catharsis” in which our spirits are temporarily uplifted out of their dreary banality.

In this disability tale, things are made better; that which was lost is found.

Sadly, two millennia of mainstream lit crit fail to deal with the great moral fact of the play: Oidipous’ parents tried to kill him when he was a helpless baby.

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A dramatization of this theme, This is the Son of Kings, was published in this blog in 2013.