A quiet, preliminary, J’accuse

1. You are a person having cerebral palsy being bullied for offending the community, but the ALLU (American Legal Liberties Union) refuses to take your case. Domingo Piteco Cabrón, ALLU director since 2001, observed that your appearance actually does offend the community.

2. You are a person having cleft palate being bullied for offending the community, but the ALLU (American Legal Liberties Union) refuses to take your case. Domingo Piteco Cabrón, ALLU director since 2001, observed that your appearance actually does offend the community.

“Not a protected class,” he pointed out.

Thinking out loud about civil rights assistance the stigmatized disabled need

 Recently I brainstormed thoughts on initiating a public program to assist cleft palate people after the K-12 year existing programs, which basically help parents of babies born with a cleft get the needed corrective surgery. (I may post the initial rough draft of those ideas soon.)

Those existing programs are vital, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to help us after we reach adulthood, and find ourselves dealing with a mainstream society which doesn’t treat us very well at all, while generally pretending we don’t exist. There’s not much thinking about cleft palate around to go on. Earlier posts on this blog have referenced Sociologist Erving Goffman’s applicable reflections on stigma, the “spoiled identity,” which results in “reduced life chances.” (1)

Example, from Wikipedia: “Goffman's book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) examines how, to protect their identities when they depart from approved standards of behavior or appearance, people manage impressions of themselves, mainly through concealment. Stigma pertains to the shame a person may feel when he or she fails to meet other people's standards, and to the fear of being discredited—which causes the person not to reveal his or her shortcomings. Thus a person with a criminal record may simply withhold that information for fear of judgment by whomever that person happens to encounter.” (There’s a big difference between people having a cleft palate which doesn’t affect the lip, nose and face, who can “pass” and live more or less normal lives, and those who have a visible birth defect and encounter social obstruction at every turn.)

Reasons a program needs to be initiated:

1. There don’t seem to be any programs now

2. Identifying and establishing means of contacting members of the local population of cleft palate people (so those who want to can form a community, for example)

3. Setting up and publishing gatherings for CP people, so they can socialize, share information, advocate for their cause, compare strategies for dealing with disability discrimination, contact their legislator, etc.

4. Contacting candidate foundations for financial support for the various aspects of this trial program, including: 1) A counseling program; 2) Legal assistance (example: At a party a community college instructor who was a person of color got on my case, called me “funny looking” and generally degraded me and caused the other partiers to back away from me. An attorney on retainer could advise if a civil right had been violated, if the instructor had violated educational institution policy, etc.) 3) A possible ombudsman program that could assist CP people being bullied in the public schools; 4) Publications, such as How to deal with fear, anxiety, bewilderment, depression caused by pervasive social abuse; 5) Identifying or initiating relevant sociological studies (for example, Is there statistical data concerning discrimination cost - Has a relative income level comparison for CP/mainstream people in comparable populations been done? If not, finance the institution of one.)

/******/

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

Goffman also echoes Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, noting that stigma reduces a person in the mind from being a “whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” ... stigmatized people are vulnerable to invasions of privacy, with perfect strangers feeling comfortable starting personal conversations.”

I responded to an old roommate, not in acceptable social language, but in the language of what’s actually going on

A mutual friend put me in touch with a guy who was my college roommate for one semester, apparently to research “my case.” Below is an anonymized version of what I said to him, basically that I’m not the humble and apologetic guy-with-a-cleft-palate he knew.

I probably won’t hear back from him:

 /******/

Hi, “Peter”, long time, etc. I saw your call on the iPhone, didn’t find a message, however.

[Email omitted]

Prefer written contact. Your Facebook wall doesn’t list Bucolic College …

I think you wrote about cleft palate when you were my roommate (“your case”, you remarked to me).

And when you stopped by my [Left Coast] home, possibly you were following up.

I write a blog about CP and the stigmatized disabled under an anonymity name. Friends and family anonymized there who might be exposed if connected to my name, but you can have the URL if you respect its privacy.

I’d like to see your Bucolic College report if possible. I expect it’s condescending, but I’ve factored that in.

My Facebook wall has some good historical material on 50s Alaskan Island village life - Our mutual friend just remarked on that - can pull up more articles if either of you are interested.

/******/

How do we respond to the constant discrimination.

 It was a hot day in August, 1975. A bunch of us backpackers in an unaffiliated youth hostel in Athens, a big Dutch guy got on my case - President Ford had taken action about some boat in another country, as I recall. “It makes me mad,” he tells me. It was hot and muggy and I blew up at him: “I. Am. Not. My. Country!,” I said. “Calm down!” he ordered. “I WILL NOT CALM DOWN,” I yelled. It felt very satisfying.

Unexpectedly, the Empire types - the Limeys, the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Canucks - seemed to respect that. Maybe they’d never seen a person with a cleft palate defend himself before.

Certainly most of the time we don’t. A year or so back, on the Rapid Transit from downtown to Linden, there was a scrawny middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. I relaxed the Basic Rule - Don’t make eye contact with the crazies. Before long she’d produced a dollar bottle of gin and was trying to get passengers to help her open it.

When she came to me I smiled and shook my head regretfully (I’m a former employee of the bus company), and she starts this verbal abuse: “You are weak. YOU ARE WEAK.” We’re right up behind the bus driver, he must be hearing. I considered standing up for disability rights - when we don’t it just encourages the pervasive abuse of our society - but let it go.

Maybe there’ll be a right time …

 

The identity game and life with a cleft palate.

I was working at a suburban Toys“R”Us in 1998 when a woman and her son came through my check stand. The boy saw the scar on my lip and immediately said, “evil.”

This is sometimes a factor that can cause a majority of Americans having a cleft to be assumed racist on sight. People see the birth defect, and like this boy, think, “bad person.” For people of color, this can turn out, “bad white person” - “racist” if the disabled person is Caucasian.

The pervasive social prejudice against people having a cleft palate or other stigmatized disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, in these cases is compounded by an immediate condemnation: “racist.”

The politics of identity is about status rankings - “victim status” in popular parlance - based on relative levels of discriminatory treatment received, with the people of color Martin Luther King campaigned for at the forefront. Yet the symbolic worst identity isn’t “African American.” We have a familiar catchphrase for the worst identity that could happen to anyone: “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” It isn’t “I don’t care if it [n-words] the Governor.”

Not all people who are biologically Caucasian have a “white” identity. The six million Caucasians slaughtered in the Holocaust were murdered because of their identity, but it wasn’t “white.” The Caucasians who worship in mosques have an identity which brings the targeting of Islamophobia down on them, but it isn’t “white.” And the Caucasians whose lives are altered beyond all recognition by the community’s pervasive birth defect prejudice aren’t “white.”

The politics of identity isn’t in liberalism. It’s in the ideology of the antiliberal left. (The three most famous words of liberalism, “We the People,” are an opening salvo against identity.) Unfortunately, the left’s inconsistency in applying its identity doctrine leads to the left being bigoted in practice against people having disabilities. Nominally, your left identity is your “oppression” identity. If the main factor in your life is some characteristic you have that causes society to attack you, that, in theory, is your left identity. (One way to identify a recognized oppression identity is is that it is accorded “protected class” in society and at law.)

Not only cleft palate, not only birth defect, but disability in general has been left out of the civil rights revolution. As an assistant city prosecutor noted a few years ago, “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.” No case law against disabled people being publicly demeaned, degraded, humiliated, and disenfranchised by anyone looking for someone whose civil rights you may violate with impunity.

It is implicit in left thought that there is something basically wrong with white people, and men, and white males particularly (examples: “Check your white privilege”; “All men rape”). Obviously, this can’t be applied all the time. But the “disabled white person = ‘racist’” syndrome described above - that is another story. Example: I was at the “welcome new graduate students” party of a city university when a person of color walked up to me and accused me of white privilege, despite the presence of many other white males there. He had used “white males evil” as an excuse to vent a prejudice against people afflicted with birth defects. The hypocritical logic of left thought not only allows this, it may actually foster disability discrimination.

On another occasion, an East Asian instructor at a gathering featuring community college staff deliberately misinterpreted my statement that I had attended there as a false claim that I had been employed there. Then she began derogatory rhetorical questions that had people backing away from me. Decent people should have objected to this ugly travesty. They didn’t because it fit bigoted left identity logic: “In a debate between a minority woman and a white male, he is a dominant person and she is a victim getting her own back. (Besides, his birth defect offends the community).”

If you have a cleft palate, the public is on record as thinking you have the worst, most oppressed, identity there is. By the logic of left thought, the progressive community should be demanding recognition of your civil rights at every turn. Instead, they cloak their bigotry against us in the mantle of “anti-racism.” As that hoary old left polemicist Noam Chomsky would say, “I note this, and I draw certain conclusions.”

Universities putting the prestige of the institution ahead of the cause they profess and the students they’re supposed to serve in the case of disabled applicants

The stigmatized disabled, (please see two cites below) such as the CPs (Cerebral Palsy, Cleft Palate, subjects of previous posts), may find that public institutions of higher education, funded by their taxes, do not want them because they would not want a graduate having a socially targeted disability, particularly a birth defect, out in the world with a degree from them. Whereas these universities might be afraid to be caught discriminating against minorities who are in a protected class and part of the civil rights revolution, there is no social pressure or legal sanction against schools marginalizing members of what dol.gov, ada.gov, and other Federal websites describe as “America’s largest minority.”

I speak from personal experience. In the fall of the year I graduated from college, I entered a prestigious midwestern university on a national scholastic fellowship. At the university’s welcoming event for PhD candidates in my department, the official conducting the event, seeing that I have a cleft palate, gave me a look of unbelieving disgust. In none of the classes was I made to feel welcome.

Many of us who have birth defects are conditioned not to speak out about the bigotry of the mainstream toward us, or even to recognize that it is happening. In my case, it was years before I realized that this devastating rejection wasn’t my fault. After a few years I obtained a graduate degree from a western city’s commuter university which was just starting its graduate program, a credential which gained me admission to a state university on the left coast. There were various harassments, such intentionally mispronouncing my name. Years later, participating in a senior citizen audit program at the same institution, when the professor administered an exam which auditors do not take, he openly discriminated by glaring at me as I sat quietly waiting.

In another course, the professor made no effort to conceal his prejudice. Whenever I asked a question or attempted to make a comment, he adopted a demeanor of ridicule or disgust.

This speaks to the situation generally for people having birth defects. It’s socially acceptable to be abusive. This sometimes makes it dangerous to go to parties. Someone, feigning legitimate interest, starts asking questions. They turn out to be rhetorical questions - the subtext is “What’s an [h-word] doing at a party?” - and nobody objects, instead everyone starts edging away.

It’s not just the state university that discriminates openly. At the state employment department, an employee near the desk where I was being assisted loudly teased a co-worker with a mustache about his “hairlip.” Subtle. When I was posing for a driver’s license photo, the state photographer said, “Cheese, whiskey, [h-word.]”

The sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a “spoiled identity.” For people having birth defects, this means that we, not having a social identity, are not part of society, and can’t have a normal life (many of us live in reclusive seclusion, because even as adults, going out in public incurs the danger of getting bullied).

The catchphrase everyone (unfortunately) knows - “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor,” means that this once-illustrious personage will find that life as he once knew it is over.

Nobody cares (that’s why parties - Parties! - are hazardous for us).

What would happen if we went to our Representative or Senator and asked if something could be done about the civil rights of people having birth defects and any other disabled people who are getting targeted?

/***   ***/

Doha Madani, NBC: “John Manly, one of the lead attorneys who helped represent more than 700 women in the settlement, characterized the idea that the university was not aware of the allegations, which spanned decades, as "a damn lie."

"There are many in the administration and the board of trustees who don't belong at that university," Manly said Thursday after the announcement of the settlement. "Not all, but some. ... They put the prestige, fundraising and the university brand ahead of the well-being of students for 30 years."”

/***   ***/

Jamie Yuccas, CBS News: “Hundreds of former patients have accused Tyndall of sexually abusing them during examinations. The lawsuit claims the university knew about the complaints against him, yet did nothing to protect students. …

"I knew there was something wrong with the way he talked to me and the filthy disgusting stories he told me, but when he was taking pictures under the guise of treatment... I didn't know those things were wrong." said Audry Nafzinger, now a sex crimes prosecutor. "They are very powerful institution, USC, and the fact that they just didn't care and threw us to the wolves is so disgusting."”

“America’s largest minority” and the continuing normalization of a familiar derogatory catchphrase

I hope sometime, once the coronavirus emergency has abated somewhat, to contact such entities as my legislative representative, or the ACLU, concerning the continuing civil rights issues of the stigmatized disabled. One approach could be to present the well-known catchphrase, “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor,” and note the response.

If the response is along the lines of, “Yes, that indicates that there is unfinished business concerning the social status of people having disabilities in our communities,” that would be something to work with.

But if there isn’t much of a response, that also could be a point in argument. “The phrase indicates pervasive social prejudice. What action has your agency taken concerning this issue so far?”

/******/

Many of the early articles in this blog noted that a Molly Ivins article on the Time website used the catchphrase as if it wasn’t derogatory toward a vulnerable targeted minority (the title of the article is something like “The Chattering Class Should Just Let Go,” and it’s apparently archived behind a paywall now). CNN reprints it: https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/09/14/chattering.html , again apparently without any awareness that it might be problematic. Would they have printed “I don’t care if it [n-words] the Governor?”

The civil rights revolution will remain in an unfinished state until the habit of casual disrespect for America’s largest minority is addressed.

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/

/*****/

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]

/*****/

“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.”

 /*****/

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.”

/*****/

(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.”