Does the performative era exacerbate the pervasive public discrimination against the stigmatized disabled?

Black Columbia Professor John McWhorter’s Woke Racism’s explanation of Critical Race Theory describes it as an academic fad which is not constrained by evidence and reason: “It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” The lack of cognitive constraints facilitates the targeting of anyone who can be accused of politically incorrect thinking or speaking. Why this matters for the civil rights of the stigmatized disabled is that it has ushered in an era of heightened self-righteous moralism. Not only can any difference from the conventional wisdom be characterized as utmost sinful heresy, McWhorter gives example after example of extreme punishment of anyone singled out for wrongthink. If such wrath can be visited on virtually any Ivy League student or professor who exercises freedom of speech, it creates a fear society which increases the pariahdom of a disabled minority which is already marginalized.

McWhorter gives many examples of extreme punishment which performative virtue signaling exacts for anything that can be construed as adverse to a race, gender, or sexual orientation:

“Thus, an obscure legal theory now feeds directly into a modus operandi that leads to indefensible suspensions, firings, and shamings nationwide.” Examples: “Is it necessary that the president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation be forced to resign because the group’s statement in allegiance with Black Lives Matter after the Floyd murder was not long enough?” “Is it necessary that when, in 2018, a woman attended a party thrown by a Washington Post employee and wore blackface in ridicule of a recent comment by Megyn Kelly, she was not just called aside but cast into unemployment as a revolting heretic unworthy of civilized engagement? The blackface was unwise, to be sure—by the late 2010s it was no longer within the bounds of most educated people’s sense of humor to wear blackface even in irony. But still, the offender clearly intended it as signaling allegiance to the barrage of criticism against Kelly. Only in the late 2010s could this clumsy goof-up qualify as grounds for unemployment, with her callers-out claiming that she had made the party’s space “unsafe,” as if she had simply walked in corked up and saying she was Oprah. A few people at the party not only hounded her out but dedicated themselves to getting her fired from the newspaper for her transgression of etiquette. They succeeded, after even going as far as strong-arming the host of the party into revealing her name to them so that they could pursue her persecution.”

As in the case of the witch hunt that ensued when it was discovered that Virginia Governor Northam had appeared in blackface in a youthful peccadillo, responsible liberal voices might ask, “Where’s the path to redemption?”

“She had made the party’s space ‘unsafe’” (by appearing in blackface). There are people whose bigotry against disability makes them “offended” when, for instance, they encounter someone with a cleft. Could this justify their complaining to management that they should not have to labor in a “contaminated, offensive” workplace?

McWhorter describes: “Kangaroo court inquisitions, … psychological torture sessions seeking to purge people of improper thoughts, … obsessive policing of language.” That’s not an environment that bodes well for people considered “misfits” because of a birth condition.

McWhorter’s opening chapter: “As I write this in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color. Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told. Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently. What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?”

It is a short path from hair-trigger, self-righteous woke antiracism to a heightened readiness for ableist attacks on America’s largest minority. Social performativeness increases the “social tyranny” John Stuart Mill warned against in his classic study of liberty. It is bad for democracy, it is bad for the pursuit of happiness, it turns the land of the free and the home of the brave into a fear society.

A day in the life

 Experiences I’ve had that maybe you have too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of cleftphobia: “What’s a misfit doing at a party?”

“Public prejudicial discrimination—harassment—is an appeal to those present to share the harasser's opinion that there is something wrong with the person who is being singled out which renders them outside of society. That is why it is not the responsibility of the target of prejudice to defend themself socially—social negation is assumed. That is why it is the responsibility of any group, as soon as they realize it is possible that discrimination is taking place, to make it clear in no uncertain terms that discrimination is not accepted there.” - Personal note, 2008

Cleftphobia is often apparent at parties. One suddenly finds oneself on the hot seat. Interrogation pretending to be normal social curiosity—but the subtext is, ‘What’s a misfit doing at a party?’

It’s a strange life we the clefted live. Perhaps strangest is that we don’t talk about it.

In Public Man, Private Woman, the late Jean Bethke Elshtain said that in classical Greece, women did not have a public role. Women “did not have speeches,” was the way she put it.

Just to be a clefted person in a mainstream social gathering is anomalous. People go months without encountering one of us. They are quite unaware of what our lives are like, never knowing if the next stranger will be the one who does a number on us - finds a way to make it clear that they think misfits like us don’t belong.

The decent ones keep us at arm’s-length, carefully avoiding any sort of serious discussion. This is aided and abetted by the lack of a mode of discourse for engaging socially with a de facto subordinate, excluded, different subpopulation.

Example: On the way to a “soup dinner” occasionally hosted by an in-law, I made the mistake of making eye contact with a scrawny middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. When the bus started moving, she began trying to open one of those one-ounce bottles of gin. She asked one or two nearby passengers for assistance, then held the bottle out to me. I smiled regretfully (I used to work for the bus company, and it is illegal to consume alcohol on the bus).

She began verbal abuse. “You are weak,” over and over. Louder: “You are weak.” The bus driver could hear. (Should I have gone over to him and said, “a passenger is violating the civil rights of a disabled person right behind you?”)

I didn’t mention it at the partially family dinner either. Instead of arousing empathy, it would more likely have been seen as politicizing the occasion.

The massive social changes, which have made public conduct emphatically less civil, which have broken numerous guardrails concerning things which are not done because they violate the understood working of a functioning public space, are making things much worse for the stigmatized disabled. What the Founders called “toleration” has eroded, until the public feels it has a right not to see or hear anything whatsoever that might make them uncomfortable. Higher education, where the founding principle once was encountering new ideas that broadened the mind, now has an ever-expanding index prohibitorum of “hurtful” terms and conceptual positions.

This goes along with a rising belief that we shouldn’t have to deal with people whose differences make us feel uncomfortable, unless they’re in a protected class and we have to.

Near the end of a quarter century in my last apartment building, I was waiting in the lobby on Christmas Day for a family member. A young woman went through the lobby a couple times on the way to the laundry room. Then the apartment manager came out. She had complained about someone who shouldn’t be there.

It didn’t end with that. Someone messed with my door lock. “You’re the one” looks on the elevator. Someone figured out how to steal bandwidth from my hotspot.

People who hadn’t been born when I moved in believed that “the community” had the right to force whoever they didn’t like out.

We, like you, are as God made us. Please don’t target us for immutable conditions that we can’t change.

Term One for a discourse of the Fighting Disabled: “Cleftphobic,” “Cleftphobia.”

Are the practices of the left Cleft-Phobic?

The Politics of Identity isn’t about identity as you would understand it. It’s about Who’s Oppressed according to neo-Marxist doctrine. And The Community.

As a result, neo-Marxists don’t show solidarity with what Americans apparently think is the worst identity you can have. Neo-Marxists target what is actually considered the worst identity:

What was the last time you heard, “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor?” This familiar saying means that the worst thing that could happen to the Governor wouldn’t be to wake up black. It would be to wake up having ”a split upper lip,” “a cleft,” “funny looking,” a “misfit,” as a friend of my grandmother said; hence offensive to The Community.

And thus, under the coin of the realm of the Politics of Identity, victim status, the worst identity isn’t to be among those subject to the claimed structural racism of modern civilization — it’s those who offend The Community by being born with a birth defect that makes them funny looking to many in mainstream society.

Marxists say, I’m told, “In order to defeat the master you must use the master’s tools.”

Using progressives’ own terms — Your Politics of Identity doesn’t advance your cause because The Community isn’t a universal standard. It is a vested interest which practices “social justice” and group aggrandizement, instead of seeking the public good. The Community is social, tribal. “Our truth.” Being social, rather than public and civil, it practices what Mill identified as “social tyranny.”

The Politics of Identity is not about the liberal proposition that all “are created equal,” the universal principle that finally rendered slavery unthinkable, that made it “a crime against humanity.” No, the Politics of Identity continues the Marxist obsession with classes. Unequal classes. The Politics of Identity selects classes it believes victims of a power imbalance — women, minorities, LGBTQ people — and proclaims that some classes are more equal than others because they have victim status.

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“Our Constitution … neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” wrote Justice Harlan in Plessy, because class is whac-a-mole. Doesn’t provide “the equal protection of the laws,” but always leaves something out.

The catchphrases of the left, communitarian, segment of society support the class ranking system of the Politics of Identity rather than the equal protection provisions of the Constitution, to the disadvantage of socially despised classes having stigmatized disabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happens When the Supreme Court of the U.S. Gets It Wrong?

Angela Van Etten: “When Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 they adopted the same definition of disability used in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. They expected that courts would follow Rehabilitation Act caselaw when deciding who is disabled. Shockingly this did not happen. Instead courts narrowly interpreted the disability definition leaving many ADA claimants without justice.

As a result, discrimination against people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, blood cancer, major depression, diabetes, epilepsy, learning disabilities, multiple sclerosis, and sleep apnea went unchecked.

A diabetic could be denied coverage due to the mitigating measure of taking insulin leading to the absurd result that an employer could refuse an accommodation request to take a break to administer insulin because the employee was not disabled!”

The Court has failed to give disability due consideration before. In 2013 this blog’s post In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and the Disabled noted, “ These … articles described case after case 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. Senator Tom Harkin: “The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity.” The question these articles brings to mind is, Why the needless cruelty of these excessively narrow interpretations?”

Reference: ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA)

A preliminary note on the particular characteristics of the cleft palate disability

The author of the IndependenceChick blog refers to the mainstream as temporarily abled. Doesn’t really fit those who have a cleft. Personal example: I’m a high school and college letterman in the distance events (admittedly in small schools); climbed Mt. Hood a couple times (requires crampons and ice axe); ran marathons.

The nub of the story could be detected in the situation at the undergraduate school I attended. The three other clefted people there did not have a cleft lip. They could pass. They were not treated as disabled.

Our disability consists in the pervasive social attitude of those who can see us. Our disability is social.

It would help if the civil rights revolution was popularly understood as including us. It would help if we were popularly understood as being in a protected class, since the formal mechanisms of “civil rights” unfortunately leverage identity.(1)

Another topic, as things are, and particularly in the holiday season, gift-giving-and-the-outsider seems to be an undiscussed aspect of cleft prejudice. The person we give a gift to uneasily feels that we are presuming that we are their equal in doing so. But not giving the gift violates a social norm. It’s a cleft Catch-22. The existing social system’s neglect of people having a cleft here, as in many places, lacks:

1. A social standard for required social gift-giving
2. A social language or mode of discourse for us is missing. If the issue is race, one can say “racist,” “racism.” The proposed equivalent, “ableist,” “ableism” is feeble. (Would “cleftphobic” serve as “transphobic” does?)
3. In any case, we’re not supposed to talk about it. (I remember the feeling of struggling against a taboo when starting this blog years ago.)
4. The last post observed that cleft people can’t use the communitarian solution because their 1-in-700 status effectively means that the average cleft person doesn’t have a community
5. Political action is hindered by the same factor: 1-in-700
6. Democratic public-spiritedness should help the clefted population, but again as the last post implies, this is now much more the era of power, not ethics/civic virtue

A personal experience with institutions, which may be more than anecdotal: In the fall of the year I graduated from college, I entered a midwestern university English Department’s Ph.D program, having a national scholastic fellowship. At the department’s welcoming party, when the department’s representative saw me, he got a look of unbelieving disgust. In the classes, it was clear that I was not welcome.

At a left coast university, in encounters as a graduate student (I entered on an M.A. from a city university just starting its graduate program), as an auditor, and in an adult education class, an attitude having nothing to do with scholastic ability prevailed.

My impression, which you may not agree with, is that where the stigmatized disabled are concerned, some public higher education institutions care more about their impression than about their education responsibilities to their students.

Concluding notes: A google search on “cleft palate” still

1. Produces entries about us, not by us
2. Helps the parents of children having a cleft (who certainly need it) by providing corrective surgery and other needed services during the growing years but
3. Does not discover entries:
4. By us
5. About local, state, or federal programs or funds after age 18, to deal with widespread discriminatory attitudes and practices; severe isolation and unavailability of social contact and community; lack of political influence; and concealed exclusion from institutions which fear they will be tarnished by association with someone who has a cleft

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(1) The Founding, in beginning the Preamble with “We the People,” implied that identity was not supposed to matter. In the same spirit, Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy: The Constitution knows nothing of class and regards man as man where his civil rights under the Constitution are concerned (quoted from memory) prefigured MLK’s own anti-identitarian content-of-their-character, not color-of-their-skin formula.

Unfortunately, since the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause seems to be currently instituted as protected class, it would really help if the American public came to believe we are in a protected class.

Cancel culture and the pervasive social discrimination against the stigmatized disable.

This is the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The America of that time, up until around 1980, had characteristics that were more friendly to those who are different. Those who opposed McCarthyism during the Eisenhower administration, for example, supported the individualism of the right to march to the sound of a different drummer. The same respect for the right to be different made them oppose “guilt by association.” They opposed groupthink, which is now valorized as “solidarity.” They opposed “end justifies the means” rationalization in the name of principled argument, representing individual values rather than group aggrandizement. The chief characteristic of the America of the Great Generation was friendship. The chief characteristic of what America has become is enmity.

This is particularly disastrous for people who are thought to “offend” because of birth defects.

Sociologist Erving Goffman noted that disabled and other stigmatized people have a “spoiled identity.” 

Christophe Van Eecke on “Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture” in Quillette: “Nevertheless, a very similar effect is obtained by destroying the victim’s social world. This explains why it is important  for shaming and cancellation to be public events—they are meant to isolate the accused from the community. This isolation is experienced as physical as much as spiritual. The destruction of the world that is achieved in torture by the destruction of the body and its relationship to its immediate physical surroundings is achieved in cancel culture by the infliction of an abject state of loneliness, which equally cuts the victim off from the world.” (Emphasis added)

Unlike other targeted minorities, the clefted, being a minuscule population (1 in 700), and having no governmental or other societal programs once they become adults, do not have a community. We can be, as previous posts have noted, attacked on the grounds of “What’s a misfit doing at a party?” without fear that anyone will come to our support.

Van Eecke continues: “This experience has been most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argues that inducing a state of loneliness in people has the effect of destroying all sense of community, reducing individuals to isolated atoms, and thereby preparing them, through abject fear, for totalitarian rule. As Arendt explains, “Totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As Arendt points out, “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.” A lonely man “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.” Solitude can be enjoyed—it is often even a luxury—whereas loneliness is terror.” (Emphasis added)

The disabled “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.”

Van Eecke: “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, which ensures that this person will lose his job, his livelihood, his social circle, and will almost certainly not find another job in the foreseeable future. In close analogy to physical torture, where everyday objects (a chair, the food one eats) and even the body itself are turned into hostile weapons, the shared world is turned into a hostile environment for the publicly shamed person, who is now shunned by everyone. The very people who were only recently friends and colleagues are now the weapons that inflict pain through their absence, confirming the victim’s isolation.”

We know that sooner or later you will be humiliated. “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, … ”

Van Eecke: “In this way, the security a person feels within the human community is destroyed and the world is made hostile. It effectively reduces the limits of one’s being to the limits of the body. Any person who has ever suffered severe public shame will acknowledge that the limits of one’s body are a thin shell between oneself and a hostile environment.”

Sooner or later you will be humiliated. Suffer “severe public shame … ”

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The language of the new regrettable enmity society, and its cancel culture, map a great increase in the already discriminatory tendency of the mainstream toward those born having a birth defect.

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - The Scarlet Letter of the CPs: “You’re Guilty”

Yours truly is fortunate that his formative era was the Truman - Eisenhower - Kennedy years. At the time of its Army-McCarthy row, the left rejected:

• End justifies the means rationalization
• Groupthink
• Extrajudicial determination of guilt
• Guilt by association
• Conformism

Nearly a decade ago Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom proclaimed a “mission to civilize” in the face of social tendencies which make us “meaner and less civilized.” In an episode highly criticized by the left media, Thomas Sadoski’s character Don Keefer prevents the airing, by a student who has been raped, of a precursor of the Shitty Media Men phenomenon. Shitty Media Men was an online spreadsheet which allowed  public rape accusation without due process. A writer who objected was “excused from the room” by Sorkin. Sorkin/Keefer took the position that this sort of extrajudicial determination of guilt without due process could damage the reputations of innocent people.

This new righteous attack culture in the name of social justice makes this era worse for people having a spoiled identity because of birth defect stigma. Sorkin was socially punished for predicting that anonymous accusation having the ostensible purpose of countering rape could derail innocent people’s lives.(1) This same new climate of punishment, which rejects the law’s sacred presumption of innocence, means American culture has gotten worse for disabled people, particularly if they have stigmatizing afflictions. (“You’re guilty!” a City of Seattle co-worker once greeted me, apropos of nothing whatever.)

The new, righteous social justice presumption of guilt actually has an ancient pedigree. John 9:2 “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

A current The Atlantic article by Anne Applebaum says we have entered a new Scarlet Letter era. “The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her [Hester Prynne] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”” (Emphasis added)

“We live in a land governed by the rule of law,” she adds, “we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.”

And some Cerebral Palsy people, some Cleft Palate people, and others who look different, are “out of the ordinary relations with humanity” in an unrecognized shadow world. Where it is impossible to live a normal life. The Scarlet Letter of disability stigma means they lose everything — “jobs, money, friends, colleagues” — after violating no laws … 

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(1) Stephen Elliott: “How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed my Life”

“The Paris Review decided not to run an interview they had already completed with me for their web site. I was disinvited from several events, including a panel at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Someone even called a bookstore in New York where I was scheduled to do a reading and urged them to cancel their event. …

Then my television agent stopped returning my calls. Was this just business as usual, or had she found out about the list? I didn’t know. If she did know about the list, she certainly wouldn’t be sending me to any meetings. Hollywood doesn’t care if you’re innocent or guilty; they just don’t want to be anywhere near that kind of controversy. Friends who knew I had been named stopped inviting me out. I started to get depressed, because I was walking around with this awful secret. I’d look someone in the eye and I wouldn’t know what they knew about me. I couldn’t talk about what was happening without revealing that I had been accused of rape. …

Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused. We don’t talk to one another. We assume that if someone else has been accused, there must be a good reason. We’re afraid of guilt by association.”

“People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether.”

 Sarah Katz: “People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether. “These types of laws are written without even thinking about how they’re going to impact people with disabilities—until we come forth and start talking about our experiences and how legislation like this is going to impact us,” Michelle Bishop, the manager of voter access and engagement at the National Disability Rights Network, told me. “People with disabilities are very often collateral damage in these conversations.””

Reflections on Canellos’ _The Great Dissenter_

In view of Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy, saying “the Constitution neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” what is the status of “protected class” at law?

If the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is today being implemented as protected class, should the stigmatized disabled, the CPs (Cerebral Palsy and Cleft Palate) for example, be in a protected class, in view of the pervasive social prejudice against them?

We seem to have two things going on. Protected Class as a term of art under a Constitution, not of classes, but of “all men,” according to the ringing phrase in the Declaration. And an obvious population at need, the demeaned, degraded, and marginalized disabled, rendered second class citizens and denied Equal Protection, because the public believes them not to have been included in that dodgy workaround, “Protected Class.”

Justice is universal, after all. No need to question where equal protection applies. No need to name who gets it and who doesn’t. No need to specify maligned disabled people so they won’t be left out. That’s the beauty of universalism. Martin Luther King recognized the inherent universalism of justice when he proclaimed one of what Milton called, “the known rules of ancient liberty”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

But protected class is particularist. It is crosswise to true justice. It is Whac A Mole. It leaves as many out as it includes.

That’s one of the reasons there’s no Brown v Board, no Obergefell, no landmark civil rights case, for us. Nor the small routine defenses granted minorities: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

No wonder the public attacks at will. Creates an uproar at parties, the subtext of which is, What’s a misfit doing at a party? Springs subtly crafted, socially deniable, public humiliations. Feels free to be openly scornful of us in our university classrooms, and in community housing. All of this imposing what Goffman called a “spoiled identity” without the countervailing influence of civil rights law.

Canellos begins The Great Dissenter, “The narrative turned … ruthlessly extinguished … a slow, menacing starvation. The ingredients for success … gradually withdrawn. … There was no recognition of their struggles, their accomplishments, or the tragedy of their lost hopes. There was only silence.”

He was talking about the the people the Civil War was fought to liberate, as a reactionary social movement determinedly dismantled the postwar Constitutional amendments.

Another deeply entrenched social attitude treats us as having a spoiled social identity and makes it impossible for many of us to live normal lives.

One of the recourses for those whom society will not accept is just law. But we were left out of the civil rights revolution. There is only silence.