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The U.S. Supreme Court Just Knocked Down A Cornerstone of Human Rights to the Cheers of an Extremist Few

25 Jun

Hours before the German Bundestag removed a Nazi law restricting public information about abortion services, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to medical freedom, opening the door for laws that seek to not only criminalize abortion but many forms of miscarriage treatment, contraception, IVF, and maternal behavior during pregnancy. The Court came to this decision amidst a historically low approval rating among U.S. voters of 25%. It is not a coincidence that the countries rated highest in the Democracy Index currently guarantee reproductive freedom to citizens.

Having made many, many life-altering medical and family-planning decisions, I despair when I see people on any side of this issue projecting their deeply emotional, personal experience onto someone else’s to further a political agenda. Any safe and fair society requires STRONG, CONTINUOUS, EASILY ACCESSIBLE support for people who are delighted about their pregnancy, people who want to end their pregnancy, people who don’t know how they feel about their pregnancy, people who placed their children for adoption, people who regret having placed their children for adoption, people who feel relieved about their abortion, people who regret their abortion, people who are childfree and happy, people who wish they’d had kids when they could, people who love their kids but need help, and people who hate parenting and really need help.

I don’t care if any of these scenarios is more likely than another. When it’s your life, your right to support should not be contingent upon how many other people feel the same way. That’s the basis of humans rights, of democracy. It is the only option for anyone who believes in harm reduction instead of moral superiority regarding family planning politics. Anything short of broad support for all the aformentioned people leads to miserable parents, miserable children, miserable communities, silence and secrecry and shame and abuse and misery everywhere.

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Do We Need Statues of Real People?

1 May

Happy May 1st! The idea of “the people” and “the public square” and “equality-means-everybody” has me thinking about statues. And about historical figures and artists and everyone whose work had an undeniable impact on the world and the problem of their having also done or said terrible things that contributed to the subjugation and/or suffering and/or marginalization of many people. And I wonder, do we need statues of real people? (Or faces on coins and bills?) Germany places its statues of undisputed criminals in museums. I’d be hard pressed to find any recent statues of real people around here.

Does any society need statues of real people? The human impulse to want to learn about – and usually like – someone whose work we like is so powerful, it’s surely impossible to eradicate from our systems. Fandom is here to stay. But books, articles, documentaries and museums exhibits can/should force us to learn about the person in context, learn about everything they did, whom they helped and whom they hurt. Statues simplify people, remove context, rinse them of responsibility for any harm they caused. In turning them into idols, we place them above others, which is the opposite of equality. Do we really need statues of real people in public? What will be lost if we ended the tradition?

Imaginary figures seem fine to me, whether unnamed as in the nice big lady above you can see in Oslo, or well-known fictional characters. I don’t think there is a problem with statues of the Greek gods. Everyone knows they were jerks.

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This Universal Pandemic Proves Our Diversity

19 Apr

Hidden Object (Image by Hans-Jörg Aleff used under CC 2.0 via)

 

Most of the world has been asked—if not ordered—to stay at home and only socialize online. Almost immediately the divisiveness inherent to social media was out in full-force. My friends and family have been venting almost since Day One about the posts and tactics they find most distasteful:

“I can’t go online anymore if it means finding out another one of my friends is blaming this on Chinese people, black people, or city people.”

“There SO many high-horses out there right now – people trying to shame anyone who goes to a bakery or uses public transportation or orders online and therein endangers delivery workers.”

“Be grateful your friends at least are committed to social distancing right now! Half of mine are still convinced anyone who does so is a sissy.”

“I’m gonna unfriend the next person who lectures about how we should be avoiding chocolate or shampooing with strawberry jam because it’s good for your brain cells and therefore your immune system. It’s hard enough to get people to listen to the clear-cut facts. We don’t need the airwaves clogged with theories!”

“I can’t take the memes that tell everyone to stop whining. ‘All we’re being asked to do is stay on the couch and watch Netflix’?! Complaining is helpful in a crisis!”

Indeed, orders to immediately have perspective and shut up sound crotchety at best and ice-cold in light of the escalation in unemployment, mental illness, domestic violence, and child abuse under lockdown. We absolutely owe it to seniors, disabled and chronically ill people, and every essential worker to do what we can to slow the spread of the virus and lessen the danger they face. But that doesn’t mean shrugging off even smaller problems like loneliness, cabin fever, or the obliteration of the work-life balance. A single mother of toddlers who works as a journalist said every minute of her day is a choice between neglecting her job or her children, and leaves her feeling every night that she failed at both. The U.K. reports an increase in custody battles over children since the lockdown. Less acrimonious legal procedures like immigration and adoption procedures are now in limbo.

Not since the last pandemic a century ago has everyone on every continent faced the same exact enemy. Earthquakes, bombings, hurricanes, and even World II occurred in specific locations. Some if not most people on earth lived far away from those catastrophes and only knew them as news reports. Right now I can ask my friends and family in every time zone the same question: How is it for you? I live in Germany, which so far has one of the lowest death rates of any of the infected countries and, at the time of this writing, has more residents recovering from the virus than infected by it. While that is some cause for hope, the diversity in international infection and death rates pretty much ensures that non-essential international flights are a long way off. For so many parents like me, seeing our kids hug their grandparents is almost certain to be the very last thing governments will allow. I know I am still partly in denial over that.

Social media is a hard substitute to accept. Unlike speaking to friends in very small groups or one-on-one, social media (like mass-emails) excludes the extremely helpful ways in which we each alter our speech and tone according to whom we’re addressing. And so we speak to everyone at once and too quickly alienate those whose experience we forget. Posts about what to read or watch now that we all have so much time at home alienate those whose workload has tripled. Or evaporated. Posts that overemphasize the dangers of the virus in order to try to frighten people into staying home make those with at-risk loved ones burst into tears. Posts trying to point the finger at wet markets or the Chinese government (or U.S. Democrats or cell phone towers) prove that the blame game is always poisonous and always fraught with fallacies. Scientists and journalists from Nate Silver to Bill Bryson had long been warning that humanity was due for a pandemic. The differences in how states have handled it proves that our political choices do ultimately determine how many will be in danger.

We all face the same virus and what it means for each of us is as diverse as humanity itself. Recognizing the wide range of experiences is necessary. It will degrade us if it is done with jealousy instead of empathy. Solidarity means no one is more expendable than I am and bravery in the face of a worldwide threat means overcoming the urge to think only of my experience.

Escaping social media and moving to the phone, I’ve found friends and family to be overly gracious. Jeez, I thought I was inconvenienced, but it’s nothing compared to what you’re going through! they say so often to each other. We vent and then edit ourselves, counting our blessings and privileges without humblebragging, and express sympathy for each other’s individual plights. For all the vile xenophobia that is but a Google search away, online organizing shows that many are ready and willing to aid people in poverty, African-Americans, refugees, homeless citizens, and prisoners, all of whom are a greater risk. The applause from balconies for health care professionals across Europe and North America has been heartening, and in many places it has been followed by concrete efforts for increased funding.

And who keeps even more people alive in a hospital than the doctors? The cleaning staff. This crisis has shown the need for paying our workers based on the necessity of their labor, not the skill-level. It has shown that childcare is absolutely and always a job in itself, worth as much as any other. It has shown how difficult it is to communicate simple but scary facts to over 7 and a half billion people. And it has shown we do have some choices about our responses and we can let the better angels of our nature prevail. When this is over, history will tell whether or not we did.

 

U.S. hotline for domestic abuse: https://www.thehotline.org/

U.S. hotline for the Deaf for help in domestic abuse: https://thedeafhotline.org/

U.K. hotline for domestic abuse: https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/

German hotline for domestic abuse, in several languages plus German Sign Language: https://www.hilfetelefon.de/

German hotline for depression: https://www.deutsche-depressionshilfe.de/corona

 

 

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In School I Learned the Story of Emmett Till, But Never the Story of How Many Still Try to Destroy Him

28 Jul

Emmett Till(Image by Trending Topics 2019 used under CC 2.0 via)

 

This week the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered a photo of three fraternity brothers posing with guns next to bullet holes in a sign commemorating the spot on the Tallahatchie River where 14-year-old Emmett Till’s body was found in 1955 after he was tortured and murdered. One of the fraternity brothers posted the photo on his Instagram account, where it garnered hundreds of likes before it was drawn into the national spotlight. The fraternity has since expelled the men in the image.

Like many Americans my age, I first learned about Emmett Till in school when I was 15-years-old as part of a lesson on the Civil Rights Movement during Black History Month. I remember the eruption of “WHOA!” among my classmates when we first saw the image of Till’s battered face in the documentary Eyes on the Prize. We learned that Till’s mother insisted on an open casket to show the public what the murderers had done to her son for whistling at a white woman. We learned that this moment helped launch the Civil Rights Movement onto the national scene. And then we went about our day. As with most history lessons, we filed the tragedy as “in the past” and all but said, “Isn’t it good that  this doesn’t happen anymore?”

The memorial sign to Emmett Till would not be erected for another 10 years. I hope students today learn in their Civil Rights lessons that it has been repeatedly riddled with bullet holes ever since. My classmates and I didn’t learn in school where the opponents of the Civil Rights Movement ended up – not only the politicians and the Klansmen, but the white students in the South and the North who threatened their first black classmates. We watched the film version of To Kill A Mocking Bird with its fictional schoolgirl protagonist shaming a lynch mob into backing down simply by showing up at the last minute with her innocent face. We did not learn about the very real photographs of families smiling with their children next to lynched corpses that were turned into postcards and distributed as souvenirs at the time. When it came to such horrors, we learned that there were Bad Guys but there was the silent assumption that they all died off or had a change of heart because it was In the Past.

And it all had nothing to do with America’s Glorious Past. The way we learned it, the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements both cropped up randomly for some reason in the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries. We didn’t learn that the Supreme Court slowly began overturning racist laws at the same time that more and more atrocities of the Holocaust were coming to light, making overt racism less and less widely accepted. We didn’t learn that slavery was such a contentious issue among our Founding Fathers that it had to be jettisoned to the state-level lest it break up the United States before they could even form a country.

Since the very beginning of the United States, talking about racism has remained a quick and easy way to divide our citizenry. Our only hope of solving this gargantuan problem is not to merely condemn and expel individuals, but to fully admit and understand the scope – how far back it goes and how widespread it still is. That’s how you start to solve any serious problem really.

 

 

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Mother’s Day & All It Touches

12 May

Mother and Son(Image by Andy415 used under CC 2.0 via)

From the Archives, updated

A very happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful mothers I have had the pleasure of knowing, not least of all my own.

And to those of you who have lost your mothers,

And to those of you who have lost a child,

And to those of you who had to take care of your mothers (and yourselves) much earlier than the rest of us had to,

And to those of you who have tried hard to become mothers despite what neighbors (or politicians) may have said,

And to those of you who have tried hard to become mothers despite what nature ultimately decided,

And to those of you who bravely chose to have someone else become a mother in your stead,

And to those of you who are not mothers but have raised a child as well as any mother could,

In gratitude and with the deepest respect.

 

 

Banned Books Week Should Fight Censorship & Simplistic Thinking

23 Sep

 

Today the American Library Association kicks of its annual Banned Books Week to spread awareness of the dangers of censorship. Each year the ALA releases a list of the top ten books that were most often requested to be removed from U.S. libraries—usually school libraries—by parents and political activists alike. In 2017, the majority of the most challenged books were stories about LGBT acceptance. However, as with nearly every year, a few titles on the list were targeted for use of racial slurs.

I love Banned Books Week if anything because discussing these issues is crucial. I do believe every public library should be free to contain every book humanity has ever brought forth. But, as examined before, those opposed to censorship should not assume the solutions are simple like censors do.

When it comes to kids, you’d have to look hard to find someone who believes that no one should ever take a child’s age and developmental level into account when selecting stories for them. I save many of my favorite books for the children in my life until they are old enough to appreciate them fully because infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers can get scared or—more likely—bored if they can’t follow along. Most children in primary school do not understand sarcasm, which is why Stephen Colbert did not let his kids watch The Colbert Report.

Children are a diverse group, so of course many kids will be ready earlier than others to handle mature topics. But just as I believe it takes a mature mind to understand the  BDSM portrayed in Fifty Shades of Grey, I believe there is a world of a difference between an older child who is ready to learn about the nuances of racism and a young child who will likely repeat the N-word without giving it much thought, and think it’s funny if it elicits shocked expressions among grown-ups.

With all this in mind, Banned Books Week should be about debate, endless and free.

 

 

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What’s the Difference Between Immigrants & Expats?

3 Jun

immigrant(Image by Charles LeBlanc used under CC 2.0 via)

 

The past month has seen some deeply depressing images of what cruelty humans are capable of when they fear large numbers of people from across the border. From the now scandalous policy of a “hostile environment” for suspected undocumented immigrants in the U.K. to the separation of children from their parents at the U.S. borders to the report that only 10 percent of Hungarians feel “totally comfortable” being friends with an immigrant, xenophobia has a lot to celebrate.

“I don’t mean you.” It’s a phrase I often hear when I point out my status to someone going on about foreigners here in Germany. In one of the most painful exchanges I’ve ever sat through, a man specifically told me Germany should be doing more to allow nice, hard-working, honest people like me into the country instead of opening the door to “all those dirt people.”  

I wish I had asked him what exactly separates me from them. Even though I could likely guess the answer, it’s an important question to ask. Did he see me as nice and honest because he’d met me twice before, unlike those constituting the faceless mobs? Or by nice and honest did he mean expat instead of immigrant? What’s the difference? Legally none. Both groups have to get their visas from the same immigration office.   

Expats are generally less feared than immigrants and I postulate the biggest reason is because expat is implicitly understood to mean more likely to be in the middle- to upper income brackets and have a college education. Expats are generally defined as foreigners brought to their new home not just in search of employment but by their employer, who is almost always a multinational company, a university, an embassy, or an international research organization. Their employer is likely to ensure that their stay is temporary, so expats usually replace each other, rather than accumulating.

There is of course another type of expat that is slightly more likely to permanently immigrate. Western countries have long produced wandering artists, scholars, and backpackers who seek inspiration and happiness far from home. Technically they are in search of work when they land in their new country, just like immigrants. But they are viewed as expats and not immigrants if their economic background ensures that they will be able to maintain a middle class (or upper class) level of financial security no matter what happens. If things go really bad, Mom or Dad or someone else back home will ensure that they never risk tumbling into true poverty.

I came to Berlin 13 years ago this month fresh out of college and looking for work just as many of my classmates were doing in cities across the United States. I chose Berlin not because it offered great opportunities—it rather infamously did not—but because I had fallen in love with the city while studying here. I had made friends—all fellow students—and they and their families welcomed me warmly. Obtaining my work visa was in no way easy, but it was far easier than the ordeal faced by the people from Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America who sat next to me in the waiting room at the immigration office.

When there was a long delay in the application process, family and friends loaned me the money to cover my rent. When I was told I needed more offers of employment than I had presented, a professor I knew from a past translation project offered me a position as one of his research assistants. Another got me in touch with her colleague who was looking for a nanny. All these connections had been made during my college years and they helped keep me legally safe and financially secure as I struggled for the right to stay in Germany. It would be dishonest to pretend I did it all myself and that diligence and determination are all anyone really needs. Nothing shapes your life experience quite like the social network you belong to and the average income of that network. A black friend whose family is middle class and immigrated from The Gambia told me he hears “I don’t mean you” from xenophobic voters fairly often, too.

Class differences create hierarchies of immigrants that promulgate dangerous myths about superior and inferior cultures. Immigrants to the United States from China and India, for example, are stereotyped as “the model minority” because they are two of the few ethnic groups to earn more on average than white Americans. Pundits of all political stripes have insisted that the stereotype of hard-working, high-earning Chinese and Indian immigrants versus uneducated, low-wage Latin American and Caribbean immigrants can be simplified down to a matter of having the right values. This ignores the realities of the visa system, outlined best by Prof. Janelle S. Wong at NBC.com. She points out that in the U.S. , 50% of all immigrants from China and 70% of all immigrants from India have a bachelor’s degree, while only 5% of the people living in China and 15% of the people living in India do.

This is due to changes in immigration laws that occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Prior to that, most Chinese immigrants such as those that built the U.S. railroad did not have college degrees and were stereotyped in the harshest possible ways, which culminated in The Chinese Exclusion Act. The parallels to U.S. policy proposals aimed at Mexican immigrants today are emphasized in a new PBS documentary named for the act. Sometimes stealthily, sometimes brazenly, societies treat those with a higher education very differently than those without.

But the advantages I have here in Germany over other immigrants are not only economic or education-based. Once I was harassed on the street for speaking English with my partner because “this is Germany and we speak German here! You’re hurting my ears!” But I’ve never had the police stop me on the street and demand to see my German residency permit, unlike a friend from Jamaica. When I plan a vacation, I’m free to move around Europe and most of the world without a travel visa, unlike friends from China and Côté d’Ivoire. I’ve stood near skinheads here in Berlin and been horrified, but I’ve never once felt threatened. That’s what being simultaneously white and Western gets you. No matter how much money you have in the bank or where you went to school.

Mawuna Remarque Koutonin argued years ago in The Guardian that the only difference between expats and immigrants is racist thinking and it has to go. As we have seen, she is right that the distinction can be profoundly offensive. In these xenophobic times, solidarity among foreigners (and humans) of all sorts is crucial. But any expat who claims to face the same probability of persecution as an immigrant is also problematic, ignorant of the very real and systemic privileges bestowed upon some but not others. Naming the different realities faced by the different people lining up at the immigration office is important because if you name it, you can talk about it.

And we absolutely must talk about it because too many nationalist voters across the Western world don’t want to. They don’t like to talk about the ramifications of class background or the power of racism. They don’t like to talk about why they fear foreign poor people more than local poor people, and they don’t like to talk about local poor people either. They like to talk about cultural differences being insurmountable, about having good values and bad values, good people and bad people. And that’s where the problem starts.

 

 

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The Hart Family Murder & The Dangerous Assumption that Adoption Is About “Rescuing”

29 Apr

Kids Playing(Image by Duane Story used under CC 2.0 via)

 

Last month Jennifer Hart drove her wife Sarah and six adoptive children in their SUV at 90 miles per hour over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. When the story first broke, the public saw a wide array of photos posted by Jennifer on social media portraying a happy, hippie family at music festivals, farmer’s markets, and human rights demonstrations. Over the past four weeks, details have emerged suggesting the parents who proclaimed “Love is always beautiful” were as narcissistic as they were idealistic.

The Hart mothers were white and all of their children black, adopted from the foster care system. In 2010, one daughter showed bruises to her teachers and claimed Jennifer had spanked her over the edge of a bathtub and held her head under cold water. Sarah took the blame and was convicted of assault. A week later the parents switched to homeschooling all the children. They soon moved to Oregon where they were again investigated for physical abuse and food deprivation in 2013. While the social workers’ report concluded that abuse could not be proven, it noted that the children were at risk and found only one of the six children to be the correct size and height for his age. The Harts then moved to Washington State. Last month Child Protective Services attempted to contact the family three times after neighbors reported one son had finally asked them to after weeks of begging for food. Four days later, the family SUV was found at the bottom of the cliff. Two of the children’s bodies are missing, but all family members are presumed dead and investigators are classifying the crash as intentional.

The first thing that stuck out to me was just how many photos there were in which the black children of the white parents were paraded around like heaven on earth. “It’s important for abusers to manage their identity,” says professor of criminology Hannah Scott. “It was very important that they look good outside their family.” The second thing I noticed was the cult-like praise friends of the parents fired off to the media in the wake of the investigation: “These children came from scary, scary home situations [before their adoption]… I think Jen and Sarah should be idolized.” Mary Elizabeth Williams wisely inquired at Salon, did the children have any friends who could say the same thing about the Harts? Indeed, like so many children of abuse, witnesses now attest that the Hart kids were discouraged from having any relationships outside the family.

In her piece, Williams cites an article from the Coalition for Responsible Home Education warning that children who are adopted, disabled, and/or homeschooled are commonly found among abusive parents. Most homeschooled (or adopted or disabled) children in the United States are not abused, but a 2014 study of tortured children found three-quarters had been either homeschooled or never enrolled in any form of education. Laws regulating homeschooling vary widely from state to state. After the Harts fled Minnesota, they moved to Oregon and then Washington, where parents are required to register homeschooled children with their local school district, but the onus is on them to make contact. Homeschooled children in the U.S. are exempt from the regular health checkups schools provide that would detect starvation and other forms of abuse. Williams blames the holes in this system on America’s highly individualistic culture: “That same American culture of ‘Don’t you dare tread on my freeeeeeedom’ that gave us our gun obsession also feeds the lack of accountability in families that circumvent the intervention systems that schools can provide.”  

Children’s rights are more strictly protected here in Germany, where homeschooling and all forms of spanking are illegal. I don’t expect the U.S. to be able to ban homeschooling or all corporal punishment any time soon, but making it a felony to fail to register homeschooled children with local school authorities could be a step in the right direction. Hawaii has become the first state to introduce a bill requiring parents who seek to homeschool to undergo background checks. Alexandra Argyropoulos, who had notified authorities in Oregon of abuse in the Hart family, has been inspired to start a White House petition calling for a national child abuse database that would allow Child Protective Services to share information across state lines. All these steps of course face loud opposition.

Meanwhile many have pointed to the racism inherent in the Harts’ story. Rachelle Hampton writes at Slate, “The ways in which Sarah and Jennifer managed to continually evade the notice (or action) of officials is a luxury that is by and large only provided to white parents.” Biological relatives of three of the children have come forward to dispute Jennifer Hart’s claims on Facebook that they were rescued from a violent home. Whatever the facts, Hart’s narrative did exploit the widespread assumption that black American children are often better off in white middle class families like hers. Far more importantly, it also breaks the rule taught by many adoption advocates that the child’s backstory belongs to the child and is not for the adoptive parents to advertise to strangers like juicy gossip. Indeed, while the Hart family tragedy epitomizes many problems of race relations in the West, it also epitomizes many of the widespread prejudices adoptive children face.

The National Adoption Attitudes Survey in 2002 revealed the pervasive assumption that adoptive children must have adjustment problems while their adoptive parents must be particularly “unselfish.” Abusers like the Harts thrive on these assumptions. In the documentary Somewhere Between, a teenager expresses unease at being called “lucky” by strangers who know nothing about her except that she was adopted from China by white American parents. In her excellent piece “The Uses of Orphans,” adoptee Alison Kinney analyzes in depth “the casual, commonplace expectations of edification, gratitude, and cultural ambassadorship foisted upon orphans and adoptees.” She explains:

From the time I was 10, strangers wanted me to discuss my adoptive parents’ fertility, the cost of my adoption, the imagined poverty, sexual habits, and mortality of my birth mother, my genetic relationship to my sister, my wise advice to potential adopters, and my gratitude to parents and idle bystanders for my welcome in this country. They’ve used my “success,” for which they also claimed credit, to shame the supposed failures of the less fortunate…

…I’m far from the only former orphan whose life has been shaped by the expectation that I would serve as translator, apologist, cheerleader, and double-agent. One adoptive father called me an ungrateful bitch, because I supported birth mothers’ rights.

Some adoptive children have been abandoned by or removed from horrifically abusive birth families. Others have been lovingly placed in the care of adoption services by birth parents who have bravely admitted that they are not in a position to provide what every child deserves. To assume, however, that all adoptive children fall into the former category and would therefore automatically be better off with pretty much anyone so much as considering adoption is the old model. Prospective adoptive parents are routinely warned against it by many adoption experts who have seen what damage it can do. We should all be warned against it.

While we should all be grateful to our parents—provided they did not abuse us—no child on earth should be expected to be more grateful for receiving basic care and kindness. In her post “10 Questions to Ask Yourself to See If You Have A Savior Complex” at Adoption.com, activist Sarah M. Baker writes about the wrong and right ways to do it:

I have read about religious organizations encouraging people to adopt because it is their “duty” to help orphans. They place the people who do adopt these orphans on pedestals and boast about their good deeds. But, most adoptive parents I know chose adoption to fulfill their need to grow their family, to parent a child, to fill a void in their homes and hearts. While it is true that the children they adopt are in need of a forever family, these parents don’t overlook their child’s losses or take compliments from strangers lightly. They often remark back that they were the ones who were “saved” by adoption.

Baker highlights the ubiquity of the problem among religious communities, but it also exists among self-proclaimed progressives like the Harts. Many adoption agencies are acutely aware of the risk of attracting the narcissistic personalities most likely to think of themselves as heroes at the expense of the child’s well-being. One family told me their agency wants prospective adoptive parents to be brutally honest about which sorts of adoption scenarios might challenge them. They are particularly suspicious of anyone who says, “We can handle anything!” because saying yes and then finding out you can’t handle it is deeply unfair to the child. The Harts proved this point tragically well.

 

 

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Don’t Be A Sucker

20 Aug

 

Leaving you this weekend with original 1947 U.S. War Department film containing the two-minute clip that’s gone viral this week. It’s relevant in the wake of Charlottesville, and of yesterday’s anti-nationalist marches in Boston and here in Berlin. But it’s particularly relevant in its familiarity. The warnings of the dangers of authoritarianism and the assertion that there is no scientific proof of racial differences in character or ability have been repeated countless times in the 70 years since its release. Because so many have claimed otherwise. So often thinking theirs is a new, radical idea.

 

 

 

 

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Another Reason Why American Students Should Protest Campus Speakers If They Want To

23 Jul

Protest(Image by Jorgen Carling used under CC 2.0 via)

 

Academics across the political spectrum are debating whether or not students should protest speaking events on their campuses by controversial figures like Charles Murray, Bill Maher or Milo Yiannopolous. Murray tried to prove in his bestseller The Bell Curve that black people are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence than white people. Maher has made no effort to differentiate between Muslim extremists and all Muslims in political discussions on his TV show Real Time. Yiannopolous is a professional Internet troll who says to anyone who finds his arguments upsetting, “Fuck feelings.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett argues in The New York Times that Yiannopolous should be protested and rejected by academia because “he is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.” She puts Charles Murray, however, in a different category. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue back in The Atlantic that any campus protest of any speaker is an attack on free speech and contributes to a dangerous culture of victimhood that coddles college students. Both articles make interesting points. Both articles miss the point as to why I primarily believe students should protest any or all of these speakers.  

Unlike students here in Germany, where higher education is free, college students in the U.S. are not mere pupils who have been accepted based on their academic performance with the purpose of engaging in profound discourse that benefits both themselves and the academic community. College students in the U.S. are customers that go into sometimes life-long debt in order to purchase the product that is their four-year education. UC Berkeley, where students protested Bill Maher as a commencement speaker, currently charges $29,784 for one year of tuition, room and board. A year at Middlebury College, where Charles Murray was met with violent protests, right now costs $63,917. Google why tuition in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past four decades and you will find countless theories. But the fees are real as is the fact that guest speakers are not only invited but paid by these colleges. It is thus perfectly reasonable for students to express their opinion as to how their tuition money is being spent, just as it is perfectly reasonable for consumers to launch boycotts against companies that engage in unethical practices or belittle minorities.

Furthermore, these guest speakers demand exorbitant speaking fees. Charles Murray charges between $20,000 and $30,000 for a single speech. Bill Maher charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per event. I was told by a staff member at my alma mater that his  department could not afford one speech by a well-known theorist in the field of language. His fees were lower than Murray’s, let alone Maher’s.

My college education was invaluable. And academia confronts, examines and debates controversial ideas that can be deeply upsetting to many people every day: ideas like when does life begin and end, who can be considered human, is love or attractiveness quantifiable, should blasphemy be considered hate speech, should we breed shorter people to save energy, etc. But these debates alter when someone who has made a career out of arguing for one side is paid an enormous sum to give a speech about it. Aspiring teachers, social workers, and librarians have a right to say whether they are willing to go into life-long debt so that a celebrity can earn between $20,000 and $100,000 in one afternoon on campus by firing off some rants. They have a right to say whether the hosting professor should perhaps instead use college funds to pay $25 for one of Murray’s or Maher’s books and photocopy a chapter for his class, where the ideas can then be debated over a few days if not weeks.

That is precisely how I first encountered Murray’s argument that black people are genetically predisposed to a lower IQ. My genetics course culminated with analyzing The Bell Curve and discovering how scientifically flimsy Murray’s evidence is. This absolutely endowed me with a detailed understanding of how inane the colonial belief in separate races is and prepared me to confront those who still cling to it. I am very glad for that. But would I want the tens of thousands of dollars spent on my education to have helped contribute to the wealth Murray has accrued from reiterating this intellectually weak but attention-grabbing idea? The same class addressed the fact that the eugenics movement both resulted in the sterilization and deaths of thousands of disabled people but also contributed intellectually to the early stages of genetics as a science. As someone with achondroplastic dwarfism, I found it important to learn about that. But should I have stood idly by were the college to invite and pay a eugenicist to give a speech? How about a Neo-Nazi?

That is an ethical quandary at best. One that warrants debate. And peaceful protest is a form of debate, an exercising of the right to freedom of speech. 

Not all protests on college campuses are on the right side of the issue. The dumbest demonstration I ever witnessed in my student days was against the ban on smoking in the cafeteria. This migraine-sufferer was ever so grateful to see the fumes disappear. But I wasn’t enraged at the idea of the smokers voicing their dissent. I walked by their protest without bothering to comment and later mentioned my disagreement when asked. 

I was sympathetic the following year when students held a peaceful but angry protest of the new performing arts center, which was designed by Frank Gehry and cost $62 million. Some of my friends on campus were there in part thanks to scholarships but nevertheless had to work 65+ hours a week in the summer to cover the rest of tuition. They showed up at the protests, arguing that the $62 million should have instead been spent on scholarships. Despite what many like to think of most campus protesters, they were not spoiled children shielded from dissent and far too used to getting exactly what they want in they life. They were more aware than most of the way money works in the world – a world their college claimed to be preparing them for.      

 

 

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Recommended Weekend Reading

28 May

Grand Court(Image via Arild Storaas used under CC 2.0 via)

 

Speaking of politicians belonging to historically marginalized groups, here’s some upbeat news from Ireland. It shows that minds can be opened faster than many believe. Our challenge is to keep them opened now and forever.

 

 

 

 

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Never Call Something “The Last Acceptable Prejudice”

21 May

Primitive Negative Art(Image by Primitive Negative Art used under CC 2.0 via)

 

When my family moved from one the most diverse school districts on suburban Long Island to rural Upstate, I was taken aback by the prejudices locals had about the New York metropolitan area. Reactions ranged from a creeped-out exclamation of “Ew!” to concerned questions about crime and pollution. “I despise New York City with a passion!” said one little old neighbor while passing the rhubarb pie during a Sunday get-together. Deeply homesick, I was resentful of the local disdain for what to me had been a wonderful, Sesame Street-like checkerboard of cultures. And I became slowly horrified the more I began to understand that “inner city” and “crime-ridden” were all too often euphemisms for “non-white.”

When I went on to college, however, I was reunited with City kids and professors who were equally open about their disinterest in rural life. They weren’t so much passionately hateful as consistently apathetic, convinced that anything that lay beyond a one-hour radius of Manhattan was more imaginary than real. Jokes about “hicks” often sprang up at the mention of hunting or farming. Many of these urbanites also considered the sheer existence of insects to be a personal affront no citizen should ever have to endure.

Now residing in a major city, I have little patience for bigotry about either setting. The jokes are only ever good when told by those who have actually lived there. And neither group gets to claim that they are the targets of “the last acceptable prejudice.”

Comedian and political commentator Trae Crowder argues just that in The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: “You ever notice how rednecks are pretty much the only subgroup of people in this country that it’s almost entirely socially acceptable to mock publicly?” Similar assertions have been made in reviews of J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Last month Bill Maher repeated his claim that ageism is the last acceptable prejudice. Columnist Marina Hyde pointed out that The Guardian has declared old, white male-bashing to be the last acceptable prejudice, The Economist has decided looking down on regional accents is the last acceptable prejudice, and Religious Studies professor Philip Jenkins pronounced anti-Catholicism to be the last acceptable prejudice. An article last year in The Independent announced, “Laughing at Dwarfism Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice.”

I understand the frustration behind the sentiment. Dwarfism does not get much attention as a human rights issue. Much of this is due to our rarity in the general population, but also due to the pervasive and enduring belief that our existence is too funny to take seriously. As researcher Andrew Solomon writes in Far from the Tree, “At the mention of dwarfs, [some of my] friends burst into laughter.” As I’ve written before, students in a course studying the power of language told me they would never find the word “midget” as horrifying or upsetting as the N-word or the C-word because their gut reaction was to think of dwarfs as too cute and amusing to be controversial. So yeah. It’s an uphill battle.

But that hardly means that all of this constitutes the last acceptable prejudice. What about the ubiquity of condescension toward the rural poor or the elderly or those who speak in dialect? What about the G-word for Sinti and Roma? What about crude assumptions about adopted children? What about tired tropes about identical twins? What about gingerism? How many self-identified transvestites are out, besides Eddie Izzard? How many of the 1 in 2,000 people born intersex feel safe to be out and proud about their bodies? How many overweight people have never been shamed? And for the all the complaining about PC gone mad, how many racist and sexist jokes and arguments can you find just by sifting through TV shows, Facebook comments, or political party platforms?

The phrase “the last acceptable prejudice” is often used to impart the urgency of a human rights crisis, but it can also connote competition. And it veers dangerously close toward Oppression Olympics. During the 2008 election campaign, Hillary Clinton argued, “Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal. You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women. The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world.”

Such assertions almost always betray ignorance of the oppression of people other than those you identify with. To argue that there are places with no oppression of racial or ethnic minorities is a sweeping generalization, and to conclusively prove this would be a very tall order indeed. And to argue that the treatment of women is “the single biggest problem in the world” implicitly downplays the problems of xenophobia in places like Denmark, where the current political status quo is committed to gender equality initiatives but also committed to harsh restrictions on immigrants, refugees and religious minorities. 

The only time it is useful to compare oppressions is when you want to highlight another group’s success to prove it a plausible goal for your own. When African-American men and women were freed from slavery in the U.S., suffragists pounced on the opportunity to demand why only African-American men and not women would be granted the right to vote. Both the first and second women’s movements in the U.S. stemmed from the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and the gay rights movement stemmed from both. Transgender, queer, and intersex rights movements have advanced from that, as have others addressing widespread prejudice about birth, blood and the human body. 

Yet divisive bigotries and competitive thinking survive within these movements and thrive when Oppression Olympics is accepted as fair play. Solidarity is threatened by that, which is why we would do well to agree that inaccurate, superlative phrases like “last acceptable prejudice” harm more than they help.

 

 

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A Mother’s Day Tribute to a Sullivan Woman

14 May

Barbara Sullivan 1975

 

I don’t remember when I came to the conclusion that being a dwarf meant I absolutely had to care about all forms of discrimination and social injustice. It seemed to always be there. I remember at age 19 stumbling upon some closed-minded corners of the Internet and promptly firing off mass e-mails reverberating with shock and outrage about the prevalence of homophobia in the dwarf community – a community that I believed, if any, should be particularly sympathetic to the concerns of those persecuted for how they were born. Solidarity among those ostracized for inherent traits they have no choice about should be automatic and unwavering.

But plenty of people who can be categorized as minorities disagree. There is a ream of reports about homophobia among many minority advocates, racism and misogyny in gay communities, transphobia in lesbian communities, and plenty of social justice groups fall short of embracing disability rights and the openness to bodily diversity it requires. It seems we can’t go a few days without some social justice activist revealing ignorance of and/or apathy toward the work other minority groups have been doing for years. In other words, not everyone “born different” feels the same automatic solidarity I do. It’s why the divide-and-conquer strategy so often works.

And perhaps there are other reasons for why friends frequently tease me for being an “issues person.” On Mother’s Day, it would be negligent of me to ignore another influence on my worldview that has been as powerful as my dwarfism. My mother, Susan Sullivan, is a social worker after all – and she decided to become one a good 10 years before my birth brought her and my father into the dwarf community. Her mother, Barbara Sullivan, was a social studies teacher. She would be 100 years old were she still alive today. Her worldview and its legacy deserve more than a cursory mention.

The 1975 article announcing my grandmother’s retirement in the Peru Central School newspaper reads:

Mrs. Sullivan, who teaches Problems of Democracy and Consumer Education, is presently teaching her last semester…

She has taught us many things. Maybe the most important of which is the ability to empathize or put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is the foundation from which we can solve local, national and personal problems. Then she has gone one step further.

Mrs. Sullivan has opened many eyes to racism, sexism, poverty and the injustices present in our court and prison systems. Not only has she opened the eyes of her students, she has also helped her fellow teachers.

A lot of work is done in her classes but also a lot of discussions. The kind of discussions that help end individual prejudices…

You can bet she will be involved in the community projects that time has not allowed for in the past. Because that is the kind of person Mrs. Sullivan is – caring, understanding person who will always be remembered by any student who has ever taken any of her courses.

A little article cannot give appropriate thanks for all she has taught us. The best way we can show our thanks to her is to go out into the world and work toward ending the injustices that trouble her heart so much. Until we can do this, all we can say is… Thanks.

Grandma Barbara also taught the school’s first sex education class – a feat my teenage mother at the time found as impressive as it was embarrassing. But Grandma Barbara preferred interacting with teenagers over younger children, asking me with deep interest about drug use and the AIDS crisis when I entered middle school. When I was younger, the discussions were simpler but nevertheless motivated by sociological pursuit. She examined integration at my school by asking whom I interacted with, and I received my first black doll from her. She had been an ardent supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, and was deeply concerned about racial injustice long after it was fashionable. The night Barack Obama was elected president, I quietly shed a few tears over the fact that she had not lived to see it. But in my head I could hear her shrieking, “Hallelujah!” with all the abandon for which she was famous among her friends.

How much her own background brought her to such conclusions about the world I cannot say. She grew up in a small town in Western New York where pets were named unprintable racial slurs. An avid reader, perhaps her relentless pursuit of knowledge helped. But her intolerance of injustice was as intellectual as it was visceral. I remember her smacking the side of her head and clenching her fist in fury during a scene in the 1994 film The Jungle Book when Mowgli is shoved about and laughed at by British officers at a gentleman’s club. Through example, she inculcated in us an inability to stand idly by while others are ostracized.

One of the first Mother’s Days in the United States was proclaimed by suffragist and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who envisioned something far different from the celebrations embodied by flowers and greeting cards we have come to know today. She called for a day when the mothers of the world would commit to peace. She firmly believed that war would end across the globe once women were given the right to vote because no mother would vote to send her son into battle. Her belief was noble, however naïve or inaccurate.

And Grandma Barbara would have appreciated the sentiment. She was in so many ways a simply loving grandmother, who spoiled my brother and me with sweets and treats, and chased us around her backyard chanting, “Tick tock! Tick tock!” in pretending to be the crocodile from Peter Pan. But her boisterous love of the world was matched by her passionate desire to repair the world. My mother and I cannot deny she passed it on to us. It is a gift for which I will be forever grateful.

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Tax Day!

9 Apr

HELLO! HUMAN RIGHTS (Image by Andres Musta used under CC 2.0 via)

 

As Tax Day approaches in the United States and here in Germany, everyone will have an opinion as to which entities deserve public funding, and which are impractical, immoral, or evil. It is perhaps easier for me to remember that taxes not only support disabled people. Through health care, medical research, social work, education, and the justice system, they keep many alive. And they also help lessen the everyday physical pain experienced by some of us.

Even banal subsidies can make a substantial difference. As a German resident classified with a “Grade 50” disability, my ticket for all public transportation in the Berlin metropolitan area is subsidized so that I pay a fraction of the normal fee. This discount offsets the extra costs I regularly incur by needing to use taxis or a car rental for distances most other 35-year-olds would either walk or bike. By relieving me of this financial burden, I can have as much money saved as a pedestrian does to spend on food, clothes, rent, movies, music, houseplants, hair curlers, napkin rings, bubble gum, sealing wax, bath toys, or presents for my loved ones. Alternatively, it saves me the extra time I would have to spend walking and then recovering from the pain of walking – time which I can use to be more productive, which helps me qualify as a taxpayer capable of paying it forward to others in need of subsidies.

I have been called a freeloader. A disabled friend was told she should realize “what we have to do for you” – “we” being the non-disabled taxpayers. Many political theorists argue that the extra costs faced by disabled citizens should only be offset by privately run charities funded by donations from those who actively choose to be so morally upright. Others go so far as to advocate Social Darwinism, which would be a death sentence for many disabled people.

The intricate relationship between government and tax structures have occupied economists, political scientists, academics, philosophers, monarchs, and politicians since the legend of Robin Hood, and I have no intention of tackling it in its entirety here. But amidst the myriad points and counterpoints, one truth remains clear to me: A society that agrees to ease some of the burdens disproportionately placed upon disabled people is agreeing to ensure the existence of disabled people. And by doing so as the general public in a mandate to itself—instead of leaving it to the “good will” of a few individuals—this society tells disabled people they should be no more grateful to be alive than anyone else should. That message is crucial. While we all have varying abilities that shift in value throughout time and space, equality means that no one is altogether more important than anyone else. We must believe this if we want to claim to believe in human rights.

 

 

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High Heels Are A Civil Rights Issue

26 Feb

king_charles_i_after_original_by_van_dyck

(Public domain image via)

 

Last week there was much discussion on the blog about the social ramifications of height, but what about high heels? The Women and Equalities Committee of the U.K.’s House of Commons recently found that employee dress codes that require heeled-shoes for women are violating laws banning gender discrimination. The Committee reviewed the matter after receiving a petition signed by 138,500 people and started by Nicola Thorp, a London receptionist who in December 2015 had been suspended by her employer without pay for violating the company’s dress code for women by showing up for work in flats.

I personally find high heels frequently quite becoming. I also personally find them physically hazardous. Pretty much anyone with any sort of orthopedic disability has been advised by their specialists again and again to limit the time they spend in heels to a minimum. While reporting on the U.K. ruling, NBC News let women in on “an essential secret — carrying a pair of trainers in your handbag.” This is cold comfort to those of us who know that back pain is also caused by carrying more than 5% of your body weight in your handbag. One twentysomething friend with an invisible disability was told by her spinal surgeon that she should wear heels pretty much never. Thorp was right to sue on the basis of gender discrimination because only women are required by some employers to toddle about on their toes, but a case could be made on the basis of disability discrimination as well.

That disabled women could be fired—or simply looked upon unfavorably in the workplace for “not making an effort”—is indeed a social justice issue. We in the West have come to regard heels as a sign of female beauty and professionalism not so much because they are inherently smart looking, but because they were invented to signify wealth.

Heeled shoes were designed to be painful and inefficient if you walked around much because the upper classes around the world have traditionally used their fashion statements—from foot-binding to corsets to flowing robes and fingernails—to prove that they were wealthy and didn’t need to labor to survive like the lowly workers. Prof. Lisa Wade offers a wonderful break-down of the history of the high heel at Sociological Images, pointing out that they were first considered manly because men were the first to don them to display social status. Women began wearing them to imitate this status, which led to men abandoning them. Wade explains:

This is a beautiful illustration of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class distinction. Bourdieu argued that aesthetic choices function as markers of class difference. Accordingly, the elite will take action to present themselves differently than non-elites, choosing different clothing, food, decor, etc. Expensive prices help keep certain things the province of elites, allowing them to signify their power; but imitation is inevitable. Once something no longer effectively differentiates the rich from the rest, the rich will drop it. This, I argue elsewhere, is why some people care about counterfeit purses (because it’s not about the quality, it’s about the distinction).

Eventually men quit wearing heels because their association with women tainted their power as a status symbol for men. (This, by the way, is exactly what happened with cheerleading, originally exclusively for men). With the Enlightenment, which emphasized rationality (i.e., practical footwear), everyone quit wearing high heels.

What brought heels back for women? Pornography. Mid-nineteenth century pornographers began posing female nudes in high heels, and the rest is history.

In many moments in the history of many cultures, extra pounds of body fat have also signified high social status because wealth was needed to keep someone well-fed. The price of sugar and of meat plummeted in the 20th century in the West and were soon no longer considered delicacies only the wealthy could afford. This coinciding with the eugenics craze in the early 20th century brought about the birth of our modern preoccupation with not just longevity and bodily cleanliness but physical “fitness.” These shifts are why modern fashion dictates that those who wish to project high social status should dress inefficiently, like a traditional aristocrat, while remaining physically strong, slim and active, like a traditional laborer.

High-status men are now encouraged to wear expensive attire in addition to building and maintaining a muscular physique that can get down in the dirt – something the manly dukes and earls of yore would have considered horrifically common. High status women are now encouraged to diet and exercise to be “healthy” in addition to wearing heels to hint at sexiness in their physique via the historical association with both princesses and porn stars – at the risk of breaking down their bodies as they rush off to work and back like the peasant women of yore.

Indeed, our modern fashion rules for professional women are ever so young because upper class women who worked were an anomaly in the Modern Era until the 20th century. The First and Second Wave feminists successfully fought for our right to vote and become actors, bankers, flight attendants, and politicians, but we have yet to expunge the idea that a woman who suffers for beauty is admirable, rather than irresponsible. Nicola Thorp’s petition, however, has dealt it a blow.

Women should feel free to wear heels almost whenever they wish, but disabled women should not have to suffer social consequences for choosing to protect their bodies. True equality may also come when men can wear heels like Mozart and Louis XIV without fear of gay bashing, as long as such a fashion shift does not harden into a fashion decree. If it does, then disabled men will have to use their right to petition against discrimination.

No matter how you personally feel about them, just remember that modern ideas about fashion, gender/sex, class, and disability all meet whenever we consider a pair of high heels. That’s why we call it intersectionality.

 

 

 

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Tuesday the U.S. Senate Will Vote on Betsy DeVos… and the IDEA

29 Jan

 

Tuesday the U.S. Senate will vote on Donald Trump’s candidate Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. DeVos’ answers during her Senate confirmation hearings earlier this month galvanized disability rights groups, who were horrified by her seeming ignorance of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). When the law was passed in 1975, only 20% of all disabled children in the U.S. had access to public education. Thirty organizations, ranging from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools, signed a letter sent to the Senate Committee on Tuesday, requesting a delay of the vote on DeVos until she has answered more specific questions regarding the federal law. DeVos sent a letter to the Committee chair on the same day, endeavoring to clarify her positions.

This all occurred the day after disability rights and issues disappeared from the White House website. Disability Scoop reports:

The outgoing administration’s site featured information on expanding education and employment opportunities for people with disabilities, enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act and a video tour of the White House in sign language, among other materials.

Now, however, links to the disability pages return an error… Searches for disabilities or disability on the new version of whitehouse.gov yield just nine results including two related to Grover Cleveland.

The American Association of People with Disabilities and other advocacy groups said DeVos’ letter failed to allay their concerns. DeVos has a long history of promoting school voucher systems, which use public funds to send children to private schools, while requiring families to waive rights and protections they are afforded by the IDEA. Because school voucher systems promote free enterprise for school administrators over adherence to federal guidelines, they have their roots in the states most famous for advocating on behalf of states’ rights. Florida has the oldest school voucher program for disabled students in the U.S. and in 2011 a Miami newspaper uncovered widespread corporal punishment. Corporal punishment was banned in schools in the counties in question, but teachers in the voucher system insisted they were not bound by any government law. Pro-voucher system sites insist the rate of corporal punishment is lower than in public schools in Florida, which does not ban corporal punishment statewide.

Independent disability advocacy organizations have generally argued that the voucher system has yet to prove helpful to those they represent. Disabled citizens, after all, are the first to be harmed by a system that encourages competition based on individual ability over universal civil rights protections. A study by the National Council on Disability concluded:

…it is not at all clear whether existing private schools want to serve students with disabilities or indeed can provide their specialized services and needed supports in the absence of the kind of critical mass enjoyed by school districts. IDEA, for example, recognizes the importance of family participation in the child’s educational plan, but also legitimizes the expertise of specialized staff and personnel who have specific knowledge and competencies for providing a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) to students with disabilities. To place the burden on parents to seek out a private alternative to provide the kind of specialized educational program needed to serve their students with disabilities may be unreasonable. In Florida, the special education vouchers are apparently providing the stimulus for new schools to come into existence to serve only students with disabilities. This movement, however, could reverse the scientifically documented findings supporting the provision of educational services to students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment of inclusive opportunities. The end result of large-scale voucher extensions to students with disabilities could lead to a new kind of institutionalization at public expense.

To be fair, the parents of many students with disabilities in the United States advocate for voucher systems. American conservatives tend to show more support for voucher programs out of a preference for the free market over government regulation and/or for specific religious instruction over an unaffiliated curriculum. These preferences also motivated the primarily conservative opposition to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post argued earlier this week that criticism of the voucher system is bipartisan because both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for weakening public education as a civic institution over the past two decades, ultimately paving the way for candidates like DeVos.

 

 

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From the Frontlines of the Women’s March in Berlin

22 Jan

berlin-00

 

German newspapers currently estimate 2.5 million people worldwide—on every continent, including Antarctica—took part in yesterday’s Women’s March.

Earlier this week there was a debate about the mention of disability in the official platform of the March on Washington. Disability advocate Emily Ladau wrote:

My heart sank when I read it.

The first time the word “disabilities” is mentioned, it shows zero recognition of disability as a social justice issue:

We recognize that women of color carry the heaviest burden in the global and domestic economic landscape, particularly in the care economy. We further affirm that all care work — caring for the elderly, caring for the chronically ill, caring for children and supporting independence for people with disabilities — is work, and that the burden of care falls disproportionately on the shoulders of women, particularly women of color. We stand for the rights, dignity, and fair treatment of all unpaid and paid caregivers. We must repair and replace the systemic disparities that permeate caregiving at every level of society.

I also recognize that women of color disproportionately take on the caregiving as a job, that caregiving can be extremely demanding work, and that fair compensation is imperative. But you know what it says to me that this bullet point is one of only two places where disability is mentioned in the entire platform released by the Women’s March? It says that my existence as a disabled woman is a “burden.” My existence as a disabled woman is “work” for someone else. My existence as a disabled woman does not matter.

Disability is mentioned only one more time in the entire platform… And considering that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1 in 5 Americans have disabilities, disability rights deserve more than a cursory mention in the official Women’s March platform.

This touches on two problems: the vast swaths of feminism that ignore the discrimination burdening disabled women, and our macho culture’s fear of men taking on caregiving roles or any jobs done primarily by women. While feminists continue to fight for mandated paid maternity leave, mandated paid paternity leave is widely considered a bridge too far in the United States. Only 12% of American men offered it by their employers take it. Some economists have tried to explain away the election of Donald Trump by talking about the emasculated feelings of male workers facing a paucity of management opportunities in the American Rust Belt and that the only way to appeal to them is to give them jobs that make them the primary breadwinners in their homes once again.

While fair wages and economic inequality should be a paramount concern of any human rights movement, the insistence that men must be the primary breadwinners and will never be satisfied turning to “pink jobs” like caregiving is not highlighting an indisputable truth about all men – it is highlighting a problem in white male American culture.

Those who say the male ego simply cannot budge on the issue need only look to American black men, who pursue caregiving jobs at a rate 3 times higher than white American men do. Or look over here to Germany, where 1 in 5 students in caregiving programs are male. (Eighty percent of German men also took some form of paid parental leave—which is mandated by the government—in 2013.) Or look to the the Dulais Valley coal miners whose true, history-making story was the inspiration for in the 2014 film Pride. In that film, the problem of emasculation is recognized when one of the strike leaders argues against accepting donations from a gay and lesbian group: “Think of the men! It’s bad enough that their wives are financially supporting them, but now they’re relying on a bunch of gays and lesbians?!” Spoiler alert: By the end, the men they’re talking about open their minds. Or demonstrate that they were never concerned about it to begin with.

The Women’s March stated loud and clear that it’s on all of us to open minds about gender roles until our entire culture changes. We feed the denigration of women—not to mention all other forms of xenophobia—when we agree that white men should feel denigrated to do anything traditionally done by women. We need women who would be embarrassed to date a man in a traditionally feminine job to abandon such thoughts. We need men who are tempted to belittle a guy for going to nursing school to prove he is braver than that, until the man who does snicker is the one feeling out of place. And everyone needs to agree that caregiving is freakin’ hard and deserves to be compensated accordingly.

Yesterday’s Women’s March was a resounding success. Despite Ladau’s valid complaints—as well as earlier reports of friction among some white, middle-class feminists and feminists belonging to other minority groups—the day ended up awash in calls for combating injustice faced on the basis of disability, gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, ethnicity/religion, immigration status, and appearance. In Washington, Gloria Steinem demanded a moment of silence for those who could not be at the March because they had to work in underpaid jobs. Tammy Duckworth got up out of her wheelchair and onto her crutches to demand unwavering defense of the Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Angela Davis seemed determined in her speech to mention every single marginalized group in the United States and overseas. And when the crowd in Berlin began chanting, “Black lives matter!”, one black woman at the center began singing for joy with tears in her eyes.

There were many signs and songs that not every protestor immediately embraced. One marcher who identifies as queer told me he disliked the portrayals of Donald Trump in drag because being trans or feminine should never be a source of shame. Plenty of marchers of all political stripes expressed unease with blatantly owning the sexualized slurs so many women are the target of. Those of us who are fans of cyborg feminism cringed at gender essentialist references to “Mother Earth” or “natural” womanhood. Others winced at all the swear words. But democracy is hard work. And it was a victory for democracy that millions were willing to march together and engage in an international conversation that sometimes made them uncomfortable. A willingness to leave one’s comfort zone is the first step toward fully embracing and protecting universal human rights.

 

 

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Blaming the Election on the Minority Rights Movement Is Flawed and Dangerous

20 Nov

 

It’s a trick you’re bound to encounter if you work with issues of diversity: Someone comes along and insists that he’s got nothing against any particular minority—in fact he’s all for progress!—but lots of people feel left out by diversity awareness so people should really stop talking about it. Now. I was told on Election Night by a voter that bringing up racism or homophobia is “divisive.” Mark Lilla writes in the New York Times this week that an over-emphasis on minority identities at schools and universities is what has caused the backlash seen in the recent U.S. election. 

This argument pushes the fallacious color-blindness approach to human rights, calling on us to “focus on our commonalities and not our differences.” Most people our society designates as minorities would love to be able to do this. We would be thrilled to live in a world where your race, nationality, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, cognitive ability and appearance are considered no more remarkable than whether or not you’re right-handed or left-handed. Such a world is the final goal in the struggle for social justice. But the insistence that the only way to achieve such a world is to start pretending we live in it already demands we kindly stop filing complaints of inequality, underrepresentation, harassment and abuse.    

Dr. Michael Ain says in the documentary Dwarfs: Not A Fairy Tale, “When you wake up in the morning, and you do what you have to do, you don’t think you’re different. When I woke up this morning to go to work, I don’t think, ‘I’m short.’ It doesn’t approach me when I look in the mirror. It doesn’t cross your mind until someone makes it apparent.” He then talked about how many doctors tried to block his efforts to apply for medical school on the basis of his physical appearance. “The first guy I interviewed with told me I couldn’t hold the respect of my patients because of my stature,” he reports.

Many of the proponents of the commonalties-not-differences approach are noble in their intentions if naïve in their conviction that such cases are tremendously rare and best left viewed as isolated incidents. But other proponents are simply irritated when attention is afforded to injustices other than those they personally have suffered. I have encountered many arguments placing blame on the “entitled, whining” attitude plaguing minorities, who are too obsessed with their own victimhood to learn about hard-work and self-reliance. Nine times out of ten, supporters of this view then argue that straight, white men actually have it harder than anyone else thanks to the social justice movements of the past 50 years. Which begs the question: Wait, who’s really acting like a victim here? Who’s blaming others for their lot in life?

Minority rights groups contain many people also guilty of such self-centeredness: Blacks who suppress Jews, Jews who suppress women, women who suppress trans citizens, etc., ad nauseam. Which is why it is crucial to reiterate that if we’re going to support the rights of one group, we have to support them all. Your identity matters far less than your willingness to think beyond your personal experience and understand the diverse sorts of harassment and Othering experienced by citizens of all identities.

And speaking of commonalities, I am done reading lectures from professors, pundits and princess experts that claim those of us in the minority rights movements are elitist and don’t understand the “white working class.” People who could be lumped into the “white working class” include many of my friends and family. Some of them join overly educated hard-liners in blaming immigrants and minorities for society’s problems, and some of them are leading the discussions on human rights. Some of them are massively insecure and will lash out if they have to hear anything about xenophobia, and some of them listen to diverse points of view better than anyone of any political conviction. And a tremendous number of them are LGBT, disabled, immigrant and/or non-Christian. Many of them are fully accepted by their peers for who they are. Many are not. Reducing human rights discussions to attacks on—or defenses of—“rednecks” ignores and insults the diversity of that group. Human rights discussions must always cross class lines. Those of us who base our work on intersectionality have been saying this for decades.

Writing and teaching about diversity awareness can be exhausting when even the classiest behavior is accused of divisiveness. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this and so does Brandon Victor Dixon, the star of Broadway’s smash hit Hamilton, who made his now famous appeal to the incoming vice-president of the United States on Friday night. See the video above or the transcript here:

Vice-president elect Pence, I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us, just a few more moments. [Some audience members begin to boo.] There’s nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen. We’re all here sharing a story about love. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us. We thank you for sharing this wonderful American story, told by a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations. 

Critics on both sides of the political spectrum are reprimanding Dixon for making this plea. After all, isn’t Pence accepting all Americans by attending a play with a diverse cast like Hamilton? 

As many others have pointed out, Pence is a politician recently elevated to a position of tremendous influence who has given many Americans good reason to worry that his acceptance of them does not extend much beyond tolerating their presence on a stage. He has successfully fought for the right for businesses to discriminate against LGBT customers and is an advocate of gay conversion therapy, which has been widely condemned as psychologically damaging by medical professionals. In his 2000 bid for Congress, Pence sought to defund any AIDS support organization that did not urge patients to repress their sexual orientation. 

Both stars of Hamilton are openly gay and one is HIV-positive. In a just world, they would have no reason to worry about their health under any presidential administration. But we do not live in that world yet, and Dixon’s appeal to Pence was as justified as it was polite.  I implore anyone who thinks otherwise to try changing their sexuality before they make a call for an end to diversity awareness.

 

 

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While Facing A Trump Presidency, We Cannot Afford to Let This Slide

13 Nov

Ku Klux Klan(Image by Martin used under CC 2.0 via)
It’s been a good week for anyone who believes white Christian straight men deserve more power than anyone else. Donald Trump was elected to the most powerful office in the world with the support of extremist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the alt-right, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Family Research Council. Many have felt validated by the electoral victory to voice what they really think of minorities. Graffiti found in Durham declared, “Black Lives Don’t Matter And Neither Does Your Votes.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, whose mission is to document and prevent hate crimes, reported over 200 incidents in the first three days after Election Day, mostly at K-12 schools, universities, and businesses. 

None of this is surprising to those of us who documented the uptick in celebratory hate crimes in the U.K. after Brexit and who have witnessed Trump do nothing to discourage supporters screaming Nazi slogans at his rallies. His long history in the public eye gives no indication he would start any time soon.  

Trump launched his political career by spreading fear that America’s first black president is not a U.S. citizen. Back in the late 1980s, he injected himself into the notorious case of the Central Park Five, wherein a group of black teens were pressured under duress by investigators to confess to raping and beating a female jogger nearly to death. Trump took out a full-page ad in the Times, calling for New York State to reinstate the death penalty because “THEIR CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” In 2001, a lone man confessed to the crime and DNA testing proved the likelihood of his guilt to be 6 billion to one. As recently as last month, Trump insisted the Five were still guilty.

Trump has been accused by over a dozen women of sexual harassment and/or assault, and a leaked tape recording caught him bragging about forcing himself on women. Sexual violence prevention groups know that most sexual predators are serial offenders, and therefore the more people accuse someone, the more likely it is that he is guilty. It may be important to acknowledge that in the United States one is innocent until proven guilty. But the Central Park Five know that if you’re a black man in Donald Trump’s world, you may be declared guilty even after you’re proven innocent. Trump throwing a black supporter out of his rally upon assuming he was a “thug” has done nothing to ease worries about the way he likes to govern.

Many Trump voters have been joined by those who didn’t vote at all in calling for national unity now that the election is over. They take offense at any assumption that their political choice was based in such bigotry. The best response to this has come in a post by Michael Rex that’s gone viral:

I believe you when you say you didn’t vote for any of these things. Most of America wasn’t thrilled with the choices we had in this election. But… If you’re tired of being called a bigot, then you need to use the same voice you used on Tuesday and speak out against these things fully and clearly. It’s not enough that you didn’t say them yourself. You need to reassure your friends and family members who feel like they no longer have a seat at the table that you still stand with them, even if your priorities were different on Tuesday. If you aren’t willing to do that, then you have no right to call for unity.

Mark Joseph Stern writes this week at Slate, “I Am A Gay Jew in Trump’s America. And I Fear for My Life.” And rightly so. Not only are hate crimes on the rise in the U.S., but nationalist movements that blame immigrants, minorities and gender equality for their problems are gaining power here and in the U.K., Australia, France, Sweden, Germany and in Eastern Europe. In the countries where democracy is younger than I am, voters are reverting to authoritarians with little interest in the processes and institutions that protect human rights. People of color, religious minorities, women, LGBT citizens and those of us with disabilities know that the concept of universal human rights is younger than many people they know. A few wrong turns and authoritarians could turn all the progress of the past 50 years into a mere moment in human history when the law offered to protect us against violence, harassment, medical abuse, and other existential threats.

Trump hasn’t had a chance to change any laws yet, and the Alternative for Germany is only polling at 20%. But hate groups around the world have been feeling empowered for a while now. Neo-Nazis, Klansmen and any other people willing to beat someone up for the way they were born commit their crimes when they think they can get away with it – when there is a high number of people who aren’t violent but still share their views, combined with a high number of people who don’t care either way about human rights discussions.

A pregnant German woman was recently punched at a train station near a friend’s house for supposedly being a “lousy refugee.” An acquaintance in a wheelchair was told by a stranger on the street, “We should gas your kind.” Perpetrators are less likely to do any of this if they fear not just legal consequences but their friends and families shaming them for such despicable behavior. Which is why it is on all of us to support the watchdog organizations that aim to expose and combat hate crimes, to speak up for those who are being told that their place in the new world order is at the bottom, and to convince the people who don’t care about any of this that they absolutely must summon the bravery to.
 

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U.S. Election Night 2016

6 Nov

 

This Tuesday night I’ll be featured live in English on Deutsche Welle’s U.S. Election Night Special, commenting on the results and what they mean to me as a U.S. citizen living in Berlin. I’ll be giving interviews between 6 pm and midnight EST (0:00 and 6:00 CET).

Deutsche Welle is broadcast internationally throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. You can watch its live stream here.

 

 

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