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 examinedbefore, 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.
Thanks to an online public outcry organized by members and supporters of the Restricted Growth Association, a handful of “midget wrestling” events have been canceled in the United Kingdom. The objectification of people with dwarfism in freak shows spans from the Early Modern Era’s court jesters well into the present day at dwarf-tossing events, “mini” cover bands, dwarf theme parks, and on reality TV shows. This is the first time in recent memory a certain freak show has not simply been condemned by human rights activists but in fact terminated.
As Erin Pritchard writes in The Independent: “We do not put people who use wheelchairs, people who are deaf or blind, or people with learning difficulties on a stage and laugh at them.”
What a month. Asia Argento, one of the first women to speak out against Harvey Weinstein and lead the #MeToo movement last year, was accused this week by a younger man who claims she coerced him into sex when he was underage. Argento denies the charges.
Early last week, Professor Avital Ronell, who is lesbian, was found guilty by New York University of sexually assaulting one of her students, who is a gay man. Throughout the university’s investigation, many feminist academics–including superstar Judith Butler–defended Ronell and slandered her accuser in ways reminiscent of how so many women of the #MeToo movement have been.
The next day, a grand jury investigation into six Pennsylvania dioceses was released, which is the largest study by a government agency of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to date. The investigation found abuse of over 1,000 children by 300 priests over the course of seven decades. Most of the victims were boys.
In a rant that now appears astoundingly prescient, Samantha Bee kicked off the month of August by pointing to a fact that is as harrowing as it is simple: we are really bad at talking about men as victims of sexual abuse. Even if you don’t like her humor, her argument is rock-solid.
Studies range widely in the estimate of how many men and boys are raped or sexually assaulted. The CDC says 1 in 71 men in the U.S. have been raped; the National Crime Victimization Survey found in 2013 that 38% of victims of sexual violence in the U.S. were male. As with all cases of sexual assault, statistics are muddied by the vast problem of under-reporting and by variations in definition. In many jurisdictions around the world, it’s not considered rape if your partner did it, and it’s not rape if you begged your partner to stop after sex began, and it’s not rape if you’re not a virgin, or anything less than a flawless human being, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Even the more liberal estimates confirm the already widely held belief that more victims of assault and rape are women and girls rather than men and boys. But that doesn’t mean we should only afford male victims a cursory mention. Human rights means justice for everyone, no matter how rare their experience, and if you believe in equality for minorities, then you know fighting for their rights demands particular rigor because minorities are so easily shoved to the margins.
For almost a year now, the #MeToo movement has shed much-needed light on the horrors wrought up on straight, white, cis, non-disabled women. But its failure to communicate the horrors wrought upon victims of other demographics with the same frequency has been disturbingly persistent. And it’s not just because straight, white, cis, non-disabled women are the most common victims. They’re not. As shown earlier this year, disabled women are far likelier to be victims of sexual assault than the general population.
Before anti-feminists joyously insist that this just proves women’s rights activists are a bunch of dumb hypocrites, it’s important to realize that almost no one has done a very good job of talking about rape victims who are men. It’s traditional gender roles that say that guys can’t be raped by women because we should assume guys are constantly horny and would never turn down a chance for sex. It’s traditional gender roles that, at worst, find it funny when a man is raped by a man because it means he’s either weak or gay or both. It’s traditional gender roles that, at best, recoil in horror at the idea of a boy or man being forced but ultimately have no idea what to say about such a thing.
Two years ago, Raymond M. Douglas published a book, On Being Raped, about his experience and the failure of modern society to equip boys and men with the appropriate language to talk about it. Mainstream feminism has failed to tackle this problem. Now’s the time if ever.
As #MeToo founder Tarana Burke wrote on Twitter last Tuesday:
I’ve said repeatedly that the #metooMVMT is for all of us, including these brave young men who are now coming forward. It will continue to be jarring when we hear the names of some of our faves connected to sexual violence unless we shift from talking about individuals… and begin to talk about power. Sexual violence is about power and privilege. That doesn’t change if the perpetrator is your favorite actress, activist or professor of any gender.
And as Douglas told NPR in his advice to other victims, “The most important thing: You’re not alone. There are so many more of us out here than you think. Don’t give up.”
*I use the term “victim” in deference to Douglas, who says, “One of the reasons that a lot of people are a little squishy about the word ʻsurvivor,’ is that it seems to imply that once you’ve attained that status, it’s all done and dusted, it’s all safely in the past. And for a huge number of people, it isn’t and it won’t be, it won’t ever be.” It is imperative to note, however, that many other people prefer the term survivor.
Leaving you this weekend with a tip to watch Dwarfs in Art: A New Perspective, which airs tomorrow night on BBC 4. I’ve long documented portrayals of dwarfsthroughout history on the blog and this documentary promises to go into greater detail. Several of the portrayals of dwarfism are well-known enough to have become stereotypes dwarfs must combat with regularity – which is quite absurd when you consider how rare the condition is.
Featured in the documentary is academic Tom Shakespeare, who regularly writes about disability and bio-ethics, and has achondroplasia like I do. He is a professor at the University of East Anglia and a frequent contributor on the BBC with thought-provoking arguments on issues ranging from physician-assisted death to religion vs. spirituality to bucket lists. I’ve featured an interview with him from his project Disability and Sexuality (see above) because he deserves recognition far beyond the British Isles.
One of the most harmful and ubiquitous of all impulses is the desire to have someone to look down upon in order to feel better about ourselves. When we are worried that we’re not winning at life—at work, at love, at health & fitness—we too often look for those we think could be ranked below us and use the idea At least I’m not like that! as a salve. Occasionally indulging in such thinking privately in our weaker moments is human, but to assert it out loud or act on it is to descend into the cowardice of a high school mean girl. It’s both socially poisonous and wholly ironic that the fear of not ranking high in a given hierarchy too often inspires us to buy more and more into the idea of the hierarchy, instead of inspiring us to question it.
Firm belief in hierarchies is the fastest path to hate and the fact that it feeds on human insecurity is reason enough to question it, as I recently did at a dinner party, attacking the idea of natural hierarchies of beauty: “Attractiveness is always a matter of personal taste. There are no universal rules. I for one don’t find Dwayne Johnson or Tom Cruise or Jon Hamm attractive at all, despite what any magazine editor says. Johnny Depp, now he was once cute—”
“No, he wasn’t!” rebutted a friend.
“See? Attractiveness is always a matter of personal taste. There’s no such thing as being universally attractive.”
I’ve encountered lots of arguments to the contrary, but little evidence, which is why I looked upon the recent Atlantic article about “dating out of your league” with narrowed eyes. Upon closer reading, I realized the study it featured wasn’t really saying anything new. The phrase “out of my/his/her league” is generally used to mean people can be objectively divided into ascending ranks of beauty or sexiness and that only people in the higher ranks have a chance at those in the higher ranks. It’s one of pop culture’s biggest myths. That certain people attract more people than others in a certain social setting, however, is a fact that can be corroborated by evidence. And that’s what The Atlantic was talking about, noting: “dating ‘leagues’ are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability… [and] people do not seem to be universally locked into them…”
If you follow this blog, you know I frequently use the term “conventionally attractive” instead of “beautiful” or “hot” because there is no objective measure of anyone’s looks around the world and throughout history. The phrase “conventionally attractive” means your looks and/or style are considered attractive by the current mainstream fashion of your culture. It does not mean that you will be desired everywhere by everyone, which is why people disagree over Johnny Depp and are often bewildered by the fashions of their ancestors/teenage children.
In a world that’s produced the corset, foot-binding, neck rings, teeth-blackening, and the bagel head, it’s clear any body type or feature can be striking, intriguing, wonderful. And any body type or feature can become suddenly hideous when ruined by a sickening personality. When Polish-Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki mocked an African-American competitor’s body, I agreed with those commenters who noted that pink Northern European skin can be pretty, but it can also make you look like a pig.
Pop culture asserts that the inordinate attention conventionally attractive people receive is always positive, leading too many of us to think that being conventionally attractive corresponds directly to being successful in love. Doesn’t a throng of smitten people lined up outside your door mean that you can have your pick?
Yet if we listen to conventionally attractive people—instead of just look at them—the contemplative among them often explain how upsetting it is to have to face lots and lots of personalities they have pretty much nothing in common with but who are passionately convinced they do. As one conventionally attractive friend put it, “I am sick of casual dating.” Another spent years wondering if he had deep personality flaws since so many of his dates seemed to only want one thing. As said before, being desired by someone who doesn’t love you at all can get really creepy. Really fast.
When we first fall for someone, we pretty much always let the thrill of romance project great expectations onto the object of our affections. But lasting partnerships are not built on the intoxicating joy of first attraction alone. Psychologists are divided as to how long the limerence phase of a relationship lasts—some say between 6 to 18 months, some say up to 3 years—but they all agree that it does end at some point. Celebrity divorce rates alone indicate we all need something more than our partner’s face, body, and charisma to keep us interested. Broadening our concepts of beauty can only help us with that.
The primary reason I don’t believe in leagues is because I know too many conventionally attractive people who have fallen hard for those who are anything but. Mainstream fashion ignores all that to our detriment. The study in The Atlantic of online dating sites in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Seattle found white people, black men, Asian women, educated men, and very young women are considered far more conventionally attractive than black women, Asian men, women with higher education, and women over 18. Other studies have added to the list of types mainstream fashion seems to be too narrow-minded to handle like shorter men, people with disabilities, and women of color with skin tones considered “dark.” There is no good reason to let such disparities continue.
A friend recently asked me, “What if you’re just not into blondes?”
It’s fine to occasionally note your tendencies and tastes. The weakness lies in believing they are immovable or should be turned into rules. If you’re just not into blondes and date accordingly, you are simply more likely to lose at the game of love if there are one or more blondes out there who share your values, sense of humor, and idea of fun. And because values, sense of humor and hobbies do not correlate to physical features, it is statistically likely that there are such people out there in the very bodies you’ve vowed to avoid. When you decide you can’t possibly open your mind to love in a wide array of bodily forms, you miss out.
Forty years ago this week, Louise Brown was born in Oldham, England, the first human ever conceived by invitro fertilization. Since her birth, over 8 million people have been born thanks to invitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology. I can attest that if you have recently become a parent after a long journey trying to become one, it is particularly hard not to get choked up at hearing the recording of “Happy Birthday” sung to Baby Louise by her family and friends back in 1978.
And yet. Brown’s parents and the doctors who helped them become parents got hate mail and death threats. The hospital received a bomb scare. Brown’s father had to arrive under police protection. To this day Brown reports she is trolled online.
Advances in reproductive technology since Brown’s birth have helped create families for people facing infertility and deadly heritable diseases, single women, and same-sex couples. All such people are targeted regularly by various political groups—some vicious, some peaceful—who deem them “unnatural.” Yet no one on earth could tell the difference between a person who was conceived via IVF and a person who was conceived via sexual intercourse by meeting them.
As examined previously on the blog, adoptive families also have a long history of facing down those with horrific ideas about nature involving the importance of bloodlines and, as one commenter to The Atlantic put it, “inferior genetic stock.” Social and medical interventions in making families are indeed complex and merit nuanced discussions. But the vitriol involved in such discussions just goes to show that there are too many out there who can’t handle the idea of families unlike their own.
John Oliver kicked off the month with an excellent report about the complexities of gene editing. (See above.) Unlike most reporters of these issues, he manages in few words to explain precisely why ridding the world of genetic mutations like deafness and dwarfism should not be the solution to the problem of society’s hang-ups about bodily differences.
Meanwhile, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which I have referred to as The Best Book of the 21st Century, has been adapted into a documentary out this week in the U.S.
In less wonderful news, a Silicon Valley paper has uncovered an Amazon proposal for a newly patented robot that throws warehouse products into bins. The hypothetical item referred to 17 times in the illustrations that the robot could throw is a dwarf. Little People of America is not amused. Kudos to reporter Ethan Baron for shedding light on an issue few would more than laugh at.
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.
Self-determination is key to identity. There is no hierarchy of oppressions. What can be socially constructed can be socially changed. We must be the change we want to see. These are all pillars of social justice I’ve quoted on this blog and they are all true. But then came Rachel Dolezal. And she proves these truisms require a blaring asterisk that screams There’s also more to it than that!
The much-debated documentary The Rachel Divide was released last month on Netflix and reveals that Dolezal’s is a complex story. Most know her as a white woman born in rural Montana who began self-identifying (or masquerading) as African-American as an adult and was suddenly forced to resign as president of the Spokane NAACP in 2015 when her parents exposed her origins to the press. Her ex-colleagues are right in saying, “Who’s affected by this? All the people that the NAACP had been advocating for… She destroyed something that now we have to rebuild if we can.” Her teenage son is right in saying, “She did not choose her words carefully. And it affected me. It affected my brother. The more I talk to people about it, the more it drains me.” And Dolezal is right that there are reasons she tried to escape her past.
Her parents are white religious fundamentalists who raised her and her older brother Joshua along with four black children they adopted. Two of those children, Izaiah and Esther, currently corroborate Dolezal’s claims that their parents were abusive and that the older brother Joshua molested the girls in the family. Many, including the legal system, have cast doubt on these claims in light of her deceit about her race. Others, including some of her critics, believe this part of the story to be true. Either way, when Dolezal and her two siblings fled their family, this was the beginning of her journey toward tanning her skin, donning wigs and fully identifying as a black woman. Izaiah and Esther don’t seem to see much problem in any of that. But the rest of Black America certainly does.
And they have good reason to. Coping with abuse comes in many forms. The public is in no position to decide what sort of professional help would be appropriate for Dolezal to recover from her traumatic childhood, but you don’t have to be a therapist to know that honesty is mandatory for healing. Dolezal’s past decision to lie and current decision to demand that she maintain a life built on that lie is helpful to absolutely no one.
All of her steps forward take her back to her very public role as a black activist. She is now desperate for work but only applies to teaching positions in Africana studies. She obviously loves her children, but repeatedly drags them into the lion’s den of social media, bragging about their black identities and receiving hate mail in return. She cannot retreat into obscurity because her name is known across the nation, so she changes it to something Nigerian. In interviews, she says her only option other than continuing the ruse is to go back to being the abused daughter of religious fundamentalists in Montana. No right-minded person would wish any survivor to return to an abusive home, but Black America isn’t asking her to. They are simply asking her to tell the whole truth.
Some have expressed bewilderment at the degree of outrage Dolezal has faced for simply being who she feels she is. After all, Dolezal argues that she can be black because race is a social construct. Indeed it is. But so is money, as Ijeoma Oluo said in her interview with Dolezal last year. And having money and not having money create vastly different life experiences.
Yet that too is an idea many people fail to grasp. You don’t have to look hard to find those whose exaggerations expand into fictions about having grown up poor. Plenty delude themselves that not being able to afford everything they want as soon as they want it is just as hard as living below the poverty line. Like Dolezal, they infuriate those who have truly have known what the privileged pretend to. Because it’s dishonest, misleading and, perhaps above all, tone-deaf.
I do not know what it’s like to have grown up poor and to listen to trust fund kids claim they did, too. Nor do I know what it’s like to be black and to watch Rachel Dolezal take up so much of the discussion on race relations. But I do know what it’s like to be disabled and read about those who fake (or wildly overstate) debilitation and illness. If no one faked illness, we wouldn’t need doctor’s notes to go on sick leave. I wouldn’t have to carefully figure out the best way to explain that I sometimes need assistance and I sometimes want to just brave it when discussing my disabled status with my employers and the bureaucrats of social services. While most truth-stretchers merely exaggerate minor symptoms, some go to extremes, faking cancer or other life-threatening diseases to garner sympathy. Anyone who believes illness is enviable to the point of plagiarizing it does not understand the inescapable pain inherent in it. Such plagiarism often triggers a backlash fueled in part by a desire to make them understand exactly how painful it can be. That desire is not noble, but it should not be surprising.
Nor should it be surprising that those who havefalselyclaimed to be Holocaust survivors have faced similar vitriol.
As The Rachel Divide shows, Rachel Dolezal’s deception did hurt the civil rights movement, but she shouldn’t be granted enough power to inflict lasting harm because there are ultimately very, very few out there like her. You can talk to thousands of black women in America and you are very unlikely to come across one who was born white. The majority of hate crimes reported this year have been verified by the Southern Poverty Law center. And most people who say they have cancer really do.
Fabricators must face the consequences of their actions. They deserve to be reprimanded for exploiting people and the institutions who are there to help. They deserve to be made to understand how terrible it feels to be lied to. And, even if their lies were born in desperate circumstances, they do not deserve any sympathy from those who have been true victims of oppression. Some may be able to approach Dolezal more neutrally than others, but black Americans should never be expected to. Perhaps if Rachel Dolezal ever manages to comprehend that, she will begin to comprehend what she did.
Our neighbors recently told me that their adoptive daughter had been musing about her background. Little was known about her biological family because her birth mother had requested anonymity at the hospital. Her file contained almost no information other than a note from a nurse that the birth mother seemed to be Russian. I wondered aloud if the nurse could tell the difference between a Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Bulgarian accent. After all, I had met a boy who spent a good deal of time believing his birth father was Turkish, only to later find out that the social worker who wrote it down had made an error (as we all do in the course of a work day), and that his birth father was in fact Arab. Our neighbors said their daughter was interested in taking a genetic test.
My father and his siblings recently took such a test. After long wondering whether their great-grandparents, who had anglicized their Slavic surname upon immigrating to the U.S., were Polish or Belarusian, the test had an answer: they were probably Eastern European. I had to laugh. Our family’s study of historical records and names has given us far more specific information about our ancestors’ origins and cultures than the DNA tests have.
Indeed, the DNA of one of my father’s siblings was estimated to be 30% Western European, whereas another’s was estimated to be only 2% Western European. That’s because we all inherit half of our genes from one biological parent and half from the other, but not necessarily the same halves as our siblings. So are you not very British at all if you inherited a lower percentage of those genetic markers than your sister, even if your surname is British? Surnames of course can also come from step-parents. And DNA tests render invisible all the cultural heritage and influence of adoptive parents anywhere in a family tree.
And as Sarah Chodosh warns at Popular Science, “all of your ancestry data is mostly an estimate. That’s why companies attach a confidence interval to your results. They may say you’re 48 percent Eastern European, but that they’re anywhere from 30 to 80 percent sure of that result. Most people focus on the 48 percent and forget that the results aren’t for certain.”
The popularity of direct-to-consumer genetic tests hasexploded over the past year in the U.S., where they are unregulated. The country’s identity as a nation of immigrants inspires many to be curious about their ancestors that left the Old World for the New. But why only claim them as your ancestors? If you consider yourself Irish because someone in your family tree emigrated from Dublin, why not consider yourself Scandinavian seeing as the Vikings founded Dublin? When does identity start and when does it stop?
As philosopher Alva Noë explained at NPR, DNA tests can currently explain some things about ancestry, but nowhere near the whole story:
Consider: Even if you are a descendant of Shakespeare, there is only a negligible chance of your having any of his DNA. This is because autosomal DNA gets passed on randomly. Shakespeare’s kid probably had 50 percent of his DNA; his kid in turn, on average, a quarter, and so on. Within 10 generations, Shakespeare’s DNA has spread out and recombined so many times that it doesn’t even really make sense to speak of a match. Putting the same point the other way, each of us has so many ancestors that we have no choice but to share them with each other. Moreover, we don’t share any DNA with the vast majority of them. True, you will shareY-chromosome DNAormtDNAwith very distant ancestors, but these make up a vanishingly small percentage of your total ancestry.
Indeed, if you go back far enough, we start to share ancestors, which is why everyone with any European ancestry is related to Charlemagne. Does that make our DNA more interesting or less? Rarely do I meet people here in Germany who are interested in any of their ancestry that reaches back farther than their great-grandparents, unless they have an unusual surname, a claim to nobility, or an interest in nationalist politics.
This is important to bear in mind as a heated debate continues in the U.S. about genetic studies of different human populations and/or “races.” You can read about the arguments from those who fear more fodder for racism and those who believe any such fear is idiotic political correctness, but so far Ian Holmes has summed it up best in his article “What Happens When Geneticists Talk Sloppily About Race”:
It’s common for natural scientists to eschew questions of linguistic semantics, preferring to steer debate to technical issues. This relates to how we define ourselves professionally: Science as a discipline seeks objective truth via empirically testable hypotheses, not subjective questions of public perception. “Now we’re just talking semantics” is a line that often signals imminent consensus, in friendly arguments among members of my profession.
But when speaking publicly about race, language matters. Regularly in American history, slavery, discrimination, and other forms of racism have been justified using distortions of science and pseudoscientific ideas. The U.S. program of eugenics was second only to Nazi Germany’s, which it directly inspired and informed.
Indeed, clear and conscientious communication from scientists is key because most of us do not understand genetics very well. And the general public is quick to apply social values to scientific facts researchers may have assumed would be perceived as neutral. With reports like “You’re probably Eastern European” or “you’re probably French-German,” many people are making broad assumptions about their heritage, unaware that these tests tell them next to nothing as to what language their ancestors spoke or which holidays they celebrated because these regions were very culturally diverse in the age before nationalism and mass media, which are very new inventions. Robin Hood and Richard the Lion-Hearted didn’t speak the same language, despite what romantic Hollywood portrayals would have us think. As recently as 1880, three-quarters of the people living in France didn’t speak French.
Ethnic identity is more often a matter of a piece of paper than a gene. Because politics happen on paper. And it’s politics that define borders, decide which languages and dialects are taught in schools and which are not, which religions are allowed to practice freely and which should be made to not feel at home, which people we decide are Us and which people are Them.
The most famous moment on the PBS show Finding Your Roots was when Larry David, who has had a long career in comedy that often highlights his experiences as a New York Jew, discovered some of his ancestors were Southern slave-owners. Such a revelation came from studying legal documents, not genomes, because there is no such thing as slave-owner DNA.
An American-German couple I know are working to obtain a U.S. passport for their son who was born here in Berlin so that he will feel a connection to his American heritage. Will that do it? I know a Norwegian man with a U.S. passport who spent less than year in the States. He was born there and the family then returned home after his father’s job transferred him back to Oslo. His older sisters, however, spent five years there and remember them well because their memories were formed after infancy. They don’t have a right to citizenship because they weren’t born in the U.S., but culturally, they’re more American than their passport-holding brother.
Records on ancestry are few and far between for the descendants of colonialism’s victims. For most of Western history, their ethnic identity has often been dictated by laws intended to uphold racial hierarchies. The American One Drop Rule was invented to prevent the descendants of slaves and slave-owners from inheriting the latter’s wealth. Clearly it can be poignant to discover with a DNA test that your ancestors didn’t just come from “Africa” but a specific region in Africa – even if it is a big, diverse region with just as many conflicts between groups as there have been in Europe and the other continents over the centuries. The case of South African Sandra Laing famously revealed the resilience of racism based on appearance despite changes in the laws regarding ancestry. Or, in the words of Black-ish:
Maybe grouping humans ethnically based on ancestral DNA markers will destroy many prejudices, but maybe it will cement many others. The story of human history is the story of various groups embroiled in conflicts, many of which have ramifications well into today. This is why we cannot afford to be careless when we talk about genetics and heritage.
But perhaps we can also be careful without being too serious. My grandmother would frequently tease her son as he reported new genealogical findings, asking, “When are you going to finally tell me that I’m a Russian princess?”
Hopefully never, I joked to my partner. All families should be valued, but I for one would not be pleased to find out that mine was thoroughly inbred.
As in many of my articles, the identities of many of the unnamed people cited here have been altered to protect their privacy.
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.
Leaving you this weekend with a link to an excellent personal essay and video published at CNN.com last month by Rebecca Cokley, a civil rights lawyer who worked in the Obama administration. The granddaughter of a segregationist judge, Cokley has achondroplasia and her average-size husband is African-American. She writes about the ramifications of these intersections for her two children who also have achondroplasia. She writes about the doctor who planned to sterilize her without consulting her. And she writes about the mistreatment she experienced at last year’s Women’s March:
People often act as though disabled people don’t have a right to bodily autonomy. When I attended the women’s march in D.C. in January, I was repeatedly grabbed and manhandled by women who wanted to know where was my mommy and why didn’t I know better than to wander away from her. They all looked shocked when I responded, “I am the mommy,” but not a single one apologized to me.
In the video, she also delves in to the many ways in which she and her family are privileged.
Profiles of people with dwarfism are rarely brave enough to venture beyond the comforts of human interest stories and into the very real but hard political realities. (I know. I google them weekly.) And most headline the subject as “small but [insert compliment here].” This piece is definitely worth your time.
Over this past week, articles about the allegations against Aziz Ansari by a woman known by the pseudonym “Grace” were the most read articles at The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, New York magazine, and pretty much every feminist website from Jezebel to Bustle. Everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to Samantha Bee to Dr. James Hamblin participated in the discussion at some level, myself included.
Do you want to know what I think? I think feminist Jill Filipovic has summed it up best. But I also think it’s far more important to note that not one of these sites picked up National Public Radio’s week-long report on the epidemic of rape and sexual assault against developmentally disabled people, who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused than the general population, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. NPR kicked off the story by calling it “The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About.” Mainstream feminism proceeded to not talk about it, proving the point fantastically well.
Why has this excellent, in-depth report gone unnoticed while Ansari and Grace could only have garnered more attention if they were running against each other for president? You don’t have to be The Huffington Post to know that readers will pretty much always prefer a story involving a celebrity than a story about ordinary people, social groups and statistics. I knew too well that just putting Ansari’s name in the title of this article would up its chances of survival. Barbara Ehrenreich has been complaining since day two of the #MeToo movement that “there are far too many think pieces about high-level actresses and far too few about the waitress at your local diner.” Readers are also more likely to click on stories involving young adults and/or sex than stories about older people and/or anything bereft of sex. Ginia Bellafante complained this weekend about the endless analyses of Grace’s night with Ansari in contrast to the relative silence about the life and legacy of Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Dr. Mathilde Krim.
Anna North, who covers gender issues at Vox, argued for the relevance of the Ansari story, saying, “I mean, honestly, my first reaction was just sort of recognition. This is a situation that I’ve heard from my friends. This is – the behavior she describes through Ansari is behavior that I’ve heard men confess to in their own lives. So I thought, like, yep, this feels real familiar.” While this does validate discussions about dates like the one Grace had, it also explains the sad truth as to why it managed to bury NPR’s story about a sexual abuse epidemic. It is safe to say the majority of young adults writing and reading stories about social progress do not react to stories about developmentally disabled people with a “Yep, this feels real familiar.” Nor do they encourage each other to.
In my experience, most young adult feminists and social justice activists limit their discussions about developmental disability to stories about volunteering in a special ed class and debates about the word “retarded.” The issue of whether or not to screen for Down Syndrome in utero is an increasingly common discussion among pregnant women and their partners, but the opinions of people with Down Syndrome rarely take center stage in that debate.
Disinterest is not the only factor to blame. Accessibility, the issue most likely to leave disabled people marginalized in mainstream society, is what also leaves them isolated from the places where most social justice activists convene. People with developmental disabilities are the minority least likely to live on college campuses, and they are more likely to be socially integrated in small towns than in metropolitan areas. Few feminist and progressive publications offer versions of their articles in Simple Language.
But while such barriers help us understand the marginalization of developmentally disabled people, there is little reason why we should accept them. Human rights means everybody. Feminism rightly declares the personal is the political, but this serves as a wall instead of a bridge when the personal experiences shared by the most people dominate the discussion at the expense of others. Empathy is rightly considered the best facilitator of communication in the fight for minority rights, but minorities will suffer when empathy is expected to come instantly, without the effort of learning about experiences other than our own.
There’s no reason why the #MeToo movement can’t talk about the issues exemplified by the Ansari story and the abuse epidemic endured by developmentally disabled people. There is, in fact, plenty of cross-over. During a week when the second Women’s March has pledged to be as inclusive as ever, it would be great to start a discussion asking the women who clicked on the Ansari story why they didn’t react to headlines about the epidemic. In the multiplearguments that #MeToo should teach women to show more agency and take self-defense classes, it would be great to recognize that disabled women are one group for whom self-defense classes are rarely helpful. In the same way social justice activists are helping the long marginalized experiences of LGBTQIA+ people to broaden society’s ideas about sex and gender, they could help the experiences of disabled people to broaden our ideas about what it means to be independent, strong, accomplished and attractive.
Justice will be done when reports like NPR’s about the abuse of developmentally disabled people shock the world and in doing so make it to the The New York Times’ Most Read list. And when the online March for those with disabilities who could not join an outdoor protest actually gets mentioned in the national reports about this weekend’s Women’s March. Until that day, mainstream feminism reveals its empathy to still have its limits.
My absence from the blog since mid-October is because I’ve been on maternity leave. I will not be blogging about this (wonderful, complex) experience any time soon to protect the privacy of all involved. I can say that my views expressed in previous articles about family planning, genetic selection, caregiving, gender policing, and what makes a family haven’t changed much since I’ve become a parent.
I plan to continue to write for the blog (though perhaps not every week) in the new year. I thank you all sincerely for reading and wish you and your family, no matter who that may be, the very best for 2018.
“Hey, I had a test question about achondroplasia today!” an old roommate of mine reported to me a few years back. He was a medical student and had been studying for his licensing exam.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “What was the question?”
“Whether or not achondroplasia affects intelligence.”
“And the answer was…?” I smiled.
“The answer was no,” he replied, returning the smile.
That this was a test question implies a necessity for teaching this fact. Indeed, for a good part of modern history, children with achondroplasia and other types of dwarfism were too often assumed to be intellectually disabled and placed in institutions or special ed classes for life. Hence a meme from Little People of America that’s been floating around the Internet in honor of Dwarfism Awareness Month: “A common misconception about people with dwarfism is that they are cognitively delayed or mentally impaired. This is NOT true.” Activism will remain crucial until this misconception is no longer common.
What are the chances that it ever will be? Equality and empathy are the heart of every human rights movement, but these ideas alone did not disprove the idea that lower than average height is indicative of lower than average intelligence. Science did that. The scientific method uncovers the facts. Political activism spreads the word.
Despite what some extremist conservatives claim, science doesn’t have a liberal bias. It often reveals facts upsetting to many. For example, contrary to some Dwarfism Awareness campaigns, people with achondroplasia cannot be anything they want to be. They cannot be construction workers, gymnasts, military combatants, weight lifters, or participate in most contact sports because the achondroplastic spinal column is compressed, rendering these activities more life-threatening for us than for most people. That’s a scientific fact.
It need not be a cause for regret. I don’t consider a life without the ability to participate in contact sports or construction work any less enriching than a life without the ability to sing on key or identify bird calls or cut hair or write without spellcheck. (When I’m feeling snarky, I steal a line from this movie: “Dear White People on Instagram: You own an iPhone and you go on hikes. We get it.”) Competitive and aggressive feats of strength can be a way to be a stronger person, but they are not the only way. You can tell me a million times that I cannot safely lift anything heavier than a small child over my head and I will never take it as an insult.
What is insulting is to tout broad assumptions about conditions and bodies as facts when they have not been corroborated by several studies. Someone with dyslexia is unlikely to master a word scramble, but that does not mean she cannot be a skilled writer. Someone with Down Syndrome cannot practice medicine, but that does not mean he cannot get a job. If you hear that people with dwarfism cannot have a high IQ, teach, drive, play tennis, perform surgery, give birth, or take care of children, these are not facts. They are assumptions. Yet they have been dispersed far and wide, terrifying far too many people with dwarfism and their parents.
Having a rare genetic mutation has taught me that teaching science to the masses is hard. Most of us who are not scientists develop our understanding of medicine based on doctor’s visits, pop science news articles, and hearsay, as opposed to peer-reviewed research published in medical journals or textbooks. This is to be expected—when was the last time I read a medical journal straight through?—but it results in all sorts of inaccurate and potentially dangerous assumptions.
When I recently tried to explain to some new friends that the gene for achondroplasia is dominant, one insisted, “Achondroplasia can’t be dominant because then most people would be dwarfs!” Wrong.
When my parents visited one of their first Little People of America meetings shortly after I was born back in the early Eighties, one volunteer said, “Dwarfs don’t live as long as average-sized people do because they have to walk twice as many steps in their lifetime.” Also wrong. The most common cause of lower life expectancy among dwarfs throughout history has been a lack of access to appropriate health care due to social marginalization.
When a journalist asked the owner of a Hollywood freak show last year why one of his main performers had died at the age of 32, he replied, “A lot of them don’t have long life spans. Little hearts and the whole thing.” The reporter revealed in his excellent exposé of the depressing freak show business that the performer in question died of alcoholism.
My career as a writer has helped me see how much we love stories that are both out of the ordinary and easy to understand. My dwarfism has caused me to be confronted with the ubiquity of scientific misinformation in these stories and has helped me see how xenophobia facilitates the lazy thinking perpetuating scientific myths about minorities. Black Americans can’t swim? More like they were barred from learning how. Half of gay male teens have AIDS? File that one next to the Victorian belief that masturbation causes blindness. Women don’t have the skills to be Silicon Valley programmers? In Western cultures where men are expected to be bread-winners, women have been dissuaded from pursuing the highest-earning jobs, whether we’re talking about doctors and nurses, professors and school teachers, or milk men and milk maids.
This is why I approach most scientific and medical “facts” uttered to me with a heavy dose of skepticism. This can be draining. Some days I would like to simply trust Google or a Facebook Group for dwarfs instead of having to track down out-of-print medical textbooks or wait months for my orthopedist to have a free appointment in order to find it out if I should be concerned about osteoporosis or fibroids. But doubt is the fuel of innovation and vigorous research ultimately harms no one.
And when facing complex disabilities and learning about what certain bodies absolutely can and cannot do, we should not confuse being talented with being good. Just as it is hard for us to resist a fascinating story, it is hard for us to resist the idea that strength of body and mind also indicates strength of character. But acing any sort of competition says little about your ability to be brave, honest, generous or humble. Need proof? Celebrity scandals are but a Google search away.
We will have the German election results in just under six hours. After the unanticipated success of Brexit and Trump in 2016, many here are terrified that the Alternative für Deutschland will end up doing better than the polls predicted. There is speculation that many of its voters would never reveal their decision to a survey-taker. If the AfD does do better than predicted, it will declare victory – even if over 80% of the country has voted against it.
If this happens, please be thoughtful—not careless—when you consider using Nazi language to describe what’s going on. Some members of the AfD have definitely earned the Nazi label because their rhetoric and policies are flat-out militaristic, authoritarian, and/or racist. But German political scientists are careful to only apply terms like “Neo-Nazi” and “fascist” when it is apt. Much of the foreign media too often uses World War II jargon—like “marching to victory”—to describe any right-wing politics that happen in Germany, while refraining from using it to describe right-wing movements in their own countries. Rule of thumb: If you didn’t use those words to describe the xenophobic politics of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Brexit, or Donald Trump, think twice about using them now for the AfD. At best it’s lazy and at worst it implies that racism among Germans is worse than racism among any other sorts of people. As nationalist politicians across Europe and the United States continue to threaten democracy, no one can afford to be complacent.
And please beware the term “refugee crisis.” Over one million Syrians have arrived in Germany and guess what? Very little has changed. I live a few blocks from a refugee housing unit and couldn’t name one difference in my everyday life since the doors were opened. Perhaps I pass by more refugees than I realize on the street – but they’re not really any different looking from any of the other immigrants and expats. To be fair, many refugees are certainly experiencing crisis. The war in Syria is a crisis. The horrid conditions along the Balkan Route constitute a crisis. The bureaucratic mess paralyzing several authorities that refugees are required to deal with is a crisis. But when you broadly use the word “crisis” to refer to the arrival of people in Germany, you’re doing white supremacist groups like the AfD a huge favor.
Some other fun facts you might miss? Germany’s voter turnout over the past decade has been consistently higher than in the U.K. and the U.S. All voters over 18 are automatically registered here and receive the address of their polling place via mail. Because Germany has a coalition system, every voter gets two votes. The polls have consistently projected the two largest parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) to garner the most votes, while the four smaller contenders have been separated by a mere 1%. (The graphic above of the recent polls illustrates this well.) If the AfD shoots ahead, this will be newsworthy. If it comes in third place but only by 1 point, that should also be noted in all post-election analysis. Failure to note it will only help the AfD create a narrative of overblown success.
In politics, as often in life, narrative is everything.
I was riding the bus home from work earlier this week through downtown Berlin when I caught sight of this campaign poster for the Alternative für Deutschland party. Featuring a white woman’s visibly pregnant belly, it reads: “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves!”
Talk about a punch in the gut. At first glance, the poster appears to be promoting closed borders and “traditional” family values. But it can never be read free from the history of the Nazis’ obsession with using women to make white, Christian, non-disabled babies. Lebensborn was an association built expressly for that purpose. Women across Germany who had four or more children and who were not branded degenerates were awarded medals by the Third Reich. Anyone who has gone to school in Germany knows about all this.
It would be perverse to claim this AfD poster is more upsetting than any of the others, which target burqas, halal cooking and the idea of multiculturalism. But as a woman with both a residence permit from the immigration office and a disabled ID card in my pocket, I felt the attack personally. The deep sadness then turned to desperate hope that the poster escaped the view of those who are more likely to be targets of street harassment than I am (people of color, LGBT couples and religious minorities), and anyone returning from a fertility clinic or an adoption agency.
Germans go to the polls next Sunday. Over the last ten days the AfD has been projected to win between 8% and 12% of the vote – far behind the top two parties, but fighting neck-in-neck with the Greens, the Left, and the pro-business Free Democrats for third place. As long as they reach the 5% minimum necessary for earning seats in the Bundestag, a difference of three or four percentage points will technically have little effect on the AfD’s ability to influence policy. Because all the other political parties have refused to work with the AfD, it will not be able join a coalition. But coming in third place instead of fifth or sixth will make a big difference in the post-election narrative. Both critics and supporters of the AfD will claim that Germany is shedding some of the post-WWII taboos and political correctness that have defined its democracy for the past 50 years.
Many voters here tell me they hope the AfD’s success in next week’s election turns out to be a one-hit-wonder that quickly falls apart like so many small parties have done before. But no matter what happens on September 24th, it is important to remember that the 12% of voters who have ever been sympathetic to the AfD and its xenophobic politics have been around for a long time.
Unlike the ostentatiously angry Nationalist Party, which has never come close to garnering 5% of the vote, the AfD has sought success by branding itself the moderate voice of xenophobia. They hope to appeal to conservatives and left-wingers alike who worry about multiculturalism gone mad. Most of their voters like to think of themselves as open-minded, not hateful. They just think there need to be restrictions on immigration because they’ve heard tales of towns overrun by foreigners who don’t know how to put their garbage in the bins. They just want to ban burqas and niqabs because sexism. And Islamic holidays and symbols should not be prominent in public or in schools because Germany should be recognized as a Christian nation. They don’t mind that the AfD’s candidate for chancellor is openly lesbian. It would just be nice to put an end to all this talk about LGBT rights. They tell my friends and me that when they complain about immigrants, “I don’t mean you.” C’mon, they’re not Nazis. They’re just asking, “What about me?” If you’re gonna call it racism or sexism, then it’s the reasonable kind. The kind every person is born with. Common sense.
The short but bombastic history of the AfD proves that xenophobia in moderation doesn’t work. The party was founded by pro-business politicians who opposed the EU à la Brexit. These founders were soon driven out and replaced by the anti-immigrant populists of today. Every few months the party has had an internal war involving someone who said something that’s just too reminiscent of the Third Reich. On the outside, friends of color report more frequent street harassment since the AfD’s increased presence. The disability rights organization AbilityWatch reports the AfD was the only party who declined to respond to their issues. The gay and lesbian alliance LSVD rates the AfD the most homophobic of all the major parties despite its current leadership.
That campaign poster embodies all this. It’s what you get when you think some degree of xenophobia is reasonable.
Disclaimer: As noted before, no political party will ever be endorsed on this blog, but political threats to human rights and equality, both historic and contemporary, will always be analyzed.
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.
A woman lost her life over the removal of a statue. Her murder is an atrocity and a tragedy. But the greater danger of the horrors that went down in Charlottesville is the readiness of anyone to sympathize with or relativize the white supremacist movement that brought it on.
“I’m tired of seeing white people pushed around,” one marcher toldThe New York Times. “Jew will not replace us” was chanted by torch-bearers on Friday night. I don’t want to run through the specifics of Confederate monuments or Nazism or the globalwave of nationalism. I’ve done that before and plenty are doing that now. Some of the marchers call themselves Neo-Nazis, some call themselves alt-right activists, some identify as Trump supporters first and foremost. But all were white-supremacists.
While plenty of spectators from afar will surely protest that the acts of violence were carried out by only a few, white supremacy is not limited to the willingness to harass minorities into submission. White supremacy is so much bigger than that.
If you believe it’s important that white people remain the majority of the U.S. population—or any Western country—that’s white supremacy. If you want to decide what words are and aren’t offensive to minority groups without listening to anyone belonging to those groups, that’s white supremacy. If you feel self-conscious as the only white person in a room but never consider how often people of color endure that situation, that’s white supremacy. If you feel pushed around at the sight of a non-white or non-Christian person getting a job, a raise, a promotion or an honor that you didn’t get, that’s white supremacy. If you more readily fear non-white and non-Christian criminals and terrorists, that’s white supremacy. If you tend to believe white poverty is about unfairness or personal problems while any other poverty is about inferior cultural values, that’s white supremacy. White supremacy is about power, and if any of us feel threatened when the descendants of slaves request the removal of honors for those who fought to keep their ancestors in chains, we absolutely must ask ourselves where, when and why we feel powerful.
It’s not easy to face these questions. White people in the West grow up used to seeing white people at the center of most conversations. White people today didn’t create slavery, anti-Semitism, colonialism or this white supremacist reality. But we reveal how deeply we have come to believe in it if we can’t handle the idea of seeing the system change.
Many of the [deaf, dwarf, autistic, schizophrenic, disabled, transgender & gifted] people I interviewed said that they would never exchange their experiences for any other life – sound thinking, given that exchange is unavailable.
– Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree
Clichés are ideas, images, and sayings that are overused. They start off as messages that easily convey meaning. Such ease may at first be a sign of their success. But when they are repeated too often, they foster laziness. They hamper inquiry and innovation. We see a happy picture of a mother and child, we recognize it and all the uncomplicated feelings it is intended to convey, and we move on. Clichés hinder change and therein progress.
The opposite of a cliché has the opposite effect. It makes us pause, look again, consider the world and our assumptions about it, and—in the best case scenario—prompts a shift in us and our habits.
The term “inspiring” is cliché in the realm of disability, which is why it is on its way to becoming a taboo, if it hasn’t already. A boy who walks with crutches while flashing a smile is inspiring. The sheer willingness to face each day with lupus is inspiring. A runner with prosthetic legs is inspiring. Inspiration porn refers to such images in posters, human interest pieces, and memes, and their use as a reminder to a non-disabled person of how good they have it. This reminder is ever-so brief in comparison to the life situation that triggered it.
Inspiration porn is unrealistic but it has its roots in truth. Well-being is often achieved through a sense of gratitude and gratitude comes from having perspective. But the overuse of inspiration porn is problematic because it is one-sided. We are shown the simplicity of happiness but never the complexity of bioethics, the politics of disability rights, or the repetitiveness of chronic pain. The predominance of grinning patients is worrisome to disabled people because we could conclude from it that the world is only interested in us insofar as we are willing to repress anything contrary to the sunny narrative. This implies that the world is our ultimate fair-weather friend.
Inspiration porn can enable emotional vampirism. In the name of being “inspired,” we are often invited to watch someone with a disease or disability on reality TV, shed a few tears, congratulate ourselves for our willingness to dabble in sadness, and quickly move on to life as it was, perhaps lecturing others on just how hard others have it, while never considering our indirect role in any hardship. How many people say they have been “inspired” by Little People, Big World but then do nothing to change the U.S. policy on the U.N. Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities? I’m gonna say lots. Those addicted to emotional vampirism empathize in all the wrong ways, frequently muddling the truly tragic and the merely different.
But “inspiration” need not be unproductive. Watching and reading about disability, illness, and loss can ground us to humanity. After all, what else can – besides knowing someone personally? Such connections can lead us to genuinely understand the frivolity of our daily worries about job promotions, physical fitness, and that thing a supposed friend muttered to us that may have been a back-handed insult or may have been nothing at all. Having perspective is rarely a bad thing. There’s no harm in feeling gratitude—not pride, but gratitude—for every day that we do not have to endure intense physical pain or face probable death.
We can draw both good and bad conclusions from seeing someone doing something we didn’t know was possible. I am concerned when exceptionally talented disabled athletes are promoted as proof of why no one should ever take a break or not take risks. But I was suddenly overjoyed the first time I was treated by a doctor with a visible disability. (Seriously, I almost hugged him.) Representation feels good. Seeing is believing, to use a cliché.
History has proven that innovation and bravery are often contagious, as are idleness and cowardice. We’re social animals. Progress relies on our recognizing the world’s hurdles that need to be removed regardless of whether or not we have a personal connection to those they hold back.
But “inspiring” is overused. Maybe “humbling” is a better term. In this day and age, humility is so rare we may as well consider it radical. And how about “provoking”? When we see someone face struggles we can only imagine, we could ask ourselves if it provokes anything in us. And go from there.
Painting On Scars 
