Tag Archives: Women’s March

Rebecca Cokley & Never-Ending Diversity

28 Jan

Light Box Body(Image by Luca Rossato used under CC 2.0 via)

 

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.

 

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Aziz Ansari, #MeToo and the Problem of Empathy

21 Jan

(Public Domain image used under CC0 1.0 via)

 

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 multiple arguments 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.

 

 

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From the Frontlines of the Women’s March in Berlin

22 Jan

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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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