Disability and the Death Penalty

I am just finishing edits on my sixth piece on the death penalty in the last two years for Pacific Standard. Here's what I've written:

• First the Supreme Court established a better standard for determining whether someone was intellectually disabled (and thus protected from execution) by overturning the "Lennie" standard. Because Texas asked juries to compare people to "Lennie" from Of Mice and Men.
• But then Arkansas executed Ledell Lee, a man who was clearly disabled with fetal alcohol syndrome and possibly innocent. Few disability rights organizations (The Arc was an exception) seemed to care.
• That led me to ask just how many prisoners on death row were disabled? Answer: pretty much all of them.
• This year a tip from a friend showed me how "ethnic adjustments," the knowledge that IQ tests are racist trash, are used to artificially raise the score of convicted prisoners of color to make them eligible for the death penalty. 
• Then most recently I talked about Kwame Rockwell, a prisoner in Texas set to be the next disabled person executed in the U.S. He's mentally ill, not intellectually disabled, so his protections aren't as clear. His execution was halted at the last minute to re-assess competence though.

So what does all this mean about the state of the Death Penalty in the US in 2018? Check back with me at Pacific Standard next week.

Murder in Kentucky

I mostly share pieces now via Twitter and Facebook, but am going to make a new site to share stories (Both mine and those of others) soon! Just waiting to see what next year brings at Pacific Standard. Meanwhile, here's my latest:

Speaking as an American Jew, one reeling and in mourning over the massacre in Pittsburgh, let's not erase this killing in Kentucky. "We must identify and then stop the forces that are turning all of these white male lone wolf terrorists into a pack." https://t.co/VvOjoj9yi8

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) October 29, 2018

Read it all here.

Hutch for Sheriff

New at Pacific Standard:

Hutchinson wants to show respect toward groups that feel excluded and bring them into the conversation. "I agree that black lives matter," he says. "They [community groups including BLM] deserve a voice and deserve to be heard."

If elected, Hutchinson may have one advantage when it comes to drawing in the diverse groups that make up Hennepin County: his own identity as a gay man. He doesn't fold his sexuality into his pitch, which remains focused on policing and basic issues of justice—but he also doesn't hide it. He mentions his husband, Justin, within the first few minutes of our conversation, and when I ask him later about the impact of his sexuality on his politics, he grows reflective. "I understand what it's like to be not in the majority," but he adds he has also learned that people turn out to be pretty accepting of differences, once they get to know you. "I was outed a few years ago when [someone] sent pictures of Justin and I getting married to all these old cops. Everyone was completely cool. Most cops are great people who don't give a crap as long as you do your job."

"As sheriff it shouldn't matter. It will matter to some," he admits, but the core issue for him is that he has learned to treat everyone the same. As Hutchinson says, "If you're a person in Hennepin County, you shouldn't be treated any differently because of who you love, what you look like, where you're born, who you pray to, whether you have disabilities or not. Hennepin County, we're a community. We're better together"

Interview - Bruce Schneier and the Internet that Wants to Kill Us All!

NEW AT PACIFIC STANDARD!

Is the problem that corporations want to sell the data generated from devices like an e-toothbrush? 

In computer security, we have something called the CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Most of what we worry about with data is confidentiality. That's the Equifax hack, or the Office of Personnel Management hack, or Cambridge Analytica. Someone has my data and they're misusing it in some way.

[Click Here to Kill Everybody] is primarily about integrity and availability, which matter much more when you have physically capable computers. Yes, I'm worried that someone will hack the hospital and see my private medical records, but I'm much more concerned if they change my blood type. That's an integrity attack. I'm afraid that someone will hack my car and turn on the microphone, but I'm much more scared that they'll disable the brakes. That's an availability attack.

And in the hospital they'll eventually have, if they don't already, Internet-connected IVs where a hacker could turn up the morphine?

That's right. When computers can affect the world in a direct physical manner, the integrity and availability threats are much worse than the confidentiality threats because they affect life and property. The obvious examples are always cars and the power grid, but there are many others.

Interview - Maysoon Zayid

I talked to the comedian Maysoon Zayid about her new ABC Comedy Can Can.

Is this a comedy about identity? About your identities as a disabled Muslim woman? Is it political?

Being Palestinian is inherently political, [but] it's funny first—really, really funny. I am super excited to see what I didn't see [on TV as a kid]. It's so rare we see a disabled person [who is] also a person of color; so rare we see an empowered Muslim woman, or a Jersey girl with style.

The story is just a single woman working on career, relationships, and family. She's single, Muslim, lives in Jersey. She has guys fighting over her, but her dating problems have nothing to do with disability. She just has very bad judgment.

The story I open the interview with about how we met is true. You can read about it here.

Hurricane Maria and the Human Choices that Kill

New from Pacific Standard:

On February 2nd, 2018, Aníbal Dones Flores, 54, woke up in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, with an asthma attack. It was almost half a year after Hurricane Maria had savaged the island, but Flores still didn't have power in his house. His condition grew worse as he labored to awaken his brother, hoping his brother could turn on the generator to power Flores' breathing machine. The brother called 911, but the dispatchers sent an ambulance from neighboring Juncos, rather than one from San Lorenzo itself. By the time the EMTs arrived, Flores had died.

Flores is one of the thousands killed as a result of Hurricane Maria, a disaster still claiming lives even today, thanks to the severity of the storm, the long neglect of the island's infrastructure, and, arguably, a willful disinterest from federal disaster officials. The story of his death, along with the deaths of about 475 other Puerto Ricans, was collected through a collaboration between Quartz, Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Associated Press. The project came online even as President Donald Trump was falsely claiming that over 3,000 people didn't die in the disaster and subsequent response, arguing that he and his administration had done a "fantastic job" supporting the island.

The grim narratives in the project reveal just how badly relief efforts have failed, how long the road is to recovery, and, as we have regularly reported at Pacific Standard over the last year, how disaster recovery will continue to fail if it doesn't prioritize access for disabled people who are in harm's way. Instead, even when disaster services are robust, disabled people routinely get ignored or abandoned. In Puerto Rico, where federal efforts fell so short, story after story reveals the extent of preventable deaths in the wake of the hurricane.

ADAPT: Effective Activism takes Practice

I interviewed Anita Cameron for Pacific Standard about the WORK that goes into ADAPT actions.

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So you stage mock actions to practice? What are those like?

It can be anything! It's usually taking over something: An office, a bathroom, whatever, to simulate, as close as possible, what you do [in a real protest]—the adrenaline, the chaos, to give people a feel what to expect.

On Sundays [before actions] we have our legal meeting; it goes into into the history of ADAPT, civil disobedience, and why we use that. And we have published an activist guide. I wrote the part about intersectionality. I'm black. I'm disabled. I'm a lesbian. And I worked in the LGBT community before I joined ADAPT. Once I joined ADAPT, I spoke out pretty much about disability discrimination for 25 years. But when Michael Brown got killed, I really decided that, look, I can't separate my identities and my intersections of oppression from disability.

Also, we [must] pay attention to our walking folks who may be helping to open doors. The police sometimes will grab the folks who are walking. Just because you're walking doesn't mean you're non-disabled, but they'll assume the walking folks are non-disabled. They assume that if they grab the walking people, the folks in wheelchairs or mobility devices will somehow run away.

That has never happened.

No! Not in the 35 years of ADAPT has that ever happened.

We know what we're getting into. Especially us veterans who've been around a few years, a few decades.

Bad Historical Metaphors - #MeToo and Witch Hunts

New piece in Pacific Standard on historical language and victimization claims:

As a historian and journalist, the use of these loose metaphors to protect the powerful has concerned me for years. This latest push against serial sexual harassment in media and entertainment, as noted by BuzzFeed journalist (and Pacific Standard contributor) Anne Helen Petersen, has driven the bad historical metaphors to new heights (or depths). In a recent New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear about Hollywood following the Weinstein revelations, various industry sources compared the practice of re-shooting scenes that featured sexual predators to "Soviet Union-style erasure," as if losing screen time were equivalent to being consigned to a gulag. It's not "blacklisting" when someone chooses not to hire an accused sexual predator. It's certainly not a sign of incipient Holocaust or gender-based despotism. Nevertheless, a male comedy producer calls Hollywood a "reverse Handmaid's Talesociety." One industry insider told Goodyear, "Men are living as Jews in Germany."

Powell: Parents with Disabilities Fight to Keep Kids

For Pacific Standard, Robyn Powell writes about the rights of parents with disabilities. Around the country, parents are routinely placed at risk of losing their children due only to the fact that they (the parents) are disabled. She writes:

Nearly one in 10 children in the United States are at risk of being removed from their home by a child welfare agency simply because their parent has a disability.

In October, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of five parents with disabilities who had their children removed by New York's Administration for Children's Services, alleging widespread discrimination. What happened to these families is not unique or uncommon; rather, their tragic experiences are part of a national phenomenon: Parents with disabilities are disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and once involved are more likely than non-disabled parents to have their parental rights terminated.

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Will Butler: A Rock Star Organizes Local Politics

New interview at Pacific Standard with Will Butler, one of the stars of Arcade Fire. Highlights:

What have you found so far?

I'm trying to preach to the choir and radicalize them a little bit, not push them farther left, but make them a little harder. Part of it is a community-building exercise. You came to the show, and now you're here, and now we're talking about something important. I try to introduce a little bit of flour, a little bit of thickening, to the music-goers in that city. I will never be more influential than having just gotten off a stage with a show that people liked.

How do you organize these local events? Do you just call up and say: "Hi! I'm a famous rock star and want to put something together!"

Some of it is cold-calling! I live in New York. I wanted to do the the afterparty for the campaign to close Rikers Island jail. I like to have activists and politicians together. I literally just cold-emailed my city councillor: "Dear Mr. Lander. I am a constituent. I play in a band called Arcade Fire. We're playing Madison Square Garden. Would you like to talk at the show after?"

Universally, every assistant in a progressive politician's office knows our band. That's our constituency.

Read the whole thing!

Disability and Disaster

I wrote a long feature for Pacific Standard about disability and disaster response:

There are four basic different types of needs related to disability that emerge in the aftermath of disasters: health maintenance (medicine, electricity, medical care), ability to move in and through physical areas, effective communication access, and what the experts call "program access." Some of these needs are obvious: People who depend on dialysis or oxygen need power. Diabetics need insulin. Chemotherapy patients need hospitals that work, and so forth. A wheelchair user might well not be able to cross flooded areas, climb stairs to escape rising water, or access a shelter. Shelter space might also be inaccessible because messages about locations aren't communicated in sign language or Braille. Such spaces might be too loud or chaotic for people with sensory integration needs (as would be true for my son, who has Down syndrome, many autistic individuals, and many others).

Needs can overlap. Many people fall into more than one of these categories, and access to the resources required to meet these needs is never distributed evenly. The consequences of a natural disaster for any individual will be intensified not only by specifics of the disability, but also by other forms of inequality and marginalization such as race, class, gender or sexual identity, and legal status. Disabilities can also be temporary or changing, especially when disasters bring injury or new health risks. Disability disaster response therefore requires understanding all the varieties of disabilities and the inequities of our society—and too often requires fighting against governmental structures built without disability in mind.

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING.

GOP Plan for Higher Ed

The GOP tax plan is intended to limit the potential for higher education to enable class movement.

The GOP tax plan is calculated not just to shift wealth upward, but also to remove some of the educational tools that make it possible for people to shift their own class status. It's not just tuition waivers. As detailed in The Atlantic, spread across undergraduate and graduate education, the GOP plan would strip funding from all fields, and sow chaos. For example, Republicans also want to eliminate student loan interest deductions and force students who don't graduate to repay Pell Grants. Overall, according to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, the cost of education would go up by $71 billion over 10 years.

The Republicans have crafted a vision for American higher education in which only the already-elite can chase their dreams, study deeply, develop new ideas, and become the creators of tomorrow. The GOP tax plan is what class warfare looks like.

READ THE WHOLE THING PLEASE!

Betsy DeVos: Theocratic Vandal

New today at Pacific Standard;

We're just beginning to scratch the surface of the damage that the Trump administration's particular combination of incompetency and vandalism can do. The Republicans have empowered a class of people who either don't understand federal policy or actively resist enforcing federal protections for the people and places in need. The first victims have been those multiply marginalized by factors such as race, class, gender identity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, and, of course, disability. We've seen this manifest in the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency raids hospitals and prevents teenagers from accessing reproductive rights. But there's no shortage of damage to come, and so many of the targets involve disability.

Someday soon there will be elections for local, state, and federal officials in your communities. Progressives need to explain that policy is a matter of life or death, so voters can see the consequences of these disastrous appointments in their lives. Because when a theocratic vandal takes control of the education system in America, no one's access to a safe, high-quality public education is secure.

Damnitall.

Study Humanities; Get a Job

In Pacific Standard, Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon wrote a great piece about how humanities supports you getting a job!

The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search. The humanities teach students to understand the different rules and expectations that govern different genres, to examine social cues and rituals, to think about the audience for and reception of different kinds of communications. In short, they teach students how to apply for the kinds of jobs students will be looking for after college.

This is a good piece. I have made similar arguments and will continue to do so, both as a writer and as an advisor in history.

That said, it's still accepting the premise that the value in what we do is about capitalism. I'm not sure, long term, that's going to work.

Disaster Studies - There are No Natural Disasters

I talked to Jacob Remes about Critical Disaster Studies, Hurricane Maria, Imperialism, Trump, and more. New at Pacific Standard:

"At the heart [of the field] is a saying that became common in the 1970s: There's no such thing as a natural disaster. There are hazards, some of which are natural (earthquakes, tornadoes, river floods) and some of which aren't (industrial fires, pollution, dam collapses, nuclear bombings). But what makes them a disaster is how they intersect with individual and community vulnerability, which is socially constructed. Once we understand this fundamental paradigm, we can understand how disasters are political events with political causes and solutions, not just (or even not primarily) technical failures."

And

"So to think about Puerto Rico, we can see how imperialism (which of course is wrapped up in white supremacy and capitalism) shapes both Puerto Ricans' vulnerability to the hurricane hazard and also the U.S. mainland's response to it. Puerto Rico has been suffering under the Orwellian-named PROMESA Act, which essentially created a federally appointed fiscal control board that ruled the island for the benefit of mainland bondholders, rather than for its citizens. This has been hollowing out the Puerto Rican state for several years and has made Puerto Rico less able to respond to things like hurricanes. And of course, after the disaster, we can see how Puerto Ricans' second-class citizenship—yes, U.S. citizens, but without representation in Congress or a vote for president—means they do not get full access to the American state when it comes to disaster relief."

Please read and share. Your shares mean everything in terms of whether a piece gets read widely.

There Ain't No Normal: Hamilton and Headphones

I wrote about my son's bright green hearing protectors for Pacific Standard. I hesitated to get them at first, badly swayed by the idea that they would more firmly mark him as different and cause isolation.

They do the opposite. They open up the world. Including Hamilton.

Here's the takeaway:

I'm not alone. I know far too many people with disabilities, family members of people with disabilities, and other caregivers who hesitate to meet access needs if doing so involves revealing disability. Hearing aids are expensive because they try to be invisible while containing complex electronics. Some of the most interesting new hearing amplifiers are highly visible, giving the makers more room to embed computers to process sound.

On Twitter, AbbyLeigh C., a 23-year-old woman with Crohn's disease and multiple forms of arthritis, wrote at length about her reluctance to use a wheelchair when in college. She exhausted herself walking, trying not to "give up" by using a chair, and eventually took a medical leave from school. Now working on her last few credits, she says, "Once I stopped hurting myself by pushing myself, and accepted having to use the wheelchair, and got out of bed—I started to get less sick." She told me over direct message that her wheelchair allowed her to get back out into the world, which "was a crucial moment for me getting back to feeling like a real person."

My son's needs are specific, but they are neither special nor abnormal. Whenever any of us encounter disability, we must stop letting our sense of the "normal" shape the choices we make either for ourselves or for others. Best of all, my concerns about people staring at his headphones were completely unfounded. Everyone was too happy watching him dance.

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Free Speech is Messy

For Pacific Standard, I write about the free speech complexities of the upcoming "free speech week." First, the organizers didn't even ask the speakers or book the spaces before they started crying oppression. Second, "security concerns" forced the Anthropology department to cancel a long-planned talk.

I write:

"Thanks to "safety concerns," the annual distinguished lecture of the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley was canceled. Dr. Anna Tsing, a leading anthropologist, was going to speak at the Morrison Library. Then administrators told the department that although this lecture had been scheduled many months in advance, the presence of Yiannopoulos on campus at the same time as this lecture would either need extra security (paid for by the department) or else a new venue at the last minute; failing that, they would have to reschedule.. In other words, Yiannopoulos' potentially phony "Free Speech Week" abrogated the very real speech rights of a brilliant scholar. In a joint letter, Berkeley faculty wrote, "If this 'Year of Free Speech' is about giving an equal platform to all speakers, it would seem that it has already failed. Hate speech has taken precedence over academic discourse."

Free speech is messy. One person yells. Another is silenced. These situations require deep thinking and careful investigation of how to defend a core American freedom. What we can't do is promote simplistic, absolutist fealty to abstract rights without exception because that creates the potential for Yiannopoulos' mischief."

READ THE WHOLE THING.

The Scarcity Model of Disability Services

In Florida, parents are forced to call their disabled children "limited" or they risk losing effective healthcare in order to fund GOP donors. It's a nasty story, but it's part of a big parent where parents, teachers, and therapists are forced to emphasize deficits in order to preserve access to needed supports. I wrote:

I can only imagine what a person-centered or other positive approach might have been like for us in those earlier years. We should never have had to justify services by listening to others denigrate our son. The tears around my dining room table were, in the long scheme of things, a minor setback on our road to understanding him and learning to advocate for him effectively. Still, I remember the sting. It shapes how I enter every meeting since, always on my guard.

The corruption in Florida, meanwhile, is much more serious. The specific alleged conduct is vile and potentially life-threatening. Anyone involved should be fired, sued, voted out of office, or prosecuted to the extent the law allows. That none of these things will likely happen points both to the routine acceptance of harms done to disabled children and to the specific collapse of decency in Florida's state government. Still, it's a system that forces us to emphasize faults that makes such corruption possible.

All humans have needs. A scarcity model based on support only for those with "special" needs is not the only way to organize society. Demanding proof of deficits demeans people with disabilities and opens the door to corruption and abuse.

READ THE WHOLE THING PLEASE!

What's Going On At InBev?

Yesterday, Pacific Standard published a piece of mine on medieval brewing and lack of gender diversity at Google. I mostly talked about medieval history and the Bennett-thesis on patriarchal equilibrium. But as I reached the end of the draft, I started doing a little research into contemporary brewing, tipped off by a friend that there had been a lot of comment about gender and craft beer.

Indeed there has been! Although home brewing codes masculine in our culture, there's been lots of emphasis lately on supporting female-owned craft breweries. At the same time, though, the huge beverage company InBev has been buying up craft breweries, so I went to look at their management team. Its a vast global enterprise, with divisions all over the world. Not a single woman is in charge anywhere. I wrote:

Back to brewing—the craft beer revolution of the last few decades has provided opportunities for women to enter the industry, despite the modern cultural associations of beer with manliness. The Pink Boots society, an organization dedicated to supporting women in the beer industry, has been growing over the last decade. But patriarchal equilibrium is rearing its head in that industry as well, not because individual men are driving out individual women, but because Big Beer is attacking Craft Beer. Right now, Anheuser-Busch InBev, the beer giant, is purchasing craft breweries. There's not a single woman on its management team.

It's important to identify and work against individual acts of discrimination. The gender consequences of InBev offer another way to look at the big picture of gendered (and other forms of) discrimination.

READ THE WHOLE THING.

On Brewing and Google

When the anti-diversity memo by (now former) Google employee James Damore went viral, all I could think of was medieval brewing. In the memo, Damore argued that women as a gender just aren't as mentally fit as men to be good programmers. Appropriately, the rebuttals to Damore have focused on two issues. First, he's wrong on the science. Second, he ignores the specific history of coding and gender. Both critiques are accurate and important. As a historian, though, I'd like us to broaden the discussion away from technology and the last 50 years, and recognize that the exclusion of women from coding fits perfectly into centuries of labor history. It turns out that whenever an occupation becomes profitable, women get cut out....

As the Google story broke, I emailed Bennett to ask for her reactions. She wasn't at all surprised: "This coding story is an old story—in employment and so much else, power moves toward power. The shocking thing about coding-and-gender is that it is such a dramatic version of that old story, and that it happened on our watch." Bennett recalls that, during the late 1980s and '90s, feminist scholars were talking about the rising gender imbalance in computer programing even as it took place. As she wrote to me, "We know this pattern; we can now discern it early; and we've not yet figured out how to stop it."

New from Pacific Standard.