Where Is Hope - Police Violence and Disability

Today at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, I'll be attending a showing of Where is Hope, a film on police violence and disability. I've seen the film, and it's direct and powerful, forcing viewers to really think about the experience of violence at the hands of law enforcement, and particularly why that violence falls so heavily on people with disabilities.

Here's the event page. If  you're in the area, come see it. Or follow them on Facebook/Twitter and find out when there's a showing you can attend.

Here's a profile of Leroy Moore, one of the creators. 

Here's a piece by Moore on a forum on the issue from 2001, but he's been working on this since the early 90s. I feel very fortunate to be able to learn more about the history of this movement from him.

If you are concerned about police use of force and disability - and if you read this page you probably are - you could try to bring Moore and his co-creator, Emmitt Thrower, to your campus, organization, or community. 

Debating the Cold War

Charles Pierce has a piece on the many victims of the Cold War in Latin America. It's being raised as an issue versus Sanders (and will be used to hammer him in the general, if he gets there, because much of America remains afraid of "socialists" and "Communists").

History in public!

Intersectionality: Including Disability In the Police Use-of-Force Discussion

Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope this document functions as a useful tool to help shift our perceptions.

One of our concerns, and something I think about daily as I've been writing on this beat for most of the last three years, was to make sure that our contribution added to the broader efforts to reform American policing, rather than offered a way to derail from critical ongoing conversations such as Campaign Zero and Black Lives Matter.

On Monday morning, Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) had me on their show "The Morning Shift" to talk about the white paper. Tony Sarabia, the host, gave me a chance to talk about our intersectional approach, asking:

Sarabia: Does what you're doing, putting it into a different context, does it minimize what so many people have been pointing out lately, that this is an attack on African-American civilians.

Me: It /is/ an attack on African-American civilians. And it plays into our long history of both individual and structural racism in American society. But one of the things that we've learned under the principles of intersectionality, is that when you are marginalized in multiple ways, you are multiply endangered.

So for example, many of these names of high profile victims of police violence - Kajieme Powell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray - these were all African-Americans and that's not a coincidence. It's an indictment of our, of the racism in American society. But all four of those people were also disabled ... and I don't think that's a coincidence either. So if we're really going to work on this, we need to look at these people as whole people, and think about the ways that racism and ableism intersect with each other and magnify each other. 

We wrote something similar in the White Paper:

Taking an intersectional approach allows us to examine the roles of ableism—individual or structural discrimination against people with disabilities—in police use of force, without ignoring racism, classism, sexism, or other relevant issues.

We argue that disability intersects with other factors (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) to magnify degrees of marginalization and enhance risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change. We also operate from a broad, cross-category, set of definitions for disability, inclusive of physical, developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, emotional, and any other form of disability that might fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Intersectionality is tricky. It's not a magic word that cures all forms of unconscious bias. It remains my aspiration, however, in every word I write about social justice and civil rights.

More "Special Rights" for "Special Needs"

Yesterday I wrote about an ID Card for autistic drivers, with links to similar stories.

Now we have "autistic wrist bands."

These are well intentioned efforts to stop police from hurting neurodiverse people. There's a better way, though, and that's to train police not to hurt people who aren't causing active threats.

As always, I quote my friend Jisun:

It is not an individual’s responsibility to wear or show evidence of his or her diagnosis in order to remain safe and retain their basic civil rights.

Read the post. Keep this in mind.

Three Bills In Florida on Police and Disability

There are three new bills working their way through the Florida legislature on policing and disability. One of the interesting things about disability is that even people who refuse to consider most structural reforms to policing and reject the #BlackLivesMatter movement are still willing to push for reforms when it comes to disability.

That's actually a problem. My argument is that the issues with disability and law enforcement reveal broader issues with policing and society at large. Fixing that is tricky and involves widespread reforms, so instead lawmakers like to do two things:

1. Provide disability-specific training for cops. Lawrence Carter-Long (my frequent collaborator) and I have taken to calling this the "Special needs cops" approach. It is not meant to be complementary. It's basically fine but limited in impact.
2. Less frequently, but worse, is to find a way to label disabled people so that cops can recognize them as disabled and give them extra rights. But no one should have to label themselves in order to receive their basic rights under our laws (from the Constitution to the ADA and beyond).

Florida, it turns out, is doing both right now (h/t Leroy Moore for this link), along with a third bill (which I support) defending the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities when being interrogated.

Here are the bills:

• CS/CS/SB 936 [my emphasis] - "Citing this act as the "The Wes Kleinert Fair Interview Act"; requiring the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to issue an identification card exhibiting a special designation for a person who has a developmental disability under certain circumstances; requiring a law enforcement officer, correctional officer, or another public safety official to make a good faith effort, upon the request of a parent, a guardian, or the individual, to ensure that specified professionals are present at all interviews of an individual diagnosed with autism or an autism spectrum disorder, etc."
• CS/CS/HB 1043 - Interviews of Victims, Suspects, or Defendants with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Designates act "Wes Kleinert Fair Interview Act"; requires qualified professional or relative or caretaker of certain individuals to assist law enforcement officer, correctional officer, or other public safety official during interviews in specified circumstances; provides responsibility for payment of related expenses; prohibits failure to have qualified professional, relative, or caretaker present from serving as basis for specified actions; requires agencies to develop & implement appropriate policies & procedures & provide training.
• SB 1352 - Autism Awareness Training for Law Enforcement Officers; Requiring the Department of Law Enforcement to establish an online continued employment training component relating to autism spectrum disorder; providing that completion of the training may count toward continued employment instruction requirements, etc.

Previous coverage of my trouble with labeling provisions:

• Special placards for Deaf drivers touted as great solution in Cincinnati. 
• T-shirts in Colorado - "I have autism. If I am alone please call 911."

Disability and Media: Inspiration Porn Continued

One of the continuing issues I address is inspiration porn, media that may seem to praise disabled people, but in reality objectifies and dehumanizes. I wrote on it recently here.

After it came out, Lydia Brown, one of my favorite writers, let me know that they also had a recent post about the "Down syndrome wrestling story," which I gladly share. Must read! Their categories were a little different than mine (in part due to speaking broadly about the genre, whereas I focused most recently just on the slice of stories on teenagers with Down syndrome):

(1) Disabled person does something extremely extraordinary (climbs Mt. Everest, is elected to a country's highest governing body, publishes New York Times bestseller, etc.), and it's presented as inspiring because the person is disabled, and not because 99% of the total population (disabled and non-disabled) could have never achieved it.

(2) Disabled person does something pretty mundane for most people (graduates middle school, plays in a basketball game, bakes cookies, etc.), and it's presented as inspiring because apparently disabled people are assumed to be incapable of doing ... anything. At all. With or without adaptive equipment. With or without practice and instruction geared to their learning style.

(3) Non-disabled person does something not overtly negative or generally shitty to disabled person (doesn't call them names, invites them to a birthday party or a prom, doesn't discriminate against them during a job interview, etc.), and it's presented as inspiring because LOOK AT THE MAGNANIMOUS, KIND-HEARTED (non-disabled) SAINT BEING NICE TO A PERSON SUFFERING FROM A DISABILITY. (*language intentional)

(Note there is often a racial component to these stories too: white disabled people and or white "helpers" present more easily accepted caricatures of saintly, angelic, heroic, courageous, inspirations.)

As always, read the whole thing!

Racism/Ableism: New Rule from Department of Education

Last week I was pleased to see the announcement of this new rule tracking ways in which racism and ableism intersect in our school system. From the National Council on Disability press release:

The National Council on Disability (NCD) – an independent federal agency – applauds the new “Equity in IDEA” rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Education which seeks to address widespread disparities in the treatment of students of color with disabilities who too often enter the "school-to-prison pipeline,” which refers to all policies and practices that have the effect of pushing students – especially those most at risk – out of classrooms and into juvenile and criminal justice systems. 

Some of my reporting on racism/ableism intersections in schools.

• Pacific Standard - When teachers abuse disabled children
• AJAM - Corrosive Cult of Compliance in our Schools

Sex with Shakespeare

Jillian Keenan, one of my favorite writers, has a new book: Sex with Shakespeare.

The blurb:

When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her—until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare’s language flowing through her blood for the first time. In Sex with Shakespeare, she tells the story of how the Bard’s plays helped her embrace her unusual sexual identity and find a love story of her own.

Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, Keenan’s smart and passionate memoir brings new life to his work. With fourteen of his plays as a springboard, she explores the many facets of love and sexuality—from desire and communication to fetish and fantasy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Keenan unmasks Helena as a sexual masochist—like Jillian herself. In Macbeth, she examines criminalized sexual identities and the dark side of “privacy.” The Taming of the Shrew goes inside the secret world of bondage, domination, and sadomasochism, while King Lear exposes the ill-fated king as a possible sexual predator. Moving through the canon, Keenan makes it abundantly clear that literature is a conversation. In Sex with Shakespeare, words are love. 

I know Keenan's work through her writing against corporal punishment of children. She persuasively argues it's sexual abuse. She's also written extensively on kink as identity.

What I find interesting here is the way that we need to process aspects of our identity that society deems deviant (or at least atypical) through broadly accepted cultural products. It's a way of finding patterns that give us permission to be ourselves (even if most of us don't then take our complex self and place it in the pages of the New York Times, as Keenan did). For Keenan, it was Shakespeare, but as K, a literary critic and friend of mine pointed out, there's a world of people who have found similar self recognition in the world of Jane Austen, or other modes of fiction.

In the end, as always, my argument is this: Representation matters. So does the ability to read and process great literature.

End The Office Hour: Guns on Campus

Professor Dan Kline at University of Alaska - Arkansas speaks about violence, guns on campus, and the mistake the Alaska Legislature is making.

While some schools worry about issuing psychological trigger warnings about emotional material, UA professors would be worrying about actual triggers.

“The presence of a gun fundamentally would change the kind of things I would feel comfortable teaching and the way I would react and interact with students,” Kline said. “There’s an implied threat there. Not an implied threat. There is a threat there. Whether it is direct or indirect, the presence of guns is correlated with more violence.”

The University of Houston - Downtown (not the same university as the Houston I've been writing about) has released their draft guns policy. Yesterday, University of Houston did the same.

There are many things to say about these policies, but here's one that hasn't been heavily reported.

The draft policies both deny faculty the right to ban guns from their offices (on pain of a $10000 fine. CLARIFICATION: The fine would be for the university, not individual faculty).

Meanwhile, Sources on faculty at both institutions tell me that they are required to continue to hold office hours as part of their duties as a faculty member. Failure to hold office hours could result in negative results in tenure, promotion, and other review procedures. 

Therefore, faculty members now have to choose between being cornered in their offices by a student with a concealed handgun or suffering professional consequence for abandoning office hours.

The universities are being pushed by the legislature to permit guns on campus, but they get to define professional obligations in any way they want. That must include allowing faculty to end office hours.

And for the record, guns are allowed in admin offices too. It's a disaster all around. Right now, though, I am focused on the needs of my colleagues. 

Bunnies with Teeth: Newman resigns

This was good news:

President Simon Newman of Mount St. Mary's University resigns. More shortly. https://t.co/PvBNnGYxqe

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 1, 2016

My piece on the illegality of his plan under Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation act was here, for The Establishment.

Welcome to the Trumpification of higher ed.
There are many reasons to be concerned about the bunny-drowning president. He’s trying to discard at-risk students, ignore the best traditions of Catholic higher education, and attack core principles of academic freedom and the meaning of tenure. What’s gotten less attention is this: the tool Newman’s administration hoped to utilize involved identifying mentally disabled students and driving them from the university. That’s not just ableist; it’s also probably illegal.

Both the Faculty members who stood up to Newman (prompting the now infamous bunny comment) and the student newspaper that reported on it deserve a lot of credit, followed by the general uprising from more students, faculty, parents, and beyond.

One underreported angle: Accreditation. From Inside Higher Ed:

In June, Mount St. Mary's University received reaffirmation of its accreditation, with strong reviews, from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
But after a month of controversy at the Maryland institution, Middle States may be having second thoughts. It has told the university that it must provide answers by March 15 to questions about how “recent developments” may “have implications for continued compliance” with one requirement and four standards that are crucial to being accredited. And the standards in question aren’t minor technical issues, but core requirements on issues such as integrity, admissions and the way faculty members are treated.

Alas, he's not alone. See the University of Iowa and beyond. Swaggering CEOs who think they can fix higher ed, or lower ed, for that matter. Turns out swaggering CEOs are generally fairly ignorant about education.

Let's be clear, Newman represents only the egregious example of a widespread higher ed problem of the CEO president. #MountStMarys

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 1, 2016

At any rate. this is good for the Mount, and best of luck to them going forward. And watch out for killer rabbits that jump about and have sharp teeth.