Disability and Immigration Rights

NEW PIECE at Pacific Standard 

"As ICE has intensified operations under the regime of President Donald Trump, disability-related cases and causes have routinely gotten public attention. In part, this has to do with the way that disability commands sympathy and can sometimes generate generous media coverage. It's easier for immigrant rights groups to command national attention when there's a disabled six-year-old at risk. But it's also because ICE has turned rapacious, sweeping aside long traditions protecting medical facilities such as hospitals from enforcement actions."

Against Banning Laptops: Take good notes, trust students

Ruth Colker in the Cardozo Law Review argues that evidence for banning laptops, at most, suggests limited internet access during classroom times requiring content acquisition. Colker writes:

Those studies [promoting bans] represent a careful presentation of three artificial experiments where students are assigned their note-taking style— longhand or computer—and in which students have little incentive to learn the material from the lecture. They are paid to participate irrespective of how well they do on the exercise. The material is not assigned in any course at a university. And the material is conveyed entirely through a brief TED Talk or lecture.

And then Colker talks about her law school students in which laptops were a choice:

My students were not listening to a thirty-minute TED Talk and then being asked to apply limited, discrete information. My students were trying to absorb information over a fourteen-week period for a final, summative, twenty-eight hour take-home examination. For the purpose of taking the final examination, some of my students wanted to have typed notes that they could cut and paste to create an outline. Some students told me that there was inefficiency to handwriting notes because they then needed to type them into an outline. The kinds of benefits that may transpire from taking handwritten notes on short lectures may not correspond to note-taking in a class that consists of considerable discussion and dialogue in preparation for a twenty-eight hour take-home exam. On the other hand, other students told me that they found it beneficial to transfer the handwritten notes to typed notes. The additional step of typing notes was a learning experience for them. They therefore made an informed decision not to bring a computer into the classroom because they preferred to handwrite notes. But, interestingly, all students reported to me that they eventually created typed notes—unlike the students in the experiments.

One conclusion - Trust students:

I have been especially interested in comments from students who have self-identified to me that they have a disability. When laptops are allowed without restriction, these students report that students often do surf the Internet during class in a way that is very distracting to those sitting around them. But these students also report that the Internet surfing ends when the professor has a clear policy banning such conduct in the classroom. For example, during the year of this study, my first-year students had the same classmates during the fall and spring semesters. I taught them in the spring. They reported to me that their classmates who surfed the Internet during the fall were not Internet surfing in the spring in my class because of my clear Internet policy.

In the end, it's about note-taking:

The research for both typical students and students with disabilities strongly suggests that students do not necessarily take effective notes, irrespective of whether they use a laptop. A simplistic statement that laptop users should not take verbatim notes appears to be an insufficient way to help students take more effective notes. Some students may take effective notes using handwriting. Other students may take effective notes with computers. The technology itself does not dictate the outcome. The student’s note-taking effectiveness affects the outcome.

READ THE WHOLE THING

My Son's Birth

It's my son's 11th birthday. Read this!

My son is 11 today. Here's the story of how our friends helps us find our bearings. They refused to stop congratulating us. https://t.co/USJpXKNkOj pic.twitter.com/6QH2BcYDSh

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 11, 2018

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."

Teaching Non-Compliance

On NPR, Joe Shapiro has a powerful new series on sexual abuse and intellectual disability. I'll have more to say about that later in the week. Here's one reaction though from a fellow parent that's incredibly important.

The author thinks about all the ways that we train folks with Intellectual and developmental disabilities to be compliant, rather than to promote autonomy and agency. But it doesn't have to be that way. She writes:

Here are some of my initial ideas to ensure that we (as parents, as caregivers, as teachers, etc.) are not encouraging compliancy in kids with intellectual disabilities, but are rather encouraging autonomy and agency:

• 4. We can play practice games where we do something mildly irritating to our child–tickling, blowing in their ear, a small silly thing–and they communicate their “stop” to us, and we stop immediately, and we high-five them. Again, we’re teaching healthy non-compliance here.
• 7. We can applaud when our kids assert their wills. We can champion their defiance, knowing it will serve them well.

I do number 4 a lot. I tickle my son, then we talk about whether we'd like more tickles or not.

Of course, teaching non-compliance raises risks when interacting with law enforcement, as I've written so often about under the #CultOfCompliance rubric. It's a challenge.

READ THE WHOLE THING!

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!

Diagnosing Trump

Yesterday, as news about the Wolff book rolled through the net, I had an accidentally well-timed piece on the complexities of talking about Trump's age and his brain. I acknowledge that in fact age-related cognitive change might be an issue in a president (or other forms of cognitive change), but continue to believe that outside of very judicious high-quality reporting, we've got to stop this wild gossiping. I open with Reagan and write:

I've been thinking a lot about Stahl lately, thanks to the latest round of speculation about President Donald Trump's mental health. For 18 months, I've joined many other disability justice activists in decrying such speculation as based in ableist ideas that associate Trump's cruelty, incompetence, and deception with some kind of easily diagnosable pathology. These armchair diagnoses have provoked tense and angry discussions, driving wedges between diverse segments of the progressive community. I’ve taken a hard line against this speculation. I don’t think it will unseat Trump. I do think it will make people with mental-health needs more likely to stay closeted. With the alleged deception and silence surrounding Reagan's Alzheimer's on my mind, though, I’ve had to admit that there might be some occasions where reporting on presidential mental fitness could be appropriate. Still, we can distinguish between ableist gossip and good, reliable, journalism. Let's set the bar high.

I also tweeted:

When Trump is taken down, the GOP will lean on "mental health" as their rationale, never address the racism and bigotry, and then use that as leverage against any openly neurodiverse candidates.

I don't really see a way around it. But feel it's important to keep saying this.

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 5, 2018

So it's not that I don't agree that it's possible that there's an issue, as any of us at any time could experience change that might make being president impossible even with reasonable accommodations, but that our cultural ability to talk about mental health is so limited by deeply embedded cultural ableism that it's not going to hurt Trump and it is going to hurt lots of other people. It will emerge when Trump falls anyway (when/if), but it won't be causal. It'll just be a tool of the GOP pretending it's not their fault.


Yesterday The Atlantic published James Hamblin's long and very thoughtful commentary on Trump's mental state. He write, in the key paragraph:

After more than a year of considering Trump’s behavior through the lens of the cognitive sciences, I don’t think that labeling him with a mental illness from afar is wise. A diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder is too easily played off as a value judgment by an administration that is pushing the narrative that scientists are enemies of the state. Labeling is also counterproductive to the field in that it presents risks to all the people who deal with the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses. To attribute Trump’s behavior to mental illness risks devaluing mental illness.

This is good. A thoughtful paragraph. Glad to see it in such high stakes writing. He goes from there to suggest:

The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.

A presidential-fitness committee—of the sort that Carter and others propose, consisting of nonpartisan medical and psychological experts—could exist in a capacity similar to the Congressional Budget Office. It could regularly assess the president’s neurologic status and give a battery of cognitive tests to assess judgment, recall, decision-making, attention—the sorts of tests that might help a school system assess whether a child is suited to a particular grade level or classroom—and make the results available.

I, of course, find the idea of a presidential-fitness committee frightening. I know how intelligence assessments are used to reinforce ableist concepts, institutionalization, segregration, and stigmatization of intellectually disabled folks.

I have no solutions, only reactions. It's a tough moment. The problem is ableism and the way it infuses our society, making non-ableist reactions to situations like Trump's brain that nevertheless assess his ability to do his job impossible.

Reproductive Rights and Disability Rights - The new wedge

New at The Nation:

Anti-choice activists have found what they think is a winning wedge issue: Down syndrome and other “sympathetic” disabilities. The latest attack was in Ohio, where, in late December, GOP Governor John Kasich signed a bill that bans abortions after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. Ten states have either passed similar bills or have presented them before legislatures. The function, and I suspect the goal, of these laws is not to improve the lives of people with Down syndrome or even to stop abortions based on prenatal diagnoses. Instead, the anti-choice movement is trying to use the public’s positive feelings about cute kids with Down syndrome, like my son, to undermine reproductive rights.

In response to these threats to reproductive freedom, I’ve had to start saying something new and difficult: If individuals want to terminate an otherwise wanted pregnancy due to a prenatal diagnosis, I support their decision.

I’ve spent many years now asserting the need to re-order how we ascribe value to diverse human lives. My son may not participate in the capitalist economy, live independently, or speak (he might also do all of these things!), but his value as a human is intrinsic. I’d like others to see it that way too. Selective abortion, as I’ve written for The Nation, reveals our attitudes about disability and other forms of difference. Still it’s time to affirmatively support the right to eugenic abortion, even as we fight the need for it. The struggle for disability rights begins with the affirmation that no one gets to tell anyone else what to do with their body. That includes abortion.

The Attack on Olmstead

New at Pacific Standard:

Right before Christmas, Jeff Sessions rolled back key disability rights protections. More is likely coming:

What seems to be happening, according to Eve Hill and numerous other disability rights advocates to whom I spoke, is that the Sessions Department of Justice is siding with sheltered workshops. Sessions has a well-known general antipathy to federal enforcement of disability rights, so he's the perfect figure to use in rolling back this Olmstead guidance. Here, we merely have to follow the money. As Hill notes, "People who pay people with disabilities below the minimum wage get contracts that pay the regular fair market value even though they pay below minimum wage." Many sheltered workshops are extremely profitable enterprises, grossing considerable income from the work itself, while presenting themselves to the public as educational or charitable enterprises.

Police Violence in 2017

Well, it's the new year. Here's a report (excluding disability) on police violence in 2017. Here's the Washington Post on police killings in 2017 including mental illness.

Reading through these cases, I feel we're making no progress. Still 25% known mental illness, still reasonable estimate of a third to a half involving disabled people in some capacity, still vastly disproportionately people multiply marginalized by disability, race, class, gender identity, etc.

And the killings are just the worst outcomes, overlooking all the violent and threatening confrontations experienced by marginalized peoples that do not result in fatalities.

So many good programs out there, well-intentioned folks thinking hard, but the numbers stay about the same.

Back to work.