On Speech and Consequences: Roseanne and Kaepernick

Yesterday, ABC fired Roseanne Barr for her racism (after hiring her and promoting her offensive tweets as a reason advertisers should be behind the show), a move that prompted a lot of people to compare her to Colin Kaepernick - some in defense of one, some in defense of the other, but too often dealing in abstractions.

Here's how I parse the difference:

Note: racist speech and action should generate negative social and professional consequences.

Note: anti-racist speech and action should generate positive social and professional consequences.

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 30, 2018

It's not really very difficult to tell the difference between kneeling to protest anti-black violence and making racist comments about a black woman being descended from an ape. We don't have to dwell in the world of abstractions here (we /do/ when talking about state censorship and prosecution for speech acts, where defending offensive speech is a leading bulwark against fascism).

The racist New York lawyer who threatened to call ICE on people speaking Spanish should experience professional and social consequences for his act. The author writing that women who have abortions should be hanged should experience professional and social consequences for voicing his horrific idea.

The right wing is going to respond to the firing of Barr with accusations of hypocrisy, that saying negative things about the president, for example, is equivalent, or that the NFL like ABC can do what they like and we're hypocrites for criticizing one and praising the other. This may even have a certain abstract truth.

But we live in a real world. There are lots of gray areas and complexities when talking about speech, but sometimes, it's pretty clear: Fire overt racists, protect overt anti-racists.

We can do this. 

CN: ABLEIST SLURS - Disability and Community: The Challenge

The differences between different disabilities are so great that grouping all disabled individuals into a 'disabled community' is stupid. Physically disabled individuals are very different from mentally disabled individuals. People born disabled are very different from people who became disabled in their old age. The differences are too great for there to be any real 'community'. - Shawn, a comment writer.

Shawn wrote this comment on the Google+ version of this post - Why disability as identity matters. Please don't go find and mob them. I just wanted to post it here, though, so as to show the challenges that our movement faces in building solidarity across categories, of pushing the social of disability rather than the medical one.

Here's another comment, possibly from the same person which I deleted, but have been thinking about for days.

I want to comment on "Why Disability as Identity Matters". The differences between a blind person and a severely retarded person are great. The differences between someone who was born with a disability caused by a genetic disorder and someone who has become disabled in old age are great. Grouping all disabled people into 'the Disabled Community" is stupid and possibly harmful. Disabled individuals differ too much from each other for us to identify as a group. I was born with and have always had a physical disability. I do not want to be thought of or treated as if I were retarded.

I'm sorry for this person that they are so filled with loathing, but it's important, again, to face this kind of sentiment.

The social model of disability, itself now pretty old and being pushed at by various other models, teaches us to rethink disability not in terms of what our bodies and minds can and can't do, but in terms of the ways that society is structured to permit only certain types of bodies and minds to thrive. That's where I find the solidarity across disability categories and why I support disability-as-identity movements.

What about you?

Down Syndrome is "Hell on Earth."

Austen Heinz is the typical silicon valley disruptor superstar. Edgy. Controversial. Disruptive.

He was profiled for his DNA Startup which allows you to "create life."

In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints that DNA quickly, accurately and cheaply.
“Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game,” Heinz said. “And that creates a whole new world.”
The 31-year-old CEO has a deadpan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kidding. In a makeshift laboratory in San Francisco, his synthetic biology company uses lasers to create custom DNA for major pharmaceutical companies. Its mission, to “democratize creation” with minimal to no regulation, frightens bioethicists as deeply as it thrills Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Thrills capitalists! Fights bioethicists! Sounds like a amoral Silicon Valley winner to me.

Here's the hate speech [my emphasis]:

Heinz and other scientists have years of technical hurdles to clear before they can create living, breathing humans from a plate of printed DNA. Such an act is not possible right now. But he doesn’t hide his enthusiasm about the possibility.

Is he essentially enabling eugenics? He rejects that term, which to him means government interference with reproductive rights. He insists that it differs from his approach, which he describes as allowing individuals to eliminate future suffering in a more humane way than abortion, “which is pretty barbaric.” “A decent percentage of people have really nasty mutations that cause really bad, horrible things,” like Down syndrome and cystic fibrosis, he said. “These are basically like hell on Earth, and I think it’s smart to be able to avoid those things.”

1. Eugenic principles/ideologies are not state sponsored eugenic programs, but it's still eugenic principles and ideologies. I write about this a lot (most recently here). [UPDATE: Here's a useful article on who Heinz is as a provocateur]

2. What really bothers me about the "hell on Earth" line is not just that he said it, but that it was

I deal with being angry by
using silly pictures.

presented here as a simple acceptable opinion.

Would a racist talking about how blacks are inferior be simply permitted to make their statement without rebuttal or some kind of comment from the journalist? An anti-semite? A homophobe?

It seems to me that most journalists, when they have subject saying such terrible things, deal with it sensitively. It's correct to report that Heinz is, in fact, one of the new eugenicists, ignorant and filled with hate for people with Down syndrome and cystic fibrosis. He'd like them to be eradicated, at least for future generations, preferably while making vast sums of money. This is what the new eugenics looks like.

But using this horrible line as your concluding sentence in a section, then blithely starting off into the science of the startup, is not, I think, best journalistic practices. I suspect that Lee, the author and business editor, didn't even notice. She's just interviewing a wunderkind, reporting what he says, trying to sell copy.

And this is part of the mission of the disability rights movement. We need to make it clear that ableist language, ideologies, and discriminatory acts are prejudicial and not to be simply left to hang in mainstream discourse without retort, context, criticism.

One final maxim of mine:

What's going on with prenatal testing right now is a test-run for the future of human procreation. We're failing the test. Left alone, it's going to mean that disability codes for poverty and lack of access to modern medicine, rendering the world even more divided than it is now. We've got a lot of work to do.

Also, Down syndrome is not hell on earth.

Nico and his Sister. 1. It's too snowy for hell. 2. They love each other a lot.