#SayTheWord

There's a new hashtag campaign around saying the word "disability." It is initiated and led by my friend and writing companion Lawrence Carter-Long. I am wildly in favor. I am trying, in my writing this year, to write the sentence: "There are no special needs, only needs" as often as possible.

We all have needs. Needs vary. Needs require different kinds of resources to meet. We all have needs.

Here's a great recent post from "E is for Erin" on the tag.

There’s a social media campaign going on right now to #SayTheWord – it was started by Lawrence Carter-Long, the Public Affairs Manager for the National Council on Disability, and is an active Twitter hashtag. The word, of course, is disabled.The importance of this campaign is driven home to me over and over again as I see people performing ludicrous and painful contortions to avoid saying it. Reminder that when I make a criticism the way well-meaning people interact with disability, I am not attacking the people (parenthetical reminder that I was immersed in ableism myself not long ago), but inviting people to think about things in a different way.
Instead of saying disabled, nice people say things like:

• differently abled
• handicapable (yes, really)
• physically/mentally challenged
• special needs

It’s that last one, special needs, that I really want to take aim at, because I believe that seemingly innocuous phrase does serious damage to disability rights.

It's an excellent post. I also quite like, for those not already familiar, Lydia Brown on "identity first language" and Lisa Egan on "I am a disabled person."

Update: Brown (in a comment that isn't showing up. Thanks Blogger!) says: See also, my post on differently-abled as a term: http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/08/differently-abled.html 

Universal Design for Writing About Humans

The National Center for Disability Journalism at Arizona State University has released a new style guide for writing about disability. Here's the press release. There's also a "words not to use" document.

As a disability-rights journalist, I like the NCDJ a lot. They do great work and this is an important guide. These tools are absolutely necessary. People want to know "the correct term."

Of course, correct terms aren't always possible. There continues to be a vibrant debate within the disability community on person-first vs identity-first language, for example. While I don't think it's possible, or desireable, to get past these lists - it's great for journalists and editors doing quick checks on appropriates style - the release has made me wish for a universal design for writing about other humans.

My principles:

Ask.
Listen.
Respect.
Don't assume I know the answers.
Check preferred pronouns.
Hold myself accountable.
Take criticism graciously.
Always try to do better.

If I were a clever chap, that would be an acrostic. Instead, it's just a set of aspirational goals for how to write about other humans.

What did I miss?

Language and Power - Philosophy and Propaganda

David Johnson is my main editor at Al Jazeera America, so to the extent you appreciate the pieces I write there, you have him to thank (along with several brilliant assistant editors). All mistakes, of course, are my own!

But he's also a philosopher and what one might call an "alt-academic," someone who took his academic training and made a career in journalism. After sending him so much of my writing over the past year, it was a pleasure to read this essay by him on propaganda and philosophy.

In the piece, Johnson uses a book review of How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley (prof at Yale, also columnist at "The Stone," the philosophy blog at the Times), to talk about the power of language, idea, and image, but also his own career and the role of philosophy in public discourse. He writes:

The 9/11 attacks occurred the week I had to defend my dissertation in philosophy. I took my first tenure-track job (yes, such a thing existed back then) during the launch of our now fourteen-year-old “war on terror.” As I made my way in academia in the midst of George W. Bush’s presidency, my new colleagues and I would inevitably discuss the authoritarian and distorting turn of American public discourse. How could so many be so cowed and so misled into supporting such an obvious misadventure as the Iraq war? How could our leading institutions—and especially the media—fail so miserably to underline the immorality of torture and question the claims as to Saddam Hussein’s threat to national security? This dismal time raised the specter of propaganda, and posed the questions of how the false alibis of power could hold such sway in a liberal democracy and what could be done about it.

In 2004–2005, I was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan. By then, I had become so radicalized by the American political situation and so frustrated by the restrictive horizons of my research—my specialty was ancient Greek philosophy—that I felt I had to make a choice. On the one hand, I might continue on the academic track and try to speak out where I could. (Like many of my peers, I was an active extramural blogger.) On the other, I could leave the ivory tower behind and plunge into journalism.

As someone who has a "diversified academic career," as we're calling it, attempting to remain in academia and yet plunge into journalism, as well as an author of a string of essays about public engagement, I naturally found this narrative interesting.

Johnson then plunges into the book itself. And that, too, seemed important to me, because language undeniably has power and any state exercising that power can be accused of propaganda. So is there good propaganda and bad propaganda? How do we tell? Is it always subjective?

I haven't read the book yet, but Johnson suggests that these questions are not satisfactorily answered.

So what, in the end, makes the propaganda that launched the Iraq war or attempted to end the “death tax” bad but other instances of propaganda—such as the campaigns that launched FDR’s war against Fascism, economic royalists, and want—good, or at least tolerable?

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say the ends justify the means, but Stanley is surely onto something when he claims that the most productive role for propaganda in a liberal democracy is to shore up liberal-democratic ideals. In this view of things, the cure for the problem of propaganda isn’t to make less of it, per se, but to harness it into the service of undergirding the core values of our political system: reasonableness, pluralism, and equality.

I left academia to fight for these values. Although journalism is not propaganda, Stanley’s book clarifies what’s at stake when journalists fail to see how the propaganda of our liberal democracy is functioning.

One thing that's clear - the reason David is a good, demanding, editor is that he's a good, thoughtful, writer and thinker.

Public Shaming Has a Body Count - Confirming vs Reinforcing Hierarchies

As I watched the finale of Game of Thrones, I spent a lot of time thinking about sexualized shame. We're in a kind of ongoing conversation about internet shame lately, with much of the drama focused on white people who feel really uncomfortable being taken to task by historically marginalized groups (people of color). The status quo is so worried about these white folks that Jon Ronson wrote a whole book about them, and keeps taking to the internet to tone police us.

Me, I'm worried about when shame interacts with power, rather than when people without power collectively use shame. One way is to think about punching up/punching down, but first of all - I don't like punching. Second, I think the simple verticality of power spectra is almost never clear (this is true for comedy).

Instead, I recommend thinking about whether a given situation undermines hierarchies and stereotypes or replicates them. When Tim Hunt is called out for his sexism, the collective action undermines hierarchies. When Adria Richards was harassed out of her job, the collective action replicates and reinforces hierarchies.

Recently, Jeb Bush's 1995 call for more public shaming came to light. His actions as a governor reinforcing that shaming mentality did likewise. In fact, the public shaming of women for their sexual choices has a long history and remains a fully modern aspect of our society today.

In Salon, I wrote about the 13-year-old girl Izabel Laxamana, who killed herself after her father shamed her for sending a selfie. I wrote about Jeb Bush. I used Cersei Lannister as a jumping off point, because too many responses to that pointed at the scene as a kind of thing "other people" do. It's not. It's us.

And then we come to Bush’s anti-choice credentials. At its core, the discourse of anti-choicers embraces the need to shame women for their sexual choices, functioning as what Amanda Marcotte calls “the sex police.” For single women in particular, the anti-choice movement wants their decision to have sex visible to the world, a warning sign to others. And Bush’s anti-choice credentials — again, drawing from his history as governor — are severe. In 2003, Bush declared himself the “most pro-life governor in modern times.” He fought to keep an intellectually disabled rape victimand, in 2005, a 13-year-old rape victim, from having abortions. He now says he is willing to consider a rape and incest exception to a ban on abortion, but that’s it. For all other women, in the views of Bush, the decision to have sex is a public matter.
Shame is a powerful tool. It can be used to shed light on prejudice and injustice, but the power dynamic between a state and a woman being shamed by the state is inherently abusive. When we take a scene like Cersei’s walk and justify it as a dramatic re-creation of a bygone era, or the kind of thing that only happens in other places, we miss the ways such dynamics continue to play out in our society. That’s not a criticism of “Game of Thrones,” but a criticism of us.
The public shaming of women in order to control female sexuality is not a medieval throwback or a fictional problem, but a major part of our culture today. It killed Izzy Laxamana. And it’s still being perpetuated by at least one man seeking to become the most powerful person in the world.

Public shaming has a body count.

The Rise of Neo-Primitivism

I've become increasingly interested in nostalgia, especially when used as political discourse (following the scholarship of my friend Matthew Gabriele (@prof_gabriele), a professor at Virginia Tech).

It reminded me of this recent essay from Andrew Potter, the editor of Ottawa Citizen, on the "Rise of Neo-Primitivism." Potter describes the "neo-primitives" imagined by speculative fiction author William Gibson, and links these fictional people to moderns. He writes:

From the paleo diet to the “ancestral health” craze to the criminals leading the anti-vaccine movement, we live in neoprimitivist times, in precisely the manner sketched by William Gibson. A disturbingly large segment of society has adopted a highly skeptical and antagonistic relationship to the main tributaries of modernity. But as in The Peripheral, these people are not opting out of modernity, going off the grid or deciding to live in caves. Instead, they are volunteering for “another manifestation” of modernity, living in the modern world, without being entirely of it, or even understanding it.

It's an interesting essay throughout, talking about the faux authenticity ascribed to "natural" and "nature" in this modern world, and the consequences.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted that the misfortunes that can befall humanity can be sorted into two broad categories: things that are inflicted by nature, and things that are inflicted by humans. For most of our history, a great deal of suffering was due to natural causes such as famine, disease, and disaster. But as we have developed in knowledge and skill, the class of harms inflicted upon humans by other humans has come to occupy a greater chunk of the total. Put simply, there is less disease but more war, and as a result, we’ve come to believe that “nature” is relatively benign, while “civilization” is increasingly a threat.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet we are caught in the grip of a fierce nostalgia, where the thought of contracting a disease like the measles is not something to be feared, but to be welcomed as a sign of our profound connection to nature.

We live in neoprimitivist times. Authenticity seeking wedded to technophobic irrationalism has led us to a bizarre situation where we are increasingly ignorant and suspicious of the scientific and technological underpinnings of our world. It’s like fish deciding that water is their enemy.

I don't know that I agree with all his conclusions - some of the mistrust of technology is learned, rational, behavior. But I like the concept of nostalgic neo-primitivism.

Boys and Girls - The Sexualization of Language

Open a new browser window and do an image search for boys. Here's what I got.

All but two images in the first four rows are, in fact, boys (there are two adult male actors in row three).

Now do the same thing for the word "girls."

It's breasts and butts and lace and sexualized poses. Around image 40 or 50 you start to get the occasional actual child (from girl clothing ads), but as far as I scroll down, it continues to be mostly sexualized images of adult women.

Now there are plenty of other issues here in terms of race and body type and so forth, but right now I just to focus on the gender and age issue. 

I spend a lot of time writing and being concerned by the constant sexualization of girls throughout their whole lives, in fact even before they are born. I call it cradle-to-grave sexism.  Every time someone makes a "better get a shotgun" to an expectant father of a girl, it reinforces the idea that the whole job of the father is to control his daughter's sexuality. Every flirty doll intended for children. Every shirt about dating or getting money from daddy or otherwise linking sexist perceptions of adult behavior to children. Every "sexy" Halloween costume for girls. It's endless. here's the word "girls" itself. There are no girls. There's no room for a girl to just be a child.

And here we see that even the word "girl" has been locked within this sexualized framework. Even the word!

And unlike when there's some sexist product we can fight or boycott or protest, I have no idea what to do here. This is not Google's fault, but rather the aggregation of use and links and imagery flung up on the page. I have no solutions today.

[Note: This post was inspired by a friend, J., who was talking about gender pronouns with her daughters, and thought Google might help. Google instead showed this].

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.

Mistakes and Community

At Thanksgiving dinner, a friend of my parents, A., was the lone non-family guest, as his wife was out of town. At one point, we were discussing dinner and how we had tried to rein in the feast a little (excess rather than excessive excess), and I said, "We tried to pull back from our obsessive compulsive cooking this year."

Then I stopped. Then I offered my fullest apologies to A.

A's son, B, has obsessive-compulsive disorder. In fact, just minutes before my verbal slip, we had been talking B's current involvement in a residential treatment facility and the many intense challenges created by B's OCD. The struggles are many and serious.

A accepted my apology and we moved into a conversation about language and how much it irritated him when detail-oriented people, joking, said, "Oh, that's just my OCD showing," when they organized something. It's not a joke. It can be debilitating. We had a really good conversation about language, power, and privilege.

Lesson 1: When you screw up, and you will screw up, own it. Apologize. Try not to do it again.
Lesson 2: No one is entitled to have their apology accepted.
Lesson 3: On the other hand, one mistake (rather than a pattern of repeated bad behavior) can become an opportunity for dialogue and strengthening community, rather than sundering it.

I am not, of course, really talking about my mistake at Thanksgiving, though it was a mistake and I am sorry. And I will mind loose "OCD" talk in the future as ableist.

I'm really talking about Daniel Handler's apology. About Barilla (now given a 100 rating for its LGBT policies by the HRC). About #shirtstorm and Matt Taylor's apology. About all kinds of moments in which macro and micro aggressions cause pain, cause offense, reveal privilege, and so forth.

My general goal is that when someone really offends me, but I think they did it unintentionally, because they were unaware, to try and change it so that they become more intentional in their speech and actions in the future. It's about trying to improve the community and welcome the offender back in, but changed, rather than saying - This person is OUT forever.

In medieval studies, we are having our first real discussion of which I'm aware about sexual harassment and how to address it. One focus is on building a call-out culture, particularly pushing people who are safe (i.e. men, also tenured people) call out sexism explicitly when they see it. This is good.

Then what? The unconciously sexist person is called out - then how do we bring him (usually) back into the community? Do we want to?

People make mistakes all the time, driven by their privilege, in terms of language or action. Some people are willfully predatory or discriminatory, but more are just unaware of the consequences of their speech or actions. When we make them aware, then what? I hope that I can be like A and use the moment of awareness as a positive. But there's no obligation NOT to be angry.

This is a little nebulous, but on my mind.

What do you think?

Eden Foods - Grotesque Mischaracterizations and Fallacious Arguments (#HobbyLobby)

Yesterday I began following the story of Eden Foods (this is a good place to start), an organic food company whose products are beloved by many friends, especially my vegetarian and vegan friends (they make beans and soy milk, among other products).

In 2013, the company and their chairman and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, sued the federal government for the right to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees.
Here's the court filing.

The plaintiffs, Eden Foods, Inc., and Michael Potter, appeal from a denial of their
request for a preliminary injunction that would forbid federal agencies from enforcing
that mandate against them. They contend that offering such contraceptive services to the
employees of Eden Foods would substantially burden the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs

Potter refers to contraceptives as "lifestyle drugs." He has compared buying birth-control pills to Jack Daniels. He believes that "Obama's in your bedroom" and that he a defender of freedom, and has also characterized Obama as a dictator. Moreover, he actually can't identify which religious principle in particular leads him to object to providing birth control.

Two things interest me here. First, I have my doubts whether an organic food company can survive a boycott from progressives. Whole Foods has managed to be an anti-union corporation with CEO who likes to go on Obama-is-a-fascist rants (speaking as a historian, this is not what fascism looks like) and yet still thrive. I rarely shop there, but they seem to do alright, in part by providing the only option for high-quality insanely-expensive fancy foods in many area. Eden Foods has to compete with other, less offensive (in public anyway. I assume almost all CEOs are terrible people), brands.

Second, I am always interested in the way that white wealthy Christians present themselves as victims (in the language and power section of the blog). There is power in simultaneously claiming righteous might while also under assault by powerful and nefarious forces. It's an old rhetorical move and remains widely spread among the American Christian right (see my piece on Sarah Palin at the NRA). In response to the outrage at their position, Eden Foods has gone on the defensive-offense.

Here is what I wrote to them.

Dear Eden Organic (info@edenfoods.com)

I love organic food and I try to buy it as much as possible. Due to your position on providing birth control to your employees, I am now boycotting your products. I will let any grocery store at which I shop that carries your products know this as well.
Sincerely,
David M. Perry

Short and polite. They responded (this is also their press release):

Dear David,
Eden Foods is a principled food company. We were convinced that actions of the federal government were illegal, and so filed a formal objection. The recent Supreme Court decision confirms, at least in part, that we were correct. We realized in making our objection that it would give rise to grotesque mischaracterizations and fallacious arguments. We did not fully anticipate the degree of maliciousness and corruption that would visit us. Nevertheless, we believe we did what we should have.
The objection we filed has never been part of the Hobby Lobby lawsuit.

Note that I never mentioned Hobby Lobby. Who cares whether they are part of that lawsuit or another?

What interests me is the "grotesque mischaracterizations and fallacious arguments." I've been trying to get an answer as to how they have been mischaracterized to no avail, as I'm sure they have bigger PR fish to fry than some blogger. I also suspect that they believe it. They believe NOT that they are denying coverage of an essential health item, but that they are the principled heroes in an iniquitous world. The attacks strengthen their resolve.

My response was:

I will share your statement with my readers.

However, I have read the statements of your CEO and believe your company is discriminating on the basis of your religious beliefs. The Supreme Court has ruled, for now, that you are legally allowed to do that. I, on the other hand, am legally allowed not to buy your products, to suggest to my readers that they not buy your products, and to tell stores at which I shop that I will not be buying your products and to suggest they don't either.
Sincerely,
David Perry

Boycotts are tricky and I've written about them before. Usually, the goal is to change behavior and you need to leave your target an out. I'm not sure what the out is here, given Potter's statements. I think, instead, the goal here is to send the message more broadly that imposing your religious views on your employees will result in financial penalties. It may be too late too change Eden, it may not be possible to put them out of business (again, see point 1 above). But it's not too tell other companies that they better watch their brands.

Happy Independence Day.

The End of Mental Retardation

Language moves. In the world of disability, phrases enter our lexicon to replace other terms that become pejorative, then they too have to be replaced. This is a normal process and does not mean we cannot work for better language, because representation matters. Representation shapes reality and reality shapes representation. This assertion is a fundamental tenet of my writing and this blog. One of my goals is to work on the many details and complexities linking language to power and privilege, especially as it relates to disability.



So here's a headline that you might have missed (I would have missed it if not for Rebecca Cokley, executive director of the National Council on Disability): Supreme court ends "mental disability." Sort of.

The U.S. Supreme Court is often divided, but on one little-noticed point last week, it was unanimous: the term "mental retardation" is no longer appropriate to use. This may seem trivial and way too late. Mental health professionals and most of the rest of us long ago abandoned that phrase, which echoes insulting schoolyard epithets.

But at an institution whose decisions have broad impact, the court's action is a significant sign of society's progress toward treating each other with dignity.

The court's shift came Tuesday in Hall v. Florida, which struck down Florida's method for determining whether a death row inmate who claims intellectual disability should be executed. On that issue, the court split 5-4.

But on the second page of the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy laid down the law on terminology: "Previous opinions of this court have employed the term 'mental retardation.' This opinion uses the term 'intellectual disability' to describe the identical phenomenon." Justice Samuel Alito Jr. adopted the same term in his dissent. As recently as 2013, the court routinely used "mental retardation" in its opinions.

The persistent effort by some states to execute people with severe intellectual disabilities is just one of the many horrors of the death penalty and its application in America. That's the bigger issue here.

Still, SCOTUS reflects a broader societal shift in language and representation, and I'm pleased to read Kennedy's and Alito's language here.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice is ________.

Brief rant: 1) Nothing is EVER the "last acceptable" anything. There are multiple types of prejudice at work in pretty much every situation.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 20, 2014

2) Calling something "last acceptable" is a way of saying no one is paying attention to your cause! But it's not needed.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 20, 2014

3)No, - Prejudice against rural people is NOT the last acceptable prejudice. But yes, it should be unacceptable. http://t.co/XYo02oteuy
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 20, 2014

4) No - Prejudice against religious people is NOT the last acceptable prejudice. But yes, it should be unacceptable. http://t.co/XNcKAygwSC
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 20, 2014

I think those four tweets say it pretty clearly. I link to two higher ed pieces. Both pick an issue - rural and religion - that imply the following. Higher Education may still contain prejudiced people about all kinds of things (race, gender, sexuality, for example), but those "mainstream" prejudices are at least not broadly acceptable. MY CAUSE, whatever it is, remains under the radar - it's the last acceptable prejudice we hav to deal with.

People, there are lots of prejudices. Some of them are more called out than others. Some of them in fact need to be rendered more visible. None of them are "last." I wish it were otherwise.

I am by far NOT the first person to notice this. s.e. smith wrote a great post in 2013 that said (focused on the widespread use of "last acceptable" in regards to obesity):

The phrase keeps popping up, over and over and over again, in a wide variety of media, and it often remains unchallenged; I see it coming up in quotes, in titles, in lengthy essays, with minimal pushback. When Tasha Fierce confronted it at Bitch magazine a few years ago, people seemed genuinely surprised and offended when she said she didn’t agree that fat was bigotry’s last stand.

Later, smith adds [my emphasis]:

There’s a bigger issue at play here, which is the genuine belief that something is the ‘last acceptable prejudice’ in a world full of prejudicial attitudes. People use this phrasing because they think it’s true, and because they think it furthers their activism, and in the process, they do a lot of damage, in addition to making themselves look absolutely ridiculous...

More than just being wrong, it’s also a classic example of setting marginalised groups against each other, rather than helping them work in solidarity, and it explains why intersectionality and an understanding of intersocial prejudices is so important. Because when people hear that ‘x is the last acceptable prejudice’ and they’re members of group y, what they’re hearing is that they don’t experience prejudice—which is in direct opposition to their personal lived experience of the world, and to what members of their social group know to be true.

I am focused on issues related to disability and gender, where they intersect and where they don't. I recognize all other kinds of intersocial prejudices exist. I am a little more concerned about the visibility of disability issues. I do think people in higher ed, and elsewhere, are more aware of sexism than ableism. So I try to raise the profile there.

But it's not the last anything.

When you are an activist and you see your issue being ignored, it's frustrating. Fat jokes, class jokes, rural jokes, religious jokes (just to take a few) permeate our culture, even our leftist intellectual academic culture, giving the sense that they might be "acceptable." That's a good conversation to have, the ways in which our ignorance of difference might lead us to perpetuate discrimination and prejudice.

When we privilege one category over the other, though, we say that it is only our issue that needs attention. That we are the most oppressed. That you (collectively) are the most ignorant in regards to our cause. It's not true. It is easy rhetoric to use, but it's actually not all that savvy for building alliances and trying to shift language, perception, or policy.

As s.e. smith says - the pathway out of these "last acceptable" woods remains: intersectionality.

How to Talk to Adjuncts (if you're tenured)

This is my first attempt to generalize some guidelines for talking about people with less power than yourself, especially when trying to highlight an injustice that you, to some extent, are responsible for perpetuating.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on how to talk about feminism if you're a guy (especially a straight white married guy).  It was a somewhat light response to a serious discourse problem - it's complicated if you want to talk about problems experienced by others, especially if you are of the group that has all the power and privilege. It's complicated, but it's also necessary. The four core rules are:

1. It's not about you (don't make stories about the discrimination faced by women about how you, the man, feel about it).
2. It's sometimes about you (men need to talk to men about rape, for example).
3. It's always about them (don't erase women's voices from the conversation. Cite, link back, use privilege to amplify the voices of others and hopefully erode one's own privilege).
4. Don't expect gratitude (A lot of male feminists want women to like them more, or to exempt them from critiques - the "not all men" defense - or otherwise, once again, making it about the wrong topic).

This week I wrote about adjuncts - the contingent labor force of academia. I think all these rules apply. 

I'm a tenured professor living in a nice house in a suburb of Chicago. My wife and I have two professional incomes. I've also been given a big platforms on CNN, the Chronicle, and beyond. I'm a straight white married man. My university is a great place to work. If adjuncts resent these facts, that is reasonable. I can't expect gratitude for noticing their difficulties. And most of all, I cannot make the stories about me.

Rule #2 applies too, though, as it's going to take tenure-stream faculty being part of the movement to achieve any kind of change. I  have some ideas of how that can happen; I have a criticism of the attempt to use hyperbolic metaphors to evoke sympathy. I think we need SHARED identification, not to use analogies to marginalized groups. I might be wrong though.

For the rest of the blog, I want to offer an example of how NOT to talk about adjuncts from a position of privilege, then give a critic my space to critique me. 

Matt Reed, aka @DeanDad on Twitter, wrote a blogpost on Inside Higher Ed in which he asked for ideas to get adjuncts to come to workshops. He wrote, among other things:

In a perfect world, of course, we’d have enough money that this wouldn’t be a problem. But this isn’t a perfect world. So within the fiscal parameters that actually exist, we’re trying to find a more effective way to reach significant numbers of adjunct faculty.

In my piece for the Chronicle, I talked about specifically this kind of language, saying, "We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue." Reed's heart is in the right place I guess. Most people's hearts are in the right place. But then when attacked on Twitter, he got defensive. He makes a huge amount of money overseeing a system in which adjuncts are exploited, but he wants to be the good guy.

Adjuncts online started criticizing him, asking him how dare he ask adjuncts to do anything given that Deans make 150K and they make 3K a class. Dean Dad responded defensively. Here are the tweets.

@deandad about your post, the problem is that an #adjunct would have to teach 50 classes to have a salary = to a dean http://t.co/rWBSmb9iOW
— Fabián Banga (@fabianbanga) April 23, 2014

@deandad The math: #Adjunct $3k per class. Dean = $150k/year. So $150k/$3k=50. That is the answer to your problem
— Fabián Banga (@fabianbanga) April 23, 2014

@fabianbanga Where is this mystical land in which community college deans make 150k? Not even close.
— Matt Reed (@deandad) April 23, 2014

@deandad @fabianbanga Public records show Matt Reed's salary is $125,000 per year, plus benefits. pic.twitter.com/b4bLQMcfrg
— everlearners (@everlearners) April 23, 2014

In fact, most Deans at Reed's school make 80-90K. If you are an adjunct making $3000 a class, the difference between 90K and 150K (both with benefits and job stability) is negligible. It's like when people making a million dollars a year complain that they shouldn't be seen as rich because they aren't making 10 million a year and real estate in NYC is so expensive. Getting defensive when you have the privilege and are being criticized for it doesn't help. It's also not right. Sometimes, you just have to take it.

When I was criticized, I tried to keep Dean Dad in mind. Below is a Storify of a critique from an adjunct. What I tried to do was to accept the criticism and not to get too defensive. I tried to remember - it's not about me. Don't expect gratitude.

The critic, Gordon Haber, wants me to use my platform to rage about the injustice, making the criticism that sure, while adjuncts are raging, people like me aren't. We, to use my own language, just "tut-tut." I can defend my piece, but his criticism isn't wrong. I'm doing something think-y rather than rage-y, even though I agree the injustices are worthy of rage. Maybe a stronger piece as my first step onto Vitae would have been better.

At any rate, it's not about me and I'll keep working on living up to my rules.

I'm letting Gordon Haber have the last word from his blog post, in which he writes.

Now, Perry is right. And he was gracious when I criticized him on Twitter. And he ends his piece by suggesting that tenured faculty make common cause with adjuncts, to which I say, “A fine idea but I won’t hold my breath.” But in the end I find it galling that here we have another academic launching a critique of labor issues in higher ed byparsing adjunct rhetoric.

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On Being Offended: Washington Obscenities, Barilla, Klosterman, Cohen

Here's my principle on language and offense:

You do not get to decide whether I should be offended by something you do or say; you only get to decide whether you care.

Here's what I mean. Someone uses language I find offensive. I call them on it. They cannot decide for me whether it's ok that I am offended. They can try to persuade me that it's not offensive. They can try to persuade me that I have misunderstood. I can try to persuade them that they have not thought through their language. And so forth. But at the end of the day, if I am offended, I am offended.

And if they don't care, then they don't care. It's my job to make them care.

I mostly write about language and offense in the context of intellectual disability. When I hear people use the r-word, it's mostly in the context of themselves or someone they know without a disability. "Those <insert political opponents> are a bunch of _________." "I felt like such a _______ when I failed that test." But I've been thinking about this principle broadly for the last few weeks as I've pondered a few different case.

1. Take the Washington football team. Dan Snyder, the owner, says that the R-word name (different r-word) has a proud tradition, some Natives don't mind, and that no offense is intended. Well, first of all he's wrong about Native American groups. The survey he cites has flawed methodology. Some of the quotes in support of the racial epithet turned out to be misquotes. And so forth. At any rate, I am offended by this obscenity. I get to decide whether I'm offended. Snyder gets to decide whether he cares, and so far, he doesn't. It will take financial pressure to change things.

2. Take Barilla. When the CEO made homophobic (and later sexist) statements, people were offended. He, or at least the company's PR people, decided that they cared and quickly apologized. Now they are making more inclusive ad campaigns. It's true that when people called out the CEO, lots of voices tried to argue that he wasn't being offensive, he was just expressing his support for one kind of family over another. But again, I was offended, and he doesn't get to decide whether that's fair.

3. Take Chuck Klosterman, ethicist for the New York Times. A blogger and mother of a child with Down Syndrome, who blogs at atypicalson.com, called him out for repeated use of the r-word and other pejoratives about intellectual disability. After a few days, Klosterman replied to the author:

I should not have used “retard” pejoratively. It was immature, hurtful, and thoughtless. I have no justification for my actions. I realize the books that contain those sentiments were published over 10 years ago, but that is no excuse; I was an adult when I wrote them and I knew what I was doing. I feel terrible about this and deeply embarrassed. I take full responsibility for my actions and understand why this matters so much to you. I’m truly sorry.

Feel free to re-post this message on your web site. I deserve the criticism I am receiving, and I want other people to know that I realize I was wrong. I would also like to donate $25,000 to whatever charity you feel is most critical in improving the lives of people with cognitive disabilities . . . I have done something bad, so help me do something good.

What's so impressive about this response is that he didn't go to the usual dodge. He didn't say that he meant no offense, that he wasn't talking about people with Down syndrome, or deny that it was offensive. He simply apologized and tried to make appropriate restitution. And just as I wrote about with Barilla, it's now our job to trust, but verify - allow him an out, let him make the apology, but keep an eye on things going forward. I'm really pleased by how this story turned out.

4. Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a racist and offensive column yesterday (it was about how Chris Christie was awesome but was going to have trouble winning the GOP nomination, because he didn't block gay marriage). He tried to pretend it wasn't racist by writing such lines as "Today’s GOP is not racist" and using the phrase "conventional views" instead of retrograde racists, but, again, he doesn't get to decide whether I'm offended, only if he cares. Here's the widely-quoted paragraph.

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

So people with conventional views gag when seeing an interracial couple according to Richard Cohen. Here's his response to the outrage.

"The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right."

 I don't know whether he's a racist. But what he wrote was racist (and homophobic). He doesn't get to decide whether I find it offensive, he just gets to decide if he cares.

Just compare Cohen to Klosterman in their response to discovering people are offended. Klosterman owns it and writes a careful apologetic letter linked to specific action to make restitution. Cohen decides to be offended that we are offended.

Well, Cohen gets to be offended at the widespread offense taken to his column. We just don't have to care.