Vilissa Thompson's Black Disabled Woman Syllabus

Vilissa Thompson, over at Ramp Your Voice, has put together a "Black Disabled Woman Syllabus." It's a massive collection of links from various intersectional angles, a living document always ready to be expanded, and a fantastic resource. Thompson writes:

Over the past few weeks, I have been approached by individuals who wanted to understand the Black disabled experience, particularly the plight of Black disabled women and why our struggles matter. (The inquiries picked up when I published my“Lemonade” post last week.) I noticed a pattern from those who asked of my knowledge and personal reflections: many are ignorant of the experiences of Black Americans in general, Black women particularly, and when broken down further, Black disabled women specifically.

I decided that as someone who views herself as an “educator” within my advocacy scope, it would be fitting to create a compilation of books, essays/articles, speeches, music, and other bodies of work that accurately explains the diverse forms of Blackness that exists for Black women, and how the lives of Black disabled women meshed within that discourse.

I asked some of my incredible friends and fellow advocates for resource recommendations for this idea, and was provided a wealth of information that surpassed my hopes in establishing a “syllabus” of our intersectional experience.

Dive into the resources; read; share.

Thank you Vilissa for doing this.

Disability and Race: Testimony from Autistic Hoya

Great writing from Lydia Brown on healthcare disparities for disabled people of color.

From both personal and professional experience, I am keenly aware that healthcare disparities are one of the most insidious and pervasive forms of discrimination impacting any underrepresented or minoritized group. These disparities are evident in quality of care, diagnostic accuracy, network adequacy, service delivery models, multicultural competency, and overall health outcomes. These disparities result in lower life expectancy, less access to any healthcare including mental health services, and other deleterious effects on well-being and social stability.

Read the whole testimony here.

Here's a post on racial disparities in the Down syndrome community from Stephanie Holland.

Disabled and Homeless - Chicago's Public Housing Scandal(s)

Donaldson has a disability, uses a wheelchair and is living on limited income. “You have to decide between living day-to-day and rent,” she told me. Finding an accessible home that she can afford is a challenge, and the struggle is compounded by landlords who turn her away because she is in a wheelchair. “When you look for housing you face discrimination because you’re a person with a disability,” Donaldson said, exasperated.

From The New Republic - on Rahm's next scandal.

The Chicago Housing Authority, charged with managing more than 21,000 of units of public housing, could provide Donaldson with a place to live that is both safe and affordable, a place where her daughter could have her own room and where the facilities would be wheelchair-accessible. Public housing in Chicago suffers from stereotypes born of high-profile 90s-era social ills in projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor homes, and many Chicagoans would rather turn their gaze away from the institution and those who rely on it. They shouldn’t. As the city looks elsewhere, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly and steadily perpetrating some of the most disturbing institutional mismanagement in a city where jaw-dropping corruption is a spectator sport.

Read this.

The "Authenticity" Dodge

I met Arthur Chu this summer at a workshop on the problem of misogyny on the internet and we've been corresponding via email and social media a lot since then. Our writing interests overlap when it comes to representation issues in media and games. He interviewed me on the problem of claiming "authenticity" as a way to avoid diversity.

Here's an excerpt:

DP: When you start to create fantasy races and then you make the argument “Oh no people of color, we have to be realistic,” you’ve revealed your cards. You’ve shown that you just don’t want to have a diverse world, that you want to promote this myth of homogeneity, that you want to use historical reality to justify making a choice that makes other people upset.

AC: That’s interesting, because it seems we’re in an upsurge of interest in sword-and-sorcery fantasy–

DP: We sure are, it’s great!

AC: And it seems recently we have this appetite for “old-fashioned” narratives that center the West and reduce the rest of the world to antagonists or scary foreigners, even if it’s in a winking, ironic way. You’ve got the Lord of the Rings films that started the revival of high fantasy in film hewing close to Tolkien’s depictions of the Southrons and the Easterlings as sort of flat enemy races, and then you’ve got Game of Thrones using the Dothraki to bring back the trope of the barbaric Mongols. What do you think is driving this trend of the past ten years or so?

DP: Oh, to me it’s a much longer trend than that. Orientalism is built into 800 years of Western narrative production about the East. That the East is simultaneously more advanced and more decadent and more barbaric and more civilized all at the same time. And I think that the Orientalism of Game of Thrones is the perfect embodiment.

Layered Privileges - There Is No Meritocracy

There have been two debates about privilege recently.

One was Tal Fortang's barbaric yop that he, Princeton undergrad, is not privileged by his whiteness, because his family was persecuted by the Nazis. The second was a Thought Catalog essay on female privilege.

The first essay demonstrated two key facts:

1. Tal Fortgang does not understand the concept of privilege.
2. American Media works likes this: Conservative white boy feels oppressed by liberals? How interesting! Let's give him a forum to air his many grievances. This reaction was not just limited to Fox News, a place of naked partisanship, but much more widely. I think it has a lot to do with the white media also feeling that they worked damn hard for their achievements and being suspicious of the whole privilege debate. Also, it's good for ratings.

The second, less well reported but still circling through my social media circles, was a snarky list of 18 types of female privilege.

I'm not linking to it because I think it's basically clickbait and trying to sell a book about women and sex. Moreover, it's mostly typical male grievance discourse. I've dealt with it before. To the extent that these grievances are legitimate, which some of them are, the solution to the problem is more feminism.

On the bright side, in reaction to Fortang, the New Yorker just published an interview with Peggy McIntosh, the Wellesey academic who first developed the term "white privilege" as a way of explaining structural advantages experienced by white people. In the interview she offers a very useful short-hand for thinking about layered privilege.

Here is McIntosh's original paper from 1988, "“White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”

It's a great piece. One of the main criticisms is that it's a little blind to class privilege (she's highly aware of gender privilege, in general), but it started a conversation that sometimes is really useful. Here's how she responded to the Fortgang piece [my emphasis]:

When Tal Fortgang was told, “Check your privilege”—which is a flip, get-with-it kind of statement—it infuriated him, because he didn’t want to see himself systematically. But what I believe is that everybody has a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life. Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one’s place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents’ places of origin, or your parents’ relationship to education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background. We’re all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are, who we’re seeing, or what we’re required to do.

That's useful language - that there are many variables that create structural advantages and disadvantages. It's worth thinking about which ones are at play in any given situation.

In particular, this subject matters to me in the context of undermining the myth of a meritocratic society. I write this in regards to higher education all the time, but it's a much bigger problem. By default, the people with the power to change society peacefully are those who succeeded. Those people who succeeded impede structural change because they know they worked hard and they believe in their own merit. Therefore, those who do not succeed must have done something wrong or otherwise have less merit.

I work very hard. I know, however, that my success in school, my success in work, and my ability to leverage my work into media access cannot be divorced from my class, my gender, and my race. That doesn't mean that I have to feel guilty, but I also can't feel smug and deserving.

Identifying the layers of privilege at work in my life has been good for me. It's given me a sense of purpose in my writing and freed me to take different kinds of stands. It's helped me figure out when to speak and when to listen (always a problem for us talkative white guys, and still something I'm working on). It's pushed me to focus as much class as on race and gender, to push new variables into the equations of privilege.

Here's my main take-away: recognizing privilege means working to undermine it. An equal society is not one in which everyone is, in fact, equal, but in which there is an equality of opportunity.