So remember the WtB dad in Black.White.? He was obsessed with one aspect of passing for black: the chance to experience firsthand the most famous racist slur of all. He was downright gleeful about the idea. (I’m not sure why he was so eager. Was he planning to whip out his driver’s license and shout, “You can’t say that to me! I’m white!” Was he planning to laugh it off and prove that it wasn’t such a big deal after all? So many possibilities.)
And the BtW guy patiently explained that racism wasn’t that simple. He might not have the, um, opportunity to hear that slur. The racism he would experience would be much more subtle–at least, to a white person–and ubiquitous. A shoe salesman might not want to touch his feet. A woman might clutch her purse as he walked past. A principal might assume that his child didn’t have access to books at home. A teacher might assume his child didn’t like to read. A bank teller might require four forms of identification. He might go all evening without seeing a single person of color on TV–except maybe for the drug dealer Lennie Briscoe shoves into the one-way mirror.
Mundane stress was a term coined to describe the effect of the thousand thousand ways in which people of color are told that they are worth less. It seeks to create a concept of racism and its attendant trauma more sophisiticated than your average Law and Order episode. The theory behind it has since been expanded to cover marginalization of other groups.
Disability-rights advocates have made the same point. Disability hate crimes do happen. People with disabilities are still automatically institutionalized. They are subject to shocking abuse and discrimination. They face hatred, conscious and overt. But they also suffer from ableism in ways that are less dramatic–at least, for someone who doesn’t actually have to deal with ableism. Waiters don’t take their orders. Teachers underestimate them. Public officials ignore them. Authors, screenwriters, dramatists, journalists, and directors (and the people paying their salaries and consuming their work) either ignore or use them. Even things like the height of a toilet seat or the absence of a railing or the width of a corridor are coded scorn–things that may seem minor unless they keep you from shopping, or going to the bathroom, or entering a building. “Little acts of degradation.”
These “little things” together form a toxic atmosphere. In order to combat ableism, potential allies cannot trivialize examples of ableism that seem minor or isolated to able-bodied people, or relegate ableism to some nightmare vision of Bellevue (or Bedlam) rather than locating it in our hometowns. Doing so perpetuates the fantasy that ableism is a limited problem rather than a systemic one, a historical problem rather than a current one, a distant problem rather than an immediate one. To ignore present disparity is to perpetuate it, and to consign the real lives of the people who suffer from it to invisibility.
So I was rather surprised to read this passage in vegankid’s otherwise awesome post on Blog Against Disablism Day:
A teenager comes to realize that they don’t identify with the gender that they were assigned at birth. So they start to change their presentation to match their gender identity. The teenager soon find themselves locked up in a mental institution, labeled as suffering from Gender Identity Disorder or Gender Dysphoria, and being crammed full of so many drugs that they can’t even remember who they are. Society locks them away and attempts to pump them full of enough drugs that they either comply with their gender assignment or they develop a real mental disorder that allows them to be locked up for the rest of their lives. Either way, society doesn’t have to look at a gender-variant child who challenges the binary gender system.
Institutionalization for gendervariance is extremely rare, especially these days. I would venture that it is a lot less common than institutionalization for a disabled person. It does happen, but it’s not the norm. So why describe a scene straight out of Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte? Why describe something so exceptional, when the damage is by no means limited to that extreme?
What does happen all the time? Well, our families disown us, or make us ashamed of who we are–abuse and estrangement are much more common than involuntary committment. We are harassed verbally and physically at school, at work, and on the street. We get beaten up. We get raped. We get ignored. We lose custody of our children. We worry about whether or not we will be able to have children. We fear for our lives and safety. We are denied treatment by doctors, therapists, insurance providers, and the prison system. We are punished for developing the only coping strategies available to us. Bureaucracies of all stripes divert us into the wrong place at the wrong time. We have to lie to our doctors in order to receive responsible care, or go without care altogether. We get fired and denied employment. We face housing discrimination. We cannot use shelters or treatment programs. We cannot use public bathrooms. We cannot obtain accurate identification. We hear joke after joke after joke after joke. We exist on teevee only to murder or get murdered. We kill ourselves. We get killed. Our parents blame themselves for us.
Some of these threats are obviously deadly. Some of them are “little things.” Most of them are mundane. Most of them are not necessarily hateful, but the result of a simple lack of understanding on the part of the straight world: a failure to think. They occur in situations that might otherwise feel comfortable and harmless, in places as supposedly safe as home or as boring as the DMV. Fighting discrimination, more often than not, isn’t about confronting our archetype of monstrous evil. It doesn’t take an army of doctors wielding syringes and straitjackets to kill someone who’s already vulnerable–let alone make them miserable.
hey piny,
you’re probably right. i should have chosen an example that is much more common place. But institutionalization does still happen, as you pointed out. In fact, it happened to a good friend of mine. I sorta purposely chose an extreme example to show 1)how ableism affects trans people, and 2)to show an outrageous example of ableism. Granted, i wrote this post without reading over it or editing it and in retrospect it would probably have made for a better example to choose something that is much more common place for us (in fact, it probably would have been best to choose something from persynal experience). But as i told Bitch | Lab once, i have a tendancy to use provocative language when it may have been best to do otherwise. Something i need to work on still. So thanks for calling me out on it. And thanks for this great post.
You make a really good point about how we must not portray ableism as isolated or individualist (so true!). That’s also why i tried to link trans issues with people with disability issues. I’m a firm believer that we are largely disabled by society, not so much by our physical or mental capabilities. I’m hoping that looking at how Queer people were and how trans people still are “disabled” by labeling us as mentally ill will help people to realize that others who are labeled as “invalid” are merely being disabled by an ableist society. Does that make any sense at all?
I think that possibly the reason for that level of emphasis, is that these days, when someone is institutionalized for gender-variance (and I’ve seen, in recent years, people institutionalized for pregnancy, so a lot of the things people think are things of the past… disturbingly enough, aren’t), then if the trans community hears about it (which of course isn’t always possible) there’s an outcry.
I noticed that in my local bookstore, The Last time I Wore a Dress was flagged as an “employee’s choice” book. Judging from the comments on the employee’s choice card, what was so shocking about the book was not what happened to the author, but the fact that the author was “only” in there for gender-variance. It’s a great book, and it’s an important book, and I don’t want to diminish in any way the horrors of what goes on in those situations. I have a friend who was given a copy of it and won’t even read it because she was locked up for “maladjustment to the feminine role” as a teen, and it’s too close to home for her.
But there’s a tendency, and I see this not only in feminist and trans circles, but in many other circles as well, to make it more of a horror to be institutionalized for being certain things, than for being disabled.
Dave Hingsburger wrote once about a scandal in Canada in which children who were originally judged “mentally retarded” were suddenly judged “not really mentally retarded,” and there was a huge outcry because of the beatings, abuse, and rape at the institution they were at. The outcry was not because these things occurred, but because they happened to people who were not “mentally retarded”.
When I was in the process of coming out as a lesbian, I went to my local LGBT community center. In the course of conversation, they found out I’d been institutionalized at one point. There was an audible gasp, and then, “You mean for being a lesbian?????”
I didn’t want to answer, because I knew what their reaction would be, and I was right. When they found out I was merely autistic, then the same woman breathed a sigh of relief and said something like, “Oh, well, that makes sense.”
Which, along with many similar experiences, meant I never really connected with the LGBT community as much as I wanted to. It was very clear to me that various atrocities were okay to them as long as they weren’t being done in the name of someone being lesbian, gay, bi, or trans. I even had much worse statements made to me, ones that made it clear that I might not even be physically safe around these people, and I backed off and stopped showing up.
But, the point that I just went on a bunch of rambles about, is that it’s possible, even unconsciously, to make it “worse” to be locked up and mistreated for being gender-variant, or pregnant, or a lesbian, than for being disabled or in some category that is currently labeled “mental illness”. And it’s also possible to be afraid to describe what happened to you or people you know in the name of some “real” disability, and thus reach for the examples that more people would agree are ludicrous. (I sometimes am afraid, myself, to discuss certain things that are done to us, as disabled people, because so often the expected but painful slap I get is something on the order of “But if it’s for that, it’s okay.”)
And, I don’t know if that’s what was going on in the post being described, in fact I can’t even venture to read that poster’s mind on the subject, but it does seem to happen a lot.
balla – you’re very right. There are multiple levels to ableism and even those that face ableism to some extend (like trans folks) don’t necessarily make the connection or give a shit about people who face ableism but are deemed “actually disabled”. As if it ok to fuck people over for certain traits but not others. That’s fucked. Hell, that’s ableism.
Actually, if he’s watching Lennie rough up the dealer, he probably also saw Ed Green, Lennie’s black partner and Anita Van Buren, Ed & Lennie’s black, female, boss.
In way, this is worse. The Powers That Be in the entertainment biz throw a few folks of color into the mix, pat themselves on the back for being so progressive, and then go right back to serving up huge helpings of the Patriarchy. Meanwhile, as piny linked to, real change takes a giant step backward.
My husband used ot work with mentally disabled people, and he said that although he already knew that it was wrong to treat people like retards, he hadn’t realized until then that it was wrong to treat *retarded* people like retards. Not that he ever would have, because he is unfailingly polite. But he also discovered that many people, and not such old people either, had been put in the class of “retarded persons” because of some other disability, such as deafness or blindness.
As to being treated less than fairly because of gender variance, that’s happened to me, and I’m not even gender variant. I just don’t look, sound, walk, etc. like a “normal” woman, and hey, that’s enough for some people. Not that I will ever know what it’s *really* like.
[...] eople call me on my shit. So thanks to piny over at feministe for this post, which responds to my recent Blog Against Disablism Day post. Institu [...]
An old article in Bitch magazine made the same point about the Richard Gere line in Pretty Woman: “I never treated you like a prostitute.” How sweet!
I hope I didn’t sound as though I was recommending or condoning institutionalization for “those people.” As you say, I wanted to make a point about describing injury in ways that don’t play into what people seem to see as acceptable–or what they cannot see at all.
I remember pretty much the same thing. There’s a sort of “What century are we in, anyway?” air to the reviews I’ve encountered, but the focus is on outdated attitudes towards gendervariance, period. I read TLTIWAD years and years ago, but I remember it being strikingly similar to accounts of institutionalization by people whose incarceration “made sense” and is still status quo. Loss of privacy? Isolation? Dehumanization? Senseless rules? Crushing tedium? Institutional squalor and paucity? “Wallet biopsies”? Overt warehousing as opposed to anything that might pass for treatment? You bet!
Oooh, ooh! I’m white and I got to hear that word in a discussion among my co-workers on my last day of work last week, which served as a reminder about why I left that job. It was relating to a rude customer, but the topic quickly shifted to how many of “those people” are moving out here (here=on the list of the top ten most conservative cities in the US) and how one co-worker’s daughter behavior has changed for the worse ever since she lived among “them.”
None of these people would have ever said anything like that to the man’s face, of course. Ever.
Reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s commentary on the producers of the Earthsea miniseries – they were proud of themselves for having a “diverse” cast which included a few token dark-skinned people and a half-Asian character in the overwhelmingly white cast… while only a few characters in the original novel were white. And the book was written in the 1960s, whereas the movie was made in 2004.
Not long ago, a black co-worker of mine asked me if white people still used “The N-word.” After pausing to think about it, I told him no–at least, not in POLITE society. In most circles, people find the word abhorrent. But unfortunately, what a few people say in public and what they joke about with each other in private are two radically different things. Worse yet, I told him, most of the racist sentiment has been driven underground and, precisely because it WAS shunned by polite society, become that much more popular in private.
It shamed me to have to tell him that. But I’m afraid it’s still true, even today.
Which always raises the question for me – in this kind of metaconversation about any other group, we’d comfortably use derogatory language *that we’re discussing*. We talk about the use of words like kike and chink and gook and so on – and the same in non-racial contexts. Yet, in that same kind of metaconversation, for whatever reason, we have to replace the word “nigger” with “The N-Word”. Why is that?
Piny,
My question is about the first quarter of your post: is it racism if you don’t see any minority media professionals?
I ask b/c I wrote an anti-Huffington Post about it, but I’m not sure where I stand. In the end I excused her.
I’d like to hear your thoughts since you seem to understand the possibility of a ‘subtle’ racial alienation
My post is here.
I try not to use those words, either, although I’ve quoted them as I do here. I feel perfectly comfortable using in ironic or mocking contexts slurs that do apply or have applied to me–freak, fag, etc, although I’ve become more cautious with those that apply to queer women. And, honestly, it’s never made me uncomfortable to see non-queer people using those words as clear ventriloquism; I know that Amanda, for example, is complaining about homophobia, not exhibiting it. To the extent that “the n-word” is a lone euphemism, it could well be for the reason that it is seen as worse than other racist slurs.
[...] osted by piny @ 1:16 pm
Eteraz brought up a post of his up for discussion in the comments thread on Mundane Stress. My post spent some time discussing invi [...]
You know, I’ve always observed that I tended to experience more oblique racism (or, in my case, anti-semitism), when people assumed that I wasn’t part of the “target” group. I’m Jewish, but I don’t “look jewish” (whatever that means), with my blonde hair and blue eyes and pale freckled skin. Oh, and my extremely scotch-protestant last name throws people off as well (and no, I didn’t convert, my grandfather on my dad’s side was scottish – and was disowned for marrying my orthodox jewish grandmother).
So…back to the story. I come from an area of NY that has a pretty significant jewish population, so growing up, it was the norm for me. But then I went to my freshman orientation in upstate NY, and I was talking to a new classmate of mine about our high schools, and he said…”yeah, most of the kids in my school are really ‘jewish’”. I looked at him, not quite knowing what he meant, because he had already mentioned that he attended a private catholic school, asked him to clarify, and he said…”jewish, you know, cheap“.
Man, I lit into him like there was no tomorrow. And the thing is, as sheltered as his upbringing was, I honestly believe he had no idea that what he said was offensive (Dude became so left-wing by the time we graduated that he ended up running the international socialist organization on campus). But I guarantee he would have known better than to say something of the sort had he “known” that I was jewish.
I suppose in some ways it’s been a benefit to me that I can “pass”, not that I’ve ever tried to hide it, but it’s disturbing, as someone who is assumed to be part of the dominant culture, just how much people who think they’re among their own let down their own guard and exhibit such bigotry.