Abstract

Excerpted From: Adrienne Asch, Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity, 62 Ohio State Law Journal 391 (2001) (86 Footnotes) (Full Document)

[I]ndividuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority who have been . . . subjected to a history of purposeful unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of political powerlessness in our society . . . resulting from . . . assumptions not truly indicative of the . . . ability of such individuals to participate in, and contribute to, society.

These words form part of the findings and purposes section of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the 1990 law that is intended to protect people with disabilities from discrimination in, and promote their access to, employment, governmental services, and public accommodations. In the more than ten years since its passage, the law has been subject to analysis and critique from proponents and detractors as well as significant challenge in the courts.

The writings of many critical race theorists suggest that what disability scholars, activists, and legal advocates find so discouraging in court decisions, lackluster agency enforcement, and public opposition is exactly the institutional response that should be expected. Central to critical race theory (CRT), is the view that racism is not aberrant but rather the natural order of American life. Describing the major points of the theory, Richard Delgado writes “Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture. . . . [[W]hite elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”

There are many valuable messages to be gained from post-civil-rights-era CRT and feminist writing, and thus this essay can examine only a few topics with resonance for disability. To summarize my principal contentions, let me suggest the following: Much of the message of CRT is skeptical about achieving the kind of social transformation that would enable historically excluded groups to achieve and maintain a valued place in American life. The early civil rights strategy of fighting for school integration, integrated neighborhoods, and affirmative action in employment was a strategy that, at best, could help only some people of color to improve their lives. Even for those who could gain material improvements, the dream of integration and a society without racial consciousness itself contained views that endangered the self-esteem and social cohesion of people of color. To the extent that this same message applies to the fight for social change for people with disabilities, I share some of the skepticism about whether the goals are attainable. However, I am not ready to abandon the quest for a society in which human beings are appreciated for abilities and talents, assisted based upon their needs, and where differences in skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and health status are not occasions for exclusionary or pejorative treatment. Like the integrated society discussed by Alan Freeman and the thought experiment of philosopher Richard Wasserstrom, but rejected by critical race theorists such as Gary Peller, I am interested in achieving a society where eyesight is no more consequential for life chances than is eye color. The ideals I espouse here do not commit me to claiming that non-social consequences of being sighted or blind are identical to whether one has blue or brown eyes; however, they do commit me to putting forth an argument about disability and about social justice that appreciates similarities and differences among people with impairments, and between people with impairments and people of other discriminated-against groups.

[. . .]

Judith Butler put the limitations of identity politics bluntly: “You can articulate your identity all you want; you need the damn resources in order to respond to the concrete problems of bodies in pain.” To get the resources, you need to work with others; to care about other bodies in pain, you need to move beyond your own circumstances. . . . The potentially multiple, fluid qualities of any person's identity seem to evaporate in the assertion of a single trait.

The human variation approach to disability and impairment could, if adopted, mute the notion of groups of people with disabilities as contrasted to people without them. If environments become more accepting of more members in the population, perhaps there will be less reason for excluded persons to form groups based on oppression because they will be increasingly welcomed into family, neighborhood, work, and interest groups. If people continue to find an impairment status worthy of embracing as a part of community membership, it could be out of whatever commonalities beyond oppression they find in that status.

Is there something about impaired capacities-less-than-typical hearing, motor coordination, strength, sight, or skill in understanding and communicating through language-that is unimaginably “neutral” or positive, no matter what the society? Philosophers and bioethicists with interests in disability rights are grappling with this question and as yet, I know of no emerging consensus on what remains of disability as a problematic status apart from an unwelcoming society. We are so far from achieving a welcoming society, that it is about as fanciful as the thought experiments of racial identity and meaning discussed by Appiah, Stubblefield, and Wasserstrom above.

For now, I cannot settle on an answer. I think about Gregory Williams's contribution to this symposium, a portion of which concerns his own musings on similarities and differences between race and disability:

I was challenged by a young man confined [sic] to a wheelchair as to whether his life had been harder than mine. I quickly agreed that, given the choice, I would have much preferred receiving the racial epithets hurled at me, the racial violence directed against me, and the doors closed to me because of my racial heritage than to live his life confined to a wheelchair.

I think back to the first time, almost forty years ago, that I read an article questioning whether it was better to be a White, upper-class man who was blind, or to be any man who was Black in the North or South in the pre-Civil Rights Act 1960s. Comparing virulent racism to the limitations he found as a person who was blind, before the movement for Black civil rights had achieved its gains of the 1960s and before most people with disabilities were aware of any efforts to end their second-class status, Peter Putnam wrote:

Blindness is a confining handicap [sic], but it would not confine the boy to the life in the Negro ghettos that are the shame of our cities, North and South. If he had a Seeing Eye dog, he would be excluded for his dog, not for his skin. In blindness, he would know moments of humiliating helplessness [sic], but not so bitter as the practice of Jim Crow, the loss of civil rights, or the experience of police brutality Baldwin describes, not in the South, but in New York City.

Yet blindness is a genuine handicap. Blackness is not. The blind man has lost an important sense. The Negro has all his faculties. The handicap of blindness is intrinsic. The handicap of blackness comes from the outside, imposed by force or the threat of force. The handicap of the American Negro has been the American white.

Putnam concludes his ruminations by saying that we should create a society in which it is “no longer a handicap to be black.”

When I first read those words as a high school student getting involved in the civil rights movement, it seemed to me that it was far easier to be a White, middle-class blind person than to be anyone who was Black. At that time, I had not yet encountered years of employment discrimination and social dismissal that would be part of my adult life. Putnam and myself, as people who are blind, and Gregory Williams, as a person who has self-identified as Black, all were more comfortable with what we knew, with the problems we knew how to fight and survive, than with ones we could only imagine.

Perhaps social constructionists of disability will conclude with Putnam that even in a transformed society where racism, sexism, and disability discrimination are negligible portions of individual and social life, some aspects of life will nonetheless be more difficult or impossible if disabled, and that the human variations of race are easier to accommodate than the variations of differing health or ability. I believe it possible that disability is not entirely reducible to social construction, and that some forms of aesthetic experiences and some sorts of physical activities may be precluded by physiology alone. People who are deaf will not hear music, but they can have the aesthetic experiences of enjoying painting, and those who are blind will not see sunsets, but they can hear birdsongs and oceanwaves; people who use wheelchairs will not run marathons even if they do race in them and cross the finish line before the runners. For now, as we struggle to retain the gains we thought we had won when the ADA became law, as we examine racism and sexism in a post-civil rights world where people of color still earn less than similarly educated Whites, and where women in two-career families still perform more domestic work and childcare than their male partners, we can say that there is much work to do on all fronts. To quote Gregory Williams again on the race/disability comparison:

However the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the issue was not who had the tougher life . . . . The issue was whether either one of our lives had been affected by external factors that should have had absolutely no impact on our ability to live our lives to the fullest extent possible.

Like feminists and CRT writers, I am not interested in changing my race, sex, or health/ability status; we all need to work with others to gain greater equality, more inclusivity, and greater appreciation of the complexity of humanity in all its variability. The goal is to create a society where it is irrelevant to be blind or Black.

Ph.D. Henry R. Luce Professor of Biology, Ethics and the Politics of Human Reproduction, Wellesley College.