The Bigotry Threshold

Not too long ago, my school made national news as part of an altercation at a basketball game which culminated in anti-Semitic chants. The other team began chanting “You killed Jesus” in response to my school’s yelling “Sausage fest” and “Where are your girls?” (That school is Catholic and all-boys; mine is largely Jewish.) Since then, there has been an outbreak of graffiti, mainly swastikas, in our school bathrooms, that has the administration up in arms. Although I’ve heard that fans and players at the game did not take this particularly seriously, the news media has seized upon it and the students here (and at the other high school) are receiving daily lectures and entreaties to crack down on this behavior. Some people judge it not as big a deal as it has been made out to be, while others insist that the Catholic school “crossed a line” when its fans threw an anti-Semitic insult.

The interesting thing about lines and who crosses them and how dastardly that is is that it’s entirely subjective, of course--but not only do lines mean different things for different people, the lines drawn by different people garner different amounts of credibility and respect. People insist that “sausage fest” was not meant to have homophobic connotations, but even if that’s so, my school has a troubling record of shouting highly problematic chants at sports games, usually racist. At matches against schools with mostly students of color, my school reportedly began chanting “Build a wall” at one game and “Go back to Africa” at another. How many lines do those chants cross? We can’t suppose that the schools victimized by our bigotry were not drawing lines that we crossed blithely. But our racist transgressions warranted no PSA announcements, no special meetings or  class discussions. Sports games aside, there were viciously sexist and violent graffiti and online responses to projects run by the feminism club at my school, and racist comments appeared online in relation both to yet another sports game and also to the Black Culture Day my school hosts. There is also a seething undercurrent of Islamophobia, and earlier this year some students made enormously offensive posts online about a girl who wears full Islamic face and head coverings.

None of this made national media. It didn’t even result in soul-searching or lectures on our behavior and the strength and tolerance levels of our school community. But when anti-Semitism joins the fray, it’s a five-alarm fire. It’s unacceptable bigotry all of a sudden. Perhaps it’s good that we are (purportedly) tackling our prejudice issues openly, but that it took this long raises uncomfortable questions about whose right to feel safe and valued is most prized, and about whether this upsurge of discussion about our Problems will yield any permanent or institutional change. My experience with the public school system here is that cosmetic reforms are usually considered adequate, if that. By state law we are mandated to talk about and supposedly address bullying, but certainly I have not noticed that either the students or school administration actually respond particularly well to incidents of bullying. And racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, etc.--are these not just bullying on a massive, systemic scale, both internalized and externalized?

There's also the possibility that steps are being taken now (if they truly are) to address this mostly because our reputation suddenly seems marred, as we at once rise to prominence as the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism. When the spotlight turns towards us and finds we might look bad--and, clearly,  when white people fall under fire--then and only then does the school open up a conversation about bigotry.

A student in my Italian class--the only class where we had a comprehensive (and very interesting) conversation about these recent going-ons--suggested that the anti-Semitism raises such an uproar because for many students here, it is literally the only identity they possess that could fall under attack, and they are unused to feeling in the minority. As one classmate said, “They aren’t exactly going to yell ‘your school cost $200 million’ or ‘you all drive Mercedes.’” Our wealth and privilege insulate many of us from ever experiencing discrimination or hatred, and also provide a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions when it is we who are shouting obscenities and giving offense.

The lines we draw, because we have the privilege and the power to sound alarms when they are crossed, stand out starkly while the lines other schools must draw when my school shouts “build a wall” are not granted any visibility or respect. The power to judge wrongdoing--though rarely our own--is yet another privilege restricted to certain social strata. We reserve the right both to cross lines with impunity and to scream when ours are crossed.

Of course, one final component that ought not to  be left out of this conversation is the uncomfortable reality that anti-Semitism, above all other forms of bigotry, has the potential to strike up far more fervor and outrage in my community because defensiveness runs so very high around any issues that pertain to criticisms of Judaism. Pro-Israel Zionists have largely hijacked the concept of anti-Semitism to mean any possible slight towards not just Jews but Israel as well, rendering the word so highly charged that any accusations of it strike a different and much more responsive nerve than accusations of racism or sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia. This has less to do with the gravity of the hatred that people experience due to any of these “ism”--since I am not making the argument that one form of oppression or prejudice hurts worse than another--than with the conditioned responses that are embedded in my community when it comes to issues that could possibly invoke the specter of Israel. It is an alarming phenomenon that the entrenched bigotry in our schools is brought to light only when the seethe of prejudice coincides both with white privilege and one of our political hair-trigger issues. If we have to wait for wealthy and white people to feel threatened or hurt before they acknowledge that the bigotry thresholds have long been crossed, before we can hope to see any institutional soul-searching or change, then we won’t likely be seeing a great deal of either.

A Responsibility of Privilege

There is a component to combating subtle or well-intentioned manifestations of prejudice--microaggressions--which doesn’t seem to come up in dialogue so often. Most of the conversations I’ve had about microaggressions--especially with my family, most of whom will never experience any kind of “ism” or microaggression stemming from it--end on a more sour note than I would appreciate, but it is these interactions that are crucial, in their way. Since microaggressions, as my brother points out, are micro, they are easier to dismiss as a sort of unfortunate but insignificant side effect of the bigger problems we should be spending our time on. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that dealing with microaggressions is the sole domain of the people at whom microaggressions are directed, and not really anyone else’s problem. But I would argue that it is the responsibility as well of allies and people whose identity is not questioned or misrepresented or misunderstood to stand up to even the small comments, the ones we think we can let slide.

Simply speaking, many microaggressions are not even addressed to the people whom they hurt and about whom they make assumptions. Many are spoken between members of privileged social groups, and if these people do not make an effort to call out prejudiced language when they hear it, they are quietly condoning the way of thinking for which microaggressions represent the tip of the iceberg. That in itself spawns more aggression, because if microaggressions aren’t challenged by anyone but the people they directly hurt, then the aggressor--even an unintentional and usually not bigoted one--may not be convinced that there is sufficient pushback to really examine their words and actions.

Privileged voices may be among the most powerful factors in swaying the behavior of other privileged people. And such activism, within circles of privilege, is critical for being more than a passive ally--being an accomplice instead, as Nakisha Lewis of New York City Black Lives Matter said at an assembly at my school recently (accomplices being more active and deeply invested than allies, who never put themselves on the line and have less of a stake in the struggle). To weed out bigotry, you must make the effort to extirpate wherever you can the attitudes that make life more difficult, restricted, and dangerous for people less privileged than you. Since privileged groups are the ones who commit microaggressions, by and large, it is up to the members of those groups to regulate their language and actions and be aware of others’, not only in direct interactions with people in a minority group but also in conversations in privileged spaces.

It can be hard to know what to say. It’s hard to criticize or call out or even gently nudge someone who has said something that you know is predicated on false assumptions, stereotypes, fear, or ignorance. There are times when I didn’t step in during situations when I could have--when I’ve overheard casual homophobia, for example, or when a girl I know described someone she knew as “ghetto.” Sometimes it’s just our own inertia or apathy standing in the way of speaking up; sometimes it’s other obstacles. It’s hard especially if you are not the person with the most authority or who stands to lose from pointing out their prejudice. For example, it’s harder to explain why my parents or my doctor or an adult has said something problematic than it is to do so with someone of my own age, in general.

But there are always conversations to have, always points to make, always awareness you can bring. When my mother mentioned to my doctor that I had been walking around Roxbury and Dorchester--largely working-class areas of greater Boston  inhabited by people of color--I cringed as she and the doctor expressed their incredulity and shock, laughed uncomfortably, and seemed to imply that I was either stupid or brave to have dared to walk in neighborhoods outside my privileged one. I didn’t know what to say to them, and I was deeply uncomfortable with the implications of their reactions. I could have said, “Wait, slow down. What are you implying? I think you’re operating on stereotypes and it’s not fair to the people who live in Roxbury and Dorchester to believe that I would be automatically be unsafe there…” or something to that effect. To not accuse, but to try to first understand what they really are saying and then guide the conversation towards less offensive territory.

Other times, I have tried to stand up. At a political event in Boston, one of my adult activist friends watched a woman walk by wearing both a hijab and niqab--only her eyes uncovered--and then said she was fine with the headscarf, but disapproved of Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab. I took a breath and said that I supported any woman’s choice to wear what she wanted. I wasn’t sure my friend believed that wearing religious coverings was a choice--the all-Muslim-women-must-be-oppressed narrative--but she humphed and said, “Well, fine, but you wouldn’t catch me wearing one.” I said, “Well, no one’s asking you to.” It’s not her experience to ever live, so it’s not her place to criticize how others choose to live it.

The strange concept that other people’s choices with which we don’t agree somehow threaten us can be, often, the impetus behind prejudiced behavior. The corollary to that, of course, is that those of us whom society validates as correct and moral and superior may express that privilege--the privilege of being the default--as refusing to accept other backgrounds and ways of life, and feel that different lifestyles represent an attack on ours. It seems absurd, that my queerness could threaten your straightness, that women’s rights could subjugate men, or that someone’s religion could make you react defensively as if you were in danger of oppression. The irony, of course, is that people who are othered by the Western world and corporatist society are not the ones with the power to oppress those people who benefit from the status quo, yet some still fear its demise.

It’s hard to know if people with privilege calling out other people with privilege makes serious inroads into dismantling oppressive institutions. But we do know that if we aren’t willing to take up the mantle of activism everywhere we go, whether we are interacting with people of similar or different experiences, in places where we need to sit down and listen or places where we need to stand up and speak out--then it is akin to only cutting down a plant without trying to dig up the roots, which will keep producing new shoots of bigotry. Fighting racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, classism, etc. does not stop when you return to your privilege bubble. Indeed, it festers there deeply, perhaps with the veneer of progressive respectability, and it is there that it warrants a more concentrated attack than it usually receives. And that attack has to come from the privileged people. Because the microaggressions that look so small don’t affect them, they don’t feel they have to engage. But it’s not up to people who are victimized by prejudices to be the ones to call them out every single time. It must be part of the work of activists with privilege to identify and tackle bigotry--macroaggressive and microaggressive--in their own communities, relationships, and lives.

The School System's War on Thinking

For the last several weeks of my English class, the subject of our learning and analysis has been school itself: how we are educated and how we are not, how schooling is destructive--from the very ideological foundations on which it rests to the privilege echo chamber of elite colleges.

All of the suspicions or beliefs I have long held were reconfirmed, though in all honesty the institutional conspiracy of the US educational system is wider than I’d even realized. I wrote back in September on this blog that “the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn.” What I’ve always chafed against in the school system is more expansive than I knew. What I was writing about is neither new nor unique, and, though I did not know it, already the target of shrewd reformers.

Paolo Freire, a Brazilian reformer whose essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” was one of the texts read in my English class, touches upon a phenomenon I noticed: as I put it, “We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.” Freire contends that this style of teaching is predicated on a theory, a concept of education that takes students and “turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” This method of education as “an act of depositing” makes reality “motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”--thus rendering it impossible to teach history with nuance or context. Perhaps, when my teachers teach history as if it were suspended in formaldehyde, with no connection to the present or future, they are suffering less from personal ignorance than unchallenged deep allegiance to a dehumanizing and dysfunctional method of so-called education.

One of the questions I posed in September is particularly telling: “Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think?” I tended to place the blame on students who chose not to think, who chose to obey. I would like to amend that. What is more important to realize is that thinking is not the point of school. We delay the time when--if ever--we will have to really think because the entire educational system is designed to keep us from thinking.  

John Taylor Gatto, in another of the essays we read, “Against School,” traces the genesis of the hyper-controlled, dehumanized educational system to the model taken from militaristic Prussia in the early 20th century. The goals of educating children within a militaristic machine are many, and alarming: mainly, to subvert the potential democracy and unity of the poorer classes of US society (part of the many efforts to keep that mass of people from enlightenment and uprising, to stunt their social consciousness and activism so as to protect the power of the elite--job quite well done). Gatto also references Alexander Inglis’s concept of school as a six-pronged machine with various “functions,” among which are developing habits of submission to authority, cultivating conformity, and funneling different kids to different career paths or lack of them. It’s all in the interest of creating a mass labor force for the corporatocracy, and keeping education to a minimum. As Gatto puts it, our schools are “laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.”

No wonder teenagers are faced constantly with disparagement. I have had teachers who call the students boneheads or who remark flippantly that “there is nothing any of you could say that would interest me,” but beyond obvious disregard for our intelligence, there is what YA fiction author A.S. King calls “systemic psychological hazing” which teenagers undergo in our “laboratories of experimentation,” our schools. We are trained through humiliation and disrespect that we are immature and pathetic, and as soon as we scurry up to the next level of almost-adulthood, we had better start looking down at the kids below us and ridiculing them. King says, “It’s in the mindset now—in our DNA. I see college students rolling their eyes at high school students, and graduates of both rolling their eyes at all beneath them. It’s a cycle of condescension and alienation. It didn’t always used to be like this. We’re eating ourselves.”

Why this internalized ageism? One reason, I believe, is the bizarre hierarchical importance age has been given in the educational system. Instead of teaching children as a group and allowing them to learn from each other regardless of age, as many non-Western cultures might or even the US did in the days of one-room schoolhouses, kids are cordoned into grades based on age, and largely seem to not cross those borders. Kids even one year older seem like towering giants, and the younger ones are just so little and pathetic and immature. It gives legitimacy to the work of the machine and its functions, dividing us and molding us, because if we believe that where and how we are now is wrong, we will gladly scurry along and look down at whoever we are told to look down on. It helps enforce a hierarchy instead of a mindset in which seeking help or even company from someone of a different assigned rank than you is discouraged. It helps entrench in us a dog-eat-dog mindset in which lateral cooperation is repudiated in favor of climbing social and power ladders. It’s a side effect of the production-line mentality, assembling children as fodder for the corporatocracy. Given the tolls this takes and the ways we are breaking, the surreality of our bomb-threatened and doublespeak-laden schools, but do we even comprehend what this system is really producing?

I wrote earlier that mine is “a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path.” But that same system operates on all socioeconomic levels, just with varying levels of gilding and militarism. The functions of school to produce phalanxes of identical products ready for use become clearer and more brutal the greater the distance from the softly glowing privilege bubble.

Farther down the privilege ladder, the idea of social mobility becomes more and more a bitter farce. One of Inglis’s functions states that schools serve to sift through their students and determine just how far they will be allowed to progress. The majority of kids, above all inner-city minorities, are groomed for menial labor in the same social stratum they came from. As Jonathan Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” examines, segregated schools have entrenched themselves ever deeper while white liberal society wants to consider itself postracial, and the kids in these still-segregated, still-neglected schools are being trained with appallingly militaristic methods of discipline to never exceed their social station or threaten the corporate status quo. These crumbling schools are not places for education, but are rather assembly lines, which break apart and rebuild children as effective robots, where somewhere far above, their wealthier counterparts are trained in a vastly different style, for a different purpose.

Since both history and the present are narrated by those with the power and the airwaves, the work of deliberate inequality remains out of sight and out of mind. The amount of freedom allotted to kids in schools increases in proportion to their wealth. This isn’t to say that privileged schools truly foster an environment in which thinking is encouraged or real knowledge gained, but the function of education according to Inglis for people like me, in higher socioeconomic strata, skews more towards grooming us to assume the reins of this massive corporate matrix.

This takes its toll. We may be high-value banks entrusted with larger denominations of bills, but we are still fundamentally not people in the eyes of the educational system. Perhaps the goal is to train us to act enough like people that by the time we graduate we will be very good candidates for jobs in which humanity is questionable but power is a necessity--politics, corporate officialdom, etc. I have the requisite academic intelligence, excellent memory, and more or less neurotypical ways of processing information and regurgitating it, so I have learned to play this system perfectly. The farther I get and the more honors classes I prove myself capable of taking, though, the more I lose motivation and any remnants of the belief that any of this is worthwhile.

The other day my friends and I were asking a deck of tarot cards questions about our lives and souls and such, and when the deck was asked to describe my past, present, and future, I received the card “stagnation” for my present state. I quipped, “Well, I am stuck in the educational system right now,” which does feel like stagnation. Sometimes I do think it’s all a mind trick that I can’t handle anymore--trying to convince myself that what I’m “learning” will be applicable and helpful in the rest of my schooling and beyond, and that there really is a point to shelling out all that college money. Bitter, jaded, and exhausted, I end up believing that my educational experience has largely been a series of inanities, indignations, absurdities, anxieties, and yes, stagnation. Why? I like to learn. I love facts and unusual words and logic and reading and writing and analyzing history. But school isn’t teaching me how to think, except by accident, when I became frustrated enough to understand that none of this inanity and slogging through testing and ennui was actually making me better-rounded, happier, or even smarter.

We’re living in an absurd matrix, whose dysfunctions seem to be in the same mold as those of the war on drugs: it’s not that the system isn’t working, it’s that it’s working all too well with terrible fallout. We are the fallout, my generation. Those who came before us are also victims of the industrial school system, but we stand at a point more crucial than ever, when we need to be educated more than ever, when we need to be thinking--and we’re not. Sometimes we are, but we’re not supposed to be. We know we’re suffering; we know we’re ridiculously stressed and that there’s ridiculous privilege and wealth disparity in our society. But the big picture, the insidious whole, is hard to see from inside, and even harder to dismantle.  

It goes far beyond individuals, either students or teachers. Creating individuals is not the goal of schooling any more than is teaching us to think. Even in my September blog post, I acknowledged, “The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance.” Who knew that a class within a school within this system would actually come to teach about this enemy, to help us identify how and why we are being controlled and screwed over? (How many of my classmates will believe or realize the gravity of what they’re reading?)

I’m grateful to have taken this class, but the ironies are plenty, as well as the epiphanies. In order to take a class in which I feel that the students are actually thinking, actually analyzing and applying arguments and theories to our own lives and the world around us, I had to be a top-level, masochistic student willing to take on the pressure and course load of an AP English class. That it’s at the AP level only that this curriculum is offered ensures that the students taking it will be mostly white or Asian, on the wealthier side of things, extremely driven, and equipped with the support (emotional or academic) to take such a demanding class. Even in this best of classes I’ve taken, it is serving the function of divide and conquer: as I wrote in September, “Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to.” There are kids in my class who admit that they took it only because of those two little letters, AP, and there are friends of mine who declare their lower-level classes insults to their intelligence, but are daunted by the course load of an AP English class. This is a very tricky and very clever strategy: reserving the few classes where thinking might actually take place as the domain of students who have proved themselves so successful within the system that thinking might be a habit so unfamiliar that they are at little risk of developing it.

More Twisting of Imperial History

Forget the debate about whether the United States is a demonic empire today--maybe the question is whether we ever really were. Were I to accept what I was taught in history class today, I would believe that the US flirted with imperialism and then rejected it, scurrying back to a kind isolationism. “Oh, we’re going to expand… oh, we don’t like this,” my teacher said, imitating the US supposedly shying away from empire after running up against Filipino resistance at the turn of the century. He also described the US shift to being an imperial power as happening overnight, just in the course of the Spanish-American War. I pointed out that we had been meddling in Hawaii and had overthrown their government years before that. He acknowledged that point, but reiterated: “Still, I think it is overnight.” 

Not only is history taught in a vacuum relative to the present day, is it now comprised of a string of surprising and unrelated incidents without causes or effects? The US did not wake up and decide to become an imperial power one bright morning in 1898. There are precedents (Hawaii, for one) and ideologies wrapped around every action we’ve ever taken. What was the purpose of all those cause-and-effect charts we used to make, if not to teach us that understanding context is critical? When did we unlearn that?

Another aspect of this problem is to treat historical events as inevitabilities, as though whatever mysterious forces propelled our policies were inexorable and nonnegotiable. “After World War II they had to stay expanded, they had no choice,” said my teacher. This statement trails with it the idea of the US as the reluctant superpower, humbly fulfilling the hegemonic duty we didn’t ask for. In World War I “Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy,” but apparently we decided afterwards that “we don’t like being a world power.” However, isolationist sentiment within a country--the Anti-Imperialist League in the early twentieth century, for example--does not translate to a government policy opposed to imperialism. You’d think if it were the case that we disliked being a world power, we could have done something to remedy that horrible state. You’d think the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary, the Washington Consensus, and our long record of intervening in other people’s affairs might imply that we actually enjoyed and took steps to entrench our world-power role. 

Also, I might make note of the fact that “making the world safe for democracy” is not an outdated or repudiated reason for making war. In Grenada, in Panama, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, isn’t that what we were supposedly trying to do?

The problems with the narrative of history we’re being taught are often insidious and so quiet, because intertwined with US-as-reluctant-superpower rhetoric are, admittedly, criticisms of US policy. Telling just enough of the story behind the curtain allows the impression that this narrative of history is not only accurate but bold or revisionist, when it’s really still quite adherent to the status quo. My teacher can mention that in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary, the US quite often invaded and occupied Latin American countries and conducted regime change, but that criticism leaves much unsaid. He named three countries we wronged with invasions or occupations--Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua--but the US has meddled with or overthrown the governments of every country in Latin America, some multiple times. Nor is this imperial behavior in that region a thing of the past--in 2009, the US was involved in supporting a coup against democratically elected president Zelaya in Honduras. 

But the subtle power of language changes the story: the US invades in Latin America to “stabilize” governments and replace ones that weren’t “in our best interests.” There are reasons to be tactful or not appear too biased when teaching history--but this isn’t teaching history. It’s blurring it. It’s creating false equivalencies and shaky but unquestioned narratives. It’s elective amnesia--but because of the military style our education system practices, we as students are required to accept and regurgitate information without measuring its levels of truth. The indoctrinators pass on their preferred state of amnesia to the next generation, and both the obliteration of history and the contextless interpretations of the present continue.

Recognizing the Legacy of US Imperialism

In many ways, the rise of US imperialism in the 1890s is as much our origin story as is the often-recounted and glorified Revolutionary War. Imperialism is a less shiny tale, less given to celebration, but in the oft-forgotten episodes of imperial violence (such as the overthrow of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and the brutalizing of the Philippines) are the roots of current US foreign policy and the first seeds of a mentality that would spawn so much blowback. 
 
Given the historical importance and present-day relevance, it is crucial that imperialism be taught well and thoroughly in schools. Yet my textbook calls the coup that deposed Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii a “revolution,” and states that she “yielded her authority,” not that she was subverted, betrayed, and overthrown. My history class discusses imperialism in some kind of strange vacuum--we recognize that McKinley’s humanitarian-esque rationales for conquest are facades, and we talked about the hypocrisy of the Anti-Imperialist League’s disavowal of the Philippines war but not of the genocide of Indigenous people in the US. What we don’t talk about--what history curricula seem to have a curious amnesia for--is the legacy of imperialism. Does it not warrant shock that not only was the Philippines not granted the independence we promised during the war, but we kept possession of them until 1946? Should we not talk about how the empire has sprawled, stretched, and expanded to cover the globe? How imperial overthrows of foreign governments are by no means a thing of the past (within the last several years alone, we’ve helped depose governments in Honduras, Libya, Ukraine, just to name three off the top of my head)? How the combination of Manifest Destiny, the Turner thesis, A.T. Mahan’s push for sea power, the Monroe Doctrine/Roosevelt Corollary, and Social Darwinism congealed into the toxic stew of rationales and self-righteousness that uphold our imperial foreign policy? How our “current issues” are always worsening reprises of mistakes we’ve made before and situations that we only seem to exacerbate?

It's always struck me as ironic that despite every war-hawk battle cry that urges us to remember a time we were presumably wronged--from Remember the Maine to Remember Pearl Harbor--we are so memory-challenged when it comes to remembering the wrongs we've inflicted on others, and understanding how they might be coming back to bite us.
 
The idea that the US is an empire still receives pushback from those who want to or do believe that we are a democracy with good intentions and a healthy respect for international law, or who simply dislike the connotations of the term empire. By definition, we are an empire, intervening in affairs not directly tangent to ours and subjugating people at whim, and maintaining dramatic military reach through nearly every point of the world, thanks to our 1000 or so military bases in other people’s countries (as well as our actual remaining colonies). But we don’t learn about this in the school-sanctioned discussion of imperialism. Today my history teacher described how the US double-crossed Emilio Aguinaldo in the Philippines, promising liberation and then brutally subjugating his country. “Do you feel proud of your country?” he asked us, mildly mocking. I doubt we did. But because imperialism is relegated to a distant time period when it was the thing in vogue--come on, everyone was doing it!--it’s hard for us to understand just how proud we should not be. If we don’t condone the Philippines War, then by all means let’s extend that criticism to the modern-day fruits of the exact same policies in play back then.

The Invisible Ism

Of all the vocabulary I’ve gathered and ability I’ve acquired to discuss systemic oppression, there are a couple of forms of oppression or discrimination that I’ve noticed receive less or almost no attention. By referring to them as invisible, I don’t mean that we can’t tell that they exist or that their effects are minor or inconsequential, but that they are easily overlooked or erased in discussions about combating injustice and in purportedly progressive spaces. Society collectively disregards the validity and experiences of people who are victimized by these isms, one of which I want to explore in this post: ableism.  

The definition of ableism that I’m working with is as follows: a form of structural oppression--the intertwining of prejudice and systems of power--that produces an entire system of thinking and acting that harms and discriminates against disabled people (as well as people presumed to have disabilities).  

*

            Rereading old writing of mine is always a treacherously cringeworthy experience. Invariably, interspersed with the occasional nugget of surprising astute middle-school observations will be sentences, descriptions, or words that I wish I had had the sense not to use.

            I am conscious that my writing as it is now still probably doesn’t avoid ableist language, but it is particularly striking to me that as an eighth-grader, I was both aware and completely ignorant of the issues I was trying to discuss. I wrote a story that touched on characters with autism, mental illness, and other chronic illnesses in fairly heavy-handed or inconsiderate ways. I was not trying to be ableist--I didn’t even know what that meant--and would have said I was trying to be positive or respectful about people with disabilities, which clearly didn’t work out. Part of the problem was my ignorance of issues around disability, which led me to try to constantly “justify” my character’s depression and suicidality by making her an increasingly tragic figure experiencing every misfortune I could think of. And part of it was internalized societal ideas about disability that I had no idea I’d adopted.

It was especially unnerving because I wrote a character quite like myself into my story, and there’s a scene when she’s explaining her medical problems to another character, and the thing she emphasizes most emphatically is that she is not “handicapped,” and seems terrified of being perceived as such. This disavowal isn’t something I can recall ever doing myself--at least not so vociferously. I do have to wonder, though, just how much anti-disability sentiment percolated into my subconscious before I became aware of it.

To identify as a person with disabilities (mainly chronic autoimmune disorders) is something I struggle with--how to do it, whether to do it at all, whether my chronic illnesses “qualify” me as disabled enough. As a kid, I was shy and loathed attention, and tried my hardest to fit in with the people around me. I hated that the school nurse had to come to my classroom twice a day to check in with me, that I was often late to lunch or class and attracted attention by coming in late. I hated that I couldn’t eat what I wanted and sometimes couldn’t participate in activities or had to miss school. I understood that the media did not reflect or represent people like me, and clung to the few books that did, even in flawed or unrealistic ways. I tried to include characters with my experiences in the stories I wrote (and managed to problematically represent myself even so, apparently). I had some encounters with ableism--doctors convinced I would not be able to manage my medical conditions alone in middle school, other kids’ rude interrogations, adults’ deliberate misunderstanding, TSA officials at airport security harassing me over whether my medical devices were actually explosives. But internalized and other less obvious manifestations of ableism were whole different matters, ones that it took me a long time to grasp.

I began to think about ableism around the same time I started to think more deeply about the whole web of intertwined oppressions (racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, cissexism, etc.), but at first it was only another term in a list of Bad Things. It was when I attended a class on disability rights activism taught by Lydia Brown that a whole other dynamic of societal oppression came unhidden for me--the way “normally”-functioning bodies/minds are taken as the default, relegating all those who deviate from that quietly assumed normal to some sort of defective status. The simultaneous erasure and exploitation of disabled people--as sources of “inspiration,” as symbols of divine punishment or tribulation, as medical problems that can be fixed--came clear to me, like something that had always been all around me but which I’d never really examined.

The disability activism class was one of the most valuable two hours I have ever spent. I probably signed up out of a sense of activist duty--this was an area of oppression that I didn’t know too much about and should probably learn. I was thinking vaguely of myself as disabled at the time, but I shied away from the label still--afraid, perhaps, that it would seem like I was asking for pity or special treatment, afraid that I didn’t “count” as disabled, etc. Perhaps, shamefully, afraid of associating myself with the people our culture deems worthy of rejection, subjugation, erasure, and/or violence.

This concept of internalized as well as societal ableism is one that has stuck with me most strikingly. To want to distance myself from the “disabled” label, to want to prove I was no different than non-disabled peers--this is part of what Brown described to us as disability disavowal: even within the category of people with disabilities, there is an artificial hierarchy. In order to reclaim some of the power disabled people are not apportioned or allowed, we may console or raise up ourselves by thinking along the lines of, “Well, I may be ____, but at least I’m not ____.  I don’t want to be ____. At least I’m more normal than that.” This is what my  book character from middle school was doing--insisting that she’s not handicapped, god forbid anyone see her that way. God forbid she fit into any category but some throttling concept of normal. In order for her to “win,” to be accepted, to be normal, someone else has to lose--has to be lesser, “more disabled,” less valid as a real person, less respected, lower on the totem pole of people already cast into society’s reject pile.

The takeaway from that class was the conviction that what we need now is to move from rights to justice. Beyond changing whatever laws we’ve managed to change or institute, we must have a shift in mindset and cultural values and paradigms so that progressive laws have a chance of being enforced, and better ones made, so that our lives can be something not just legally protected, but culturally understood and appreciated.

In my town, which tends to fancy itself progressive and liberal, there were attempts in elementary school to teach kids about disabilities. On the day when they taught about a condition I have, I skipped school, dreading being talked about, being regarded as irrevocably Different. I was very shy and touchy about discussing any of my medical problems, but at least the school was making an effort to increase kids’ awareness of the experiences of people around them. But I would have preferred it if disabilities could be more “normalized,” so to speak, rather than singled out for a day. Not to say that programs aimed at understanding should be replaced with erasure or avoidance of the subject, but discussions of ableism and such would be a good addition, rather than just spotlighting some sad differences that Other People have. Additionally, we have to build a general culture where disability isn’t something that’s stowed away in a corner, with disabled people at risk of erasure or far worse mistreatment.

A less harmful society is still far off, despite some efforts that have been made--awareness posters, attempts at inclusive language, attempts at accessibility accommodations. Backlash against “political correctness” and “oversensitivity” is also unfortunate and harmful, especially when it creates unsafe environments through mockery. Just the other day, one of my teachers went off on a bizarre, ableist-neurotypical rant about the fact that we have a therapy dog that visits the school once in a while. His diatribe went something along the lines of, “When Russia and China come to invade us, we’re not even going to fight, we’re going to be big squishy marshmallows with our therapy dogs, where everyone gets a trophy…” He went on, adopting a mock-baby voice. “Aw, your lives are so hard here, aren’t they? It’s just like a war zone here, isn’t it? Don’t you all have PTSD? Aw, I feel so bad for you!”

Yes, the town I live in is largely privileged and coddled, but disabilities do not discriminate by class or situation. Implying that any mental health issues we might have are trivial because our lives aren’t “hard” enough is an ableist effort to delegitimize those issues. Bringing in a puppy for students to spend time with, to give them a moment to decompress, to soothe stress--this is not an effort that warrants derision or scorn. What does deserve reproach is not that students in a privileged town may, apparently inconceivably, have hard lives or suffer from mental health problems, but that our schools are not safe places and may well contribute to anxiety, depression, and the like. Suffocation in the pressure-cooker of a privilege-sodden high school is not the equivalent of a war zone, but that doesn’t make our problems insignificant or worthy of scorn. Ironically, the stress of this teacher’s high-level class combined with the mocking of his students are exactly what can produce the problems that therapy dogs may help assuage.

In a way, this incident was born of the same misconception I had back in middle school, when I kept trying to “justify” my character’s suicide by making her life harder and harder, thinking that she couldn’t believably be struggling unless she was in the very worst situation possible--except this is worse, because here the ableism was coming from a teacher, in whom authority is vested, and whose job description is not supposed to include taking aim at his students or belittling them if they are struggling or really do benefit from therapy. Additionally, if our priorities truly were supporting mental health rather than fear-mongering around the Threat of China and Russia, why exactly would that be worthy of mockery? And just the fact that teachers can openly ridicule efforts to build support networks and healthier school atmospheres is demonstrative of the reality that we do not live in a society where everyone gets a trophy--in other words, an equal one. We live in one where there is still a clear lack of justice, understanding, and compassion.

As well as in schools, with their mixed records, there’s a dearth of consideration of this silent ism, ableism, in the domains of activism in general. At a screening of a documentary on climate change, a man asked me if there would be audio narration for the whole movie, since he was nearly blind and would not be able to see it. I had to tell him that I didn’t think there would be, and cringed during the times in the film when the narrative was carried only by pictures or words on the screen. At the same event, incidentally, a friend of mine worried that there would not be subtitles--and there weren’t--without which she had a hard time hearing the words, especially if she couldn’t lip-read the people speaking them. This was a screening hosted by an activist organization that strives for awareness and inclusiveness, and it dawned on me slowly how much ableism still pervades spaces that try to be intersectional and enlightened. At recent marches and rallies, I applauded the diversity in race, gender, and class of the speakers, and was impressed by the readily available Spanish translation, but noticed that disability was not at all taken into account. I have seen an ASL interpreter at a Jackson Browne concert, but not a political rally or conference. Many events involve stairs or walking long distances without accessibility options. And mental illness may be given even less consideration even in spaces that are supposed to be progressive or radical.

Ableism is often a quiet oppression, but it is not an absent one. It is not separate from other issues that we try to combat, and may both appear and be ignored in our well-intentioned activism. To treat mental illness as the root of gun violence has a flavor of ableism, for example. There are situations in which the phrase “man up” can be seen as both sexist and ableist. Classism affects the ability of people to get aid for health problems, including those stemming from disabilities. The fallout of catastrophic climate change will pose particular challenges for people like me who will not be able to survive without access to medical supplies. Gender identities and sexual orientations that break with the cisgender-and-straight pattern have been sometimes regarded as mental illnesses (and sometimes in declaring that they’re not, the LGBTQ community partakes in disability disavowal--“we’re queer but that doesn’t mean we’re disabled, at least,” without including or affirming the experiences of people who are both). Whatever our sphere of social justice activism, ableism is there playing a role, waiting to be brought to light, held accountable, and rejected.

Ableism creates artificial divisions and strata of society to hold differently-abled and “normal” people, and unless activists begin to address and rectify this oppression in our work, they reinforce those barriers, exactly as our discriminatory society would prefer.

The road to a better world, as always, is long. To change our mindsets, to change our actions, to alter how we think of normal and problematic, to destigmatize differences in ability, to shift our own language and thoughts as well as working to change others’, to engage with struggles against ableist incarceration or education or legal policies--none of this is easy. But no facet of activism is easy. Fighting to dismantle systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etcetera has never been easy, but we work for it, and it is necessary.

We should not settle for any less with ableism.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives/ Tomorrow is too late to pretend everything’s all right now… --“Church On Sunday,” Green Day

It’s been a long time since I thought I could feel a tangible transition between December 31st and January 1st, but as 2016 begins, I am very conscious of the time passing--of how little we have in the face of so much change we need to create, and of how little we are probably aware of it.

We live fast. We move fast. We think fast. We talk fast. And all around us, the volatile world changes fast. It’s up to us how that happens. Are we going to struggle for more victories, like the Iran Deal and the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline? Are we going to fight corporate juggernauts like the TPP? Are we going to demand and curtail proxy wars and drone strikes, police brutality, Guantanamo Bay, secret surveillance programs? Are we going to ignore our rights and let them fade away? Are we going to pay attention to each other, to forge human connections, to live with empathy and respect and thoughtfulness? Are we going to give in to the voices of the media and each other, shouting be afraid, be very afraid? Are we going to sit back and watch climate change worsen, tipping points tick closer, business as usual keep rocketing on? Are we going to put ourselves in the line of fire? Are we going to stand up for those already there?

Our challenges mount every moment that we wait. Years like 2016 and 2017 were settings for dystopian futuristic books back when I was in middle school--and now we’re living them. Time won’t wait for us to stand up, to make our choices over how much we’ll sacrifice now and how much we’ll wait to have stripped away later. Time may not be on our side, but power still can be. The world we will live in, the world we will die in, the world our children and their children will live in will depend on the choices that we make now. This year. Today.

I have been conflicted over using the term ‘political’ too often--it is so often a turn-off to people my age, yet if we deny that everything, everything we do is political, we are simply giving ourselves another outlet for avoidance, for apathy. What we do now matters. How we act is political, because we don’t have time to live in a world where politics doesn’t overlay everything. If it helps to get through to someone about climate change by framing it as something other than a political issue, that can still be an important avenue to pursue--but there is no stepping out of politics. There is no way to terminate the contract we have bound ourselves into--with the planet, with each other. We are all in this together, and we will only get out of it if as many of us as possible fight as hard as we can for a world that we can live in safely, sustainably, equitably, joyfully.

I am quite honestly afraid. But I will be here, somewhere, standing up, fighting back. Whatever I can do, I will offer it. 2016 must not be a year to dawdle. We are waking up. We are looking around. And now we have to run. We have so much work to do. Today is too late to regret, and tomorrow is too late to pretend. We need to act. This isn’t a year we can throw away.

As we move deeper into 2016, where are we headed? Which yesterdays are we going to remember or repair? What kind of tomorrows are we going to build?